Season of the Gar: Adventures in Pursuit of America's Most Misunderstood Fish

13. A Psychological History of the Arkansas Alligator Gar with Recommendations for Its Future

13 A Psychological History of the Arkansas Alligator Gar with Recommendations for Its Future A Polemic BACK BEFORE THE Choctaw and Cherokee and Chickasaw and Seminole and Creek and Spanish and French, back before the saber-toothed cat roamed the Ozarks along with the woodland buffalo, back before the ivory-bills were plentiful throughout the Delta, before the mammoths and mastodons ranged through the prairies and swamps, when the brunt of what is now Arkansas had yet to be deforested—way way back before that, in the Mesozoic and Paleozoic eras of the continent, in the rivers and marshes and bayous and vast sprawling flood plains that provided ideal spawning grounds for prehistoric monster fish sometimes surpassing twelve feet in length—back then, alligator gar ruled. And for the next 300 million years, this practically non-evolving species continued to endure. As Jay Drott put it in an article titled “Timeless Prowler,” gator gar survived “millions of years of geological and evolutionary chaos.”1 In fact, gar survived three or four ice ages, dinosaurs, the Quapaw and Caddo and Osage nations, the settling of North America, and all the agriculture and industry that came with that—to become one of the oldest living fish families on the planet. But then, after eons of being the apex freshwater predator in North America, something happened in the twentieth century. Basically, alligator gar numbers across the country went from hundreds of thousands (if not millions) down to the thousands, and, in the state of Arkansas, to less than a few hundred. And like all plummeting populations of twenty-firstcentury threatened species, this collapse was due to the actions of a more recent species—one that hasn’t even been around for a mere million 117 years. One whose nature is to impact nature with a devastating and oftentimes irreversible force—which is why all alligator gar populations are now facing the prospect of a complete collapse. As Lee Holt, a fisheries biologist and member of the Alligator Gar Management Plan team with the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission, stated, “There’s no doubt that if we don’t step up right now . . . it’s imminent. I mean, this crash you’re talking about, if we don’t do something, it’s going to happen. There’s no doubt in my mind, because the numbers just aren’t there.”2 And Holt knows, since he co-authored the study “Alligator Gar (Atractosteus spatula) Life History and Habitat Use in the Cache, Mississippi and White Rivers” with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hatcheries manager Ricky Campbell. In 2007, Holt received a wildlife grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (with matching funds from Arkansas Game & Fish) for research and equipment involved in the sampling and monitoring of Arkansas alligator gar. Because of the dangerously low numbers of this fish, though, Holt has been able to document only a few specimens in the river systems of his study. Fortunately, though, two breeding populations have recently been identified in the Ouachita and Fourche LaFave rivers, and with assistance from biologists and researchers, data is now being gathered to help protect these gator gar. Meaning the imminent crash Holt warns us of can be avoided if we take the necessary steps. At this time (spring 2009), however, the eradication of the northern snakehead in Lee County’s Piney Creek has taken priority over efforts to conserve alligator gar. But before we get into what’s being done and not being done and what can be done, here’s a simple overview of the dynamics that almost wiped out the hugest, most primordial fish in the alluvial state of Arkansas. Not much is known about the relationship between Native Americans and alligator gar, but we can speculate that it was one based on utility and respect. Utility because it’s well known that many tribes constructed arrowheads from gar scales, and respect because there are still different types of “garfish dances” performed to this day by Creek and Chickasaw tribes. Many of these dances are fertility rites that pay homage to gar, whereas other dances employ garfish teeth in “purification ritual[s] connected with the summer ceremonies.”3 118 A Psychological History of the Arkansas Alligator Gar Also, Native American axes with effigies of garfish carved on them were discovered along the Arkansas River near Fort Smith. According to the Spiro Mounds artifact database, “The distal end...