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| ISBN-13: | 9781574416077 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of North Texas Press |
| Publication date: | 03/15/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
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Return of the Gar
By Mark Spitzer
University of North Texas Press
Copyright © 2015 Mark SpitzerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57441-607-7
CHAPTER 1
The Spawn and Beyond
A Metaphor for Sustaining Biodiversity as the Deepwater Horizon Spews into the Sea
When I pulled up to the flooded field, there was already a line of pickups parked on the edge of it. I could see a bunch of people standing in the shin-deep water where the river had consumed the gravel road. Lindsey Lewis, gar specialist from US Fish & Wildlife, was out there with three bowfishermen, and I could also see Ed Kluender, a graduate student in biology at my university who specializes in tracking movement patterns of gator gar in Arkansas. Ed had called me the night before and told me that the spawn was on. I told him I'd meet him at 8:00 a.m., so that's why I was there—with my canoe.
I passed a couple of the bowhunters' wives, also standing in the water, and waded out to Lindsey and Ed. They were focused on the ditch alongside the upstream side of the road, as were the bowhunters, whose bows were lowered. But before I could even say a word, a mammoth back breached like a submarine. I could see its spotted tail and dorsal fin, and enough of that greenish-black checkered pattern on its gun-metal-gray armor to know it was a six-footer, at least.
Then it shot out onto the road, zigging and zagging toward the trucks through five or six inches of water. It was shooting straight for one of the women. Ed was chasing after it, so I lit off after it too.
The woman screamed and turned tail, but the gator gar kept coming at a clip faster than she could run. That gar was slashing and splashing and whipping its tail like a crocodile with road rage. Basically, a 200-pound human was trying to escape getting run over by a 150-pound prehistoric monstrosity, which was looking unlikely at the moment. So resigning herself to her fate, the fishwife froze in her tracks and braced for impact. The gar shot right between her legs, then beached itself on the road, before twisting at the last second and torpedoing downstream.
Ed was out of range, so it was up to me to try to slow it down, then hold it till the others could assist. I didn't know why they wanted to catch it, but I figured it was to tag it and attach a transmitter, or check to see if it had any tags—because every speck of data we can get is key in protecting and preserving the species as a whole.
I'd been catching and releasing alligator gar with "Team Gar" (that's what Lindsey called us) for the last two years. The process usually involved spreading gillnets in the winter when the frigid currents made the fish a lot more docile and easy to handle. But this time was different. This time I was hellbent on tackling a monsterfish.
Then, right when I leapt, the road disappeared beneath my feet. Having run straight into the ditch, which I couldn't see because of the floodwaters, I stumbled, fell, and the gar made its getaway.
After that, it was a lot of hooting and knee-slapping as we recounted the events we'd just seen—and those we hadn't. Apparently, four mongo gar had just spawned out in the field. There was a small creek going through a culvert under the road we were standing on, which the gar had swum through the night before. The water was going down, and the gar knew they had to make it back to their home stream, a tributary of the Arkansas River. They also knew that humans were there, complicating the process.
I looked around. On the other side of the underwater culvert, where the gravel of the road emerged, I could see three fat buffalo fish that the bowhunters had left for the flies—as they had intended to do with that gator gar that got away. No doubt, they'd been waiting here since before the sun rose.
The bowhunters left, and Ed told me how he'd been bummed to see them standing there with bows raised when he pulled up, about forty minutes before I arrived. They were waiting for the big ones, as they'd done for years whenever the river rose in the spring. Ed, however, was even more bummed to see them suddenly shoot into the ditch.
A thrashing ensued, Ed ran out, and because he was closer than the bowhunters, he got to the gar as it was crossing the road. Ed jumped on that gar, got right on its back, and yanked the arrow out of its head. As he did this, he told the bowhunters that he worked with US Fish & Wildlife, and that it was illegal to shoot alligator gar during their spawning season. No apologies whatsoever!
Inspecting the fish, Ed let it go. It was an ancient seven-footer. The bowhunters had injured it, but Ed figured it would make it. He called Lindsey on his cell.
Lindsey was literally out in the field, half a mile upstream in a kayak. He'd been videotaping the spawn, unaware of the bowhunters, who were unaware of the new rules.
The summer before, the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission had passed a package of new harvesting laws. These days, a permit was required; there was a new one-gator-gar-per-day limit; and all alligator gar over three feet long were off limits during May and June. Ed had explained this to the bowhunters, who were pretty much shaking in their waders when Lindsey had pulled up with his uniform on.
Lindsey, representing the Feds, then scared the crap out of those ol' boys by explaining how much trouble they were in. He could've brought the hammer down on them, but instead he let them go with a warning and told them to tell their bowshooting buddies about the new rules. That's when I happened upon the scene.
