Cannibal alligator spotted at this Hilton Head community

Shipyard Plantation resident Kathi Elder always keeps an eye on the alligators that occupy the lake near her Hilton Head Island home. On Tuesday, as she was riding her bike to Coligny, she saw something she wasn't expecting.

One of the four alligators that Elder normally sees congregating in and around the Shipyard Golf Club lake she rode by had something in its mouth: a chunk of another alligator.

Seeing the unusual sight, Elder sprung into action and snapped a few pictures.

"It looked like from the back of the body to the end of the tale of another alligator was in its mouth," said Elder. "He had it pretty much the whole day. He just swam around with it in his mouth. When I came back in the evening he still had it."

Elder said she didn't know what happened to the rest of the gator, whether it was eaten or if it might "come floating up" later on.

"The night before we were riding bikes and we saw all four together.," said Elder. "Two of them, the smaller two, were side by side, right by the road, and the two bigger ones were laying on the bank."

Elder is a Pennsylvania native who has lived in Shipyard Plantation from January through March for five years, and has learned to keep an eye on area gators to ensure the safety of her two small Maltese dogs.

While seeing one alligator eat another might not be a common sight, it isn't all that out of the ordinary according to a report in the journal Herpetologica, which said that the larger an alligator is, the more likely it is to engage in cannibalistic behavior. That was the case with the gator that Elder saw.

"He was a good sized alligator, " she said. "It was a good sized tail he had in his mouth."

This story was originally published March 24, 2018 at 4:06 PM with the headline "Cannibal alligator spotted at this Hilton Head community."