Has anyone ever tried spotted gar in their pond as a means to control overpopulation and stunting of the preferred gamefish?
This is certainly another one of my "crazy" ideas, but I don't see the flaw (yet).
(I can get mature spotted gar from our creek, just by using a bit of frayed nylon rope as the lure. Spotted gar side-strike their prey, and then throw it down their gullet a little later. Kind of like how a heron eats small fish.)
Many of the articles on spotted gar describe them as "voracious predators". However, despite the appearance of their long, toothy snouts, their gape widths are very small for a fish that is 36" long.
Their size is also strongly sexually dimorphic, with the mature females be significantly larger. I have observed a bimodal size distribution in our creek when the spotted gar are abundant. I think it might be possible to have a single-sex pond of spotted gars - and you could therefore strictly control the amount of gar predation.
Ideas
Could you use spotted gars to control reproduction in a pond where the channel catfish are pellet fed? I am envisioning the gars eating fingerling catfish, but being unable to consume the larger catfish. The pellet calories would then be distributed mostly to your "game" CCs, rather than the small fry.
Likewise, would the gar be effective in a crappie pond. It would be nice if the gar would decimate the population of small crappie, but leave the larger crappie alone. I think the key here would be a good food source for the crappie. Would it be possible to have an ongoing population of some smaller forage (Gambusia?), that is too small to be targeted by the gars, but an abundant food source for the crappie? It might be much easier to keep an abundant minnow/shiner population - if there are no small crappie consuming a portion of that limited resource.
Further, consider a scenario where it is impossible to keep enough standing weight of forage in the pond for your large crappie. You could add BG so the crappie could forage on the supply of small sunfish. If the crappie wipe out a portion of the small BG, and the gars wipe out a portion of the medium BG, would it be possible to have a trophy crappie and trophy BG pond?
I am sure I am wrong (or it is WAY more difficult than I have implied), or it would have been done before! However, if anyone has any good data, or even random musings, then I would like to hear about any experiments deliberately (or accidentally) using spotted gar as a pond management tool.
The most likely problems I can think of:
1.) The gar are more efficient than your gamefish at consuming the forage intended for your gamefish.
2.) Despite their small mouth gape, mature spotted gars DO NOT only consume small prey. Are they capable of killing a trophy bass or large catfish with many small strikes and then consuming the larger fish in a series of tiny bites? (Like a pod of orcas eating a whale?)
Thanks,
FishinRod
