This Thanksgiving weekend, everyone in Florida should be thankful for alligators

In Summary:

Florida’s alligators have rebounded from decades of overhunting thanks to landmark conservation efforts. Their presence now benefits the state’s environment, culture, and science, including promising medical research involving their blood. Recent moves to weaken clean water and endangered species protections could jeopardize that hard-won recovery.

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The Pilgrims were idiots. If they had just taken a sharp left at Plymouth Rock and sailed southward for another 500 miles, they could have spent that first winter luxuriating at a hotel in St. Augustine.

Related: Ask the gaggle of gubernatorial candidates what they’ll do for Florida’s environment.

The Spanish settlers in St. Augustine had arrived in the New World more than 50 years earlier. They’d also beaten the Pilgrims to the idea of holding a Thanksgiving feast.

The original celebrants were Spanish explorers and Native Soon-To-Be-Americans, and instead of turkey, they dined on salt pork and garbanzo beans. Then they probably got into an argument over whether that one side dish should be called “stuffing” or “dressing.”

Because of that history, I always think of Thanksgiving as the most Florida of the holidays and always look for something we should all be thankful for.

This isn’t easy to do these days amid exorbitant grocery prices, skyrocketing insurance rates, and widespread political insanity: “Hey, let’s revive the reputation of Red Scare bully Joe McCarthy while the president has a lovefest with a guy he says is a communist!”

But if you look for blessings, you’ll find them, sometimes in the most unlikely places. Today, I want to tell you why we should all be thankful for alligators.

No, not the college football team that’s 3-8. I mean our official state reptile that lurks in every body of water in Florida that’s larger than a mud puddle.

Some people find them terrifying because of their role as predators in the whole “Circle of Life” thing. But I’m here to tell you that alligators have many admirable qualities. For instance, they’re our first line of defense against the pythons invading the Everglades.

And I know of three instances in which alligators helped the cops nab fleeing suspects. Talk about taking a bite out of crime!

What’s most amazing, though, is that there was a time when they were on the endangered species list.

And now they may wind up saving us.

Trading gator for beer

Gators “are part of what makes Florida Florida,” said Rebecca Renner, who wrote the riveting true-crime book “Gator Country” about a particularly wild gator poaching case.

Gators are so identified with the state, she said, that “a lot of people who come here want to see them.” That’s why we have such thriving attractions as Gatorland and the St. Augustine Alligator Farm.

Fueling their fascination with gators is the fact that a lot of the wacky Florida man and woman stories you see are also Florida gator stories.

“Florida man tries trading gator for beer.” “Forida woman fights to keep her pet alligator who wears clothes and rides an ATV.” “Florida woman pulls alligator out of pants during traffic stop.” That last one, which involved turtle smuggling, inspired Dave Barry and Carl Hiaasen to write a lovely song called, “She Had Turtles in Her Trunk and a Reptile in Her Pants.”

Probably the best-known one happened in 2016, when a 24-year-old Florida man pulled up to a Wendy’s in Royal Palm Beach and tossed an alligator through the drive-thru window. He did it as a prank, but the drive-thru clerk was not amused. She was so terrified she dove out through the same window by which the 3-foot gator entered.

My favorite part of the story is that the guy was charged with assault with a deadly weapon — to wit, the gator.

The first biologist to study gators would have been on the drive-thru clerk’s side.

Slaughter for fun and fashion

Pioneering naturalist William Bartram, who visited Florida in the 1770s, was the first scientist to document alligators’ behavior. He was clearly scared of them, considering them man-eating monsters.

There were a lot of gators back then, he reported: “The alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close together from shore to shore, that it would have been easy to have walked across on their heads, had the animals been harmless.”

When he tried fishing, a congregation (yes, that’s the word) of gators went after his boat, he wrote.

“I was attacked on all sides,” Bartram wrote.  “… Two very large ones attacked me closely, at the same instant, rushing up with their heads and part of their bodies above the water, roaring terribly and belching floods of water over me.”

When another one attacked later, he dispatched it with a single shot to the head. After that, Bartram would as soon shoot gators as look at them.

Lots of other Florida tourists reacted the same way. From the 1800s to the 1960s, there was a wholesale slaughter. An incredible number of nitwit Northerners thought that no vacation in Florida was complete unless they’d bagged a gator or twelve.

Some of the shooting was for fun. Some was for fashion.

An 1893 federal fisheries report found that gator hides had become a highly lucrative industry, with Florida the center of the trade. The report figured 2.5 million hides had been shipped out of the state since 1880. Two Jacksonville firms handled more than 60,000 skins in a single year.

The alligator was being ‘‘systematically and relentlessly hunted in nearly every part of Florida,’’ the report noted, predicting that it was ‘‘only a question of time when this valuable fishery resource will become exhausted.’’

Saving the species

Five decades ago, when a Florida man named Nathaniel Reed worked as assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, he changed the nation.

This is a different kind of Florida man story than you’re used to.

Reed had spent his childhood collecting butterflies, jotting notes on all the birds he saw around Jupiter, and fishing in Hobe Sound. He loved fishing so much, his mother joked that he emerged from the womb carrying a fly rod.

The grown-up Reed was alarmed by reports of wildlife disappearing around America. He gathered a group of like-minded federal officials at a Chinese restaurant in Washington. Between egg rolls and moo goo gai pan, they jotted down the wording for what would become the Endangered Species Act.

