![]() Unlike courtship gatherings, cooperative feeding can occur at any time of the day, involves constant feeding activity, and usually has subadults and juveniles present repertoire and frequencies of observed behaviors differ markedly between these two types of gatherings.Ĭooperative feeding has been reported for many species of crocodilians, although never before described in detail. ![]() The second type of behavior is cooperative feeding - or, more precisely, gathering for fishing. Bellowing choruses were twice as likely to occur on the mornings following nights with gatherings as on the mornings following nights without gatherings. ![]() Copulations were observed near the gathering sites or after the gatherings, but never directly within. Individual animals were observed to attend such gatherings for many nights, arriving and leaving by themselves or in pairs, and sometimes swimming to the sites of gatherings from 2 miles away. They spend 4-8 hours (but not all night) swimming in pairs, courting, chasing each other, and occasionally fighting. Alligators gather in those groups on most (but not all) nights during the mating season, at locations slightly changing from night to night. The first behavior, provisionally called "courtship gatherings", involves groups of up to 100 adult alligators in Florida, but less than 10 at various locations in the northern part of the species' range. In the course of 380 hours of nighttime observations of American alligators in the wild in 2006-2009, two previously undescribed forms of social behavior were observed.
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