Erasing the Tracks of a Monster

Posted on August 29, 2013 by TMartin

Life can certainly imitate art, as can life traces. I was reminded of this last week while doing field work on St. Catherines Island (Georgia), and after encountering traces made by two very different animals, alligators and fiddler crabs. What was unexpected about these traces, though, was how they intersected one another in a way that, for me, evoked scenes from the recent blockbuster summer movie, Pacific Rim.

Could these be the tracks of a kaiju, making landfall on the shores of Georgia? Sorry to disappoint you, but they’re just the right-side and very large tracks of an American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis), accompanied by its tail drag-mark, left on a sandy area next to a salt marsh. Note the scale impressions in its rear-foot track, a symbol of the awesome reptilian awesomeness of its tracemaker. But wait: what nefarious nonsense is happening to the tail drag-mark, which is being covered by tiny balls of sand? Who made that hole next to the drag-mark? And what the heck was a raccoon (Procyon lotor) doing in the neighborhood, leaving its track on the tail drag-mark? With such a monster on the loose, shouldn’t that raccoon be hiding in the forest? (Photo by Anthony Martin, taken on St. Catherines Island; scale in centimeters.)

For anyone who has not seen Pacific Rim, you can read what I wrote about its distinctive fictional ichnology here. But what came to my mind while I was doing field work was one of the themes expressed early on in the film: how quickly humanity returned to normalcy following a lull in attacks by gigantic monsters (kaiju) that emerged from the ocean, destroyed major cities, and killed millions of people. It reminded me of how horrific hurricanes can strike a coast, such as the 1893 Sea Islands Hurricane that hit Georgia, but because no hurricane like it has happened there since, coastal developers think it’s hunky-dory to start building on salt marshes.

But enough about malevolent evil as exemplified by kaiju and coastal developers: let’s get back to traces. Last week, I was on St. Catherines Island for a few days with my wife (Ruth) and an undergraduate student (Meredith) to do some field reconnaissance of my student’s proposed study area. The area was covered by storm-washover fans; these are wide, flat, lobe-shaped sandy deposits made by storm waves, which span from the shoreline to more inland on barrier islands. We were trying to find out what traces had been left on these fans – tracks, burrows, scrapings, feces, and so on – which would tell us more about the distribution and behaviors of animals living in and around the washover fans.

Part of a storm washover fan on St. Catherines Island (Georgia), with the sea to the left and salt marsh (with a patch of forest) in the background. Say, I wonder what made those tracks coming out of the tidal creek and toward the viewer? (Photograph by Anthony Martin.)

It didn’t take long for us to get surprised. Within our first half hour of walking on a washover fan and looking at its traces, we found a trackway left by a huge alligator, split in half by a wavy tail-drag mark. I recognized this alligator from its tracks, as I had seen them in almost exactly the same place more than a year before. Besides their size, though, what was remarkable about these tracks was their closeness to a salt marsh behind the washover fan. When we looked closer, we could see long-established trails cutting through the salt-marsh vegetation, which were the width of a large adult alligator.

That ain’t no skink: the distinctive tracks and tail drag-mark of a large alligator, strolling through a storm-washover fan and next to a salt marsh. You think these animals are “freshwater only”? Traces disagree. Scale = 10 cm (4 in). (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia.)

Alligator trail cutting through a salt marsh. Trail width was about 45-50 cm (18-20 in), which is about twice as wide as a raccoon trail. And it wasn’t made by deer or feral hogs either, because, you know, alligators. (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia.)

So although the conventional wisdom about alligators is that these are “freshwater-only” animals, their traces keep contradicting this assumption. Sure enough, in the next few days, we saw more alligator tracks of varying sizes going into and out of tidal creeks, salt marshes, and beaches.

Based on a few traits of these big tracks, such as their crisp outlines (including scale impressions), the alligator had probably walked through this place just after the tide had dropped, only a couple of hours before we got there. But when we looked closer at some of the tracks along the trackway, we were astonished to see that something other than the tides had started to erase them, causing these big footprints to get fuzzy and almost unrecognizable.

