Never Seen This Before: Gar Spawning

So. I'm driving down a county road that runs through our farm. And there's a spot where the MS River backwater is about 6-8" deep. And something catches my eye. And the water is all churned up and splashing. I pull over, and walk to the edge of the water. And it's literally hundreds of Alligator Gar. In what I can only guess is a spawning congregation. They're going nuts and they're churning the water up and splashing around. And there are no small ones. These things are all like 50 pounds or bigger. As far as the eye can see.

This picture doesn't really do it justice. This one congregation seems like it was one female. Surrounded my 20-30 males. All trying to mate with her. Or fertilze her eggs or however they do it. But this is like in 8" of water, so their backs are coming out.

And there's like 10 or 15 of these pods within sight. All with dozens of fish.

So about this time a game Warden comes by. And he's like: "I've never seen anything like this in my life." So he gets on the radio and calls another game Warden. And we just sit there and watch them.

Eventually one of the wardens is like: "I sure would like one of those to eat." So I go back to the house and get my biggest spinning rod and an alligator table hook. And I just waded out in there. And I literally walked up on them. These things were close to 100 pounds and they were just swarming around at my feet.

So I hooked one and battled it for a while and eventually got it to where we could get a rope around it. So green jeans took his gar home for supper.



Anyone ever seen them do this before?