Short Stuff: Alligator Gar

The alligator gar is one scary looking fish. Learn all about these monsters in today's episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, I'm welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
there's Chuck and Jerry's here for Dave. So this is
short Stuff as usual. Let's go. So can I tell
you my inspiration for this was? I was I was
at the lake the other day. We we got to
a lake here in Georgia. I'm not gonna name it
because I don't want to be stalked, okay, like no name,

(00:24):
like no name. Uh And I was at the lake
the other day doing a project and I was very hot,
because it's very hot in Georgia right now, and I
went to jump in to cool down. And right as
I was going to take a leap off the dock,
I saw a very large, like a two and a
half foot garfish kind of treacle towards the surface. And

(00:48):
I I've seen him before out there occasionally, but it
just scare the life out of me because it is
a terrifying looking fish. If you don't know what a
garfish looks like, just do a little uhm search and
they have these long, very sharp toothed snouts and they
are terrifying if you It looks like something that you

(01:10):
would find in a river in South America. And not
the one that you would jump into a lake in Georgia. Right.
And also, um, you travel back in time fifty million
years too, because they definitely look prehistoric for sure. Oh
absolutely uh. And this is specifically about the alligator gar.
And this comes from our old friends at House Stuff
Works in Michelle Konstantinovski. Great name, very nice, but the

(01:34):
alligator gar is super old, right, Yeah. They think they
found fossils as old as a hundred million years old,
not just fifty um. And they actually the reason that
it's called an alligator gars because it has a long
snout too, but rather than being pointed like most other gar,
it's flattened, giving it kind of like a shovel like
appearance or actually like an alligator snout. And the Latin

(01:58):
name for it is attracto status spatula. And that's right, spatula.
It's the spatula fish is another way to put it.
And it I mean it really does look like an
alligator snout when you see a picture of these things. Yeah,
they are huge. There um seven living species of of gar,
and the alligator gar is the largest by far. Uh.

(02:19):
The other way you can tell a diff is they
have two rows of teeth alligator gar on the upper
jaw instead of just the one row of teeth of
the regular gar. And I think their head is a
bit wider, yeah, And I think normally there um something
like about a hundred and sixty pounds too, maybe six
ft long, which is enormous for a fish. Um. But

(02:43):
they have been I guess found up to three fifty
pounds and ten ft long, which is even more enormous.
I think the record, at least in Texas is three
and two pounds. That was back in And the reason
we bring up Texas because a YouTuber named hating More
he's a conservationist, posted a video on his channel wildlife

(03:05):
Um last May because he caught one of these things
and it was eight ft long and probably about three
hundred pounds. Did you watch that video? I did not.
It is a very large fish and uh he likened
it to um kind of hanging onto the end of
a car that's trying to roll down a driveway. I
don't see how you bring in a fish like this

(03:26):
that that's that heavy, But he knew what he was doing,
and it's it's just enormous, man. It's I think at
the end he had that. Uh you know, he obviously
released it, but he was kind of um measuring it
and showing it off for the camera, and this thing
just like whipped around to sort of wriggle and just
like just it's so strong. It just knocks this guy
over and then swims away. And he's like, well, you know,

(03:48):
I guess I I was gonna let it go, but
apparently that just happened now, right, Good for him for
letting it go, or at least planning to. You know, Well,
you do let them go because apparently they're not good
for eating. Uh. They for a couple of reasons. They
don't taste great. Uh. And they are covered with these
uh it's almost like an armored scale. Uh. They're called

(04:10):
annoid scales, and it's like that um sort of um
like an armor you would see on a dinosaur basically, right. Yeah,
they're very dinosaur like. And yeah, and the the even
if you can dress them or I should say clean
them to eat, like the meat that you get off of,
it's not going to be very good. And if you

(04:30):
find any row or fish eggs in a guar, you
want to leave those alone because they're toxic no matter
what gar species you're dealing with. So yeah, not really
a delicacy in any way, shape or form. Should we
take a break, I say, we take a break and
then we'll come back and talk more about alligator car

(05:12):
so um, chuck. I found out some pretty interesting stuff
about them. That an alligator gar is a an opportunistic
eater and it will eat basically anything. I saw that.
They'll eat deer and raccoons if they get a chance.
They'll eat waterfowl, turtles, crabs, other fish. Um. But one
of the ways that they catch some of these things,

