Dragons in Distress: Naturalists as Bioactivists in the Campaign to Save the American Alligator

This article explores the scientific and environmental activism of a group of naturalists who not only studied but also advocated on behalf of an unlikely organism: the American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis). A large, toothy reptile that once inhabited wetlands across much of the southeastern United States, the alligator had long been reviled as a fearsome predator and pursued as a valuable commodity. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, a small group of naturalists began to note its precipitous decline and to issue calls for its protection. Initially they tended to do so working individually, largely within the pages of scientific and governmental publications devoted to the species. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, as habitat destruction joined commodification to further threaten the alligator, naturalists banded together with state officials, conservationists, and other wildlife enthusiasts to form the American Alligator Council. That organization not only promoted research on the alligator but also secured local, state, and federal protection of the increasingly beleaguered species, thereby snatching it from the jaws of impending extinction. The naturalists examined in this article were not only producers and purveyors of knowledge, then; they were also bioactivists, biologists with a strong political agenda who firmly embraced the practice of engaging in the public sphere.