Alligator hunters were out in force yesterday after two women were mauled to death in Florida, less than a week after an aspiring young model was dismembered in a canal.

The three killings in six days have caused alarm in Florida, where fatal alligator attacks had averaged one every three years since recordkeeping began in 1948. May is the peak of the alligator mating season and the end of the dry season, making the creatures more aggressive. Experts say that human encroachment on alligator territory is also a factor.

Ann-marie Campbell, 23, from Tennessee, was seized while snorkelling in a remote spring in the Ocala National Forest, 80 miles (130km) north of Orlando. Friends found her dangling from the jaws of an alligator and leapt on the thrashing beast to try to wrest her free.

“They gouged its eyes and pounded on its snout with their hands,” Kat Kelley, of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said. “They were trying to pry open its jaws.”

In Dunedin, 140 miles away, the body of Judy Cooper, 43, was found mutilated in a pond. “I saw what looked like a pair of trousers floating on the pond. Then I saw a pair of sneakers attached to it, and my daughter went out there with a stick and pushed on it, and it turned out to be a body,” Fred Ferderber, a local resident, said. “Her arms were missing and she had a couple of bite marks on her sides.”

Mr Ferderber, 50, said that he had seen an alligator sunbathing behind his home in recent days. “When you got close to it, it would hiss at you. Most of the time they’ll flee into the water. This one just sits there like it’s his spot.”

The grisly killings came days after Yovy Suárez Jiménez, a 28-year-old student who had hoped to become a model, was ambushed by an alligator when jogging beside a canal in Sunrise, 30 miles north of Miami. “Alligators are pretty much anywhere where there’s water in Florida, and that’s where we’re building — around ponds and rivers and canals,” Kent Vliet, an alligator expert at the University of Florida, said. “This creates something of a dangerous situation.”

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