This is a black alligator gar that I caught July 3rd. I first thought this was a catfish the first time it boiled the surface during the fight because of the color, it was only after it jumped out all the way that I realized the truth. I have never heard of or seen any other pictures of a black alligator gar although I have seen black long nose gar and black spotted gar in the wild. I was afraid this fish was going to die since the hook was caught inside the mouth around the gills, however as you can see in the second picture this fish went back to business as usual after getting released. That is a drum in its mouth there. This was about 2 hours after first catching it, and it was in the same general area I caught it. It swam along the bank in about 2' of water like this for about 20 yards before moving back to deep water to finish the meal. For the rest of this trip we had 7 other fish, I had a big one on which ran out 30 yards against the drag three times before spitting the bait. I never got the fish high enough to see the leader, and only once was she up enough to swirl the water during the fight, probably between 7-8' in length on that fish, but I will never know

Brilliant stuff.

Dawson, I have caught one of those as well. They are awesome looking.

Is it a separate species, a genetic mutation or just a color variance cause by water conditions?

What ever it is that looks super cool......

Wish I was still out your way to go catch some of those gar with you Dawson.

I think bret or starless could explain it better than me, but has nothing to do with the water clarity.

Same species, just a pigment difference. Likely a gene that is usually repressed.


If breeding gar were easy, it would be possible to isolate this gene, and breed black gar.

Many species have a variance of melanism that are not water-clarity related.
Great catch Dawson! Thanks for the pics and report!

thats pretty neat!

caught a similar one in grapevine bout a month ago

Nice, JC!

What a beautiful fish!

Yeah, like Bret said, it's most likely a gene that doesn't show up often, at least not visibly.

Much like Mirror Carp are the same species as Common Carp. Or perhaps, a better example is koi. They are exactly the same species as Common Carp, but over many generations, those recessive genes that occasionally cause unusual pigmentation have been selective bred to become more and more dominant until the koi end up all sorts of beautiful colors.

A black gar is just a rare, wild example of that sort of thing, much like an albino animal.

awesome looking fish! I think i've seen gar like that before but never knew what it was

There's one in the tank at the Buda Cabelas.