An alligator was sighted this week in Lake Lanier and it wasn’t the first time, officials say.
A boater spotted a gator north of the Olympic Park area a few days ago, according to Channel 2 Action News. Some fishermen reported the reptile last week.
Lake Lanier is located about 60 miles north of Atlanta. The lake’s shoreline borders Hall, Forsyth, Dawson, Gwinnett and Lumpkin counties.
Staff with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources Division regional office in Gainesville said the gator was first spotted the second week of July, spokeswoman Melissa Cummings said.
Boater sees gator
Jim Brown told Channel 2 he couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the reptile.
“Then I looked a little closer and noticed the head, put the boat in neutral and starting drifting,” Brown told the television station. “So I got my cellphone out and started taking video of it.”
Officials estimate the alligator is about 2.5 to 3 feet long, Cummings said.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed the man-made Lake Lanier, which opened in 1957. Cummings said she believes the gator was originally a pet that was illegally relocated to the lake, which is not an alligator habitat.
Cummings said Georgia is home to more than 250,000 gators and most of those animals exist in appropriate habitat such as below the “Fall Line,” an invisible line that roughly connects Columbus to Macon to Augusta.
Any body of water below that line would be a potential home to an alligator, she said.
“This year has shown us that sometimes they appear in unusual locations, such as the Chattahoochee River or on Lake Lanier,” Cummings said. “Relative to an increase of ‘wild alligators’ – we certainly want all of them to remain wild.”
“I also imagine that there is more visibility to alligators this year due to the incident at Disney,” Cummings said.
Georgia gator attacks
Between 1980 and May 2007, there have been only nine reported cases of alligator attacks on humans in Georgia, including one fatality in 2007, according to the Alligator Fact Sheet put out by DNR. Six of those incidents happened as a result of the human stepping on or otherwise making contact with a submerged alligator. The remaining three incidents were a result of the alligator mistaking the human for prey.
Cummings said DNR officials have no plans to remove the gator from Lake Lanier and people should simply avoid it.
“It presents very little threat to any person unless someone were to attempt to pick it up, which we discourage as it would certainly try to defend itself,” Cummings said.
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