A more than four-metre-long alligator has been captured and killed in the US state of Mississippi after four hunters wrestled with it for seven hours.
The 364kg animal was caught on the Yazoo River on the opening day of the 2023 alligator hunting season.
Hunter Donald Woods told USA Today the group had seen “a lot of 8-footers, 10-footers” but were chasing something bigger.
“We’ve been hunting these things a long time,” he said.
When they finally did spot and hook their target around 9pm, they had no idea just how large the alligator truly was.
“We knew he was wide,” Mr Woods said. “His back was humungous. It was like we were following a Jon boat.
“We held onto him a while, until 10 or so. He broke my rod at that point.
“We hooked him eight or nine times and he kept breaking off. He would go down, sit and then take off. He kept going under logs. He knew what he was doing. The crazy thing is he stayed in that same spot.”
The fight lasted throughout the night and into the following morning.
The men said by the time the “mentally exhausting” experience was almost over, almost all of their rods and reels had been rendered useless.
By 4am they had the alligator in the boat and could finally start to understand its size.
“The sheer size of him was impressive, but we didn’t think he was anything that special,” fellow hunter Will Thomas told the Washington Post.
“But when we got him out, pulled the tape measure out and we realised that he was over 14 feet, the level of excitement went up.”
The Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks confirmed the alligator was 14 feet 3 inches (4.3 metres) long, with a belly girth of 66 inches (1.6m) and tail girth of 46.5 inches (1.18m).
The previous record was set in 2017 with an animal 14 feet and three-quarter inches long, or 4.2m.
(ABC)
