Rosie Moore tells PEOPLE about one of her most frightening moments out in the field

NEED TO KNOW

• Rosie Moore, a wildlife researcher, regularly encounters some of the natural world’s most dangerous creatures
• She has her own nonprofit for reptile research and a position at the International SeaKeepers Society, where she now undertakes extreme marine expeditions to locate rare species and tag dangerous wildlife
• Moore tells PEOPLE about one of her most frightening moments out in the field, where she “barely” escaped an alligator’s fatal bite

Rosie Moore has had a few close calls out in the field.

The 30-year-old wildlife researcher regularly encounters some of the natural world’s most dangerous creatures: sharks, crocodiles, pythons and more. Moore has her own nonprofit for reptile research and a position at the International SeaKeepers Society, where she now undertakes extreme marine expeditions to locate rare species and tag dangerous wildlife.

Essentially, she tells PEOPLE, she has a fascination with “anything that can kill you” — and a desire to “figure out” how they think and operate. 

“I think people overestimate how dangerous some animals are because they just don’t have any baseline knowledge on how to operate or be around that animal,” she says. “Somebody from Missouri has probably never swam with a tiger shark in the wild before, so they don’t have any baseline knowledge of how to swim with a tiger shark or that you can do it safely.” (She can testify, as someone who was raised in Missouri.)

Still, there’s no question that Moore’s chosen profession comes with risk — and it’s often what others are most fascinated by. The question of her scariest encounter is one she frequently receives, but she says it’s hard to pick just one.

“There’s been so many instances where if they went slightly more wrong than they did, that would’ve been it,” she admits. “You almost get used to it, where your brain stops registering how dangerous it was at the time.”

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On one occasion last year, Moore was filming alligators in the Everglades, and she got the idea to take a night swim with a friend.

In the water — in the dark of the night — Moore was filming the alligator in front of her, but didn’t realize there were others around her as well. As the camera was rolling, trained only on the one gator, another came out from behind a tree and lunged toward her for a bite.

“I heard the movement of the trees, luckily, because most of my head was underwater, so I barely heard it,” she tells PEOPLE. 

Moore had a split second to react. She swung her camera around, putting it between herself and the alligator, and used the equipment to protect herself.

“I fed it my camera — it bit down on it,” she says. “I have a huge scratch on my dome from it. It dropped it once it realized it wasn’t food, and then I was able to get out of the water onto the bank and get out.”

After a near miss like that one, Moore admits that it does scare her a bit to go out into the field (the gator incident actually came after a string of “near-death” experiences, she says). 

“I was a little traumatized for two months, and I was like, ‘I’m not leaving the house. I’m not doing anything,’ ” she says. “But, I mean, you’re going to go back and do it. It’s like your whole lifestyle and your whole identity and your career is doing all the crazy outdoor adventures.”

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