A 61-year-old woman was killed on Tuesday when an alligator tipped over the canoe that she and her husband were paddling in Central Florida and attacked her after they fell in the water, the authorities said.
The attack took place just after 4 p.m. where Tiger Creek meets Lake Kissimmee in Polk County, which is south of Orlando, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Maj. Evan Laskowski said that the woman, Cynthia Diekema, of Davenport, Fla., was canoeing with her husband in about 2.5 feet of water “when their canoe passed over a large alligator.”
The alligator then “thrashed and tipped the canoe over,” Major Laskowski said, throwing the couple into the water.
“She ended up on top of the alligator in the water and was bitten,” he added, noting that her husband attempted to intervene but was unsuccessful. The gator, which the authorities said was 11 feet 4 inches long, pulled her underwater.
Ms. Diekema’s body was later recovered from the water.
Major Laskowski said alligator trappers were dispatched to the area, where they captured two alligators on Tuesday evening.
One was more than 11 feet long, which matched “the length and description of the alligator involved in the incident,” he said. The second gator was approximately 10 to 11 feet long. It was not immediately clear if the gators were euthanized.
Evidence taken from the alligators will be used to determine if they were involved in the fatal attack, Roger Young, the executive director of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said at the news conference.
While alligator attacks on humans are “extremely rare,” they do happen, Mr. Young said.
“This serves as a somber reminder of the powerful wildlife that share our natural spaces,” he said.
Florida’s alligator population, which exceeds one million, is one of the largest alligator populations in the United States.
The Florida wildlife commission reported that the state had an average of eight unprovoked alligator bites a year over the 10-year period that ended in 2022, many of them serious enough to require medical attention.
In early March, a woman who was paddling in the same waterway where Ms. Diekema was killed was attacked by an eight-foot alligator that bit her elbow, according to the commission.
She was airlifted to a hospital, where she was treated for her injury, according to local news reports.
The state wildlife commission has been urging people to take caution in or near the water during alligator mating season, which runs from early April to June. The risk of an attack is higher, it says, because gators tend to be more aggressive, active and visible during this time.
