Gator Aid

Cerrone drove into the Anahuac National Wildlife Refuge and down a gravel road along a bayou, where large alligators sunbathed almost as densely as Galveston beach bums. These larger alligators will doubtless be targeted disproportionately by hunters, most of whom shoot for trophies. An internal Texas Parks and Wildlife memo obtained by the Houston Press reported that the average size of an alligator taken in hunts on private lands is more than seven feet. That alarms wildlife biologists such as K.J. Lodrigue of Texas A&M. "The natural ecosystem is going to suffer because of it," he says.

By way of example, Cerrone stopped her Jeep next to a leery, eight-foot gator sunning itself atop a patch of smooth cord grass. Carpetlike swaths of this wispy plant once clung to most of the upper Texas coast, preventing soil from washing into bays, streams and stock ponds. Today, most of it has been chomped up by nutria, a beaver-sized invasive rodent species from South America that, lacking predators, has multiplied explosively. But not here in Anahuac. The large alligators gobble them up, along with many of the excess snakes and raccoons that would otherwise rob the nests of water birds. Indeed, alligators act as a "keystone species"; they were probably one reason why Cerrone spooked up a great blue heron just around the bend.

"This is what the upper coast of Texas should look like," she said.

To get a closer view of alligator habitat, Cerrone stopped next just outside town at Porter's Processing and Gator Farm, the largest alligator dealer in the state. Mark Porter cautiously led the way though a fence to a pond, where the bigger alligators had dug holes 15 feet into the muddy banks. These "gator holes" provide a crucial source of water in the wild to turtles, frogs and other marsh species during droughts.

Porter, a portly Cajun from Port Arthur, is not the kind of guy to get sentimental about gators. Back in a warehouse, he opened a walk-in cooler and dragged out a flapping, eight-foot beast that had been brought in that night by a nuisance hunter. "Grab ahold of the head," he told a worker. "I'm gonna sex it to see if I'm turning him loose or keeping him." As the gator hissed like the steam engine on a devil train, Porter lifted its tail and stuck his finger in an orifice. "It doesn't like that," Cerrone observed. Porter was frowning: "Male, I don't need no males. He's still too young to breed. That would be a damn good female."

That meant Porter would be shooting it in the head.

Even though Porter makes his living by treating alligators as commodities, he's staunchly opposed to the new hunting rule, as is every other alligator tradesman who officially weighed in on the measure. "It sucks," Porter says bluntly. A flood of trophy alligators brought in by amateur hunters for processing might help his business in the short term, but in the long term, he's afraid larger alligators, which fetch the most money for skins, will disappear from many counties. "I want my grandchildren to be able to see and do everything I've done," he says.

Of course, plenty of other people are worried about their grandchildren being eaten, losing fingers or simply being in the proximity of anything slithery. They will dial 911 at the first whiff of reptile. According to the internal Parks and Wildlife memo, 50 percent of alligator nuisance complaints were called in on alligators less than six feet long. Given the preference of private hunters for larger, trophy animals, this spells major problems for the department's new policy, even according to some of its own researchers. "[I]t is obvious that a public sport hunt will not target nuisance American alligators," the memo concluded.

In the short term, the program might actually be counterproductive. Large alligators can be merciless cannibals; they will devour dozens of smaller competitors that may later challenge them for mates or food (or also wander into a swimming pool). "So by hunting the larger alligators, we are in a way making the alligator nuisance problems worse," Lodrigue says. Only after decades of consistently eliminating large alligators of breeding age would the population eventually collapse.

Cerrone worries about the precedent the hunting policy sets for her own backyard. Parks and Wildlife officials admit Fort Bend, Montgomery and Harris counties weren't protected from the hunt simply because they're urbanizing. Cerrone's rural Chambers County is also being colonized by suburbanites. "Five years from now," she wonders, "are they going to say Chambers County is not core habitat?"