Four alligator attacks in Florida, including one that left 31-year-old Brittany Clark dead, have rattled the state and raised questions about why people take risks around water even if there are warning signs that gators may be present.
While Clark was swimming with her boyfriend and a friend when the June 28 attack occurred, two other incidents involved people fishing at the edges of freshwater creeks and canals where gators were able to grab them from the bank.
Brody Dituri, 11, lost his right hand when he was bit while putting a fish back in the water. James Grayson McMicken, 71, fought off a gator that grabbed him from a canal bank behind his house by jabbing it with his fishing rod. A June 21 attack was on a snorkeler in the Rainbow River in Marion County.
Florida has an estimated 1.3 million alligators, and that familiarity with their presence may be one reason that people look for a happy medium in coexisting with gators, that, nonetheless, can sometimes put them in harm’s way.
And why does it seem like people are more frightened of sharks than alligators?
Alligators cause more fatal attacks than sharks in Florida
According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, if people had to pick, they’d rather be faced with a gator than a shark in Florida. That’s even though an an alligator attack is almost three times more likely to be fatal.
Since the mid-1800s, there have been 36 shark-related fatalities in the state of Florida, according to the International Shark Attack File. That’s compared to 33 fatal alligator-related fatalities in Florida from 1948 through June.
The last was fatal shark attack was in 2010 when 38-year-old kiteboarder Stephen Schafer died after encountering a bull or tiger shark south of Stuart Beach.
Q&A: Why do people take risks with alligators in Florida?
Florida State University Associate Psychology Professor David March explains peoples’ thought processes when it comes to alligators and why they may be more afraid of sharks than Florida’s freshwater apex predator.
Question: There are signs in many of Florida’s waterways warning of alligators, but people still practice risky behaviors that in some cases lead to injury or death. Why are the warnings not taken seriously?
Answer: I would actually be careful with the assumption that people do not take the warnings seriously. In most cases, they probably do.
The issue is that alligators are not a rare, isolated hazard in Florida. They are part of the environment. Alligators are found in all 67 Florida counties, and the state has about 1.3 million of them. So, for many Floridians, alligator risk becomes a familiar, managed background.
That means people are often making a mental trade-off, like we do in many facets of our lives. On one extreme, we could avoid every pond, lake and golf-course water hazard in the state. On the other extreme, we could behave as if the alligators don’t exist.
Most people probably aim for a livable middle ground by staying aware, keeping their distance from what look like problematic areas, and watching their children and pets. That is not the same as ignoring the warning or not taking it seriously. It is treating the warning as part of ordinary life in Florida.
Think about the fact that alligator injuries, though often serious, are still relatively rare, given how widespread alligators and human-water interactions are. FWC’s February 2026 bite summary lists only 13 unprovoked alligator bites in Florida in 2025, including two fatalities, and 500 unprovoked bites with 32 fatalities from 1948 through 2025. Without ordinary precautions, those numbers would definitely be much higher. So, I would not say the signs are ineffective or ignored. I would say that they exist in a context where the hazard is constant.
If signs are posted at the beach warning of sharks, people are likely to avoid the water. Is there more fear about sharks than alligators? If so, why would people handle the situations differently?
I think that is probably right, but the reason is important. An alligator sign near a Florida pond or lake tells people something they likely already know — this is an alligator’s habitat, so use caution.
But a shark warning at the beach would probably be interpreted as a change to the situation. It says in no uncertain terms that there may be a shark nearby right now, which is different than the norm. To people, that feels acute and immediate, hence important. It is more like a tornado warning than a severe thunderstorm warning.
That difference changes how people process things psychologically. Alligators are familiar and endemic in Florida. People know they are there, and many Floridians learn the basic rules for coexisting with them. I grew up learning to run zig-zag to outpace an alligator.
And FWC’s guidance is to do things like keep your distance, never feed alligators, swim only in designated areas during daylight hours, and keep pets leashed and away from the water. That kind of guidance correctly encourages people to treat alligators as a managed local hazard, and not a rare occurrence like a shark.
Sharks are also different in the public imagination. We see them less often, they are more culturally dramatized, and it’s easier to imagine a sudden catastrophic predator event with a shark in light of movies like “Jaws” and “Sharknado.” That portrayal gives the shark threat a lot of psychological force, even when the objective risk is low. The image of a shark attack is vivid, frightening, and culturally reinforced.
It’s likely not that people fear sharks more than alligators in every context. A parent near a retention pond with a small child or dog may be very worried about alligators. But sharks are more likely to become the focal threat at the beach because they fit the mental prototype of an acute hidden predator that is rare, fast, dangerous, and frequently reinforced by movies and dramatic news stories.
In a similar sense, why are people more concerned about sharks at the beach than rip currents or lightning?
People worry about sharks because sharks are psychologically vivid. They are visible in the imagination even when they are not visible in the water.
Rip currents and lightning are more dangerous in many contexts, but they are less agentic and less cinematic. A shark feels like an attacker. A rip current feels like water until you are caught in it. Lightning feels like weather until the danger is immediate. That makes people over-attend to the rare predator threat and under-attend to the more common environmental threats.
In all these cases, the difference is not simply fear versus no fear. It is an acute threat versus background risk. Sharks often feel like an immediate predator event. Alligators in Florida often feel like a familiar environmental hazard. Rip currents and lightning may be objectively more important in many contexts, but they lack the vivid predator imagery that makes sharks so psychologically salient.
Kimberly Miller is a journalist for the USA TODAY NETWORK FLORIDA. She covers weather, the environment and critters as the Embracing Florida reporter. If you have news tips, please send them to kmiller@pbpost.com. You can get all of Florida’s best content directly in your inbox each weekday by signing up for the free newsletter, Florida TODAY, at palmbeachpost.com/newsletters.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Why Floridians keep taking risks around alligators
Reporting by Kimberly Miller, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Kimberly Miller, USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida | USA TODAY Network
