Alligator Gar Fishing

Alligator Gar Fishing is in some ways a pre-historic experience. The alligator gar dates back to the Carboniferous Period. Once scorned by anglers, these armor-plated brutes have become fresh water's big-game fish.

A long time ago - in that geological period when coal was being formed - a fish looking like a cross between an alligator and a muskie roamed North America's sluggish Southern streams. The strange part is, the alligator gar found today in places like Arkansas' White River hasn't changed one iota from what he was in the Carboniferous Period. It takes a brute of a fish to withstand evolution, and that's what the gar is.

The gar is a cylindrical monster with long, beak-like jaws armed with dozens of sharp teeth. The alligator gar has, in fact, a face that would scare an alligator and put a crocodile to flight. Here is the original hardhead, with his head plated in bone, and even his body has hard rhombic plates or ganoid scales.

In all of the Southern gar country, you'll run into talk of "man-eating" gars and tales that this river or that holds a local monster "known to measure at least 20 feet." There has never been a carefully authenticated case of an alligator gar attacking a man, but it does seem that a fish built like a gar could give a small boy in the water a bad time. And we can think of better things to do than dip a hand or foot over the side of a boat floating in gar water. Reports of gars measuring 20 feet or more probably are founded more on fiction than fact, since one of the largest measured recently was under 10 feet, weighing 320 pounds.

However, alligator gar measuring 7 and 8 feet are not unusual, and once 50 gars found in a Louisiana lake which dried up were measured. Thirty of them reached over seven feet.

Gars are predacious fish that live alone in the weeds, or occasionally bask at the surface in schools. They are sluggish and slow-moving, except when feeding. A hungry gar can rush torpedo-like into a school of forage fish, and even when his belly's full he's apt to continue the slaughter just for sport. Gar are considered one of the world's most destructive fish, and most sport fishermen rate them as pests, something to be destroyed. A single gar, in the course of a year, can devour thousands of bass, panfish, suckers, and even game birds such as ducks and rails. One 163-pound gar was found to have 40-pounds of fish in its stomach, while another 7-foot specimen held 70-pounds of fish, including seven catfish and six fresh water drum.

One reason gars have survived so long is their tenacity to life. They can exist, for example, in drying pools long after all other fish life has succumbed. The gar's air bladder is loaded with blood vessels, so it can serve partly as a lung and enable gar to live long periods without using their gills. A gar can live as long as 24 hours out of water.

Fishing for Alligator Gar: How To Catch Them Alligator Gar Distribution