After being captured and tagged, the gators are taken to safe areas to be released. Sienna is a good distance from Cinco Ranch and so these are not the same gators. There is a state park about 20+ miles from my house that is full of gators.

Much depends on how much time has elapsed between sightings. They shed and replace teeth throughout their lives, so two different sightings of a gator of a particular size, missing a specific tooth in the maxilla (lower teeth are harder to assess unless the jaws are open), are likely to be of the same gator.

There may be other identifying features, e.g. healed wounds on the snout, missing scales (esp. the larger ones along the top of the tail).

It would also be highly unlikely to see more than one large gator far from water.

I've never gone up to a live one with one of those little mirrors dentists use. I might really like these animals, but I also know what their jaws can do.

I've got friends who've done crocodylian surveys in the US, Australia, Cuba, Kenya, and other parts of the world. Once you know what to look for, ID'ing an individual is straightforward.

Mind you, this is mostly for larger crocs and gators. Smaller ones are harder to ID to individual.

They are so dangerous.

On land, a gator is only a threat if you come very close (i.e.about the length of the animal or less). They can lunge, but they really can't run.

They're ambush predators; if they know you can see them, they absolutely won't pursue you. They'll only attack if they think you're a threat. As long as you keep some space between you and an alligator on land, you're completely safe.

Also bear in mind that alligators prefer smaller prey than crocodiles. And that assumes they're looking for prey on land, which is almost never the case; they strongly prefer to ambush prey from the water.

Crocodiles can actually gallop. They''re the only reptiles that can do this. But alligators have never been seen galloping, and when crocodiles do it, it's always to escape a threat - not to catch prey. And they can't do it very far.

..my actual field of work was relevant on DU!

I'm a vertebrate paleontologist/herpetologist who studies the evolution and diversity of gators, crocs, and relatives for a living.

I went to grad school in Austin, and I'm a birder, so I saw gators aplenty in wetlands near Houston. Some of them were of substantial size. But I also once watched a pair of otters literally playing and chasing each other around and even upon a big gator. The gator didn't seem fazed.

parks, the food, the arts and the ability to grow everything, especially lovely flowers.

I also saw that zig zagging is not effective to escape.

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One absolutely should keep some space, but their window of rapid movement is very brief. It would stop or slow down before you had a chance to zig or zag.

Alligators literally cannot run. They can walk faster at times, but most people can outrun their version of a fast walk.

The real danger is if a gator lunges at you.

The real threat is if you get too close to the water. And even there, adult humans are larger than their usual prey base. (For large Nile and saltwater crocodiles, that's not the case.) There have been predatory attacks, but most attacks are thought to be defensive.

Small children, on the other hand, could be at risk. For some attacks on adults, the adult was stooped over to do something, making them look smaller.

Keeping your distance is the best defense.

The local state park that has a ton of alligators discourages or sort of prohibits pets at this park. Gators love to go after pets

A colleague of mine is herpetologist who retired from the University of Florida many years ago. He bought some land in a rural area that had extensive wetlands and built a house there. He bought the land specifically because of the wetlands - he studied frogs. But there was all sorts of other wildlife there, including alligators.

A few years after he moved in, a subdivision was built on the adjoining parcels. They drained many of the swamps.

But what really annoyed him was the people who moved there, many of whom were retirees from the Northeast. Every time they'd see a gator, they'd call it in, and someone would remove it.

Larger gators could indeed have been a threat to small grandchildren and many pets, but they were calling in two- and three-footers. These would only be a threat to one's pet if the pet was a hamster or gerbil. And they'd only be a problem with the grandkids if the grandkid grabbed it - and even then, nothing the gator could do would be lethal. No gator that size would attack a human unless it absolutely had to.

Rather than accepting that alligators are native to Florida and monitoring their pets and younger relatives, they decided to change the entire character of the local ecosystem, even when the threat was pretty much nil.

Four separate times over the past 25 years, Nile crocodiles were caught in Florida. (One of my former grad students was part of the study that determined them to be Nile crocs.) It was one of the exotics that had gotten loose over the years. One of them was large, and it was known to have escaped from an enclosure in Hendry County, but it was still confined in a fenced-in area, so it wouldn't have dispersed very far. The other three, however, were all found close to each other in Miami-Dade County, and they weren't confined in any way. Fortunately, none was bigger than about 0.5 meters. Had they remained undetected for longer, they might have reached breeding size. No Nile crocodile has been seen in Florida since 2014, so we appear to have gotten lucky.

My ex-wife had a girl scout training session at this park during gator mating seasons. She told us that they got no sleep even though the gators were a good distance away.

BTW, that park prohibited people bringing dogs into the park due to the gators.

and it's probably one of the nicest neighborhoods south of Houston

I hope the Gators stay there and don't come east to Manvel and Pearland! lol - I'm so terrified of them that I won't even walk near the retention ponds at night with my dog. He's pretty big, but obviously, so are the gaters!

This clip had the alligator crossing a couple streets

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