Rare black alligator gar caught on a fly designed for redfish

A Texas angler received a major surprise last week when he hooked a rare black alligator gar while casting a fly designed to catch redfish.

“It was very surprising once the fish surfaced to see that it was jet black, which I had never seen in all of the alligator gar I had seen,” Justin Jordan, owner of Lotus Guide Service, told FTW Outdoors.

Jordan and Terrell Maguire were fishing from a skiff in southeast Texas when they spotted a dark figure moving across the marsh. Jordan identified the 5-foot-long fish as a melanistic alligator gar, which went after Maguire’s fly moments after it had landed on the surface.

“We landed it, but I didn’t want to put it in my boat because they stink,” Jordan said of a prehistoric fish species that dates back 100 million years. (Gars are often referred to as “living fossils.”)

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Jordan shared images to Facebook on May 16, showing the gar…