The main thing, though, was that our gar had spawned, which doesn't happen every year. When it does, it's due to a harmonic convergence of the right water level and water temperature, and the fact that those fields have to stay flooded for at least ten days for the fry to make it on their own. In this traditional spawning ground, where gar have been breeding for centuries, successful spawns tend to coincide with major flood pulses, which don't happen every year. Dr. Reid Adams at the University of Central Arkansas told me in an email that for this particular population "analysis of historical hydro data suggested that hydrological regimes were conducive to 'good' reproductive success, including recruitment, of alligator gar around 5 years out of 35." This data comes from Tommy Inebnit's 2009 thesis on this population, "Aspects of Reproductive and Juvenile Ecology of Alligator Gar," and Reid was his advisor. My overall point being: on average, this population of gator gar only has a successful spawn once every seven years, and when this happens, a very small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of eggs that get jettisoned survive to become breeding adults.
For an hour or so, we waited for more gar, but only saw spotted and short-nose crossing the road. The smaller species were also heading back to their home flow. Just for fun, Lindsey threw a cast net out, but failed to capture any of them.
Lindsey figured the big ones were gone, and that the one that almost ran down the woman was the last of the four he'd seen spawning.
"It was incredible!" Lindsey explained, animated by adrenaline. "There was one female and three males, all of them at least six feet. I got right next to them and they didn't stop. Just kept splashing like crazy, sending plumes of water ten feet into the air. Even the cows were watching. And a deer."
This made me think of how monster myths are spawned as well. From Lake Champlain on the border of Quebec circa the early 1600s to Lake Norman in Oklahoma to almost everywhere there are alligator gar, the ruckus they kick up when they mate is enough to make anyone think the disturbance is coming from an unknown leviathan. These stories go through a few narrators, the details get exaggerated, newspapers pump up the hype, and in the end we get tales of raging, man-eating creatures—when all it was was a fish orgy.
Anyway, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
* * *
Ed and I followed the trees in my canoe, tracing where the creek used to be. I was paddling in back and he was up front, and between us we had an empty five-gallon bucket. When the tree-line forked, we veered toward the area where Lindsey said the gator gar had spawned.
We could see the flattened tall grass, where the fish had rolled. It was about two feet deep. Then we saw the eggs.
They were a translucent orange, the size of BBs, and scattered in a trail through the thrashed grass. We followed their path to where the vegetation was most disturbed, and came upon the mother lode. At least 157,000 eggs were stuck to submerged plants—that's the number gar researcher Dr. Alysse Ferrara, in her 2001 dissertation "Life-History Strategy of Lepisosteidae," indicates are released from a typical female.
I asked Ed what kind of grasses these were, and he said "some sort of sedge called Cyperus." They were about three feet tall and had spindly heads.
We got to work, collecting as many stalks as possible, covered with the sticky eggs. We began filling the bucket with hundreds of clusters, since we knew what was going to happen: the field would dry out in a day or two, and the entire spawn would be totally shot.
Gar, however, are our people, so we weren't about to let that happen. Once we got that bucket full, we paddled back to the underwater creek, found some brush sticking up, and stuffed the eggs as far down as we could reach.
If the water went down, this was our assurance that a few would have a chance. That is, if the egg-sucking scourers patrolling the floodplain didn't discover them first. Having fished this system obsessively, I knew it was full of buffalo, drum, and carp, which are the major prey of inland alligator gar—and the real culprits behind gamefish nesting devastation.
Realistically, we knew that the odds were pretty low that these eggs would hatch, since these fields were also filled with snakes, turtles, crawfish, and hundreds of other creatures that might be able to devour them. At least we could be confident that it was highly unlikely that any mammals or birds would gobble them down. If they did, then they'd suffer the fate of many a chicken, dog, and human who found out too late that gar roe is extremely toxic.
The Aaron family of Cleburne County discovered this the summer before when they went spearfishing in Greers Ferry Lake and bagged a bulging longnose and decided to make caviar. After their meal, it only took a few hours for the poison to kick in. It started with vomiting, then got worse. They were rushed to the emergency room, where they shook and sweated and almost died, but eventually pulled through. This is a story I hear every spring.
It's a good thing that alligator gar have this built-in defense mechanism, since their reproductive process is extremely complicated. A few years ago I interviewed biologist William G. Layher (author of the 2008 study "Literature Survey, Status in States of Historic Occurrence, and Field Investigations into the Life History of Alligator Gar in the Ouachita River, Arkansas"), who told me that if spawning conditions aren't optimum, the eggs might never get released. I asked where they went and he said they are sometimes absorbed back into a fish's system. Hence, it pays to produce a poison so fierce that those with the munchies stay away from eggs that have a challenging time making it to maturity.
In this sense, gars have the capacity to be lethal. There have been no documented cases of an alligator gar ever actually attacking a human (just questionable stories), but there are plenty of verified instances of people being hospitalized for chowing down on deadly roe.
Nevertheless, the big ones have earned a reputation for being razor-fanged sociopaths viciously seeking humans for brunch. This stereotype, however, is simply ignorant. Such rumors were spread by early American gar-fearing cultures that demonized a scary-looking fish. This attitude encouraged decades of faulty science and disinformation that continues to endure.