The bill passed Congress by a nearly unanimous vote in 1973 and was signed into law by Reed’s Republican boss, Richard Nixon.

“We had the fervor of youth and a sense of high ethical standards for how man should treat his fellow creatures on spaceship Earth,” Reed told me years later.

The earliest list of endangered species included several well-known Florida critters, including the panther,the manatee, and — believe it or not — the alligator.

As difficult as it may be to imagine, we nearly had a Florida without alligators. Frankly, that wouldn’t be much like the Florida we know and love, would it?

The gator renaissance

The comeback began with the state and federal governments setting aside areas for the gators to live undisturbed by intrusive humans, Renner said.

State parks like Hillsborough River and Highlands Hammock, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, as well as Everglades National Park, opened in 1947, gave the gators to live and thrive in their native habitat.

Then, in the 1970s, under what became known as the Clean Water Act, developers began to think twice (at least at first) about whether they should wipe out wetlands to build houses, stores, and offices. That, too, benefited the gators.

“They’re very resilient animals,” Renner said. “Their comeback helps us be hopeful for other animals to do the same.”

The gators’ revival also helped other animals that depend on them, she pointed out. Gators dig holes that become wet refuges for fish, turtles, and frogs during droughts.

The gator renaissance is now in full swing. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission estimates we have more than 1 million roaming through all 67 Florida counties.

We have so many gators that the FWC has launched a Statewide Nuisance Alligator Program, or SNAP for short, to trap the ones that cause trouble. If anyone tells you bureaucrats have no sense of humor, tell ’em about SNAP.

But the programs that brought the gators back from the edge of extinction have now themselves become endangered.

The real predators

Last week, the Trump Administration proposed major rollbacks for both the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act.

For the Clean Water Act, his Environmental Protection Agency said it would redefine what’s protected to “exclude many wetlands and streams across the country. The changes could strip federal protections from up to 55 million acres of wetlands, or about 85% of all wetlands nationwide,” The New York Times reported.

So much for sparing all that gator habitat. Looks like it’s going to be covered by asphalt now.

As for the Endangered Species Act, his Interior Department announced several proposed changes to such things as “critical habitat” and other aspects of the law.

The most radical change calls for counting economic impact, instead of only focusing on what the science says about protecting an endangered species. Up until now, science alone determined whether a species was endangered. Not anymore.

“For example, if the Trump administration determined that the economic harm to a golf course would be greater than protections for the Florida panther, then they could make that determination,” Susan Holmes, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition, told ABC News. “It would essentially potentially put money over the science.”

The folks who are applauding this are the folks who would make a quick buck by destroying wetlands and wildlife habitat — the homebuilders, the real estate moguls, the big-money developers. You know, the real predators.

But what’s happened recently with the gators shows that we humans have no idea how economically valuable our wildlife can be when we preserve it.

In the blood

Biologist Kent Vliet became fascinated by gators when he first got to Gainesville. At the University of Florida, the young grad student was assigned to study alligators' mating habits.

To do that, Vliet traveled to the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and talked to the staff. He wanted to tag their gators so he could observe them. A staffer helped him lasso them, tie them up, weigh them, and attach an identification marker to their tails.

“The biggest one I’d ever grabbed before then was 4 feet,” Vliet said. “There were some 11-footers in there. … When we lassoed one, I’d jump on the back of the animal to restrain it and tape its jaws up.”

Adrenaline roaring through his veins, Vliet became hooked on working with gators. That was in 1980, and 45 years later he’s still at it. He’s even written a book: “Alligators: The Illustrated Guide to Their Biology, Behavior, and Conservation.”

What Vliet has been working on in the last few years struck me as particularly fascinating. He’s been collecting alligator blood for scientists studying its special properties.

Turns out gators have a superpower.

“You often see gators living in some pretty grody habitat with a huge open wound,” he explained. “Then it just heals up, and they go back to living their life.”

Their amazing healing ability comes from peptides in the gators’ blood. Scientists at George Mason University have been trying to identify those antiviral peptides, then extract and isolate them.

So far, they’ve found there could be thousands, each targeted to block a different strain of bacteria, Vliet said. Their goal is to figure out how to use those peptides to protect us, humans, from infections, too, including from COVID and HIV.

“And all from an animal that a lot of people wish didn’t even exist,” Vliet said.

So, say a prayer of thanks today that we saved the alligators, because now they’re likely to save us — assuming we can keep them around a while longer.

But with this proposed rollback of the laws that led to the gators’ revival, I have to wonder what we might lose if they go away again. And what other critters have superpowers that could help us if we take better care of their habitat?

Somehow, I don’t think our Circle of Life will turn out so well without them.

Key Points:

• Spanish settlers in St. Augustine held their own version of Thanksgiving decades before the Pilgrims, making the holiday uniquely tied to Florida history.

• Alligators once faced near-extinction due to overhunting and the fashion trade, but federal protections in the 1970s sparked a dramatic rebound.

• Today, gators help control invasive species, assist police in catching suspects, support tourism, and may offer biomedical breakthroughs through infection-fighting peptides in their blood.

• Rollbacks proposed for the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act threaten the habitats and protections that allowed the alligator’s recovery.

• The article argues that preserving wildlife, such as gators, has tangible economic, ecological, and scientific benefits — far outweighing short-term development gains.