Two Valentine’s Day picnics were crashed Tuesday by an uninvited guest: an alligator with an appetite.
Tatiana Radulovic and her boyfriend, Chris Day, were eating a picnic dinner by the Baughman Center at Lake Alice on Tuesday when a 3-to-4-foot alligator began to approach at about 6:40 p.m.
The pair, sitting near another couple, thought the alligator wouldn’t be an issue — until it went for their food. They said they had seen the alligator in the water while they were eating, but Radulovic, 19, told Day not to worry.
“Those things can run faster than people when they want to,” Day said. “You can’t mess around with them.”
Day said he listened to Radulovic, who was convinced the alligator wouldn’t disturb them unless they disturbed it.
“She’s been around gators more than I have, and I don’t know, she kind of assured me that nothing would happen,” the 19-year-old UF biomedical engineering freshman said. “Which obviously is not how it happened.”
The alligator began to rifle through their bag and ate their chicken salad wraps. It also grabbed Radulovic’s camera, worth about $50, and dragged it into the lake.
Both couples ran toward the sidewalk and away from the water, watching for about 20 minutes while the alligator sat by their picnic blanket. Radulovic said they called University Police, but left before an officer arrived.
“That could have been so much worse,” said Radulovic, a UF statistics and marketing freshman. “At first I was really upset about the camera until I realized that could have gone in a totally worse direction.”
In November 2015, a UF student captured a video of an alligator eating a sandwich from another’s picnic lunch near Lake Alice, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Kent Vliet, a UF biology lab coordinator who has studied alligators and crocodiles for more than 30 years, said alligators rarely provoke people but might if they’ve been fed before and learned that behavior.
Vliet said he has heard reports of a small alligator by the Baughman Center approaching people with food.
“It may just be a single individual,” Vliet said. “Sooner or later, he’s probably going to get killed, if he keeps this up.”
@romyellenbogen
rellenbogen@alligator.org
The alligator ate a couples' chicken salad wraps and grabbed a camera, worth about $50, and dragged it into Lake Alice on Tuesday.