(05:34):
especially some of the harder to harder to catch ones, um,
they play dead. They ambush their prey by playing debt.
They'll float and make another fisher, a raccoon or something
that's going to swim past, think that it's dead. Then
all of a sudden it grabs it out of the
water and that thing is dead. And uh, they do
eat all those things, and they have those huge alligator

(05:55):
like mouths and teeth, so they're super scary, but apparently
they're they're not gonna come after you. Um. I was
just being a little, uh, a little baby boy the
other day when I got scared and wouldn't jump in.
If I would have jumped in, this thing would have
scattered and gone far away. It wouldn't have said, you know,
human arm must eat. Uh. They're they're just not going

(06:16):
to come after you, so you don't need to fear.
I think there's never been on record a case of
I'll get her guard attacking somebody, right right, Yeah, that's
what I've seen as well. But I mean, I guess
if you had seen a gar that was floating, you
would have wanted to steer clear that one, because maybe
it wasn't ambush your arm. You know, you said that
you saw him in your lake. I'm taking it that

(06:37):
your No name lake is freshwater, right, I know it's
a saltwater lake in the middle of Georgia. You never know. Uh,
there's some saltiness in Georgia for sure. Uh. Yeah, it's
it's freshwater. Uh. And they're they're only in North America,
which is pretty surprising. Yeah, but they used to be
Remember we said that their fossils have been data back
to a hundred million years. They used to be found
all over the place. But yeah, now they're only in

(06:59):
North America. There are freshwater species and they tend to
like um, parts of like bodies of water with poor oxygen,
so like um, say like maybe a cove where you'd
launch a boat, um, or a backwater of a river
that's kind of outside of the turbulence, or even swamps
or bayous. And one reason they can survive in these

(07:21):
kind of lower oxygen environments is they have an air
bladder that not only helps them float, it also distributes
oxygen to their blood. Uh slowly but surely, so they
don't have to take in that much oxygen because they
can hold a bunch at once. Yeah. And I think
it's I think they're in Central America too. I just
want to put that on the record. So let's say
the Americas, but not South America. Men, these these alligator

(07:47):
are are really tough to pin down. I think North
and Central America because I did seek something about Costa Rica, uh,
which is okay, So the America's okay. Um. So people
just because you don't eat them, people still do fish
for them, like this guy. I think they are sort
of um. There are a lot of regulations in place
because they are really slow to to reach the age

(08:11):
where they can make little gar um. They spawn in
very specialized areas, so they're very ripe for over fishing
and for you know, like shrinking of species. But um,
for that reason, they're highly highly regulated and you're basically,
at least in Florida and I think a lot of
other places, you're only going to be given a permit

(08:31):
to fish for these things if it's scientific research or
you're working in like managing the species or something like that.
I tittered earlier, by the way, I want to say,
at an inappropriate time, but it was because you said
they're ripe for over fishing, and I just thought of
a ripe car and that sounds so gross. They're scary looking. Uh.

(08:52):
Early on though that, like you know, early earlier humans
would fish for them and do all sorts of things
that arm are like those armor like scales, those gonoid scales.
They made jewelry out of them and tools and things
like that because they're really tough. And I think they
would use their their skin for products and the skin
oil for different things. Yeah, who knows, what, do you

(09:19):
have anything else? I don't have anything else. I think
we've talked alligator alligator car to death. Well, I guess
the last thing we should mention is is that they
um even though they do our opportunistic eaters. I think
there used to be an idea that they would devastate
other fish populations, and that's apparently not the case. Right, Yeah,
that's right. So they were over fished because they were

(09:41):
considered a nuisance fish. So they were trying to protect
the fish that they wanted by fishing the car alligator
car out. But it turns out they were wrong. I
do have one more thing. Okay, the name gar for
these fishes comes from the Anglo Saxon word for spear.
That is good. And I've got one more thing. I
cannot help but think of a gar fish without thinking

(10:02):
of the great great documentary Vernon Florida, my favorite documentary
of all time, but the great Errol Morris and uh,
one of the characters, the guy that talks like this,
He talks about swimming in the river and oh, you
come u up on one of those garfish. You're a
better lookout brother. Really. And I saw that movie in college, right,

(10:23):
I didn't know what a garfish was. And it it was
many years later that I saw a guar and I
was like, oh, I get it now, I gotta see
that movie. It's just there's nothing like it. Yeah, uh,
you got anything else? I think, Yeah, you got anything else?
I got nothing else? All right, Well, that means everybody's
short stuff is out. Stuff you Should Know is a

(10:47):
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