This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The alligator had a good run as day after day the people hunting for him in a Chicago lagoon came up empty, but in the end he was no match for an expert the city shipped in from Florida.

The male gator, nicknamed “Chance the Snapper”, was first spotted in the Humboldt Park lagoon about a week ago. After local enthusiasts tried and failed to trap the reptile, Frank Robb arrived from St Augustine on Sunday.

By early Tuesday, he had caught the 5ft 3in animal using something that even cartoon alligators know to avoid: a fishing pole.

“I brought my fishing rod and it went down pretty fast,” Robb said at a news conference at the park on Tuesday morning.

Alligator on the loose: Chicago searches for roaming reptile Read more

Chance – whose name sounds a lot like Chicago’s own Chance the Rapper – looked pretty calm as Robb pulled him out of a big plastic tub, and he didn’t squirm as he settled into Robb’s grip.

Robb moved around a bit so all the photographers from pretty much every newspaper and television news show snapped pictures – Chance couldn’t do any snapping of his own thanks to what looked like a thick rubber band or electrical tape holding his jaw shut tight.

Chance was a daily news story from the day he was first spotted and photos started popping up online. Investigators don’t know why the animal was in the lagoon but they knew they had to capture it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Chance the Snapper’ in captivity. Photograph: Kelley Gandurski/AP

The city has said it is already looking for roomier quarters, most likely a wildlife sanctuary or a zoo.

“No harm will come to this alligator,” said Kelley Gandurski, the executive director of the Chicago animal care and control.

Chicago authorities warned that while the public might have been concerned about being attacked, the alligators, too, were in danger from human interaction.

Susan Horton, a veterinarian at Chicago Exotics animal hospital, told the Chicago Tribune she was worried for the alligator’s health.

“They’re not made to be in Illinois,” Horton said. “It’s warm now, but they can’t survive our winters, and we don’t know how [the alligator] was cared for by whoever released him.”

Lisa Wathne, senior strategist of captive wildlife at the Humane Society of the United States, told the newspaper pet owners should put the needs of the animal first and that trade in exotic creatures needed to be regulated more heavily.

“In Chicago, it’s not legal, but more than likely someone somewhere got this animal legally and then got it to this person in Chicago,” she said. “It’s pretty much an unregulated trade.”