The culprits were sand fiddler crabs (Uca pugilator), which are exceedingly abundant at the edge of the storm-washover fans closest to the salt marshes. These crabs are industrious burrowers, making J-shaped burrows with circular outlines corresponding to their body widths. They also scrape the sandy surfaces outside of their burrows to eat algae in the sand, then roll up that sand into little balls, which they deposit on the surface.

In this instance, after this massive alligator had stomped through their neighborhood, they immediately got back to work: digging burrows, scraping the surface, and making sand balls. Within just a few hours, parts of the alligator trackway was obscured. If these parts had been seen in isolation, not connected to the clear tracks and tail drag mark, I doubt we would have identified these slight depressions as large archosaur tracks.

Hey, what’s going on here? Who would dare to erase and fill in giant alligator tracks? Don’t they know who they’re dealing with? (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia.)

Going, going, gone: alligator tracks nearly obliterated by burrowing, surface scraping, and sand balls caused by feeding of sand fiddler crabs (Uca pugilator). (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia; scale in centimeters.)

What was even neater, though, was how some of the fiddler crabs took advantage of homes newly created by this alligator. In at least a few tracks, we could see where fiddler crabs had taken over the holes caused by alligator claw marks. In other words, fiddler crabs saw these, said, “Hey, free hole!”, and moved in, not caring what made them.

Don’t believe me about fiddler crabs moving into alligator claw marks? OK, then what’s that I see poking out of that alligator claw mark (red square)? (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia; scale in centimeters.)

Why, it’s a small sand fiddler crab! Does it care that its new home is an alligator claw mark? Nope. Does ichnology rule? Yup. (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia.)

Need a free burrow? Then why start digging a new one when alligator claw marks (arrow) gives you a nice “starter burrow”? Notice the sculpted, round outline, showing the claw mark was modified by a crab. Also check out the sand balls left outside of the other claw marks, meaning these have probably been occupied and mined for food by fiddler crabs, too. (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia; scale in centimeters.)

As a paleontologist, the main lesson learned from this modern example that can be applied to fossil tracks, is this: any tracks made in the same places as small, burrowing invertebrates – especially in intertidal areas – might have been destroyed or otherwise modified immediately by the burrowing and feeding activities of those much smaller animals. The secondary lesson is on how large vertebrate tracks can influence the behaviors of smaller invertebrates, resulting in their traces interacting and blending with one another.

More symbolically, though, these alligator tracks and their erasure by fiddler crabs also conjured thoughts of fictional and real analogues: Pacific Rim and coastal development, respectively. With regard to the latter, it felt too much like how, as soon as a hurricane (a meteorological “monster”) passes through a coastal area, we begin to talk about rebuilding in a way that, on the surface, wipes out all evidence that a hurricane ever happened.

Yet unlike fiddler crabs, we have memories, we have records – including the plotted “tracks” of hurricanes – and thanks to science, we can predict the arrival of future “monsters.” So the preceding little ichnological story also felt like a cautionary tale: pay attention to the tracks while they are still fresh, and be wary of those that vanish too quickly.

Horseshoe Crabs Are So Much More Awesome Than Mermaids

Posted on June 3, 2013 by TMartin

Given all of the controversy over a recent cable-TV program, in which its broadcasting channel decided mythical marine animals deserved more air-time than real ones, I thought it was important to highlight one extant animal that never fails to surprise me. This animal’s lineage is more ancient than dinosaurs, reptiles, or even amphibians, with its oldest fossils dating from about 450 million years ago. It is also the largest living marine invertebrate animal you are likely to see on beaches of the eastern U.S. and Gulf Coast. And at this time of year, if you see it crawling around on a beach, it’s because of sex. For the past month or so, this animal has been participating in massive orgies. Pictures of this gamete-laden frenzy somehow made it past prudish censors of Facebook and other social-media sites, titillating prurient invertebrate enthusiasts everywhere and filling them with cockle-warming glee.

Behold, a fine juvenile specimen of the Atlantic horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus)! Although it lives in the ocean, it can walk on land for hours, like some sort of reverse Aquaman, but totally cooler than him. And some day, if this one lives long enough, it will use those legs to walk on land again, but in pursuit of sex. Sounds to me like this animal deserves its own planet. (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on Sapelo Island, Georgia.)

