Chinese alligator

Chinese alligators eat snails, fish and bugs.

Their blunt teeth can crunch shells.

Chinese alligators eat whatever they can find, mostly snails, crustaceans (hard-shelled water animals), insects and fish. If they get the chance, they also catch young water birds and rodents.

Their teeth are blunt, which is good for crushing the hard shells of snails and clams. They mostly hunt at night. At Smithsonian's National Zoo, the alligators are fed small rats, mice and fish.

Smithsonian's National Zoo calls the Chinese alligator an opportunistic feeder: the diet is mostly snails, crustaceans, insects and fish, with young waterfowl and rodents taken when available, and its blunt teeth are well suited to crushing shelled prey. The Animal Diversity Web describes adults as nocturnal predators of fish, snails, clams, small mammals and waterfowl, with some speculation that they may also take turtles; younger alligators eat insects and other small invertebrates. In human care at the National Zoo they are fed small rats, mice and fish.

Chinese alligators dig long tunnels.

They sleep in them all winter.

In spring they come out to lie in the sun.

Chinese alligators dig big tunnel systems. Their tunnels can have several rooms, entrances and even pools, and more than one alligator may share them. They spend the cold months, from late fall to early spring, resting inside.

In spring they come out to bask in the sun and warm up. As summer comes, they become active mostly at night. They call to each other with bellows, slap the water with their jaws, and snap their jaws as a warning.

The IUCN notes that, at a relatively high northern latitude, Chinese alligators spend much of the year dormant in complex burrows with above- and below-ground pools and many air holes (Chen et al. 1985); they emerge to bask in May and begin nocturnal activity in June. The Animal Diversity Web says they emerge in April and gives typical burrow dimensions of about 1 meter deep, 0.3 meters wide and 1.5 meters long, sometimes shared. The National Zoo says they are largely nocturnal because of human persecution and stay in their tunnels when people are near.

Both sexes bellow to signal their location, especially in the breeding season; they also slap the water with the lower jaw and snap their jaws as a warning, and juveniles call to keep their group together, with adults responding to their distress calls (National Zoo).

Very few Chinese alligators live in the wild.

Many live in special centers where babies are raised.

Some have been set free in ponds again.

The Chinese alligator is critically endangered. In the late 1970s there were probably about 1,000 in the wild; a survey in 2015 estimated only 136 to 173. Almost all of their old wetland home has been lost, and for many years people also hunted them.

China has given the species its highest legal protection since 1972. Breeding centers now raise thousands of alligators, and some have been released into restored ponds, where they have laid eggs and hatched babies in the wild.

Jiang and Wu assessed Alligator sinensis as Critically Endangered (A1b; B1ab(ii,v)+2ab(ii,v); C1+2a(i); assessed 31 July 2017, published 2018), citing its tiny range, very few adults (68 to 86 mature individuals) and a decline estimated at 99% over three generations. A 2015 survey saw 64 alligators and estimated 136 to 173 wild animals, down from about 1,000 in the late 1970s. From the 1950s to the 1990s, habitat loss and the killing of alligators were the main causes; today habitat loss is described as virtually complete, with pollution and low genetic diversity also of concern.

China listed it as a Class I protected species in 1972 and created a reserve in Anhui in 1982 (national since 1986). Captive breeding began in 1979: by 2016 the Anhui center held about 15,000 alligators and the Changxing center in Zhejiang about 5,500 (Manolis et al. 2016). Released captive-reared alligators have bred at Hongxing Reservoir, Gaojingmiao Forest Farm and Shanghai's Chongming Dongtan wetland.