Alligators are fascinating creatures. Survivors from the age of dinosaurs, they and their crocodilian kin are the closest living relatives to birds. The mother alligator fiercely defends her nest, and protects her hatchlings for up to three years. In zoos, gators have been known to live for upwards of 70 years.
Alligators communicate with each other in a variety of different ways. Baby gators in distress will ‘chirp’ to summon their mother, and sometimes even unrelated alligators will also respond to the call. Adults employ a range of vocalizations, hisses, roars, and bellows when confronted with danger or when defending their territory.
Gators also have the ability to hear and emit ultra-low frequency vibrations, which are inaudible to the human ear, yet travel for great distances. The force of these ultra-low frequency rumbles literally make water droplets leap off the gator’s back, an effect known as the ‘water dance.’ The alligator uses these long-range signals to announce its presence to distant gators, advertising its availability to potential mates and warning off potential rivals.
Interestingly however, the alligator seems to be easily confused by other sources of ultra-low frequency vibration. Thunderstorms often trigger the rumbling response in gators, as do large vehicles or other heavy machinery. Here’s an article about a guy who got some gators horny with a tuba serenade.
Obviously, vehicles and tubas have only been a feature of the gator’s environment for a very short time, evolutionarily speaking. But thunderstorms are another matter. It seems reasonable to assume that gators have been responding to thunderstorms for a very long time. There doesn’t seem to be an evolutionary downside to select against this effect. If anything, the alligators might gain a slight advantage by advertising their own presence more frequently. Presumably the thunderstorms don’t care one way or the other.
Nonetheless, the fact remains: alligators reply to thunderstorms as if they are responding to a fellow alligator.
In short, alligators have a religion.
--Or a superstition, or a mythology; or whatever discipline encompasses the basic human tendency to anthropomorphize our environment. Alligators, by extension, must therefore be guilty of alligatormorphism. Granted, their belief system is primitive, apparently consisting of only one tenet: “There are alligators in the sky.”
Alligators have probably been replying to these phantom sky gators for millions of years. It does them no apparent harm, and may do some good. At any rate, no sky gator has yet attempted to invade alligator territory.
There are many, many instances of living species—both animals and plants—which gain a direct and obvious evolutionary advantage by masquerading as other species. However, I am unable to recall any other example of a creature consistently mistaking an inanimate natural phenomenon for a member of its own species. Birds and other animals have been known to respond aggressively to their reflections in mirrors, but mirrors are an artificial phenomenon. Birds apparently do not perceive their reflections in water the same way. It seems like any such error in perception ought to have serious negative consequences from a reproductive standpoint, yet the gators seem to be doing fine with it.
Is it fair to say that alligators alligatormorphize? Are there other such examples in nature?
