Alligators females take an active role in mating. She will actively pursue preferred males and stop the courtship if she is no longer interested.
After the prolonged courtship, the act of mating is quite brief – between 30 seconds and 2 minutes.
The male alligator's penis is actually constantly erect; it's full of the stiff protein, collagen. It remains tucked up inside until mating when it is ejected out.
The Alligator penis. The G refers to the glans, the part of the penis that expands once inside the female. The SS is the groove that the sperm travel down and the GT is the glans tip that deposits the sperm inside the female. The Sh is the shaft that always remains erect.
Once the penis is inside of the female, there is a region of the penis that expands, the glans.
Scientists think that the glans may expand to stimulate the female clitoris and provide the female with a method for evaluating the quality of her mate.
The clitoris of a closely related species, the Chinese Alligator. The clitoris is about 5mm long.
Image from Ziegler & Olbort
Females will often mate with more than one male during the season.
She can then store this sperm and select with male's sperm to use to fertilise her eggs.
She can then also control the sex of her offspring by varying the temperature of the nest she lays her eggs in.
Females are born when the nest temperatures are below 28 degrees C, and males are born at temperatures above 33 C. A temperature of 31 C will produce an even number of males and females.
References and Further Reading
Lance, S. L., Tuberville, T. D., Dueck, L., Holz‐Schietinger, C., Trosclair Iii, P. L., Elsey, R. M., & Glenn, T. C. (2009). Multiyear multiple paternity and mate fidelity in the American alligator, Alligator mississippiensis. Molecular Ecology, 18(21), 4508-4520.