The "green gar" is, these days, called the longnose gar. Do fish have noses? I don't know, but the longnose gar can breathe air.
Gars have been referred to as primitive fish or living fossils because they have retained some morphological characteristics of their earliest ancestors, such as a spiral valve intestine, and a highly vascularized swim bladder lung that supplements gill respiration for breathing both air and water.I'm reading about the longnose gar this morning, because it is one of the kinds of fish that live in our beautiful Lake Mendota — as I learned here, where I was looking because I wanted to figure out what was that crazy looking dead fish we saw on the beach yesterday:
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fish are cool!
fishing is fun!!
Gar is an interesting tasting fish. Reminds me less of fish and more of frog legs. I like it.
Those teeth are one of the reasons I keep a long pair of needle nose pliers in a handy spot in my boat.
It is very common this time of year to seen garfish swimming near the surface in the backwaters of the Mississippi.
What's a pirate's favorite fish?
Garrrr.
"Do fish have noses?"
Well, don't they some sort of smelling detector? We're all familiar with the scene where Chief Brody is tossing chum into the water in the successful effort to attract Bruce? "We gonna need a bigger boat!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImpPYKtK2AE
Years ago a friend enlisted a group of up to help him seine one of his farm ponds. The idea was to get id of undesirable fish so he could stock the pond with bass for fishing.
My limited imagination never thought to question the type of undesirable fish he had in mind.
The nets revealed a BUNCH of gar. I admit I found those nasty looking teeth a bit alarming. Then one of the other idiots said, "At least we didn't net any cotton mouth moccasins".
Never going to seine a farm pond again.
But the farmer's wife had us back to a fish fry.... Gar is pretty tasty.
The alligator gars in Texas can get bigger than 6 ft long. Shiny, prehistoric-looking beasts, with scales about the size of a half-dollar. Hard to catch, because their mouths are armored and the hook has difficulty setting. I've been in a canoe on a central Texas river, muddy, when a gar hit a bamboo pole trotline - it looked like a shark attack, thrashing and so on, and the bamboo pole popped out of the bank and headed on down the river with the gar.
I thought gar only existed in crossword puzzles. Whodathunk they were actual fish?
I caught one of those from a dock at Reelfoot Lake State Park in northwest Tennessee when I was a child. When I was pulling him up, I thought it was a snake or an eel at first. I guess I didn't really catch him because he got off the hook somehow and fell back into the water. We were glad that we did not have to handle him. We were fishing for crappie and/or bluegill, I don't remember which, but we would have been using minnows for crappie or crickets for bluegill. My father called it an alligator gar.
Cool illustration.
"Gar" was an unacceptable word in my friend Kenny's house. I learned that it was a slang equivalent for the N-word. At least according to Kenny's mother, who grew up in SoCal, not the Southland.
I didn't know one fish from another and was merely a subteen bystander as she explained it to Kenny's hot older sisters (twins!) I don't know why they were talking about fish, or racism.
I have never caught a gar before, but my reaction would be the same as hooking a large snapping turtle. As soon as you see it, cut the line. You can always get more hooks, fingers are harder to replace.
Fish don't have noses in the sense of being a part of their respiratory system. (i.e. fish don't breath through a nose). But they do have a 'nose-like' organs called 'nares'(pronounced: nair-eze). Water circulates through these and this is how a fish detects odors.
Most people don't eat gar because their skin is 'armored' with scales that are small, overlapping bony plates. They are darned difficult to clean. That is why the dead gar you saw had only the skin and scales remaining. Side note: archeological digs in the southern U.S. often find scales of Alligator gar that had been used as arrow points.
Presumably that fish didn't end up on the beach due to natural causes.
Where I'm from gar are regarded as a trash fish and are often killed due to the belief (which many know-it-alls claim to be false) that gars decimate the populations of desirable fishes. When it gets really hot you'll see dozens of gars hanging out right below the surface, periodically breaching for a bite of air. I'm guessing they hunt by scent because they're usually uninterested in artificial lures.
It looks like it has a tie to a birdlike creature. That snout could have become a beak on a later model when they left the water permanently. Also looks like my old uncle. Shortly after we left the water.
Fearsome looking creature but watch out even more for GWAR
My great grandfather said he was bitten by an alligator gar while swimming in the Red River. He had some nice scars on his leg as proof. Of course he could have been pulling MY leg. He also did some dynamite blast fishing back in the day so I'm not really sure how he got those scars.
.....and that's exactly why I never went swimming in the lakes of East Texas!!
@Daskol
I have actually seen them live. Long time ago at the old Riverside theater in Milwaukee (before the remodel).
God I wish I could have that night of my life back.
Do they bother humans? Those teeth look dangerous.
To my knowledge, most bony fish and all squamates (sharks, rays, skates, etc.) have nostrils (often called nares).
Figure 1
Figure 2
Fish nostrils do not connect to the respiratory system except in the case of a few species of lungfish, order Dipnoi.
Many fish can breathe air, particularly freshwater fish whose habitat is subject to frequent drought.
In summary, yes, fish have noses. The human nose is part of our inner fish.
grew up in Eagle Pass, texas in a very different time than now.
And there was a fine, deep swimming hole a few miles outside of town, past Seco Mines and a few miles up the highway to Del Rio: Elm Creek. beautiful big trees for these parts and there usually wouldn't be anymore than a couple of others there most ever. it played all kinds of roles for me over the years, maybe sweetest was my daddy liked to head out there for patriotic holiday or birthday watermelon-eating and some swimming.
And when you were swimming in the deepest parts, there was this longtime gar that lived there, as long as my dad was tall, and would most any time, from not-sure-where, he would gently appear and cruise underneath for a sighting.
It was charming, a weird kind of comfort.
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