Jawlene, the rescue alligator missing her upper jaw, is gaining weight and settling into her new life at Gatorland.
The animal was brought to the attraction after being captured in Sanford last month.
“At first she was kind of lethargic … but now that she’s getting healthier, she’s a little spicier,” said Savannah Boan, international ambassador for Gatorland Global Conservation.
“Make no mistake, she wants to bite you, even without a jaw,” she said.
“She’s got that instinct,” Mark McHugh, president and CEO of Gatorland, said before Jawlene’s medical check-up this week.
She weighed in at 3.82 kilograms — nearly 8.5 pounds — up from 3.3 kilograms a month ago.
“She still is pretty skinny, but gaining a pound is the right direction,” said Dr. Jim Bogan, a veterinarian who works with Gatorland animals.
“Her belly wasn’t used to having too much food in the wild, so we’re going slow on her feeding,” McHugh said.
Bogan examined Jawlene’s ears (where he looked for leeches), eyes and throat. He listened to her lungs and heart. He felt the stomach area to make sure she hadn’t swallowed something she shouldn’t have. There was a temperature check, and he examined a yellow spot on her tongue, which is exposed to the elements at all times.
He gave her an A+ on the exam.
Care and feeding
In her life before Gatorland, eating was a major challenge. She had to have luck to scoop up food. And even now, when meals are placed on the back of her tongue, it’s a task. She throws back her head and the goodie, hopefully, goes down her throat. The animal is missing her sinuses; she can’t smell the food.
“When she knows there’s food coming, all she wants to do is do it herself. But she can’t do it herself. She doesn’t know she can’t do it herself,” Boan said. Jawlene gets frustrated and hangry.
“If Savannah puts some food on her tongue and she drops it, she rolls her head sideways to try and grab it. That’s how alligators eat,” McHugh said. “They’ll roll their head sideways, and you can see her roll her head. She feels it. She knows it’s there, and she’ll roll her head, and she can’t grab it.”
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Jawlene currently lives in a backstage area with her own pool with crooks and crannies to check out. She basks in the sun at will.
“We don’t handle her much because we’re letting her stress level just settle down and get used to the environment,” McHugh said.
Gatorland receives one or two rescue alligators a month, he said. It’s a long-standing program for the attraction, which has operated on South Orange Blossom Trail since 1949.
“The life of an alligator’s a rough, tough life. Sometimes they’ll be missing fingers or toes or the end of their tail or something … but nothing as debilitating as this is,” McHugh said.
Murky waters
Jawlene’s age is unknown. She’s about the size of Gatorland’s 3-year-old alligators, but those animals have been well-fed. She could be 4 or 5.
“Her tail is really long … so she could be older than she looks because she hasn’t been able to eat a lot,” Boan said.
And there is also the mystery of just what happened to Jawlene’s upper jaw. Early theories involved unlucky interactions with boat propellers or other alligators.
“I’m honestly starting to lean more towards a sharp object. A knife … maybe even a machete,” McHugh said. “I hate to think that … but it’s just a clean cut.”
Cracks on her lower jaw that line up with the injury would support that theory. By looking at the healing, Bogun estimated that the upper jaw has been gone a year.
Jaw 2?
The idea has been floated to fit Jawlene with a prosthetic, and dozens of companies — including 3D printing companies — have reached out.
“I don’t know what you would attach it to, what muscles,” McHugh said. It would also be challenging because Jawlene is still growing, and a fake jaw could draw unwanted attention from other gators and increase danger.
“More important than anything, it’s got to improve the quality of her life. We’re not going to experiment with her,” McHugh said.
Jawlene will stay at Gatorland, he said.
“We will continue to get her comfortable here at Gatorland and eating really well, and then we’ll introduce some smaller alligators to her so that we know they’re not going to try to pick on her,” McHugh said. She’ll eventually move in with a group, he said.
“Everybody wants to see her,” McHugh said. “Our plan, eventually, is to get her an area inside the park that we can bring her out a couple of times a week and let people see her.”
Florida law prohibits the display of animals with deformities or massive injuries, he said.
“It stems from the old roadside circuses for freak animals and that sort of thing,” McHugh said.
“We don’t want to put her on display in any way then making it look like, you know, she’s a freak,” he said. “But we do want people to see her.”
