Gars’ fortunes, anglers’ attitudes evolve
The first alligator gar I hooked scared me.
The most recent made me grin.
Over the nearly 60 years between those two events, mine isn’t the only opinion to have shifted concerning these singular freshwater creatures — fish that, with their armor-plate scales, reptilian shape, alligator-like snout rimmed with a double row of dagger-like teeth and size that can top 8 feet and weigh more than 300 pounds, look exactly like you would expect of a creature unchanged since its ancestors shared the planet with Tyrannosaurus.
Alligator gar have not changed in 250 million years. But, slowly over the last couple of decades, attitudes of many toward these fish — the largest and longest-lived freshwater fish in Texas — have.
Today, Texas’ alligator gar are increasingly viewed by anglers and fisheries managers as a valuable natural resource — a crucial component of a healthy freshwater ecosystem and a topnotch angling quarry that deserves to be carefully and wisely managed.
It was not always so.
Good riddance
I was 6, maybe 7, when I encountered my first alligator gar.
The fish grabbed the minnow I was fishing in the bayou/slough that bordered our rural Gulf Coast home. When the cork went under and I lifted the stout cane pole to set the hook in what I expected to be a goggleeye or crappie, the surface erupted and the head of this huge, olive-green beast with the face of an alligator twisted from the water, thrashed that head back and forth before surging away, taking with it my pole and my breath.
Stunned and frightened, I scrambled/ crawled up the bayou bank and flew back to the house, where I incoherently babbled about the monster I was certain would have just as soon eaten me as the minnow.
At that time and for long before, that was how alligator gar were seen. Universally loathed as some kind of aquatic demon hell-bent on devouring everything in its path, especially “good” fish that anglers preferred to catch, and a symptom of a degraded, if not septic, waterway, alligator gar were branded as pariahs. Plus, they just look dangerous.
Across alligator gars’ range, anglers and fisheries managers were of one mind: The only good gar was a dead gar. Get rid of them, and populations of “good” fish would flourish.
We tried. And we did a fairly good job of it.
Texas did its best to rid itself of alligator gar. In the 1930s, a state-funded “Electrical Gar Destroyer,” a boat carrying huge generators that pumped massive surges of fishstunning electric current into the water, swept down slow-moving East Texas rivers in an effort to purge the stream of alligator gar.
To facilitate gars’ destruction, fishing regulations set no bag or size limits on gar, and they could be caught using any method, even shot with firearms or arrows in any number at any time. Other states took similar views of gar.
That open warfare took a toll. But the heaviest carnage came with changes in the natural hydrology of the rivers and other waterways inhabited by alligator gar — changes that shore-circuited the fishes’ reproduction.
Alligator gar are native to only 14 states in the Mississippi River drainage and along the Gulf Coast. Today, the fish are extinct or exceedingly rare in half of them. Population status is unknown or shows evidence of declining in the other states.
Currently, Texas and Louisiana are the only states with significant alligator gar populations. And only Texas holds populations that include a relatively high number of large, adult fish. Texas is home to the nation’s — the world’s — premier alligator gar fisheries, which hold gar weighing 100 pounds or more and measuring 5 to 7 feet.
A handful of Texas river systems — primarily the Trinity but including the Sabine, Brazos, Nueces and Rio Grande — hold the best of the state’s alligator gar treasure throve.
The heaviest alligator gar documented taken on rod-and-reel — a 279pounder that holds the International Game Fish Association world record for the species — came from Texas water. The state is the only place where it is possible to have a good shot at hooking and landing a gar weighing more than 100 pounds, and 200-pounders are a possibility.
Those huge alligator gar, anglers have come to recognize, are special fish. They are strong, powerful and acrobatic fighters, and their size and prehistoric appearance give them additional angling cachet.
That is something I learned as a teenager and young adult, targeting alligator gar in the rivers and bayous of Southeast Texas.
