Every significant body of water in Florida has some version of this sign:

And what that means is, if you go swimming, you will be feeding the alligators.

Take for example, Florida man Eric Merda, who wanted to get to the other side of Lake Manatee but thought walking would take too long.

Merda dove into the murky waters, and not far from shore, he found himself swimming aside a hungry gator. It clamped down on his forearm and dragged him under water.

Merda wasn't going down without a fight, so he wrestled the gator, trying to keep it from doing the death roll. The gator resurfaced and took him down twice more. Merda says,

"She's already got my arm, so when we came up the third time, she finally did her death roll and took off with my arm."

One arm short, Merda found himself loose from the gator's grasp, and he struggled back ashore, and then started to walk around Lake Manatee.

He was right; it was a long walk. It took three days traversing swampy woodlands to get around the lake and find civilization.

"I felt like I was walking in circles, I didn't know," he said. "So I followed the sun and power lines, stuff I could see."

When he finally found someone's house where a man was standing on the other side of a fence, he held up his stump.

"I said, 'gator got my arm;' he said, 'holy smokes man!'" Merda exclaimed.

Merda was rushed to the hospital where the rest of his arm was amputated, and now he wants to warn others about the dangers of alligators.

"Do not feed the gators, and you guys know who you are, throwing rocks at them; I've seen it on the job sites, leave them gators alone," Merda warns.

Okay, that's not what I expected his warning to be. Let me fill in the missing part:

Don't go swimming in alligator infested waters!!!

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