A massive American alligator forces its way through a metal fence in Florida. via Facebook
A video that was recently shared to social media shows how insanely strong alligators really are. The short clip was recorded last week by a person in Placida, Florida, who shared it with WINK News. WINK News meteorologist Matt Devitt then posted the video on Facebook, where it’s racked up nearly a million views over the past few days.
The video shows a massive alligator forcing its way through a metal fence in a matter of seconds. First, the gator wedges its snout between two of the metal bars. After slipping its snout sideways through the opening, it bends out the bars and forces its giant head through. With another tremendous push, the gator bends the metal fence even more—enough to get both of its front legs through. Then it kicks and twists, forcing its whole mid-section all the way through the fence. At the end of the video, the gator is working to get its hind legs through the gaping hole in the fence that it just made.
“He eventually got through according to [the viewer] who shot the video,” Devitt explained in the Facebook post.
The most impressive part of the video is just how quickly the alligator warps the fence. The bars bend so easily that they appear to be made of rubber. As more than one commenter pointed out, however, the video is somewhat misleading in this sense. While the fence looks like it’s made of wrought iron, Devitt confirmed that the bars were actually made of aluminum, which is much easier to bend than iron.
“Not only is aluminum a soft metal, but these are typically tubed … and the walls of the tube are not very thick,” one commenter wrote over the weekend. “Gator’s still strong but makes sense why he tore through it like tissue paper.”
Material details aside, the video still serves as proof that North America’s largest native reptile is also one of its strongest. The footage should also be a lesson to Florida residents and other Southerners—many of whom live among alligators and rely on these types of fences to keep the brawny predators out of their yards.
Read Next: Four Fatal Gator Attacks in 76 Days Is a Statistical Anomaly. Here’s Why It Happened
Just two weeks ago, an 88-year-old Florida woman was killed by a 10-foot alligator while walking her dog in a gated retirement community. This incident followed a year that saw four people tragically killed by alligators in only 76 days. One of those deaths involved an elderly woman who was also inside a gated retirement community when she was killed.
