Where They Live — and Why Clear Water Is Not Safe

Crocodiles and alligators live in a far wider range of water than most people picture. Rivers, lakes, swamps, marshes and backwaters; mangrove estuaries, tidal creeks, brackish lagoons, and, for the true crocodiles, the open coast and the sea itself. And increasingly the human-made kind: drainage canals, farm ponds, stormwater retention ponds, golf-course lakes, marina channels, borrow pits, even the clear spring a family drives out to on a hot day. If it holds warm water for much of the year and sits in crocodilian country, assume it can hold a crocodilian. The landscaping around it means nothing.

Which brings us to a belief people hold about this water that gets them killed. Everyone learns, correctly, that crocodilians hide in murky water. From that true fact they draw a fatal false one: that clear water is safe. It is not. A crocodilian in clear water is exactly as present and exactly as capable as one in a muddy river, and thanks to its underwater vision and its goggle-like third eyelid, it can see you far better than you can see it. Some of Florida's most crystalline springs hold alligators. Clarity does not tell you whether the water is occupied; it only means you might get a better look at the animal that was always entitled to be there. Murky or gin-clear, still or flowing, wild or manicured, the rule does not move.

And do not let depth reassure you any more than clarity does. “It’s only two feet deep” is a dangerous sentence to say near this water. An alligator or crocodile does not need deep water to kill you; it hunts from the edge and the shallows, exactly where people wade, launch a kayak, fill a bucket, let a dog swim, or crouch to cool off. A big animal can lie flat and all but invisible in water barely deep enough to cover its back, and erupt from it into ankle-deep shallows faster than you can step away. Two feet or ten feet, clear or muddy, still or flowing, it makes no difference to the animal and it should make none to you. Depth is not information. Two-year-old Lane Graves was taken from ankle-deep shallows at the edge of a resort lagoon. Brittany Clark was swimming shoulder-deep in a calm river when a thirteen-foot alligator took her. One end of the scale to the other, and the water told neither of them a thing.

Murky water hides them. Clear water does not remove them. You cannot read the safety of a waterway from how far into it you can see.