Alligator meat: not my favorite thing in the world, but you might like it. It's super nutritious,
really low in saturated fat, and it's probably the case that alligator farming has played
a big role in saving these important critters from extinction. They were hunted to the brink
by the mid-20th century, more for their skins than for the meat. The meat was mostly a byproduct
of the leather industry. Might as well not let it go to waste, right? I'm going to tell
you how this meat is produced, how you cook it, and what it tastes like. I'm leaning heavily
here on this recent scholarly review of alligator aquaculture research, linked in the description.
But first, what even are alligators, and why aren't they crocodiles? Well, in a sense,
they are. Alligators are of the order crocodilia, which originated about a hundred million years
ago. They aren't dinosaurs, but they shared some time with the dinosaurs and were closely
related to them — still are, in fact, because crocodilia are the living animals most closely
related to birds, and birds are dinosaurs. Did you get that memo by the way? Because
I somehow missed it. I mean, back in school, they taught us that birds are descended from
dinosaurs, but in an intervening years, a clear scientific consensus has emerged that
birds literally are dinosaurs, the last living dinosaurs. They're theropods, just like the
T-Rex. Do you realize what this means? This means dino nuggets are the most scientifically
accurate shape of nugget. It also means that birds are clearly, unambiguously reptiles,
even though historically they weren't considered as such. And that helps explain why alligator
meat tastes so much like chicken. Gators and chickens are cousins. But anyway, crocodiles,
the collection of species known as true crocodiles are indigenous to tropical waters all over
the planet. They're big, aggressive. Alligators, on the other hand, are indigenous to only
two places.
There's a species in eastern China and there's a species in southeastern North America, where
I am. I saw these guys in Florida. Alligators are generally a little smaller than true crocodiles
and not quite as aggressive, gators do swamps and marshes, not open water, and they prefer
freshwater. Alligators also range pretty far beyond the tropics. A crocodile gets cold,
it straight up dies. Alligators can thrive surprisingly far north here in the United
States, and that's in part due to behavioral adaptations. They're nocturnal in the summer
and diurnal in the winter, and in the dead of winter, they brumate, which is the reptile
equivalent of hibernation. They stick their snout above water, let it freeze around their
nose, and they breathe through the hole as they just chill. Alligators will occasionally
kill people, but they also keep other destructive pests in check. Plus, they burrow holes in
the marshes that become crucial habitat for lots of other animals.
So, it mattered when the leather industry drove gator populations critically low across
much of their native range by the 1950s and '60s. Gators are a big part of the cultural
identity of Louisiana, where the meat has been used in Cajun and Creole cuisine for
centuries. And it was Louisiana that first made efforts to protect alligators. They banned
hunting outright in 1962. Five years later, the U.S. Federal Government did the same.
This must've been a kind of hard thing to do politically. Unless the animal is furry
and cute, people usually aren't that interested in protecting big, scary apex predators like
snakes, or crocs, or sharks. But this shark wants to protect you: Surfshark, the sponsor
of this video. Surfshark is dedicated to stopping spammers, scammers, and spies from taking
a bite out of you. You sign up and you get all these tools you need to stay safe on the
internet. Surfshark Search, a search engine with no ads or trackers, Surfshark Alert lets
you know if any of your personal information or passwords appear in leaked databases, CleanWeb,
it blocks ads, malware, and phishing attempts.
And, of course, there's the Virtual Private Network. You route your connections through
any one of Surfshark's thousands of encrypted servers all over the world. Do that and nobody
on your wifi network can snoop on you, and you can get around government censorship,
or location-based service denials from streaming companies, for example. You can even turn
on the Kill Switch and your connection will drop automatically if you ever lose the VPN.
Swim on down to my link in the description, use the code ADAMRAGUSEA and you'll get 83%
off Surfshark with an additional three months for free. Link and code in the description.
Save 83%. Thank you, Surfshark. So anyway, the State of Louisiana banned gator hunting
in the 1960s. They also funded a lot of research into gator reproduction and habitat management,
and with that data, they were able to launch a "sustainable use" program that has been
a tremendous success.
The wild population rebounded so fast that they were off the endangered species list
by 1987. Limited hunting is allowed again and farming is allowed. Alligators are farmed
across the coastal southeast, but the epicenter of the industry is Louisiana. There's about
2 million wild gators in the state today and about half a million on farms. Well, technically,
they're ranches. It's pretty easy to keep alligators in captivity. It's really hard
to breed them in captivity. They simply need lots of open space for their mating and courtship
rituals. So, a lot of alligator farmers in the United States source their eggs from the
wild. That's a tricky job, not only because there is likely to be an angry mama alligator
nearby, but also, you have to keep the eggs upright. If you turn alligator eggs upside
down, the embryo dies. So, what they do is they mark the top and they very carefully
transfer the eggs back to the farm to an incubator. There, the baby alligators have a much better
chance of survival than they do in the wild.