As you already know from reading the title of this post, I’m talking about horseshoe crabs. More properly known as limulids by real marine biologists and paleontologists, these ultra-cool, über-hip, but totally retro critters are more closely related to spiders than they are to true crabs, but their common name is so, well, common, that scientists just sigh and begrudgingly go along with it for the sake of public communication.

Modern limulids are represented by four species, three of which are in Asia, but the grandest of them all is the Atlantic horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus. This species is at its largest here in Georgia, which may be a function of the Georgia Bight, an extensive offshore shelf that affords more food and habitat than other areas. How big? I’ve seen some as long as 70 cm (27 in) – tail included – and 40 cm (16 in) wide, big enough to scare both of our cats at home. They grow to these sizes after hatching as little limulids not much bigger than the period on this sentence, an astonishing increase in mass if they make it to adulthood (which most don’t).

The circuitous trail of a baby limulid, made on a sandflat at low tide. Its body width can be estimated by the width of the interior of the trail, and its body length was slightly more than that, meaning it was smaller than my fingernail. See that central groove? That’s from its tail, but if you want to impress your friends, call it a telson. (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on Sapelo Island, Georgia.)

Horseshoe crabs are so astounding that I could go on endlessly about all sorts of facts about them. Fortunately for you, gentle reader, other folks have written entire books about them and heaps of popular and scientific articles. (For starters, try going here.) So I don’t want to needlessly duplicate what others have done, and done well. Instead, I’ll focus on my main interest in these animals – their traces – and will regale you with tales of the traces they can make with their tails.

Horseshoe crab tails are spiky projections called telsons. Based on lots of the traces I’ve seen on the Georgia coast and a few direct observations, the main function of a telson is to help a horseshoe crab to get back on its feet after being knocked onto its back. That is, whenever a limulid is upside-down, it immediately start using its telson as a sort of sideways pole vault to lever itself into a less vulnerable position.

Without a telson, an upside-down horseshoe crab is stuck; its legs run furiously, but to no avail. However, with a telson, it can put the pointy end into the sand or mud underneath its body, and push itself up from a surface. This gives a limulid a fighting chance to get back to where it once belonged and start walking. This strategy works best if it turns to its right or left side, as limulids are longer than wide. They may be wonders of nature, but they’re not doing back flips or somersaults.

A large adult horseshoe crab that was right-side-up when trying to get back to the sea, got tired, and tried to use its telson to move itself along. In this instance, it didn’t work, but the traces made by the telson show its range of motion, working like a windshield wiper. (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on Sapelo Island, Georgia.)

OK, all of the preceding information I already knew. After all, I have: coauthored an edited book chapter about juvenile limulid traces and their close resemblance to trace fossils made by trilobites; coauthored another article on the history of limulid-trace studies (which go back to the 1930s!) that’s now in review; and devoted a lengthy section of a chapter in my book to limulids as tracemakers. So you could say I’ve been feeling pretty cocky about what I knew about these animals as tracemakers. That is, until one horseshoe crab showed me how much I still need to learn about them and what they can make.

The humility-inspiring traces showed up in a photo on a Facebook page I follow (and so should you), the St. Catherines Island Sea Turtle Conservation Program. The program organizers – Gale Bishop and Robert (Kelly) Vance – regularly add photo albums showing sea turtle traces (trackways, body pits, nests), and otherwise report on other facets of natural history they observe on St. Catherines Island beaches. As a result, I live vicariously through these pictures while marooned in the metro-Atlanta area. But they also like to throw me ichnological stunners once in a while, such as the following photo that Kelly posted last week.

Who needs made-up animals on TV when traces like these, made by awesome invertebrates like horseshoe crabs, turn up on a Georgia beach? (Photograph by Robert Kelly Vance, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia; scale is about 15 cm (6 in) long.)

Kelly found these traces while patrolling the beaches of St. Catherines Island for other traces, namely those of expectant mother sea turtles. Although these distracted briefly from his mission, I was very happy he stopped to document these, as I had never seen anything like them, despite much looking at traces on Georgia beaches.

