A 920-pound Florida alligator was caught after a 4 hour fight with hunters
- Gator hunters are bagging massive reptiles this season.
- In Florida, a 920-pound alligator was caught late last month, nearly breaking the state record.
There must be something in the water.
In Florida late last month, US Coast Guard Licensed Captain Kevin Brotz, a hunting guide with Floridagatorhunting.com, and his friends celebrated catching a near record-breaking 920-pound alligator in a lake outside Orlando.
"It was four hours of intense touch and go," Brotz told Insider about the catch. "He was much bigger than we thought."
But this 13-foot-3-inch-long gator didn thrash or tried to escape like smaller gators tend to, Brotz said, adding that he believes a creature of this size is used to standing his ground.
"I think he just wanted to eat whatever was messing with him, " Brotz told Insider, estimating that the gator was between 60 and 90 years old. "He wasn't gonna run."
The gator was the second-largest ever recorded in Florida. The top record holder weighed in at 1,043 lbs and was caught in 1989, Field and Stream magazine reported.
On August 26, less than 24 hours after Brotz and his crew brought down their gator looking like a creature out of "Jurassic Park," another monster was pulled out of the Yazoo River in Mississippi.
Insider previously reported the record-breaking Mississippi gator weighed in at 802.5 lbs and was more than 14 feet long. Its meat was donated to local soup kitchens, and its hide was sent to be processed into ultra-luxurious leather goods.
Hunters catching gators of this size are doing a massive community service, according to Christy Plott, the vice chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's crocodile specialist group, because the giant creatures become territorial, making them exceptionally dangerous to pets, livestock, and people.
"These wild culls are amazing, honestly, it's incredible population control for the species," Plott previously told Insider. "About 1 to 2% of wild alligators are culled annually, so it's not a big number, and the goal is to take out some of the larger animals that are not productive for breeding and keep other alligators from breeding — which is obviously bad for the population as a whole."
Gator hunting programs are highly regulated and have helped increase the species' population since they were first listed as endangered in 1967 in a move Plott called "the single greatest conservation success story in the history of the world."
The sales of the hunting licenses also fund local wildlife protection, Insider previously reported Tate Watkins, a research fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, said.
"Regulated, sustainable hunting plays a huge role in wildlife conservation," Watkins said.