I’m Definitely Less Than Thrilled That Alligators Seemed To Have Learned How To Climb Trees

I would comfortably put alligators in my top five list of “Animals I Never Want To See In The Wild”. They seem just so dangerous. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything about gators to hint at them not being dangerous as shit. I used to tell myself that, if I ever saw one, I would run up the nearest tree as fast as possible. Welp, that seems out now, because now they can apparently climb fucking trees.

Via Wink News:

“Can alligators climb trees? Ronald Saracino of Cape Coral certainly thinks so! Although he’s lived in Southwest Florida for eight years he was shocked at what he says he found up in a tree near Viscaya Parkway and 9th Lane.

“Saw something in a tree, at first I thought maybe it was a lizard,” Saracino said. “The more I looked at it, the more I thought it was actually probably a 5-foot gator.”

He added, “I know people are not going to believe it, but I 100 percent believe it was a gator!”

“They are more agile than people give them credit for,” explained Amy Sera, an educator at the Calusa Nature Center in Fort Myers. Sera says it’s common for gators to climb things, such as fences, if they need to.

“I’ve seen picture of crocodiles doing that behavior. It gives them a little bit better view of their territory,” Sera said. “Cold blooded animals get their energy from the sun and the warmth. So, they are more active in the summer.”

Florida Fish and Wildlife officials agree Saracino’s image may very well be a gator because of the position the animal is resting in and the size of the body in relation to the head.”

Fuck that noise. Gators are climbing trees now? What’s next, they can open your front door and walk into your house? This sounds horrible. What’s worse is that the ‘experts’ don’t even know what to say. “Oh wow, yeah, I mean, that looks like a gator, but we’ve never seen anything like that before.” Awesome. At least we know that the experts are pretty useless once the alligators become fully aware and begin to attack. I mean Jesus, if the machines suddenly became sentient, we’d talk to the computer engineers at MIT. Who better to tackle the gator invasion than the gator experts in Florida. That’s like Ground Zero for alligators. Actually, we should pull all those guys out now and stick them in like the Midwest so they can read more about these alligators they apparently don’t know anything about and also protect them from the soon to be army of hyper-intelligent alligators. I’d probably be less concerned if they weren’t already aware enough to bite the hand that feeds them, but they are.

[h/t Uproxx]