Boaters, skiiers, swimmers, good news: the latest beast in the waters of Lake Lanier has been captured. Feat not for your toes.
That beast: a young alligator, snagged by a trapper Wednesday afternoon. As lake monsters go, this Alligator mississippiensis wasn't much. The state Department of Natural Resources said the creature reached 3 feet – hardly the stuff of freshwater nightmares.
John Bowers, the department’s chief of game management in DNR’s wildlife division, said as much. “Due to the small size of the animal, it did not pose a substantial public safety concern,” he said in a news release.
That doesn’t mean the creature went gently into that big net. Jason Clark, who trapped the gator, was surprised at its reaction when he caught it.
“He was pretty upset with me,” Clark said.
This is the second alligator caught this year in the metro area. In March, trappers took a big swimmer from the Chattahoochee River. Biologists estimated she’d been in the lake, or river, for nearly a decade. She was 8 feet long – sufficient to give you a suitable case of the creeps.
This little swimmer, said DNR, was first seen in early July and popped up several times after that. Biologists figure some bozo tossed it in the lake’s chilly waters – an environment not suitable for an alligator. They thrive in areas south of Atlanta.
That’s where this young gator is headed – south, to the flatlands and slow rivers of coastal Georgia, where it can get big enough to really scare you.
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