Alligator gar reintroduced to Mingo National Wildlife Refuge
Jacob McCleland
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Alligator gar are the second largest freshwater fish in North America. The largest known alligator gar was ten feet long and weighed in at 300 pounds. This primitive fish has become rare in Missouri as their populations were decimated by habitat encroachment and a bad reputation. Anglers often regard alligator gar as “trash fish” that feed on bass and other sport fish; their double-rows of sharp teeth and ferocious appearance makes swimming in gar-populated waters an unsettling experience. Yet conservationists in Southeast Missouri are trying to help the alligator gar population rebound.
Chris Kennedy is a fisheries biologist at the Missouri Department of Conservation’s Cape Girardeau office. I recently joined him as he restocked about 150 juvenile alligator gar in the swampy bottomland hardwoods of Mingo National Wildlife Refuge.
“We’ve been monitoring the fish communities out here so that we can evaluate how alligator gar truly impact crappie, how do they impact sunfish. Do they help or do they hurt?” Kennedy asks as we glide over the murky waters at Mingo, stopping from time to time to introduce a few juvenile gar to their new home. This is the second restocking operation in Mingo within the past year. Over the summer, Kennedy released 275 baby gar. The gar we are releasing today are all between 10 and 12 months in age, and were about 8 to 10 inches long.
Kennedy and his colleagues want to see the impact that this gigantic fish will have on the ecosystem, and he cites new studies that suggest that they may benefit the swamp’s aquatic inhabitants. “There’s been one study in Louisiana that indicated that they were actually helping the sport fish communities,” Kennedy says. “We have a tendency at this point to at least believe that that’s highly probable. We still have yet to prove it. And it will take a lot of time to see those ecological changes within our fish community.”
We motor across the swamp for a few hundred yards, stop, and introduce only a few gar in the water. You can’t release them all at one spot due to their cannibalistic tendencies. “In Tennessee they stocked them and what they noted was that they stocked them all in one place and they were right there, just feeding on themselves, right there in the river. They’re highly cannibalistic,” Kennedy explains. “It leads us to believe if they were ever in a truly enclosed system and the population was getting too big, they would begin to control themselves due to their cannibalistic behavior.”
The Mingo National Wildlife Refuge would seem like a perfect habitat for alligator gar. However, several studies have shown that before the recent re-introduction, there were no alligator gar in these wetlands.
“What we think happened is during the period sometime between the 1930s and 1960s, when they were attempting to drain this refuge, they, you know, drained it a little bit too shallow and actually had some really large fish kills that probably demolished the alligator gar population,” Kennedy says. Once upon a time, alligator gar did live in this area. Kennedy points to the fact that the Mississippi, St. Francois, and Castor Rivers all once ran through the refuge before the major drainage, and all contain alligator gar. Now, however, those three rivers are disconnected from Mingo. “And there were also reports from actual old-timers that were actually here doing the drainage when they dug the ditches, and they gave various reports of seeing alligator gar throughout the refuge,” according to Kennedy.
Bad reputation
Recent scientific evidence suggests that Alligator Gar are not waterway bullies, but merely misunderstood. Very little is known about this ancient fish because they have only recently been the subject of scientific study. Kennedy thinks that the lack of research leads to the very strong opinions that anglers hold towards this fish.
“The thing that they have left is what it looks like and what they think it could be eating. And you could draw references to that by the teeth in its mouth or the enormous size that it gets. So I think, you know, the way it looks has really formed a lot of the perception that people have,” Kennedy says.
Alligator gar have never been the cool fish in the river. They are really really really big and primitive looking, with two rows of top teeth, and strong bony scales. They got their name … alligator gar … because they look like … uh … an alligator. So to review: Really ugly, not popular, an unfortunate name, a bad reputation … Alligator Gar is not getting a date to the Wetland Senior High Prom.
Kennedy admits that the alligator gar’s teeth look mighty ferocious, but their teeth are not like shark teeth, which are designed to cut and tear. “Alligator gar teeth are almost like small needles,” he says. “They are designed to hold. This is why they really don’t like to eat things that are a lot bigger than them. They are designed to eat their prey whole. They’re not designed to, like alligators, rip several limbs off and roll like an alligator would behave.”
Alligator gar are not very successful hunters. They strike and miss a lot. As energy savers, they do not like to expend a lot of energy chasing after fish and prefer an easy meal. Kennedy uses an analogy to compare alligator gar energy use to how human spend their money. “They want to go out to eat, just like we do, they want to have a good time, and they want to eat as much as they can with spending the least amount of money. This is one of the reasons why you don’t see human attacks. We’re too big. It would take too much energy to consume us.” In particular, alligator gar like to scavenge. It’s an easy meal, Kennedy says, which fits perfectly into the fish’s lifestyle. “In Arkansas they’ve been noted for hanging below chicken processing plants and feeding on the chicken carcasses that they were dumping out into the bayou,” Kennedy says. “They’ve also noted in Florida where fishermen regularly clean fish. The alligator gar will hang around the docks where they will dump their viscera over the side.”
The alligator gar’s range is actually quite large, covering much of the southeastern United States, some areas in Mexico, and as far south as Nicaragua. Southern Missouri is generally considered the northern end of where the alligator gar will live, but there have been some reports of gar as far north as the Illinois River. Since the fish covers such a large geographic area, what it eats depend on the local habitat. In Louisiana and other coastal areas, for instance, they’ll munch on blue crab. Here in Missouri, they eat prevalent fish such as shad, buffalo fish, and carp.
“And we also have to think about the type of habitat that they occupy. These fish are open-water species. They don’t hang around a lot of structures like trees or rocks the way that a bass or a crappie would. That’s why they really don’t feed on those species. Will they eat a sport fish occasionally? If he has the opportunity to he will,” Kennedy explains.
Kenndy finds that one of the alligator gar’s most unique characteristics is the ability to live in water with low oxygen levels. Fish, of course, need oxygen too, but they filter it out of the water. But that wily old alligator gar has an air bladder that works somewhat like a rudimentary lung. “He not only can take oxygen from his gills,” Kennedy says, “but he’ll also use oxygen from that air bladder inside of him. That air bladder is connected to different portions around his mouth and on his snout. He has actual slits that open and close and allow him to take the oxygen right off the surface.”
The ability to breathe in low oxygen waters allows juvenile alligator gar to survive in shallow places, like swamps, which is their preferred habitat. When the fish reach maturity – and their enormous size – they tend to move into deeper waters. Swamps are increasingly rare in Missouri, which means fewer habitats for juveniles, as well as for spawning.
“When these areas flood, they’ll go in to those shallow water habitats. They’ll spawn in about a foot or two feet of water. Now just envision it in your mind for a minute: A 200-pound female, in two feet of water, with seven 100-pound males following her. They make quite a ruckus when they spawn, to say the least. But it is pretty interesting to be able to witness it for yourself.”
Alligator gar meat is not eaten here in Missouri or in many other states. In Louisiana, though, where alligator gar are more common, the fish is considered something of a delicacy and they are actively sought by commercial fishermen. Kennedy says that alligator gar meat is so highly regarded that it costs more at the grocer “than catfish fillets in Louisiana. Now that doesn’t exist here in Missouri, but our palette is a little bit different, I guess you could say.”