music; ambience rain, boat motor
[ambience rain]
CC: “That’s an alligator out in the open prairie flat. Looks to be about a six-foot alligator.”
The best way to see Georgia’s Okefenokee swamp is to take a boat out and explore its waterways early in the morning. Luckily, the boat we’re on has a canopy, because as you can hear it’s raining, raining hard. But that’s great weather for observing alligators. Welcome to Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries, a glimpse of the world of science from the inside. Chip Campbell is a naturalist and guide.
CC: “You know how you judge how long an alligator is when you can just see his head? It’s an old alligator hunter’s trick, and it really does bear out if you check it with a tape measure, which most people don’t. I have. But along the alligator’s snout the distance in inches between the alligator’s eye bumps and where his nose bump comes up just along his snout that length in inches is the length of the alligator in feet. So, if it’s about six inches along his snout, it’s about a six-foot alligator. We drift too far over into here.”
[ambience boat motor]
CC: “Our summers are hot and humid and buggy, and you get into the midday, and everything falls quiet. The alligators get up under the, the shrubs and, and just go to sleep. They like it hot, but they don’t like it that hot, and, of course, everything gets undercover. And when the rainfall begins to hit the water, that’ll bring the alligators up sometime, and they’ll mill around. And, you know, you can tell it sorta reinvigorates them, and I think it cooks things off. It just makes conditions more comfortable for them.”
The Okefenokee is the largest black water swamp in the United States. To see pictures of it, please visit our website, pulseplanet.com. Pulse of the Planet’s Science Diaries are made possible by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.