Holding hands with Dino, our biggest gator!! He’s such a big impressive gator at 11’4”! When we first caught Dino he had a horribly infected leg & was largely unresponsive, which after multiple vet visits we learned he was also suffering from lead toxicity due to a lead fishing weight being stuck in his GI tract with a hook. After a lot of care, and a lot of moments thinking he wasn’t going to make it, and a lot of moments of him trying to kill me as we pulled him out for treatment, he’s doing m

Our biggest gator Dino crushing down some food!! This impressive jaws, teeth, flexing jaw muscles, but if you watch close you’ll also see him invert his gular scent glands! These are used for chemical communication and can release pheromones, but what do they “say”? No one really knows, I see them do it for a variety of unrelated reasons-eating, fighting, mating, when captured, I imagine they can release different chemicals/concentrations to have different meanings! ~~~Our rescue gators are wild

Swimming with our biggest gator! Dino is huge! Even though he could still gain another hundred pounds easily! He looks and acts dramatically different from the barely alive zombie gator we rescued a year ago, and we’ve been packing the weight back on him! When we first caught Dino he had a horribly infected leg & was largely unresponsive, which after multiple vet visits we learned he was also suffering from lead toxicity due to a lead fishing weight being stuck in his GI tract with a hook. After