Illinois Alligator gar...

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Ifishillinois
June 20 at 11:36am

Monster Monday brings you this prehistoric fish, the largest fish native to Illinois: alligator gar. The alligator gar was officially declared extinct in Illinois in the 1990s. We'll tell you more about the fish pictured here below, however the big news is that the IDNR Division of Fisheries will resume an alligator gar reintroduction program, which originally began in 2010 and had a brief hiatus in 2014?2015. Alligator gar were stocked in a few waterways, including the lower Kaskaskia River, during the couple of years that the reintroduction program was active.

?We?ve only stocked a few thousand in total at those sites and many of those were small, so survivability was questionable,? said Dan Stephenson, the IDNR?s director of fisheries. ?We now raise them to at least 12 inches before stocking so that their survival is vastly improved.? And for those of you worried that gar would be detrimental to popular sportfish species, biologists say the alligator gar is an opportunistic predator that mostly targets shad and rough fish, such as carp.

Why would we want a fish like that in our lakes and rivers? For one, proponents think the alligator could help in the fight against Asian carp, an invasive species that has caused problems in waterways across the state. In addition, the alligator gar is becoming a popular trophy quarry for sportsmen, particularly in the southern states where there are sustained populations of the species. Bowfishing enthusiasts in particular enjoy pursuing the huge fish.

So here's some info on the gar featured above:
This one came from our sampling on Powerton Lake, which is on the warm water temperature extreme for water bodies in Illinois. In the summer of 2011, we stocked 2-year-old alligator gar in this water body, all of which were tagged. Two years later in 2015, a total of 9 alligator gar were collected with an average length of 51 inches and 36.3 pounds. Eight fish were collected in the first 15 minutes with the new alligator gar gill nets, and one more with electrofishing. This collection was more than 10 percent of the original 78 stocked fish. These fish had moved to an interior intake canal at this warm water power plant lake (coal fired). This interior canal has no fishing access, and a constant supply of forage of gizzard shad and silver carp. We should be able to sample them at this location for many years to come.

Another interesting tid-bit on how these Alligator Gar grow:
Alligator gar can grow very quickly early in life, meaning that the stocked gar will quickly become accessible to angers. For example, in August of 2015, a bow fisherwoman harvested an alligator gar in the lower Kaskaskia River that had been tagged fish during the 2013 IDNR alligator gar stocking into the lower Kaskaskia River. When it was stocked in 2013 as a 6-month-old fish, it was 18.9 inches long and 1.14 pounds. A mere 21 months later, that fish grew 7 inches and added almost 3 pounds to its weight (26.5 inches long and 4 pounds).

To effectively manage these prehistoric fish, the IDNR is working closely with University of Illinois researchers to study how Alligator Gar, in addition to the three other gar species, grow, mature, reproduce and migrate to make certain these species continue to troll Illinois' waterways.

http://www.bnd.com/news/local/article81564327.html