I did not have this find on my bingo card for the year...
...Deep in a cave in Tennessee, thousands of feet underground, as I rounded a bend of the river passage leading a group of biology students and recent graduates in a bioinventory of the cave....I stopped suddenly and definitely swore a little "WTF is that?! GAR!?"
Yes my friends, a friggin' Gar, about four feet long, just swimming in one of the pools.
Not a single person I know of has ever seen this in a cave before. Critters from the surface do get washed in at times, and this cave has connection to surface water. However, the creeks above it are not really Gar habitat, so even us biologists are at a bit of a loss.
Well, not the property manager, who promptly said "wow, he was only this big *mimes a few inches with his fingers* when I put him in there!" (sarcasm, in case you cannot tell!)
So...enjoy a big gar, with a human for scale.
Fun fact: it would follow the light from our headlamps around, like a little kitten following a feather toy, but it declined to follow out of the pool it is comfy in
Boost if this made you smile today!
(ETA: Please don't at me to yell at me about not "saving" it, or ignoring that fish have feelings, or anything along those lines. Floods wash things into caves. Critters explore where maybe they shouldn't. There's a song in the Lion King about it. Sometimes we can rescue things out of caves that belong on the surface, but often we cannot, and for millions of years these accidentals feed the ecosystem, and support many of the other creatures that call this cave home. If you struggle with this concept: Think of it as colonization gone array so the locals win in the end.)
#fish #gar #monster #cave #caves #caving #biology #nature #shock #river #ecosystem #Mesozoic #ancient #history
