VIDEO: Stand-up paddleboarder watches in horror as alligator attacks another gator
A stand-up paddleboarder in Florida got more than she bargained for during a recent trip to Florida’s Silver Springs State Park, when she turned a corner and encountered a cannibal alligator violently ripping into its prey.
Paddleboarder Tammy Shaw posted the video to the Facebook group Alligators of Florida on 10 August, with the caption ‘Gator eating gator, Silver Springs’.
The video shows a large alligator rising from the water, with a smaller gator in its jaws, seemingly with no head. The alligator then starts to smash its prey against the water like a rag doll, in order to break up the prey into bite-sized pieces. Shaw, understandably, stopped filming at that point as she decided to make a break for it.
Shaw told Yahoo News: “My (inflatable) paddleboard is 11 feet, and he was close to that (in size) if not longer. The gator he was eating would have been 5 to 7 feet. The video cut short because I felt a little too close for comfort after he slammed it down.”
Shaw concludes: “Kind of intense, but super cool to witness.”
Shaw says she is a frequent visitor to the park, which is known for its alligator population. Shaw says that gators at the park “just do their own thing and are not really looking for trouble.”
Commenters on the video expressed a mixture of amazement and horror at the grisly scene, and many agreed that Shaw was brave to stand by and film it.
“That’s the most prehistoric thing I’ve ever seen,” one viewer writes on Facebook.
“If King Kong and Godzilla had a baby, I think it would act something like that,” another adds.
The event took place on 4 August at around 3.30pm.
