07/08/2026
Since 2018, Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency has confirmed alligator sightings in Shelby, Fayette, Hardin, Tipton, and Lauderdale counties, all in the southwestern corner of the state along the Mississippi River floodplain and its tributaries.
In March 2018, TWRA Region 1 personnel filmed a seven-foot alligator at the Wolf River Wildlife Management Area in Fayette County. A regional wildlife official told reporters the agency had been seeing gators in the area for at least ten years before the video was recorded. The video was just the first time anyone filmed one on the clock.
TWRA's official statement is precise: alligators are naturally expanding their range into Tennessee from the southern border states. TWRA has not stocked any alligators in Tennessee. The animals are moving north on their own, following river corridors and wetland systems that connect the bottomland hardwood swamps of Mississippi and Alabama to the marshes and oxbow lakes of West Tennessee.
The expansion makes geographic sense. Shelby County, which contains Memphis, shares a border with Mississippi to the south and Arkansas across the river to the west. Both states have established alligator populations with regulated hunting seasons. Mississippi alone has been hunting alligators since 2005 and harvested 791 in a recent season. The gators moving into Tennessee are not coming from far away. They are swimming across a state line that means nothing to an alligator.
The question most people ask when they hear "alligators in Tennessee" is how they survive the winter. The answer is brumation, a cold-blooded version of hibernation in which the alligator's metabolism drops to near zero and the animal becomes almost completely inactive. It can stay submerged in near-freezing water for extended periods. But it still needs to breathe. When the surface of a pond or slough begins to freeze, an alligator will push its snout up through the forming ice and hold it there. The nostrils stay above the ice line. The rest of the body is underwater, frozen into the surface, motionless. It breathes through a hole in the ice until the temperature rises enough to free it.
TWRA says that as of the most recent assessments, no breeding pairs have been confirmed in Tennessee. The animals documented so far are believed to be individual dispersers, mostly males, expanding northward from established populations. The state estimates fewer than 1,000 alligators within its borders. The distinction matters because a population is not established until females arrive, nest, and successfully hatch young. Tennessee is currently in a window between occasional presence and permanent residency. The alligators are there. The question is whether they stay.
In 2019, a baby alligator was spotted in the Tennessee River just across the state line in north Alabama. The area is downstream from Wheeler National Wildlife Refuge, where 56 alligators were deliberately released in 1979 as part of a range-expansion effort.
Those stocked animals and their descendants may be part of what is now pushing into Tennessee from the south. In March 2024, an angler on Norris Lake in East Tennessee caught a three-foot alligator on a fishing line. TWRA confirmed it was an alligator and not a caiman but said it was almost certainly a released pet, not a natural immigrant. East Tennessee's water temperatures are too cold in winter for alligators to establish breeding populations, though TWRA acknowledged individual animals could survive there.
The alligator is a protected species in Tennessee. Catching, shooting, or trapping one is a violation of state law. TWRA's public guidance is one sentence: alligators migrating into Tennessee is just another species that we must learn to coexist with like many of the other southern states.
Source: Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency / FOX 17 Nashville / WBIR / WBBJ / WVLT.
