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Wednesday, August 11, 1999
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Catch you later, gator
A teen angler catches a small version of the Big One, a 2-foot alligator someone left in Government Wash at Lake Mead.
By Joe Schoenmann
Review-Journal
Count your toes, swimmers, thar's a gator in Lake Mead.
Two Las Vegas teen-agers, angling for largemouth bass in Lake Mead, hooked one alligator and spotted another in Government Wash around noon Monday.
After the boys wrangled the twisting, toothy 2-footer and tied it to their car, the Nevada Division of Wildlife took the reptile into custody. Jon Sjoberg, supervising fisheries biologist, said the animal was killed Monday afternoon.
A hunt for the second alligator continues this week.
So -- gulp -- there's still one out there.
"We're not advising people to stay out of the water," Sjoberg said. "Just don't go swimming with a pork chop around your neck."
The slithering reptile got hooked by Shawn Purvis, 17, after Purvis had spent a long morning fishing from the shore on Government Wash. The teen-ager said he and his brother, Brad, 19, went out around 3:30 a.m. trying to snag largemouth bass. Earlier in the day he had caught a two-pounder.
Then came the catch.
Purvis was using a plastic 7-inch, torpedo-shaped Bomber lure that was being chased by a ripple of water. The alligator hit the lure.
"It came and hit it and started rolling," Purvis said. "When it got closer to us, we could see what it was. And there was another one following it."
The two fishermen were mystified.
"It kept snapping at us and doing rolls and stuff," Purvis said. The brothers wrapped their catch with fishing line then found some rope and secured it to their car.
"It was scary," Purvis said. Two of the lure's three treble hooks were stuck in the animal's mouth. "We didn't know how vicious it would be. Then it started going crazy."
Though it is illegal to own alligators in Nevada, it's not uncommon to find them dumped in local waterways, said Ken Foose, owner of Exotic Pets, 2105 N. Decatur Blvd.
"It happens more than it's reported," said Foose, who gets calls frequently from owners of caymans, similar to alligators, who want him to take them off their hands.
Because the alligators were found together, Foose figures the two were dumped recently into the lake. Alligators are loners, he said, "and they'd probably just been dumped and hadn't had the chance yet to disperse."
But what if neither of them had been caught? Could they survive, or mate and reproduce?
Foose, who said he's worked with reptiles for 25 years, doesn't doubt they could survive for some time.
"Could they live through the winter?" he said. "Maybe."
That doesn't mean a survivor would be a threat to people.
"These are real small animals," Foose said. "They're stupid, but they're not going to attack something as big as a human."
Furthermore, prospects for mating are rare. The main problem is that alligators build elaborate nests out of hundreds of pounds of rotting vegetation.
"There just isn't enough nesting material out there," he said.
Sjoberg has seen other exotic animals in state waterways in years past. One or twice a year, the state Division of Wildlife has to deal with something called a pacu, which looks like, but doesn't exhibit, the same aggressiveness as a piranha.
However, in August 1992, Reno fisherman Frank Gainer snagged a 2-pound, 15-inch piranha in Paradise Pond.
Other exotic fish dumped into state waters are the chiclid, molly and plecostomus, which is also known as the sucker catfish. While the plecostomus remain tiny in an aquarium, they become huge in the wild, Sjoberg said.
"They've gotten 18 inches long and it's the weirdest darn thing you've ever seen," he said.
And, though no one has actually caught one, a giant prehistoric serpent is rumored to be wallowing in the waters of Walker Lake, 250 miles northwest of Las Vegas in Hawthorne.
For safety reasons, lake legend has it that visitors should always carry a bag of marshmallows: The serpent apparently so loves the sweet confection that someone being attacked can use them to divert the creature's attention.
Sjoberg said the sad aspect of Tuesday's incident was that the alligator had to be destroyed. The state had to kill the alligator, he said, because it's an illegal species and "no one will take them."
"The zoos have got plenty and we can't ship them out of state," he said.
Jonathan Kraft, founder and executive director of Keepers of the Wild, 4800 W. Dewey Drive, said his group would have taken the animal and used it as an example to school children on the type of animal they should not get as a pet.
"I just hope that if they find the second alligator, they call us," he said.
Elizabeth Dupree, National Park Service spokeswoman, said park rangers planned this week to search for the second animal.
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Printable version of this story
Shawn Purvis shows the lure he was using Monday to catch bass at Lake Mead. Instead, he hooked a small alligator.
Photo by John Gurzinski.
After accidentally hooking a small alligator while fishing at Lake Mead, brothers Shawn and Brad Purvis tied the animal to their car so authorities could collect the creature.
Photo by John Gurzinski.
This alligator, caught Monday at Lake Mead by two teen-age fishermen, was killed by wildlife officials.
Photo by John Gurzinski.
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