Factual
Biologist and extreme angler Jeremy Wade is on a mission to get face to face with one of the world’s most terrifying river monsters, thought to have been behind a series of attacks in America’s deep South: the alligator gar.
As big as a shark with the bite of an alligator Jeremy says: “I’ve heard some alarming stories of this creature over many years, but I’ve never seen one in the flesh. It’s … a truly prehistoric monster.”
There are five species of gar that inhabit the United States. All gar are ancient fish and have existed on earth for over 100 million years. The alligator gar, however, is the largest of all, reaching up to ten feet in length and weighing over 365 pounds with a double row of dagger-pointed teeth along the length of the upper jaw.
Jeremy heads to the Trinity River, a 710 mile long waterway in Texas. Here he meets legendary fisherman Bobby Fly, at Lake Livingstone, who once caught a seven feet long gar – big enough to put him in the hall of fame. Jeremy also meets Mark Spitzer, an expert on the gar, to learn more about their reputation.
Mark says: “Wherever we have alligator gar, there are myths of monsters. These fish were the fishes of nightmares. One rumour that was created was that these fish eat twice their weight in a day and that they attack human beings.”
Mark and Jeremy both cast lines into the river in the hope of catching a gar. They catch a three feet long alligator gar which is only between a year or two old but its two rows of teeth leave Jeremy with a battle scar.
Having seen what a gar can do at just three feet long Jeremy listens as Bobby Fly tells Jeremythat he once saw one that was 14 feet long.
He says: “I was tied up in the top of a willow tree with a 14-foot flat-bottom and this bad boy come right up beside me and just surfaced right there. And I seen the front of my boat and the back of my boat and I seen fish all the way.”
But no gar over eight and a half feet in length has been caught in the last decade and Jeremy wonders whether there aren’t any left. In 1933, the Texas Game Fish Commission began a campaign of extermination. They built an electric gar destroyer rigged with a 200-volt electric net to kill the fish. Over the next three decades, millions of gar were destroyed in an effort to be rid of them forever and they’re now only found in a few southern states.
Jeremy travels to the aquarium in Athens, Texas where the curator Wayne Heaton dismisses the notion that alligator gar is as dangerous as a shark.
Wayne says: “Unfortunately, since these guys are called alligator gar, and that first word strikes fear into everybody. And the reason the alligator gar has its name, is not because it has the attitude of the alligator, but has .. a head very similar to an alligator. But that’s basically where it stops. You’ve got a nine-foot, 200-pound scaredy cat.”
He then tries to catch a gar in a fresh stretch of the Trinity, but begins to find the process frustrating, saying: “It’s a fairly low percentage success rate, you chuck out a lump of dead fish like this and you wait and you let it take it for a long time and most times…there’s nothing on the end.”
Undeterred, he continues fishing into the dusk until, after 12 hours, he finally comes face to face with a river monster. On reeling in a seven feet long fish, Jeremy says: “That is exactly what we wanted, that’s a proper sized fish.”
Studying his catch, he says: “For all this fierce reputation, they certainly look the part, but I’m not sure that they actually act up to the part. I think it is very much time to get it back in.”
In the same rivers and lakes that the alligator gar inhabit there are also many American alligators. The gars share the alligators’ habitats, similar teeth and the size and profile of their snouts could easily be confused one for the other. Jeremy believes that a lot of attacks blamed on gar are likely to have been the work of American alligators.
Jeremy gets into a tank of alligator gar to test his theory and is left undisturbed by the large fish. He says: “Whoa! That was an experience. I have to say the size and the aspect of those fish, though, when I first saw them was really quite intimidating. But I think this is a very, very misunderstood animal and I think it really is time that we just try to understand this fish a little bit better.”
Last edited: Tuesday, 17 November 2009
