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This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin. This will just take a minute.

If you’ve ever been to the everglades or tuned¹ into the animal planet, you know that gators can move through the water oh, so silently barely creating a ripple². It almost looks like they surface and sink,twist and turn without so much as moving a muscle. Well, it turns out they are moving some muscles, just ones you can't see. According to a study from the University of Utah, American alligators⁴ navigate⁵ gracefully⁶ through the murky⁷ water by shifting the location of their lungs. You see the lungs act like internal flotation devices and using a set of four muscles including the alligator³ equivalent of our diaphragm, a gator can basically steer⁸ just by moving those floats around. When they want to surface, they shift their lungs forward, to dive they push them back. And to row off in another direction they just shift those babies to one side or the other. The findings will appear in the April issue of the journal Experimental Biology. This ability to slice silently through the water without actually having to swim, no doubt hopes alligators sneak⁹ up on unsuspecting prey¹⁰. Whoever knew it hit them and so will never have a chance to say" See you later, alligator, after a while, crocodile."

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I’m Karen Hopkin .