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In 1935, the NY Times published an article titled, “Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer,” tracing the actions of 16-year-old Salvatore Condoluci and his comrades, who trapped and killed an 8-foot-long alligator found under 123rd Street. Today, at 92, Condoluci still remembers some of the tale, and the Times looks back at the urban legend.
Along with the printed article, former superintendent of city sewers, Teddy May, also had a part in giving the legend legs. He once investigated reports of sightings, relaying his story to writer Robert Daley, who in 1959 published the account in his book, The World Beneath the City. It goes like this:
Alligators serenely paddling around in his sewers. The beam of his own flashlight had spotlighted alligators whose length, on the average, was about two feet. Some may have been longer. Avoiding the swift current of the trunk lines under major avenues, the beasts had wormed up the smaller pipes under less important neighborhoods, and there Teddy had found them. The colony appeared to have settled contentedly under the very streets of the busiest city in the world.No one seems to be certain if the story is fact or fiction, but the belief is that many vacationing families were bringing back baby alligators as pets from Florida at the time, later discarding them. Adding more documentation to the legend, Times columnist Meyer Berger once wrote that in the mid-1930s, "sewer alligators seemed to thrive below the pavement in rather frightening numbers. They were destroyed systematically and the threat of an alligator invasion died away.”
Other things living in sewers: bees, rats, "unknown lifeforms," snakes, and Ninja Turtles.
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Really, what a croc of shit...
It's fiction. Three reasons why alligators don't live in sewers:
1) It's too cold. Alligators are cold blooded animals that can't regulate their body temp. They would freeze to death in the winter.
2) They would drown. Most sewers are either storm sewers or combined sewers that fill to capacity during a moderate rain. Any alligator in one of those sewers would die.
3) They'd starve. There's not enough food in the sewer to feed an alligator.
Wrong:
1) alligators are reptiles, and are therefore cold-blooded, meaning they CAN regulate their core body temps. Deserts drop to very cold temps during the nights when lizards and other reptiles there have to bring the body temps down to their ambient's temp. It's the warm-blooded animals like me that maintain a constant temp.
2) your basic knowledge of civil engineering needs to be pwned. there isn't, and hasn't been in a while, enough water raining where the the sewer system is constantly flooded enough for nothing to live down there. at your rate, you'd need a constant niagara falls flooding the sewers of this city. if 100 'gators, some female and pregnant, were scattered throughout the nyc sewer system, and it rained really bad one day, and HALF were wiped out to sea, the chances of other surviving half staying and giving birth is still high.
3) bull. alligators are harty animals who will eat almost anything and not eat again for a few days.
You may be right about them having the ability to regulate body temp, but they need a warm environment in which to live and they can't get that in the sewer system.
As for the rest, you're just 100 percent wrong. Arrogance and ignorance are an ugly combination that reflects poorly on you.
ehh, i forgot, i'm not a columbia-educated biologist or anything (sarcasm). i think you got your info off of Wikipedia or something.
you're points are totally, totally invalid. alligators by nature eat on a sporadic schedule, like some constrictor snakes eat weekly or sometimes monthly. they're also not picky by any means (post-mortems have found leather boots, human legs, etc.), and surely they can make meals of the THOUSANDS of rats that live down there.
awaiting your additional weak argument.
'but they need a warm environment in which to live and they can't get that in the sewer system...'
you evidently have never seen steam rise from NYC manholes. you know, those things that are used to access sewers? steam coming from down there indicates IT'S WARMER DOWN THERE THAN UP HERE.
Now who's ignorant and arrogant?
Now, now boys, let's be civil here. The best part of your discussion is that the gators eat rats. All we need now is a Pied Piper.
Or you could find.. THIS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COcxABugcdA
Just as an interesting note to everyone, there are Crocodiles in Madagascar that have been known to live deep within caves with very cool conditions even though they are cold blooded
http://www.madagascar-library.com/r/542.html