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The first time he saw them on an icy morning last January, George Howard thought that the unusual-shaped bumps that protruded from his frozen marsh were stumps.
But that did not seem quite right. He tired his eyes. They were stumps with teeth?
Howard panicked. He is, after all, responsible for The Swamp Park, which is home to an alligator reserve in Ocean Isle Beach, North Carolina. What seemed to be the frozen death of its alligators would be a tragedy on the philosophical and financial level.
He jumped the fence. and climbed on the pond, running towards the exposed alligator snouts. But what could he do? The alligators were stuck in the ice and motionless.
"I was like, Holy crap, should I try to get them out of there?", Howard told the Washington Post.
But before embarking on an impromptu ice search, he decided that scientific research was in order, or at least a quick Google search. The relief invaded as the search results: His alligators were alive. They survived in icy water by sticking their snouts through the ice. Howard's anxiety was replaced by another emotion: astonishment.
"It was the craziest thing I've ever seen," he told The Post this week. "I was just amazed. At first I was [worried] then I understood what they were doing and that was the only way to breathe. And I thought, how smart is it?
[A woman brought her ‘emotional support’ squirrel on a plane. Frontier wouldn’t let it fly.]
Howard thought that it was a unique alligator experience in a lifetime. Then, last week, a cold snap swept through much of North Carolina and the Northeast, freezing the water of Howard's 65-hectare park near the Shallotte River.
No Google search was needed this time. Instead, Howard posted photos directly on Facebook. The customers were seduced. News organizations have published articles with the word "weird" in their titles. The attackers remained unmoved.
Each of the 18 alligators living in Swamp Park – all saved after living in captivity – seemed to know the exercise in cold weather, Howard said. When it starts to get cold, the alligators plunge most of their bodies into the shallow waters, then stick their noses in the air in anticipation of freezing, creating a small hole in which to breathe. Once the water freezes, the ice sticks to the mouth, blocking the gator-cicles in place while their bodies hang below the surface.
Howard does not know the origin of the behavior. In fact, nobody really knows it.
Adam E. Rosenblatt, a professor of biology at the University of North Florida, who studies how alligators respond to environmental change, said it was the big mystery. Behavior, he said, is probably not something that alligators learned by practicing, but rather instinctive, developed over time through natural selection.
[Scientists stuffed balloons into dead wombats to learn why they poop cubes]
"If the alligator species has been living for quite a long time in cold temperatures, those who have been able to do so are those who could survive and reproduce," he said. "How did they do it? I do not think anyone knows the answer at this point.
In the late '70s and early' 80s, Rosenblatt said, scientists began to study behavior in detail. Since most alligators live in warm southern climates – North Carolina is about as far north as possible – it is unusual for them to experience prolonged frost temperatures. With the exception of the alligators, no one seemed too curious to know how they managed to cross the rare cold nights.
In 1983, alligator ecologists then noticed a whole congregation of alligators planting their noses in the ice in North Carolina. They had heard of herpetological legends of excluded alligators, who managed to survive six consecutive winters in Pennsylvania or four years in Virginia
but they knew that the ice technique could not be a new behavior. The ancestors of alligators evolved 245 million years ago. Admittedly, they were not content to choose a Keystone State cold attack to launch a new survival technique. It turns out that scientists just did not pay enough attention.
Now they know what's going on in the ice: when the alligators go away, Rosenblatt explains that they get into what's called a "brum", like a hibernation but for the cold blood. – and their bodies almost completely closed. All they need to do, is to breathe.
"They block their metabolism. They do not need to eat because they do not burn a lot of energy, "said Rosenblatt. "They slow down their heart rate, their digestive system, and they sit and wait in cold weather. It's a pretty amazing adaptation.
It does not always work. One of the first studies on "icing" in alligators, in 1982, examined an alligator who died while doing so. After three days, her body temperature became too low to survive.
In 1990, for example, scientists observed a group of alligators in South Carolina, including babies, and found that baby gators did not know the technique. They were seen beating their noses on the ice trying to pierce before drowning.
Three larger alligators who were slow to play survived under the ice for 12 hours before finally catching the air and joining the others.
the ice melted, they all simply pulled back to shore, basking in the sun as they came back from a nap.
A fogging alligator with nostrils on the outside of a frozen pond at Swamp Park in Ocean Isle, North Carolina
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