A brave teenager, who got his arm ripped off by an alligator, has been joking about the incident with his family during his recovery process, the Daily Mail reported.

Kaleb Langdale, 17, was swimming in the Caloosahatchee River in Moore Haven, Fl., when an 11- foot alligator attacked him and bit off his right arm.

Langdale tried to stop the alligator by grabbing under his bottom jaw--a move he had seen on TV--but failed. He swam to the bank without his right arm, where he was rushed to a Fort Myers hospital.

He knew he was losing (his arm), so he just took his feet, buried his feet in the alligator's head and just pushed so that he could get it free, his sister, Rebecca told News Press.

Once it popped loose, he just swam as hard and fast as he could to the dock, where some friends of his pulled him up.

Once Langdale had been rushed off to hospital, emergency services carried out a search to locate the teen's arm.

We found the alligator that was responsible, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission spokesman Jorge Pino told the Associated Press. We were able to kill the alligator and dissect the alligator, remove the arm and transport the arm to the hospital to see if the doctors could reattach the limb.

The arm was in too bad condition to re-attach it to the teenager, according to the Daily Mail. But Langdale still remains in good spirits, his family say. He even made a joke about his condition to his sister, telling her she would not be the only left-handed writer in the family.

Alligators are more active at this time of year, according to Pino. Anything that makes any splash in the water or any little commotion in the water may attract them to that particular location, he told the AP.

Pino did say, however, that it is rare for wild alligators to bite humans. We have millions of people swimming in the state's waterways and nothing happens, he said. We want to understand the dynamics of the bite and understand what happened -- what the alligator was doing, what the young man was doing -- to see if there's anything we can learn from this, he added.

Florida Florida