The holes in the sand, defining a nearly perfect circle, were made by the telson of an adult horseshoe crab that kept on trying to right itself after landing on its back. Each puncture mark shows where it inserted the telson into the sand and then pushed itself up and to its side. Based on the number of holes, direction of sand flung out of each hole, and little “commas” made by extraction of the telson, it tried to flip itself a minimum of 16 times, and all to the right. These separate actions culminated in a 360° clockwise rotation of its body. Also check out the central depression with smaller drag marks; this is where its head shield was in contact with the sand. To imagine the movement represented by these traces, think of a horseshoe crab doing a slow-motion, step-by-step, break-dance backspin.

Seeing the evidence for such persistence was wow-inducing in itself, but in my ichnologically influenced euphoria, I figured the limulid finally succeeded in righting itself. After all, the trackway just to the left of the trace, indicates where it walked away from the scene of its gravitationally challenged situation.

But then I realized there was no “impact mark.” This large horseshoe crab flipping itself onto the sandy surface should have registered an outline of its body before it started walking. Instead, the place where it started walking showed no such impression, meaning it must have made a soft landing, with only its legs and telson digging into the sand. What happened? Did it use mind over matter and levitate itself through telekinesis? Or was it gently picked up and placed on its feet by a merciful mermaid? (Or merman: let’s make sure we’re being inclusive when talking about made-up stuff.)

It turned out that Kelly was the dues ex machina that entered this limulid’s drama, providing divine intervention just when it was needed. When I expressed my puzzlement to Kelly about how this large arthropod finally turned itself over, he confessed to saving it, in which he lifted it and put it back on its feet, where it promptly walked away in a series of tight spirals. The spiraling is something I’ve seen before in their tracks, a method used to find the downslope direction, which normally leads horseshoe crabs to the low-tide mark and the comfort of a watery environment.

Another perspective of the “escape” traces made by the limulid’s telson (background), but this time with its tracks, showing how it started spiraling clockwise in an attempt to make its way back to the sea. Check out those telson drag marks in the trackway, doing a little bit of back-and-forth movement as its owner walked. (Photograph by Robert Kelly Vance, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia.)

OK everyone, start singing “Born Free!” The spiraling helped this limulid (arrow) to find a downslope direction, which took it in the right direction to the sea. But it’s not all sunshine and lollipops for other limulids, some of which are visible in the background, and look like they’re still stuck. Given the tidal range on the Georgia coast – 2.5-3 m (8.2-9.8 ft) – strong wave energy, and wide beaches, lots of big limulids that come in with the flood tide get knocked onto their backs by waves and left behind. It’s almost as if some sort of natural selection is taking place, and something similar might have happened in the geologic past, affecting the evolution of its lineage. (Photograph by Robert Kelly Vance, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia.)

In the last photograph, I was glad to see how the story told by these traces promised a happy ending for this limulid that had so stubbornly tried to put itself back on its feet. Yet when you also notice how many of its compatriots did not make it back into the life-nourishing sea, it also serves as a sobering reminder that storybook endings don’t always happen in nature, and what we wish to be true sometimes isn’t.

In this instance, I don’t know whether this horseshoe crab made it back into the sea to live another day or not. Still, the lesson it left for us in the sand lives on, and I am now slightly more confident that if any limulids were stuck on their backs at any point in their 450-million-year history, made similar traces with their tails, and these marks were preserved as trace fossils, we just might recognize them for what they are. For that alone, I am grateful. Thank you, horseshoe crabs, for being real, making traces, and continuing to share this planet with us today.

(Acknowledgement: Special thanks to Drs. Robert Kelly Vance and Gale Bishop for being my ichno-scouts on St. Catherines Island, and feeding my mind with such tasty treats while I am landlocked.)

Further Reading

Brockmann, H.J. 1990. Mating behavior of horseshoe crabs, Limulus polyphemus. Behaviour, 114: 206-220.

Martin, A.J. Life Traces of the Georgia Coast. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 692 p.

