Everything on them is either sharp or bony, so if you’re not paying attention there’s a high likelihood you’ll get hit, cut or poked. “I got whacked yesterday in the shin he got whacked in the knee. Waldrep crouched beside him, cutting the netting away. “This is why we’ve got the gloves,” Daugherty said. Its powerful thrashing rang like a fist against the metal hull.īiologist Dan Daugherty holds an alligator gar he collected, tagged and released in the Brazos River. At 4 1/2 feet, it was at the smaller end for an alligator gar, yet still longer than any other species in the river. It did look something like an alligator: torpedo-shaped, armor-plated and glistening, with broad, toothy jaws clamped on the offending net fibers. “Gar,” he called to Dan over his shoulder. The fish arched in the net as Waldrep pulled it up, its spotted fins flaring in panic. For a moment he grappled with something beneath the surface. His coworker Travis Waldrep hurriedly cleared gear away from the bow, knelt and plunged his hands in the brown waters of the Brazos River. When Dan Daugherty saw the nets bobbing, he gunned the outboard motor, swinging the boat around in the current and bringing it up alongside the disturbance. “That’s given them a competitive edge in some of those habitats.” “They can survive even in water that’s really hot and low in oxygen, which would drive out other species,” David said. Hidden within their archaic bodies is a suite of adaptations that have carried them down the millennia: spiral guts that wring the maximum nutrition out of kills, a surprising comfort with brackish water, and - most usefully - the ability to gulp fresh air. While no species ever stops evolving, the gar we have today still look much like those of that distant epoch. The mass extinction at the end of the Mesozoic Era and the climatic roller coaster that followed dented their fortunes, but did not destroy them. According to Solomon David, an ichthyologist at Nicholls State University in Louisiana, the gar family originated 157 million years ago in the Late Jurassic period and spread to every continent save Australia and Antarctica. Millions of years before the arrival of modern mammals or birds, gar patrolled the swampy rivers of America.
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