iStockphoto / Alex Pankratov
During a recent organized hunt in the James E. Daughtrey Wildlife Management Area in South Texas, an area teeming with massive bull alligators, one hunter nabbed a 750-pound alligator that is one of the largest ever captured in Lone Star State history.
The hunt took place inside the 26,000-acre Choke Canyon Reservoir which is part of the James E. Daughtrey Wildlife Management Area and five hunters nabbed bull alligators, ranging from 480 to 750 pounds. This area is home to some of the biggest, most prehistoric-looking alligators in Texas because this area is protected throughout most of the year except for when the wildlife management team opens it up for a selected number of hunters through a lottery. For this, there were five chosen. The fifth actually had to bow out and was replaced by someone on the standby list.
Hunting dates for the Alligator Hunt inside the James E. Daughtrey Wildlife Management Area so this took place last month. It is unclear specifically which day this gator was bagged but the wildlife management team updated their Facebook page with pictures of the alligators captured including the 750-alligator that is among the largest ever caught in Texas:
The massive 13-foot, 8-inch alligator tipped the scales at 750-pounds. That’s A LOT of gator bites from the deep fryer. Other photos of the alligators captured were also shared by the Daughtrey WMA:
This particular hunt in Texas had specific rules of how they could be caught and humanely dispatched. The alligators could only be captured using a hook and line. Once caught and to the boat, they then asked that a .410 caliber shotgun with light shot shell loads of #6 shot or slugs is used.
While 750 pounds puts this alligator in rarefied company as one of the largest ever caught by a hunter in Texas, it was 50 pounds off the all-time state record according to Houston’s Chron. The state record was an 800-pound alligator caught by a teenager at the Choke Canyon Reservoir back in 2013.
A 13-foot alligator is estimated to be somewhere between 50 and 90 years old. It is impossible to know the age for sure but they estimate this 750-pound alligator’s age was somewhere in that range.
Last year, a 14-footer was caught in Mississippi during alligator hunting season that also weighed 800 pounds. So once get up past 13 and a 1/2 feet the weight is tougher to predict as it would vary heavily based on what they’d recently eaten.