Monday 12 November 2018

Why alligators, wolves and mountain lions are turning up in odd places


24 October 2018

Predators are thriving in places they shouldn't, revealing some serious misunderstandings about their behaviour and how to protect them

By Isabelle Groc

WHEN Brian Silliman found himself face to face with an alligator, he thought he was seeing a ghost. It was night and he was knee deep in mud in a salt marsh in Georgia, searching for crabs and snails. Alligators are freshwater reptiles, so Silliman was not expecting to come across one, but the pair of red eyes watching him was unmistakably real. Thinking fast, he shook a cage between him and the predator to scare it away. “That freaked me out,” he says.

The next morning, haunted by the encounter, Silliman, a conservation biologist at Duke University, North Carolina, couldn’t stop wondering why the alligator was in the salt marsh. Returning to the site, he spotted more of them – and they seemed to be right at home. Diving into the scientific literature, he discovered that alligators are not the only predators found thriving in places where they are not supposed to live. It was a light-bulb moment. “I started re-evaluating everything I had been taught about large animals,” he says.


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