A tailless alligator waddling across a Louisiana road goes viral

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Ashlyn Bartholomew was driving the kids home from baseball practice on Highway 23 in Plaquemines Parish on Tuesday when she saw something moving in the roadway ahead.

“I couldn’t tell at first if he was an alligator or a big dog or what,” she said.

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Since gators are usually about half tail, it was a crazy sight, as it slowly walked across the highway, dragging nothing behind. The reptile held its stubby posterior high in the air like a French Bulldog. It swayed some as it walked, slapping its webbed feet on the pavement like a circus clown.

“He just took his little time and waddled into the canal” near the highway, Bartholomew said.

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According to Robert Mendyk, the Audubon Zoo’s reptile expert, the gator could have been separated from his tail by a passing boat propeller. But his best guess is, it lost its rear end in combat with another alligator.

Mendyk said that male gators often squabble for territory. Females do too, but not as often. A big rival gator would have the “bite force” to chomp off a tail. “I’ve seen an adult alligator missing 75 percent of its tail before,” he said.

It’s amazing, Mendyk said, that alligators regularly survive such amputations. “The wound walls itself off and heals,” he said. “They have really phenomenal healing and regenerative abilities.”

But even if the gator survives, losing a tail is trouble. Mendyk said the creature may have lost its ability to swim. It might be restricted to land or shallow water and “maybe has resorted to doing its hunting along the banks. One way of another, it seems to be surviving.

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