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Alligator gar — printable fact sheet
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Alligator gar
Atractosteus spatula
The alligator gar is the largest fish that lives its whole life in fresh water in North America, reaching 2.5 m and over 130 kg, and it is armoured in a way no bony fish alive today matches. Its scales are ganoid: diamond-shaped, coated in a hard enamel-like layer of ganoine ove…
Did you know?
- Despite their size and intimidating appearance, there are no confirmed reports of alligator gars attacking humans.
- Gar eggs are toxic to mammals and birds, including humans — a genuine chemical defence in a fish egg, and a good reason not to eat the roe. The gar lineage has been around for roughly 100 million years and its rate of molecular evolution is among the slowest of any vertebrate, which is why it is used as a reference genome for reconstructing ancestral vertebrate genes. Alligator gar spawn only when floodplains inundate, so decades of levee-building quietly removed their nursery habitat without anyone catching a single fish.
What I learned
Draw the alligator gar
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