Martin, A.J., and Rindsberg, A.K. 2007. Arthropod tracemakers of Nereites? Neoichnological observations of juvenile limulids and their paleoichnological applications. In Miller, W.M., III (editor), Trace Fossils: Concepts, Problems, Prospects, Elsevier, Amsterdam: 478-491.

Shuster, C.N., Jr., Barlow, P.B., and Brockmann, H.J. (editors). 2003. The American Horseshoe Crab. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts: 427 p.

Deconstructing an Ichnology Abstract, with Alligators

Posted on October 19, 2012 by TMartin

Many people from outside of the realm of academia (or is it a fiefdom?) prefer to get the latest scoops on new paleontological or geological research directly from the source, rather than just reading a press release or news article about it. As someone looking from the inside out, I’m pleased to see so many non-scientists try to probe one layer deeper with their understanding of a beloved scientific topic that interests them, and I try to encourage it through my own blogging, speaking, teaching, and other forms of outreach.

An alligator den on St. Catherines Island, (Georgia), with baby alligator and “big momma” alligator for scale. This week, I presented a poster with about these big burrows and their makers at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina. The original field work we did for this research was reported back in March here, and now we’re ready to share more of what we found out. (Photograph by Anthony Martin.)

Unfortunately, many of the original research articles that become subjects of media attention are behind paywalls, requiring a reader to pay for access to read those articles, even if the research was publicly funded. This practice is especially common if the research is published in one of those glamorous journals that seemingly make or break academic careers in science, regardless of the lasting quality of the research. (I won’t name them directly, but let’s just say that’s the nature of science nowadays.)

So one option for these curious folks is to read abstracts from proceedings volumes of professional meetings. Abstracts, which ideally are succinct summaries highlighting the most significant findings of a given study, can thus serve as a way for the public to at least get a few insights on the latest scientific research happening in their favorite disciplines.

Want to get below the surface with this research? Oh, sorry, I was just being metaphorical. You really don’t want to go below the surface of an alligator den, which is why we mostly studied abandoned ones, mapped them, and otherwise tried to use methods that didn’t bother the alligators or otherwise have uncomfortable encounters with them.

Along those lines, the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) has been taking place this week in Raleigh, North Carolina, and it has an abstract volume associated with the meeting. Regrettably, though, the general public does not have access to these abstracts, only SVP members and people who have registered for the meeting. The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology also has a policy regarding researchers who publicly share their research results based on these abstracts, muddied by the word “embargo.” In short, this policy holds that people working for the media, which include reporters and bloggers (the latter of whom are also sometimes reporters), cannot write about and otherwise publicize research results presented at the meeting. That is, unless the researchers have given their permission to do so, or the results have been freely distributed by the researchers through a press release, blog, or other forms of outreach.

So in the spirit of the public having easier access to this primary scientific information, the following is our SVP abstract, which I presented as a poster at the meeting yesterday. The abstract is co-authored with Michael Page (Emory University), Sheldon Skaggs (Georgia Southern University), and R. Kelly Vance (also Georgia Southern University), and we worked together on the research, writing, and editing of the abstract. Because this abstract also includes a lot of scientific shorthand (charitably referred to as “jargon”), I also included a sentence-by-sentence explanation of it, in which the abstract text is in italics and my explanation is in formal typeface. So I hope you, the gentle reader, get something from this exercise in explanation, and we look forward to sharing more of this research with you as it continues to evolve and we publish it sometime next year as a peer-reviewed paper.

DENS OF THE AMERICAN ALLIGATOR (ALLIGATOR MISSISSIPPIENSIS) AS TRACES AND THEIR PREDICTIVE VALUE FOR FINDING LARGE ARCHOSAUR BURROWS IN THE GEOLOGIC RECORD

MARTIN, Anthony J., Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States; PAGE, Michael, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, United States; SKAGGS, Sheldon, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, United States; VANCE, Robert K., Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, United States

Large archosaur burrows are rarely interpreted from the geologic record, a circumstance that may be attributable to a lack of search images based on modern examples, rather than actual rarity.

