While Florida is often associated with alligators, Louisiana actually has the largest population of gators, with more than 2 million in the state.

In 1824-25, the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette made a tour of America. During this tour, he was given many gifts, including a live alligator. When he visited the White House, he re-gifted the alligator to John Quincy Adams, who kept it in a tub in the East Room of the White House for a few months, supposedly claiming that he enjoyed watching "the spectacle of guests fleeing from the room in terror."

The largest alligator ever recorded was found on Marsh Island, Louisiana, in 1890. It measured 19.2 ft. (5.85 m) in length and weighed approximately 2000 lbs.

Alligators have a very slow metabolism, which allows them to survive long periods without food. In fact, larger gators can go for over a year without eating a meal.

One of the oldest recorded alligators was Saturn, an American alligator who was born in 1936 in Mississippi and spent nearly a decade in Germany before spending the majority of its life at the Moscow Zoo, where it died at the age of 83 or 84 on 22 May 2020.

Deinosuchus was far larger than any modern alligator, with the largest adults measuring 12 meters (39 ft) in total length. It also had the strongest-known biting force in the history of the world at a mind-boggling 23,000 pounds of force per square inch (PSI), making its jaws almost six times stronger than a great white shark.