That first encounter with alligator gar lit a fire. Never mind that most people thought alligator gar were “trash fish.” Any fish that big and powerful was worthy of pursuing. And I did with a passion, learning where the big fish preferred to live — in long, deep stretches of river where the current was light and shad, buffalo, carp and mullet were abundant — and when and how to fish for them.
We caught scores of them — fish pushing 150 pounds and heavier. We killed most of them, eating some (they are delicious) but wasting most. We thought we were doing nothing wrong.
Reputation undeserved
That began changing in the 1970s and accelerated through the 1980s as fisheries scientists and managers began peeling away the cloud of ignorance that had obscured alligator gars’ natural history and place in freshwater ecosystems.
Spurred by a shift toward holistic management of fisheries instead of concentrating just on high-profile game fish, fisheries science began taking a deeper look at fish such as gar. That research painted a different picture of alligator gar than the one so long held.
It turns out that alligator gar are not the ravenous destroyers of game fish many believed. Research showed alligator gar eat few game fish, concentrating on shad and carp and other abundant rough fish.
Also research, much of it by Texas Parks and Wildlife Department inland fisheries biologists, showed alligator gar are, despite their fierce appearance and seeming ability to survive in water inhospitable to other fish, a fragile fishery.
Like so many top-end predators, alligator gar are long-lived, slow to mature, have limited reproduction tied to very special environmental conditions, and their population can be devastated by harvest rates of 5 percent or higher — rates that have little or no effect on more fecund species.
Alligator gar can live as long as 90 years and regularly live 30 to 50 years. It takes alligator gar as long as 10 years before reaching sexual maturity. And reproduction is irregular, tied to very specific environmental conditions.
Alligator gar reproduce only when the waterways they inhabit overflow their banks. The fish spawn in shallow flooded terrestrial vegetation, smaller males attending a much larger gravid female. The fertilized eggs attach to the flooded vegetation. Successful reproduction occurs only when that water level remains high enough long enough for the eggs to hatch and larvae to grow large enough to survive on their own.
Changes in river hydrology wrought by construction of dams and manipulation of water levels to reduce flooding have made good reproduction conditions for alligator gar increasingly rare.
Those factors, coupled with increasing fishing pressure on the species as more anglers discover how enjoyable catching these huge fish can be, increases the risk of overharvest damaging this world-class fishery that draws anglers from around the world.
Imposing restrictions
With increased understanding of the true nature of alligator gar and the fragility of the fisheries, many anglers saw the light and began practicing catch-andrelease fishing. That has been especially true for the handful of Texas fishing guides who target the species.
Texas fisheries managers have spurred that increased focus on conserving the alligator gar fishery by implementing regulations limiting harvest. In 2009, Texas shifted from a no-limit rule of alligator gar to a one-fish daily limit statewide. (A five-gar daily limit applies on Falcon Reservoir.)
Also, TPWD implemented a rule giving the agency’s executive director authority to temporarily suspend harvest of alligator gar on defined sections of rivers when water levels and conditions are such that spawning alligator gar concentrate in those areas and are particularly vulnerable to bowfishing, a harvest method that can be particularly effective in such situations.
A better understanding
Texas continues refining its understanding of the state’ alligator gar resource, with ongoing research focusing on the fishery and the anglers who participate in it. Part of that research involves a voluntary online survey that will begin later this month.
The survey’s goal, the agency said, is to gain a better understanding of those targeting alligator gar, including their fishing and harvest practices and how they would like to see alligator gar managed in the future. Interested persons can register to participate in the survey on the agency’s website at tpwd.texas.gov.
Just 20 years ago, catch-and-release fishing for alligator gar was almost unheard of. Today, it is standard for most gar anglers. Gar haven’t changed, but the attitudes of many of the people who target them have. And that’s a positive thing.
That point was driven home recently on a long, quiet stretch of the Trinity River when I watched a cork suspending a treble hook baited with a chunk of carp sink under the surface. I set the hook and was immediately and viscerally connected to a 100-pound alligator gar that came twisting and thrashing from the water. I know I was smiling. And maybe the gar was, too.