Gar Quiz - the return - ID the fish

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Hello gar enthusiasts! I have never posted, but have been reading the gar threads since the winter. You guys have alot of knowledge that I find interesting. I like the science of gar fish.

Anyway, when I was a kid I caught gars in Lake Pepin on the Mississippi in WI. Caught baby gars, speared big gars etc. (I do not kill fish like that anymore). I have liked gars since then, but never did any research and science on them until last year. I have 2 sons, 8 and 11, and we bought an alligator gar and 2 longnose a year ago. Kept them in the aquarium all winter. We learned alot about behavior, social aspects, feeding etc. Fascinating social fish. Smarter than people give them credit for.

So, in the name of gar science, I built some ponds in the yard and took the boys to a figurative Gartopia in mid July. It is a place I would call a Jurassic Park of gar fish. There were longnose, shortnose and I think spotteds as well. All sizes from 2" to 30". I also saw what looked like atractosteus, but we were too far north I think. I caught 10 of the small ones 6 to 7". (The shame of this place is that in tracking down this spot I talked to locals and told them that we were looking for gar fish. "The kids were shooting them at the bridge all day yesterday")

My question for solomon or others is, do crosses between longnose and short/spotted retain a gene that gives some of them long snouts and short snouts from the same batch? (recessive/dominant question) In other words, all have nearly the same genes, but it is like some having blue eyes, some brown.

thanks
 
Hello & welcome Simeon! Hybridization is not my forte so I will wait for Solomon and Richard to pipe in, but I just wanted to welcome you to the gar forum. Great place for your first post!

- Michael
 
simeonchambers;4371736; said:
Hello gar enthusiasts! I have never posted, but have been reading the gar threads since the winter. You guys have alot of knowledge that I find interesting. I like the science of gar fish.

Anyway, when I was a kid I caught gars in Lake Pepin on the Mississippi in WI. Caught baby gars, speared big gars etc. (I do not kill fish like that anymore). I have liked gars since then, but never did any research and science on them until last year. I have 2 sons, 8 and 11, and we bought an alligator gar and 2 longnose a year ago. Kept them in the aquarium all winter. We learned alot about behavior, social aspects, feeding etc. Fascinating social fish. Smarter than people give them credit for.

So, in the name of gar science, I built some ponds in the yard and took the boys to a figurative Gartopia in mid July. It is a place I would call a Jurassic Park of gar fish. There were longnose, shortnose and I think spotteds as well. All sizes from 2" to 30". I also saw what looked like atractosteus, but we were too far north I think. I caught 10 of the small ones 6 to 7". (The shame of this place is that in tracking down this spot I talked to locals and told them that we were looking for gar fish. "The kids were shooting them at the bridge all day yesterday")

My question for solomon or others is, do crosses between longnose and short/spotted retain a gene that gives some of them long snouts and short snouts from the same batch? (recessive/dominant question) In other words, all have nearly the same genes, but it is like some having blue eyes, some brown.

thanks
Click to expand...

welcome Simeon! first off i want to mention that i received your email sometime back and will be in touch (very cool stuff going on on your end).

i need to head out to the labs, but wanted to at least post a brief response to your question. gar hybridization is relatively new in terms of what is formally known of it...we knew about it in the pet trade before we knew about it (officially) in the scientific literature (the best reference is a paper by Herrington et al 2008 in Transactions of the American Fisheries Society...if anyone is interested in this paper please shoot me an email or PM and i can send a pdf).

what i can say about hybridization is based on the few specimens we have seen, and what little formal study has been done (we are pursuing further study as we speak). it seems that the hybrids show an intermediate snout length between the parent species...since the sample size is so few, it's hard to say if one individual hybrid from the same batch has a significantly longer snout and one has a significantly shorter snout (especially with a sample size of just 2-4).

spotted, longnose, and shortnose gars all have longer snouts than gator gars, but when any of those species are crossed with gators, the progeny have shorter snouts than the Lepisosteus component, but longer snouts than the Atractosteus component. beyond that, there doesn't seem to be a ton of variation (this comes from observations of the shortnose x gator and longnose x gator crosses. we only have one known spotted x gator cross and that seems to fall in line with these other observations).

hopefully that sort of answers your question...we would expect to see some variation, but at this point, with such low sample size and little study formally done, we can only say that hybrids are sure to be intermediate between the parents, and don't seem to skew one way or the other too much (in terms of snout length). pattern seems to be a combination of the two, and in some cases is quite bizarre.

