State Wildlife Department Helps Researchers Study Alligators In Southeastern Oklahoma

On a damp and windy winter day, creatures hide under the still Idabel swamps. Tim Patton has made it his goal to find out as much about them as he can.

Fueled for the weekend by five breakfast burritos, he’s ready to camp out on the Red Slough Wildlife Management refuge for a couple days to get a close-up look at the native alligator population.

Patton is a professor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University in Durant and is one of three researchers working on an alligator research project in the southeastern part of the state.

The project is funded by the Oklahoma Wildlife Department.

On a November morning, Patton ventures out into the murky waters to check his traps. This time only some harmless turtles took the bait.

“If we catch as many alligators as we did turtles, this job would be a lot easier," Patton remarks.

The traps are one of the ways Tim and his research partners capture alligators.

The most effective method is a more aggressive one: an after dark search by boat, where they catch gators with a pole.

Patton says the key is looking for beady red eyes peering across the water.

“When you get the eye shine, they’ll just sit there,” he says. “The largest we’ve captured so far is right around 9 feet.”

Once caught, the alligators’ mouths are taped shut and they are marked. Some of the gators are given a plastic tag and a chip. A few receive radio transmitters to be tracked. The littlest get a small notch on their tails so that researchers can check back in and see how the gators have grown over time.

“Keep catching and tagging and catching and tagging,” Patton says.

The researchers will study alligators for two years, from babies to full-grown gators up to 16 feet.

“We want to know how many, what's the sex ratio, how many males, how many females, the size structure, how many little ones and big ones,” Patton explains.

Researcher Jared Wood has put up game cameras all over the refuge. Wood is an Associate Professor of Biology at Southwestern Adventist University in Keene, Texas.

“Got a couple thousand videos and some of them are pretty remarkable,” Wood remarks.

The videos he has captured feature several supporting actors, like an otter family trying to infiltrate an alligator den. In one shot, you can see a rabbit narrowly escape becoming dinner for a hungry gator mom.

“Everything’s like Christmas, what you get on that video, that camera,” Wood says.

For Jake Pruett, an assistant professor at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, studying nature is a dream come true.

“The strangest critter out here is me,” Pruett says.

As alligators creatures swim through Oklahoma waters, the scientists continue their search; always full of surprises.