Man v. Gar: The Nature of a Relationship

34 In May I blasted down to Texas. I had my friend Eric with me; we’d hired the world-famous gator-gar-guide Captain Kirk, and I was dead-set on landing a six-foot monsterfish as thick around as a trashcan with a head the size of a horse’s skull and a snout full of razor-sharp crocodile fangs. Ever since I was a kid, I’d been fascinated by this fierce and primitive fish, which hasn’t evolved since the Miocene. For five years in Louisiana I tried to catch one, but struck out every time. And for the last few years in Missouri, I’d been writing and researching what I call “garticles”—so it was high time I caught me a Texas alligator gar. Garfish once covered an area from Canada down to South America, and only a century ago they were indigenous to half of North America. But since gar are valued less than the common lab rat, they’ve been extirpated across the continent—especially alligator gar (the largest of the species), which pretty much only exist below the Bible Belt now. Within the last three decades, though, biologists and conservationists , along with government agencies, have been making efforts to study and protect this fish, whose populations have diminished due to overfishing, according to some authorities. Sportfishing has also been cited as a factor. But the most compelling argument is that of mass extermination, which was encouraged by anti-garfish propaganda in the early twentieth century. Echoing the popular nationwide attitude toward the species, government publications like Fishes and Fishing in Louisiana (Bulletin 23, 1933) helped establish the gar’s reputation as a destroyer of game fish (i.e., bass, trout, walleye, crappie, catfish, sunfish, etc.) by publishing comments such as: “Numbered among our most objectionable fishes, they are a pest to the commercial fisherman and to the angler alike, for their voracity is responsible for the destruction of great numbers of useful and valuable fishes.” Man v. Gar: The Nature of a Relationship Mark Spitzer 35 Mark Spitzer This attitude led to gars being classified as “trashfish” in close to half the states by the middle of the century. In fact, up until the 1990s, it was illegal to return gar to the water in most of the states, and fishermen were instructed to destroy them by local and state agencies that didn’t question the speculations justifying garocide. Because let’s face it: Humans have a set standard for fish beauty, and gar ain’t up there with rainbow trout. The size of le poisson armé (the armored fish—as the French explorers called them back in the 1700s), has been greatly exaggerated—and the mythical figure of twenty feet is frequently attached to the most legendary lunkers. For example, in A History of Fishes (Ernest Benn, 1931), J. R. Norman writes that “the Alligator Gar Pike” can reach “a length of twenty feet or more.” Similarly, in The Angler’s Guide to the Fresh Water Sport Fishes of America (Ronald Press, 1962), Edward C. Migdalski notes, “Many huge sizes have been recorded by word of mouth; even statements of ‘20 feet long’ . . . have been published in past years by reputable scientists.” The truth, however, is that alligator gar can reach lengths of ten feet if allowed to grow for over seventy years. Still, modern gar hardly ever exceed seven feet—though eight-footers have been recorded in Mississippi, Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, and Louisiana during the last century. As for weight, the world-record alligator gar for rod and reel is 279 pounds, whereas the bowfishing record is 290 pounds. Officially, the largest gar on record is 302 pounds (that one was caught on a trotline), but there have been heavier. According to John James Audubon, a gar “was caught which weighed four hundred pounds.” But in the last hundred years, the largest known alligator gar on record (a nine-footsix -inch 365-pounder) was caught in the Trinity River in Texas . . . by Captain Kirk. Which is part of the reason Eric and I went bombing down to Texas with my stripy canoe strapped on top of the station...