Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Alligator Gar

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

The alligator gar is one scary looking fish. Learn all about these monsters in today's episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here for Dave.

So this is short stuff as usual. Let's go. So can I tell you my inspiration for this was, I was at the lake the other day. We go to a lake here in Georgia. I'm not going to name it because I don't want to be stalked. Like no name, like no name. And I was at the lake the other day doing a project and I was very hot because it's very hot in Georgia right now. And I went to jump in to cool down and right as I was going to take a leap off the dock, I saw a very large, like a two and a half foot garfish kind of trickle toward the surface. And I've seen them before out there occasionally, but it just scared the life out of me because it is a terrifying looking fish. Yeah. If you don't know what a garfish looks like, just do a little image search.

And they have these long, very sharp toothed snouts. And they are terrifying. It looks like something that you would find in a river in South America and not one that you would jump into a lake in Georgia. Right. And also you travel back in time 50 million years too, because they definitely look prehistoric for sure. Oh, absolutely. And this is specifically about the alligator gar. And this comes from our old friends at House Stuff Works and Michelle Konstantinovsky, great name. Very nice. But the alligator gar is super old, right? Yeah. I think they found fossils as old as 100 million years old, not just 50. And they actually, the reason that it's called an alligator gar is because it has a long snout too,

but rather than being pointed like most other gar, it's flattened, giving it kind of like a shovel like appearance or actually like an alligator snout. And the Latin name for it is attractosteus spatula. And that's right, spatula. It's the spatula fish is another way to put it. And it, I mean, it really does look like an alligator snout when you see a picture of these things. Yeah, they are huge. They're seven living species of gar. And the alligator gar is the largest by far. The other way you can tell a diff is they have two rows of teeth, the alligator gar on the upper jaw, instead of just the one row of teeth of the regular gar. And I think their head is a bit wider. Yeah. And I think normally they're something like

about 160 pounds to maybe six feet long, which is enormous for a fish. Yes. But they have been, I guess, found up to 350 pounds and 10 feet long, which is even more enormous. I think the record, at least in Texas, is 302 pounds. That was back in 1953. And the reason we bring up Texas is because a YouTuber named Peyton Moore, who's a conservationist, posted a video on his channel, Wildlife, last May, because he caught one of these things and it was eight feet long and probably about 300 pounds. Did you watch that video? I did not. It is a very large fish and he likened it to kind of hanging onto the end of a car that's trying to roll down a driveway. I saw that. I don't see how you bring in a fish like this that's that heavy, but he knew what

he was doing. And it's just enormous, man. I think at the end he had it, he obviously released it, but he was kind of measuring it and showing it off for the camera. And this thing just whipped around to sort of wriggle and just like, it's so strong, it just knocks this guy over and then swims away. And he's like, well, I guess I was going to let it go, but apparently that just happened now. Good for him for letting it go or at least planning to, you know? Well, you do let them go because apparently they're not good for eating. They, for a couple of reasons, they don't taste great. And they are covered with these, it's almost like a armored scale. They're called Ganoid Scales. And it's like that sort of like an armor you would see on a dinosaur,

basically. Right. Yeah, they're very dinosaur. Like, and yeah, and the, even if you can dress them, or I should say clean them to eat, like the meat that you get off of it's not going to be very good. And if you find any row or fish eggs in a gar, you want to leave those alone because they're toxic no matter what gar species you're dealing with. So yeah, not really a delicacy in any way, shape or form. Should we take a break? I say we take a break and then we'll come back and talk more about Alligator Gar. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance

Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars. If you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Chuck, I found out some pretty interesting stuff about them. Let's hear it. An alligator gar is an opportunistic eater and it'll eat basically anything. I saw that they'll eat deer and raccoons if they get a chance. They'll eat waterfowl turtles, crabs, other fish.

But one of the ways that they catch some of these things, especially some of the harder to catch ones, they play dead. They ambush their prey by playing dead. They'll float and make another fish or a raccoon or something that's going to swim past, think that it's dead. Then all of a sudden, it grabs it out of the water and that thing's dead. And they do eat all those things and they have those huge alligator-like mouths and teeth, so they're super scary. But apparently, they're not going to come after you. I was just being a little baby boy the other day when I got scared and wouldn't jump in. If I would have jumped in, this thing would have scattered and gone far away. It wouldn't have said, you know, human arm must eat. They're just not going to come after you.

So you don't need to fear. I think there's never been on record a case of an alligator gar attacking somebody, right? Right. Yeah, that's what I've seen as well. But I mean, I guess if you had seen a gar that was floating, you would have wanted to steer clear of that one because maybe it wouldn't ambush your arm. You said that you saw them in your lake. I'm taking it that your no-name lake is freshwater, right? No, it's a saltwater lake in the middle of Georgia. You never know. There's some saltiness in Georgia, for sure. Yeah, it's freshwater. And they're only in North America, which is pretty surprising. Yeah, but they used to be, remember we said that their fossils have been dated back to 100 million years. They used to be found all over the place.

But yeah, now they're only in North America. They're a freshwater species and they tend to like parts of like bodies of water with poor oxygen. So like, say like maybe a cove where you'd launch a boat or a backwater of a river that's kind of outside of the turbulence or even swamps or bayous. And one reason they can survive in these kind of lower oxygen environments is they have an air bladder that not only helps them float, it also distributes oxygen to their blood slowly, but surely. So they don't have to take in that much oxygen because they can hold a bunch at once. Yeah, and I think it's, I think they're in Central America too. I just wanted to put that on the record. So let's say the Americas. What, but not South America. Man, these alligator

gar are really tough to pin down. I think North and Central America, because I did seek something about Costa Rica. Okay, so the Americas. Okay. So people, just because you don't eat them, people still do fish for them like this guy. I think there are sort of, there are a lot of regulations in place because they are really slow to reach the age where they can make little gar. They spawn in very specialized areas. So they're very ripe for overfishing and for like shrinking of species. But for that reason, they're highly, highly regulated. And you're basically, at least in Florida, and I think a lot of other places, you're only going to be given a permit to fish for these things if it's scientific research

or you're working in like managing the species or something like that. I tittered earlier, by the way, I want to say at an inappropriate time, but it was because you said they're ripe for overfishing and I just thought of a ripe gar and that sounds so gross. They're scary looking. Early on though, that like, you know, earlier humans would fish for them and do all sorts of things that armor like, those armor like scales, those guinoid scales, they made jewelry out of them and tools and things like that because they're really tough. And I think they would use their skin for products and the skin oil for different things. Yeah, who knows what. Do you have anything else? I don't have anything else. I think we've

talked alligator, alligator, car to death. Well, I guess the last thing we should mention is that even though they do are opportunistic eaters, I think there used to be an idea that they would devastate other fish populations and that's apparently not the case, right? Yeah, that's right. So they were overfished because they were considered a nuisance fish. So they were trying to protect the fish that they wanted by fishing the alligator gar out, but turns out they were wrong. I do have one more thing. Okay. The name gar for these fish is, it comes from the Anglo Saxon word for spear. That is good. And I've got one more thing. Okay. I cannot help but think of a garfish without thinking of the great, great documentary, Vernon, Florida, my favorite

documentary of all time by the great Aero Morris. And one of the characters, the guy that talks like this, he talks about swimming in the river and then, oh, you come up on one of those garfish. You better look out, brother. Really? And I saw that movie in college, right? I didn't know what a garfish was. It was many years later that I saw a gar and I was like, oh, I get it now. I got to see that movie once and for all. It's just, there's nothing like it. Yeah. You got anything else? I think, yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right. Well, that means everybody's short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio,

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