Archosaurs make up an evolutionarily related group of vertebrates that include crocodilians (alligators and crocodiles), dinosaurs (the non-bird ones, that is), birds, and their extinct relatives. A few of the larger extinct archosaurs may have dug burrows, but paleontologists have reported very few of these, with one exception being the small Cretaceous ornithopod dinosaur Oryctodromeus cubicularis, found in its burrow with two juveniles of the same species. The authors are proposing here that this “rarity” of archosaur burrows in the fossil record might be more attributable to paleontologists not knowing what modern archosaur burrows look like. So they don’t recognize the fossil ones, leading to a perceived rarity rather than an actual one.

To test this idea, we measured, imaged, and mapped den structures of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) on St. Catherines Island (Georgia, USA).

By “measured,” I mean that my colleagues and I used a low-tech instrument known as a “tape measure” to assess the width and height of an alligator den entrance. By “imaged,” we used a much more technologically complex instruments and method, called ground-penetrating radar (GPR) in combination with computers to figure out what these dens looked like below the surface. By “mapped,” I mean that we looked for alligator dens on St. Catherines Island (Georgia) and recorded their locations using a handheld GPS (global positioning system) unit, then plotted the distribution of these points to see if any patterns emerged.

St. Catherines is an undeveloped barrier island on the Georgia coast, consisting of Pleistocene and Holocene sediments.

St. Catherines Island is undeveloped in the sense that very few buildings or people live on the island year-round. It is privately owned and reserved for researchers’ uses under the direction of the St. Catherines Island Foundation. Like most of the Georgia barrier islands on the southern part of its coast, St. Catherines also has a geologically complex history. Its northwestern end is made of sediments deposited about 40,000 years ago – during the Pleistocene Epoch – whereas its southeastern end is made of much more recent sediments from the Holocene Epoch.

Alligators dug most dens along the edges of freshwater ponds in loosely consolidated Holocene or Pleistocene sand.

This sentence doesn’t need much more explanation other than to reemphasize that alligators gravitate to freshwater ecosystems to dig their dens (pictured below), not saltwater ecosystems, like salt marshes or coastal dunes.

Adult female alligators use dens to protect offspring, but burrows also aid in thermoregulation or serve as refugia for alligators during droughts and fires.

This is probably the neatest insight we gained from doing the research, is that the dens aren’t just used by big momma ‘gators for raising baby ‘gators, but also to make sure alligators of all ages are cozy during winters, stay wet during droughts, and are safe from fires. For instance, because southern Georgia has been going through a drought the past few years, some of the occupied dens we saw were in places that were high-and-dry, but the dens themselves intersected the local water table (seen in one photo above).

Some dens are evidently reused and modified by different alligators after initial construction.

This is an important point for paleontologists to know, and probably shouldn’t have been buried so far into the abstract, but we couldn’t very well put it at the beginning, either. Dens, like other homes, get used again, and probably by generations of alligators. This means that once a den is dug, stays open, and has a wetland nearby, alligators may just move into an abandoned den and modify it if needed, an alligator form of “home improvement.”

Drought conditions along the Georgia coast have exposed many abandoned dens, thus better allowing for their study while increasing researcher safety.

The drought is bad for alligators but was good for us when we did our field work, because so many dens were abandoned and exposed on dry land. This also eased any concerns we had about bothering the alligators, but especially alleviated worries we might have had about close encounters with protective parents near occupied dens. To be sure, we ran into a few of those, but not as many as we would have if conditions had been wetter.

Den entrances have half-moon cross-sections, and based on one sample (n = 20), these range from 22-115 cm wide (mean = 63 + 23 cm) and 14-55 cm high (23 + 9 cm).

I like throwing numbers into ichnology, just to remind people that this is a part of it as a science. Although our sample size is small compared to other studies of traces and trace fossils, it gives people an idea of the range of sizes of these dens, or at least their entrances. As an exercise in the imagination, think about whether you could squeeze into one of these. You know, if you were crazy enough to do such a thing.

In addition to field descriptions, we applied geographic information systems (GIS) and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to help define the ecological context and subsurface geometry of these structures, respectively.

Computer-aided mapping methods like GIS helped us to test how alligators decided to make dens as a function of the landscape. For instance, we found most of their dens were in lower-elevation areas, which made sense when you think about water accumulating in those places. And the GPR served the dual purpose of not bothering the alligators if they were in their dens, while also keeping us away from their, um, denizens. (Sorry.)

