My name is Alan Register, and I'm the owner of Gatorama, along with my wife, Patty.

Probably 2003 or so 2003, 2004 we started doing a hatching festival.

We thought that it would be a great opportunity for people to to see the beginning.

I was talking to some guests one day and I said, you know, I think we have some eggs that are hatching out.

I went in the incubator, pulled a couple of eggs out and let them hatch them, and they just fell in love with it.

And so we thought maybe we've got something here.

So what we're going to do is we're going to take the rest of the stuff off.

I'm going to peel this off.

And once we kind of get him exposed, now he's got his head out and look, so it's his birthday.

How about that?

So it's turned into something super, super cool.

This is our 18th year with the hatching festival, and it grows larger and larger every year.

We've got over 5000 eggs that we're going to hatch out this year, and they'll all hatch out in about a four week period.

Just about everything we do is either education or conservation, and we want to relate that to our guests as they come through.

The knowledge of what people know about alligators varies with everything that's on TV now the kids.

It seems like a lot of the kids know more than I know.

And I've lived it for 33 years.

But I think the biggest thing really now that I think about it is people think the alligator are still endangered.

They haven't been endangered since 1986.

The government has done a great job of telling them about being endangered, but they've done a lousy job about the recovery and the alligator being the most successful recovery story of any endangered species.

We raise alligators for their meat and their hides.

We're no different than a cattle rancher or a pig farmer or anything like that.

Some of the ones that we hatch out this year and last year will be used on the farm.

Others will be used for educational purposes.

We've got two or three different institutions, occasional people that we work with where we loan out alligators to them.

They use them in their education programs.

They bring them back to aus.

As for the farming aspect, it's very critical that if you think about any endangered species that has recovered, there has always been some type of farming aspect to it, whether it may not be for the meat, it might be for the hide or whatever.

The beauty about alligators is that not only do we use the meat, we use the hide How's everybody doing today?

Good?

Everybody have fun hatching the alligators?

Was that awesome or what!!!

In the early nineties, we used to export to Japan, and then we had some restaurants that we sold to.

We started selling meat like crazy.

Alligator tastes just like alligators.

And people want to say it tastes like chicken.

It's a white meat and it's very tender.

And so I think most people equate any white meat to chicken because that's the most common white meat out there.

Really less than 2% of the alligators actually make it to adult because they're getting picked off by other alligators by fish, birds, raccoons.

There's a lot of predators out there for the alligator up until they get about 4ft long.

Once they're at 4ft, they can take care of themselves 100%.

The Hatching festival is just phenomenal.

Most people really enjoy it, and we love it.