look forward to seeing you around the forum!--
--solomon
 
solomon u have a pm :)
 
thanks Solomon.

your answer is what i expected. the snout is a combining of genes for a muted affect in long/short. my theory was the brown eyes blue eyes thing. you are probably correct and certainly have the observations.

of the small gars i saw and caught, there were all different snout lengths, so my next theory i have is that during spawning, the randomness of the egss and milt from the 2 or 3 species (assuming there is a mix of species during egg release) randomly hook up to produce reletively pure strains of each as well as hybrids. over time you would still have almost pure strains and hybrids as well. over time, say in a landlocked lake, they all may be like melted crayons and brown (medium snouts). but water clarity and habitat issues would give each species an edge in its best habitat. thus we could see survival of purer strains in nature forever basicly. the longnose seems to have an edge anyway (away from atractosteus anyway) due to its long snout in certain water conditions,

if you see carp spawn, if the gars are similar, i suspect the eggs/milt mixing would be correct. the carp example is that "mirror carp" or "German carp" still show up in small quantities even now, after more than 100 years in our rivers. you would think that over time they would all become commons due to the numbers issue (I would guess 1% to 3% are the german/mirror at most) however, the brown eyes/blue eyes could explain the german/mirror still being around.

german and mirror carp are all or nothing. it is or it isn't when you look at it. common carp seem not to pick up a slight mirror/german look (medium snout)

anyway, your obsevations make sense. the observations i saw in the wild with snout length was interesting. i have a few other details of my observations that really were ccol.

simeon
 
While I have time this evening(3 kids etc) i will post some other gar observations.

In the place, i guess i willl call it Garassic Park, we had alot of fun.

I should say, we abided by all state regs (no fed regs where we were for what we were doing). in fact each state has specific laws and all components that affected our activities i had in a word file printed and on the dash of my truck. I will say, we were not in WI. you cannot move any live fish from any waterway etc. do not go there to mess with live fish. they have a virus that they are trying to control.

the most amazing thing i saw was that these gars of all sizes would sometimes be in less that 2" of water. no vegetation, just mud flats. sometimes 1/2" for the little ones, and i did see a 20" gar get high and dry and make like a snake back to the water (unspooked fish) the day was a hot 93 degrees, humid, sunny. water was 80ish in the depths to 4.5 feet. the feathered down depths say at 1" of water were probably 100 degrees. this is where the small gars were (6" to 12") when i picked them up, they were warm to the touch, like a hot dog after the microwave, at just the right temp to eat! i kid you not, they felt like warm hot dogs. this would explain the 5mm/day growth.

this was such a hot day, that in my 8" high top hiking boots, with mud almost to the top of my boots, i never was chilled or cooled down. i was sweating like crazy. i say this because if my hands were cooled down, the gars would feel abnormally warm. these fish were in 100 degree water. (perhaps they would go there for less than an hour?, but hard to say)

same place, all the yellow bullheads you could rescue were there (thousands). i helped a bunch back into the main water. the night before this we caught 40, 5" yellow bullheads on hook and line. beautiful, clean, clear eyed and healthy fish. perfect pond size! we did not keep any.

simeon
 
well, the kids are playing nice, so more info

There is trouble ahead for all gars. As we know it took all of 2 years to wipe out atractosteus in AR. Gars have been here for maybe 200 million years, but leave it to stupid Americans to wipe them out.

In my research at the local places that i went, Garassic Park and other places. here are some quotes:

"Gar fish? what the hell do you want with gar fish?"

"Gar fish, yes we caught 50 of em for bait yesterday, if you go up there, kill every dam* one of em"

"Aren't they trash fish"

You get the picture. these stupid people, including most state DNR's still don't understand what NATIVE fish do for balance! There are fanatics that will make 10,000 casts for a 45" musky....and enjoy it. There are 50" gars that they could fish for but there is such an ignorance and plain old stupidity that they do not see it. they are fishing masochists i guess. further, these bow fisherman still classify gars as rough fish (regulations as well). one claimed to have shot 70 one afternoon this summer.

i told one guy "150 years ago we shot buffalo for sport, in 35 years they were almost gone" i do not think people will get it.

simeon
 
2x Spotted? Long snout but obviously not long enough to be a LNG or else the gap in the plants would show more snout...

Also seems to be a pattern emerging perhaps after some time spent flushed out in the labs?
 
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