Gator attacks: Why so many? Why now?

Miami-based correspondent Jeffrey Kofman blogs that it sounds like stuff out of a horror film: FLORIDA ALLIGATORS ON THE RAMPAGE… THEY EAT PEOPLE WHO DARE TO CROSS THEIR PATHS. But this is not fiction. Suddenly it is a bizarre and chilling reality here. In less than a week alligators have killed three people in three different areas in the state. Alligator experts across the state tell ABC News they have never seen anything like it. In the last 60 years there have been only 17 recorded alligator deaths. (At left, the Punta Gorda woman who fended off a gator by hitting it with her sprinkler nozzle.)
This grisly spree began last week when a college student jogging by a canal in the Ft. Lauderdale area was grabbed by a gator and dragged into a canal. That gator was caught. But the alligator responsible for an attack north of St. Petersburg is still at large. A Dunedin, FL, woman was found floating in a canal with what the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office calls “animal bites that were consistent with an alligator.” (At left, not the actual gator.) The most macabre of all the incidents happened in Lake George, south of Gainesville, over the weekend. A Tennessee woman was staying with friends in a remote cabin. When her friends came across her she was inside the alligator’s mouth. They reportedly jumped in the water and freed her, but she was already dead. (At right, a fish and wildlife spokesperson addresses the media following the Lake George attack.) Why so many attacks? Why now? The answers are easy. The alligators are hungry. The drought here in Florida has forced them to travel further in search of fish and other food they normally find in the swamps and ponds of the Everglades.

The alligators are mating. Which means the big males are staking out their territory.

The alligators were here first. The never-ending housing tracts that spill into the Everglades are squeezing alligator habitat. The experts say the clash with humans is inevitable and more and more alligators are displaced by development. The alligators are multiplying. Back in 1970 the federal government placed gators on the endangered species list. They have come back… with a vengeance. Today it is estimated there are between one and two million alligators in this state.