GIS gave spatial data relatable to alligator territoriality, substrate conditions, and proximity to potential nest sites. GPR produced subsurface images of active dens, which were compared to abandoned dens for a sense of taphonomic history.

Big alligators tend to stay away from other big alligators. They also tend to burrow in sediments that don’t take too much effort for them. Female alligators also make their nests close to water bodies and dens, so their little tykes don’t have to travel so far to the water. Newer, active dens were also compared to those no longer being used to see what happens to them over time with neglect, kind of like how an old, abandoned house tends to fall apart and collapse on itself over time.

Most den entrances are southerly facing, with tunnels dipping to the northwest or northeast.

This is pretty self-explanatory, but I’ll just ask readers to think about why these dens are oriented like this.

From entrances, tunnels slope at about 10-15°, turn right or left within a meter, and lead to enlarged turn-around chambers.

Pure description here too, but by “turn-around chamber,” that means the den has enough room inside the den for a big adult alligator to go in head-first and turn around so that it’s head is right at the entrance. (See the photo of “big momma” at the top for an example of that.)

Collapsed dens in formerly ponded areas (secondary-succession maritime forests) provided further insights into subsurface forms of these structures.

Dens left high-and-dry from years ago and taken over by forests collapsed in a way that we could see the full outline of the den and measure these.

These features are: 3.1-4.6 m long; 30-40 cm deep, relatively narrow at either end (35-60 cm), and 1.2-1.6 m wide in their middles.

Dude. Those are big burrows. Dude.

Expansive areas were probable turn-around chambers, and total volumes of collapsed dens accordingly reflect maximum body sizes of their former occupants.

The bigger the den, the easier it was for a large occupant to turn around in it. And although smaller, younger alligators could have lived in these dens, some of the dens were too small to allow the really big alligators from moving into them.

One sampled area (8,100 m²), an almost dry former pond, had 30 abandoned dens, showing how multiple generations of alligators and fluctuating water levels can result in dense concentrations of alligator burrows over time.

Think of an area about the size of an American football field, and put 30 alligator dens in that area. (Now that would make for an interesting game, wouldn’t it?) These dens weren’t all made at the same time, though, and were constructed or abandoned as the pond filled or dried out, respectively.

In summary, the sheer abundance, distinctive traits, and sizes of these structures on St. Catherines and elsewhere in the Georgia barrier islands give paleontologists excellent search images for seeking similar trace fossils made by large semi-aquatic archosaurs.

That’s the big take-home message here for vertebrate paleontologists. All of the information we gathered about these alligator dens from the Georgia barrier islands, especially what they look like, can be applied to test the fossil record of archosaurs. In other words, did archosaurs actually leave lots of dens for us to find, but we just didn’t know what to look for? Hopefully we’ll find out because of this research.

Later, denning ‘gator. (Photograph by Anthony Martin, taken on St. Catherines Island, Georgia.)

(Special thanks to Ruth Schowalter for assisting with the field work, and to the St. Catherines Island Foundation for funding some of the research.)

Source of Abstract (Reference):

Martin, A.J., Page, M., Vance, R.K., and Skaggs, S. 2012. Dens of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) as traces and their predictive value for finding large archosaur burrows in the geologic record. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 32 [Suppl. to No. 3]: 136.

Life Traces of the Georgia Coast

Unseen lives of the Georgia barrier islands

Tag Archives: St. Catherines Island

Erasing the Tracks of a Monster

Horseshoe Crabs Are So Much More Awesome Than Mermaids

Deconstructing an Ichnology Abstract, with Alligators

Martin, A.J., Page, M., Vance, R.K., and Skaggs, S. 2012. Dens of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) as traces and their predictive value for finding large archosaur burrows in the geologic record. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 32 [Suppl. to No. 3]: 136.

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Martin, A.J., Page, M., Vance, R.K., and Skaggs, S. 2012. Dens of the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) as traces and their predictive value for finding large archosaur burrows in the geologic record. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 32 [Suppl. to No. 3]: 136.

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