When a young man dips into a man-made, freshwater lagoon in Homestead, there’s already a 9-foot, 250-pound American alligator waiting for him. For 30 minutes, man and beast wade peacefully in each other’s presence, separated by a metal gate. It’s an experience made possible by alligator handler Chris Gillette, who facilitates these first-of-their-kind underwater gator tours at Everglades Outpost, a 2-and-a-half-acre wildlife refuge near Everglades National Park.
“People want to do this, and I needed to find a way to be able to satisfy this demand,” Gillette says. “That’s when I came up with this idea for people to do this in a responsible way. We’re in no way encouraging people to ever interact with or try to swim with a wild alligator.”
That’s because alligators are an apex predator with 80 sharp teeth and one of the strongest bite forces ever recorded. But between the warm- and cold-blooded creatures in Gillette’s lagoon, it’s actually the gator (“Casper,” as Gillette calls him) whose odds of survival seemed unlikely after being deemed a “nuisance alligator” by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission more than a decade ago.
Since 1997, more than 184,000 nuisance alligators have been euthanized and harvested across the state. “It breaks down to roughly 40 human-gator conflicts per day in Florida—and it’s not because we have a nuisance gator problem,” says Gillette, who wrangled and rescued so-called nuisance gators on Animal Planet’s Gator Boys from 2011 to 2014. “It’s more like a nuisance person problem: Florida has over 1,000 people moving to the state per day. How many of them have any actual knowledge of alligators?”
Casper is one of 15 alligators (and four crocodiles) at Everglades Outpost. Gillette has been working with this gator for more than 12 years, and he’s now the star of the underwater gator tour.
To maintain his “quarterback build,” Casper is fed a steady diet of frozen rats. “He will bite the hand that feeds him,” Gillette says. “He is not drugged or specially trained. He was not raised with us since he was a baby. He was caught when he was only 6 inches smaller than he is now.”
Underwater gator tours might conjure the adrenaline-rousing thrill of cage diving with great white sharks, but the actual experience is far more meditative. Rather than barking commands, Gillette softly calls for Casper. At the promise of a chow pellet (made of ground chicken, pork, beef, and bone), the gator dutifully responds. It is then that participants, who are waiting underwater nearby and wearing a mask, can come within inches of the reptile’s pointy conical-shaped teeth.
“As a terrestrial human, we always see them just sitting on land or floating above the water, and it doesn’t look that impressive,” Gillette says. “But when you actually see them underwater and what they’re really like, they’re incredibly impressive. It’s a perspective people don’t often get.”
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