Spotted gar (Lepisosteus oculatus) is a freshwater, brackish species recorded in the United States.
Scientific name: Lepisosteus oculatus · Water: Freshwater, Brackish
Size: up to 150 cm
The spotted gar (Lepisosteus oculatus) is a freshwater gar native to North America and the smallest of the seven gar species found there, growing 2–3 ft (0.61–0.91 m) and typically weighing 4–6 lb, with dark spots covering its head, fins and dart-like body and thick diamond-shaped ganoid scales — Lepisosteus is Greek for "bony scale". It has a long beak-like jaw armed with needle teeth for catching fish and crustaceans, and lives in clear, slow-moving, shallow creeks, rivers and lakes where it lurks around submerged branches and aquatic vegetation, occasionally entering brackish water; like other gars it can gulp air into a primitive gas bladder to survive low-oxygen conditions. Its US range runs from southern Ontario and the Devils River in Texas east to the northern Gulf coast and the lower Apalachicola River in Florida, and it is commonest in the Mississippi River basin from southern Minnesota to Alabama and western Florida. Spotted gar are almost never eaten in the central and northern United States because they carry high mercury levels, but they are readily taken by anglers fishing live or cut bait and lures along the shoreline and in slow backwaters, and no specific fishing season is documented for them.
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