Head to head
Gar vs Pike
In the weedy shallows of a warm North American lake you might find a gar and a pike within a few metres of each other, both long, both toothy, both lying still. They are not related, and their differences run deep, one is ancient, the other modern.
| Gar | Pike | |
|---|---|---|
| Lineage | Ancient (100+ million years, living fossil) | Modern bony fish |
| Scales | Hard enamel-coated ganoid armour | Ordinary overlapping scales |
| Breathes air | Yes; swim bladder works as a lung | No |
| Snout | Long thin beak with needle teeth | Broad duck-bill with fangs and backward teeth |
| Family | Lepisosteidae | Esocidae |
| Range | North and Central America, Cuba | Cool Northern Hemisphere, worldwide |
| Largest | Alligator gar, ~3 m, 130+ kg | Muskellunge, ~1.8 m |
| Eggs | Toxic to eat | Not toxic |
Gar vs Pike: common questions
Are gar and pike related?
No. They look alike because both are long-bodied ambush predators of fresh water, but they are on very different branches of the fish family tree. Gars belong to an ancient group of ray-finned fishes that also includes the bowfin, a lineage that split off before the huge radiation of modern bony fishes. Pike are modern bony fish, in a group near the salmon and their relatives. Their resemblance, a stretched cylindrical body and a toothy snout, is convergent evolution driven by the shared job of lurking in weeds and exploding onto passing fish, and neither is the ancestor of the other.
How can you tell a gar from a pike?
Several features are distinctive. A gar's snout is long, thin, and beak-like, often as long as the rest of the head, and lined with many small needle teeth, while a pike's snout is broader and flatter, like a duck's bill, with a few large front fangs. A gar's body feels hard and rough, plated with diamond-shaped armour, and a gar will often be seen rolling at the surface to gulp air, which a pike never does. A pike has soft, smooth scales and a body marked with light bean-shaped spots or bars. In North America the two overlap in the south and lower Midwest; further north, a long toothy fish is almost always a pike.
Which is better to eat, gar or pike?
Pike is the easier and more popular table fish, with firm, mild, flaky white flesh, though it is bony, carrying a row of fine Y-shaped intramuscular bones that need careful filleting or scoring. Gar is also edible and is eaten in parts of the American South and Mexico, where the firm meat is used in balls, fried, or in tacos, but preparing one is hard work because the armour of ganoid scales cannot be cut with an ordinary knife and is removed with tin snips or a saw, and the eggs are toxic and must never be eaten. Overall, pike is the more practical catch for the kitchen, and gar is more of a specialty.