Wildlife trappers have removed at least 414 nuisance alligators from Walt Disney World property since Lane Thomas Graves was killed by an alligator at Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort in 2016, state records show. The total spans nearly a decade of captures on one of the country’s best-known resort properties and includes at least a dozen removals in the first four months of 2025.
Graves was 2 years old when he was attacked on June 14, 2016, while he was building sandcastles on the beach outside the Grand Floridian. A state investigation later concluded that an alligator lunged out of the Seven Seas Lagoon while the child was on the beach, and records show he was standing ankle deep or less in the water when he scooped it into a bucket and the animal pulled him in.
The new records put hard numbers on a response that has continued long after the fatal attack. State-contracted trappers removed 83 alligators from the resort in 2016, then 57 in 2017. From 2018 through 2025, the average was 36 removals a year, a pace that shows the problem did not end with the changes Disney made after the death.
Disney said it continues to work with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to report wildlife sightings and remove or relocate certain animals under state rules. But the records also underline a practical limit to that promise: the resort has still needed repeated alligator removals, even as families keep arriving and staying at a property built around water and designed for heavy foot traffic.
The removals are part of the state’s Nuisance Alligator Program, which FWC says is meant to deal with alligator threats in developed areas while conserving the species in places where it naturally occurs. The agency says it does not relocate nuisance alligators because they often try to return to where they were caught, and in 2024 more than 8,700 alligators posing a threat to people, pets or property were captured statewide. Trappers are paid a $50 stipend for each animal they catch.
What the records do not show is how many of the 414 removals came from the Grand Floridian area itself and how many were taken from elsewhere across Walt Disney World. That split matters, because it would show whether the danger remains concentrated around the site of the 2016 attack or is spread across the resort’s broader lagoon system and developed areas. Disney World opened in 1971, when visitors were welcome to swim in the resort’s lakes, but the state’s latest numbers show that nuisance alligators are still being pulled from the property now.