Once they've grown to a meter, a meter and a half, the farmers return 12% of them to
the wild. That figure reflects the number of animals that likely would have successfully
hatched and survived had the eggs remained in the nest. So, farming alligators helps
wild alligators by relieving hunting pressure on them, and swiping those wild eggs does
not hurt the wild alligators, just the opposite, in fact. The market for wild eggs creates
an economic incentive for landowners to preserve alligator habitats. They make money by allowing
egg collectors on their land, so it's in their interest to preserve vital wetlands. Alligator
farming can be a tricky business though. Remember that the meat is historically a byproduct.
The real money has been in the skins, most of which are still exported to France and
Italy.
Capricious fashion trends create huge year-to-year swings in the market demand for gator leather.
Some farmers are able to supplement their income by making their farms into tourist
attractions. I shot all this footage at a tourist trap — pay some money and feed the
gators. The meat also offers a more stable market to farmers. There's even research on
how discarded alligator fat could be sold for biofuels. All that said, people do have
some particular ethical concerns about gator farming. For one thing, these animals are
not domesticated. Humans have bred cows over millennia to thrive on our ranches. Gators
are still genetically wild and there's research indicating particular levels of physiological
stress among gators in captivity. Though the ones hatched in captivity do seem to do a
lot better — those males are less aggressive toward each other, for example. Certainly
humane and sanitary conditions could vary from farm to farm, but farmers do have an
economic incentive to keep the tanks clean and not too crowded. If things get gross in
there, disease spreads and they lose money. Animal rights groups have also raised concern
about slaughter, which in the U.S. generally involves using the same kind of captive bolt
gun that they use to knock cows. This destroys or shuts down the animal's brain before it
is bled out. The concern is that maybe alligators are just harder to kill, more likely to still
be conscious when they're cut. That seems like it could be true to me. I can imagine
that might be true, but I've not been able to find any kind of scientific research documenting
that this is a particular problem with alligator harvest. There's one study that finds captive
bolt and similar methods to be pretty effective at extinguishing consciousness if it's done
properly. I worry that could be a big "if."
There's an ongoing legal fight between Louisiana and California over gator products. California
wants to ban imports of any dead gator parts. One of the stronger arguments in favor of
that ban is that American gator products look really similar to products made from species
that are still critically endangered. As this argument goes, the only way that you can stamp
out trade in endangered crocodilia is by stamping out trade in all crocodilia. And that makes
sense to me. It's certainly true that there is a social stigma here in the U.S. against
wearing exotic animal skins, and the market for gator leather has been in decline here.
This brings us back to the meat. People generally consider the choicest meats to be from the
tail. These are tail pieces, often called loins. There's two sides of it, the bones
would have been in the middle between them there. This meat looks and feels and tastes
a lot like poultry white meat.
Yes, that's because they're closely related animals, but also because this muscle tissue
does a job similar to the one performed by chicken breast. These muscles are for sudden,
explosive effort. Chickens don't fly long distances continuously, right? They just kind
of hover for a second. So, there's not much red myoglobin in this tissue for storing oxygen
for long-term sustained effort, and it's filled with fast-twitch muscle fibers that are for
short, strong bursts. Same deal with the gator tail. They don't use it continuously. They
mostly laze around all day. They just need short bursts of propulsion when they pounce.
Some of their muscles they use more frequently, like the meat around their legs — that's
the dark meat, which you can also buy but it's less popular.
Also less popular is the meat from the body, which has this kind of flaked texture to it,
with these ribbons of fat running through it. You can see a bit of that in the structure
of this tail meat. In the body, it's more pronounced and the meat can have this weird,
spongy texture if you don't grind it into sausage or burgers or something. Like all
large and long-lived aquatic predators, alligators can also accumulate mercury in their muscle
from the contaminated smaller fish that they eat. It's the same thing that happens with
tuna and swordfish, though there's no mercury advisory against the gator meat as yet. It's
probably a much bigger deal with wild gator. Wild gator meat can also taste a little bit
fishy. People say that it tastes like fish, feels like chicken. This farmed gator that
I got had no fishy taste whatsoever.
It was also pretty tender, because farmed alligators are usually harvested young — maybe
a year and a half. In the wild, gators can live as long as a person, getting bigger and
tougher every year. This, you could easily have told me it was chicken breast and I'd
have been fooled — or maybe turkey. Since it's a larger animal, the meat grain is a
little more coarse, like the breast from a turkey. There's very little research on foodborne
illness and gator meat. There have been some documented outbreaks of salmonella among the
gators on gator farms. I don't know, I would probably cook it the same temperature you
do with chicken — not just for safety, but also for taste. Because this tail muscle is
the same kind of tissue as in chicken breast, it has that same slimy texture that chicken
breast has when it's really undercooked. Like I said, it's not my favorite thing, and I
do have ethical concerns about it. But certainly, alligators show us that conservation is a
complicated topic. Killing animals can be a way to save them.