I've made this case many times before, so I won't repeat myself, except to say that luckily, and finally, we're starting to get a fix on gar. The science is picking up, federal and state agencies are working with universities, and there's a serious coordinated effort underway to educate the public on the role of gar in ecosystems—because, as gar specialist Lee Holt of Arkansas Game and Fish once stressed to me in an interview, the more gar you have in a system, the healthier that system is, and the bigger the game fish get. That's a fact, and there are studies to prove it, most notably Dennis L. Scarnecchia's "Reappraisal of Gars and Bowfins in Fishery Management," published in the July-August 1992 issue of Fisheries.
There's also been a recent surge of fishing shows on cable and satellite spreading the word that gar aren't harmful. One of these is Zeb Hogan's 2010 Monster Fish episode produced by National Geographic, and the other is Jeremy Wade's 2009 "Alligator Gar" episode of Animal Planet's River Monsters series. Both of these shows shoot to dispel damaging myths, and both of these shows have informed millions of viewers about misinformation regarding gar.
I was consulted on both of these projects, and my research was used in both productions. Though I have some minor complaints about how the information I provided was used, I'm pretty happy about the changing reputation of the alligator gar. After all, my interest in this subject isn't meant to serve myself; it's to preserve a super-cool, air-breathing fish for future generations, so that it can continue to captivate imaginations and turn kids into engaged and informed citizens who are part conservationist, part something else.
Because that's what we need to sustain the natural world: a persistent interest in preservation coming from a variety of views and backgrounds—especially from those that oppose each other on a vast array of differing issues. Our common ground is our glue, so logically, we should work together on what we can agree on to conserve a major part of ourselves. After all, we are a wilderness nation, founded in the wilderness, carved from the wilderness, our identity formed in the wilderness. To forget this is a travesty which will divest us of this quality, which we can already see diminishing at alarming rates. Just look at the Pacific salmon crash in 2008; the starving, swimming polar bears; the vanishing buffer of marshy grasses on our Gulf shores that protect our cities from hurricanes. Ideally, if more people with differences took more of an interest in our interconnecting network of flora and fauna, we'd have more reason to come together so that we don't come apart.
Again, that's my theory and I'm sticking to it.
* * *
The International Gar Conference was organized by Alysse Ferrara at Nicholls State University in Thibodeaux, Louisiana. There were experts from Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, the whole gar-dammed world, and I was the keynote speaker.
Season of the Gar: Adventures in Pursuit of America's Most Misunderstood Fish had just come out from the University of Arkansas Press. It was the first book ever published on this subject in the English language, so of course I was worried that my creative nonfiction approach to the species might not fly so well with biologists and fishery experts who refer to gator gar as "Atractosteus spatula." Plus, my chapters on science and folklore and history were interspersed with some semi-ludicrous misadventures.
In a sense, I was putting my book to the scientific test. If these authorities could accept it, then maybe I'd done something good—the Henry David Thoreau quote constantly repeating in my head, "Don't just be good, be good for something."
I was also a bit nervous because I felt I might have left a less than professional impression on some garologists from my state. The evening before the conference began, my wife and I had gone to a pizza place downtown, where we happened upon Lindsey and a bunch of Game and Fish agents eating dinner. I went over and introduced Robin, then made a blundering sweeping gesture in which I knocked over a glass of Sprite, spilling it all over the table. Needless to say, I was embarrassed by that. But they, of course, just laughed it off.
This was one week after the gar spawn in Arkansas, and the book had only been out two weeks. I knew that some of the scientists had already read it, so I was ready to receive criticism. But I was also psyched to take in the panels and talks, hobnob with the world experts, and learn as much as I could.
Anyhow, the next morning the conference began, and suddenly I was up on stage reading my final chapter, which I chose for its science-based optimism about many of the new management plans designed to protect alligator gar, a creature which the American Fisheries Society categorizes as "imperiled" throughout its range (see Fisheries, vol. 33, issue 8, 2008). Meanwhile, there was a Spanish translator in the booth to my right, speaking into a microphone. I have no idea how she kept pace as I read in my regular rapid gait, but I could see the Spanish-language listeners nodding with their headphones on.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Return of the Gar by Mark Spitzer. Copyright © 2015 Mark Spitzer. Excerpted by permission of University of North Texas Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Photos,Introduction: The Gar Returns,
Chapter 1: The Spawn and Beyond,
Chapter 2: Gar vs. Sewage,
Chapter 3: Finding Judas,
Chapter 4: Enter the Next Generation,
Chapter 5: Gar Rodeo in the Cajun Swamp,
Chapter 6: Bromancing the Gar,
Chapter 7: After the Florida Gar,
Chapter 8: First-World Problems in Third-World Countries,
Chapter 9: Thailand's Lake-Monster Fisheries,
Chapter 10: Long Live the Pejelagarto!,
Conclusion: Return of the Gar,
Garpendix,