CUIDADO CON EL CATAN! ESTA DELICIOSO!

By Juan Montoya
By any measure, the alligator gar is a nasty looking fish.

A throwback to prehistoric times, it more resembles a scaly iron-clad submarine than it does a fish. With a long snout of razor-sharp teeth, it frightens the dickens of anyone that gets close to it.

But any South Texas or North Mexico resident if he’s had gar (catan) chicharrones and you’ll probably get a satisfied "yes."
Most local families eat the meat of the gar as their fathers and grandfathers before them have. The meat is whitish pink. And although it takes some doing to remove the armor-like shell of the dangerous looking fish, the taste of the flesh is rewarding of the effort.
In the rest of the country – along the Gulf Coast and the eastern United States, the fish was hunted mainly for its hard shell. Native Americans made ornaments of the rock-hard, scaly covering.
But locally, it is part of the local cuisine.
"We always considered it a treat when our dad brought home catan chicharrones," said Gonzalo Noriega, a local air-conditioning worker. "Sometimes he would just bring the meat and you could smell the odor as it cooked. They were delicious with fresh corn tortillas and a bit of salsa."
The gar is a predatory fish that is found mostly in the fresh waters of eastern North and Central America. There are no gar on the Pacific Ocean side of the North American continent.
And despite it’s tasty flesh, it’s appearance is enough to keep most anglers at a respectable distance.
"It’s got long jaws lined with sharp, nasty teeth," said Noriega. "Even when it’s out of the water, if it turns and gets a hold of you, it’ll give you a nasty slash."
But it’s other fish that make up the diet of the bony predator. They eat voraciously and have no known preference for either fish with scales or without.
Although most varieties in its known habitat are known to grow to five feet, others can reach astounding sizes. The tropical, or Cuban gar, has been known to reach 12 feet in size. The Cuban gar lives in streams that are tributary to the Gulf of Mexico, leading some local residents to think they may have run into some of that variety.
"I remember when my dad took us to fish for gar in the irrigation resacas around Los Fresnos," remembers Joe Luz of San Pedro. "When the farmers stopped using the water for their crops, there would be deep pools left where fish would be trapped. You could hear hundreds of them slapping the water with their tails as they circled crowded around the pools."
Luz said that the abundance of fish at these isolated pools would lead locals to shun fishing tackle and opt for seine nets, or tarrallas. When the lead weights started sinking the fish would get snared in the netting.
Still others used sharpened steel spears to snag a particularly large fish. But Luz remembers the biggest gar he has seen.
"As we were leaving with a bunch of gar about three feet long, we heard a commotion around one of those big irrigation cement pipes in the fields."
A large gar could not negotiate the elbow of one of these pipes and had become trapped there, Luz said.
"No one wanted to go in there after him because of the teeth," he recalled. "So my dad climbed over the pipe and to the top of it and dropped the tarralla. Other men below used a wire to snag it through the elbow pipe.
"When they pulled the net we found there were two monsters stuck in the middle," he said. "They must have been more than six feet long. My dad got one for climbing the pipe and we took him home. When we were skinning him the machete would give off sparks from the hard shell. It even smelled like smoke. But I tell you what, there was so much meat in that fish the whole of San Pedro had some."