Poor Vision

Tourists visiting the St. Augustine Alligator Farm in Florida sometimes discover not only Alligator mississippiensis in the swim. A Homo sapiens named Kent Vliet, 26, may have waded in too. With a cypress pole in hand, the University of Florida doctoral candidate in zoology usually takes the plunge in the late afternoons during the mating season. "In the morning they're a little crotchety and don't want to be bothered," he says.

On the whole, the 150 gators in the farm's breeder lake rarely seem to mind his intrusion; and after three years of cataloguing by computer some 800 courtship sequences and isolating about 40 specific behavioral acts, Vliet has come to have more sympathy for the creatures. If it is difficult for a nonspecialist to tell male gators from females, it can apparently be hard for the gators too. To examine prospective mates, they slowly bump nose-to-nose or nose-to-head-and-neck, or else try submerging each other in a lugubrious contest of love. "I can swim to within five feet of a courting pair if I do it slowly and stay low in the water," Vliet says. Because of their poor underwater vision, submerged gators are not so worrisome: "I assume that if I'm going to be attacked, the alligator will do it from the surface." Vliet has never been bitten, only "mouthed" once. Says he: "Gators get bad press. Tarzan movies did immeasurable harm to their image." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.