• FauxLiving@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    8 days ago

    As an ancient Florida native, advice for tourists: Fish off a dock or boat.

    If you’re going to fish off a bank, fish off of a location with a steep incline to the water. Almost everything that you’d use for bait is going to be something a gator will eat, so if the water near you smells like shrimp/fish then the gators are going to investigate. You probably won’t see them and they will be deterred by the presence of people, but not if they’re especially hungry (or you’ve wandered too close to a nest).

    That lake screams danger to me. The bank surrounding the water is essentially the perfect kind of shallow angle for an alligator to ambush prey. On top of that, the water is almost certainly full of tannins, like swimming in tea, so a gator would be essentially invisible until it decided to not be. Don’t go near water like this.

    It’s incredibly rare to be attacked by an alligator, the people that do are almost certainly doing prey-like things in places where they shouldn’t be.

    • Calfpupa [she/her]@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      8 days ago

      You just contextualized my childhood rules for fishing when I livedin Fl, never even considered there were local reasons for it!