Alligators Vs. Sharks: Research Shows Which Species Wins Epic Creature Showdown

MANHATTAN, KS — In a battle of scary swamp and sea creatures, which species would win an epic showdown — the alligator with its formidable jaws, or a shark, which can also deliver lethal bites? A researcher from land-locked Kansas, where alligators and sharks never venture voluntarily, arrived at some surprising conclusions.

For one thing, alligators are a lot stronger than previously thought, according to James Nifong, a postdoctoral researcher with the Kansas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Kansas State University in Manhattan. He led the first-of-its-kind study with Russell Lowers, a wildlife biologist with Integrated Mission Support Services at the Kennedy Space Center in Titusville, Florida.

Nifong found that alligators are opportunistic creatures that will eat a shark or stingray — the kind of fish that stung “crocodile hunter” Steve Irwin to death — if one swims by in shared waters. Gators feed primarily on crustaceans, snails and fish, but if they determine they can take down a shark, they will seize the opportunity for a tasty, meaty treat, Nifong found in his research.

The researchers’ findings, published in the Southeastern Naturalist, are the first scientific documentation of a widespread interaction between the two predators. (For more news like this, subscribe to Across Kansas Patch for real-time breaking news alerts and free morning newsletters, or find your local Kansas Patch here. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app.)

“Before this, there have only been a few observations from an island off the Georgia coast, but the new findings document the occurrence of these interactions off the Atlantic coast of Georgia and around the Florida peninsula to the Gulf Coast and Florida panhandle,” Nifong said in a news release.

Despite the freshwater and saltwater differences, it is fairly common for sharks and rays to share the water with alligators, Nifong said. Alligators don’t have salt glands like crocodiles, he said, but they are resourceful and can travel between freshwater and marine habitats, often spending days in saltwater. In one instance, he documented an alligator that remained in salt water for a month.

“Alligators seek out fresh water in high-salinity environments,” Nifong said. “When it rains really hard, they can actually sip fresh water off the surface of the salt water. That can prolong the time they can stay in a saltwater environment.”

As part of his dissertation research, Nifong pumped the stomachs of more than 500 live alligators to determine what they had eaten. He didn’t find any evidence the alligators had eaten anything as big as a great white shark featured in “Jaws” — the 1975 movie that scared the stuffing out of boaters, surfers, divers, swimmers and, well, just about everyone who saw it — but it’s possible a large gator could take down a great white shark, Nifong said in an interview with The Washington Post.

“There’s not a ton of people out there stomach-pumping very large alligators,” he told The Post. “They’re actually very difficult to stomach-pump and retrieve prey items. It’s very tough to be certain that you got everything out of there.”

The researchers also equipped the alligators with GPS transmitters to track their movements, and found they travel between freshwater sources and estuaries — that is, partially enclosed coastal water bodies where freshwater and salt water mix and which often house shark nurseries.

Alligators may pose a lethal threat to the survival of some species of shark.

“The findings bring into question how important sharks and rays are to the alligator diet as well as the fatality of some of the juvenile sharks when we think about the population management of endangered species,” Nifong said.

The research team also looked at some instances in which larger sharks ate smaller alligators, Nifong said.

Nifong dug into history and found news reports from the late 1800s that described battles of large masses of sharks and alligators after flooding and high tides washed the predators together. One particular historical incident included in the journal article described how the sharks were attracted to blood from alligators feeding on fish. When the alligators were washed out to sea, the sharks attacked.

Nifong conducted the alligator diet research as part of larger research of freshwater river systems and food web dynamics. He currently is researching the drivers of native fish biodiversity in the Neosho River Basin for Martha Matter in the Kansas Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, a part of the Division of Biology at Kansas State University.

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