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Are Mississippi River restoration efforts working? Scientists say this fish could hold the answer. 19%
By Alex Lubben37%
8/3/2026, 7:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 22 faulty reasoning types, including Confirmation Bias, Representativeness Heuristic, and Hasty Generalization, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 13.8% saturation with 89 hits. Analysis detected 817 faulty-reasoning hits from 647 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 28% and a BS Rank of 19% (22,166 of 27,227 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 81.40% of the article peer group.
LOCH LEVEN, Miss. — A cast net spread out like a spiderweb over murky waters, hung for a moment and dropped.
Charles Vaughan hauled it in and found what he’d traveled 1,000 miles for: a baby fish.
The alligator gar was already more than a foot long at about two months old, armored in hard scales with a pointed snout full of sharp teeth.
The species can live for a century and grow to more than seven feet long.
“They’ve got super fast growth rates,” said Solomon David, a professor of aquatic ecology at the University of New Orleans who calls himself “the gar guy.”
Under the right conditions, these fish can grow to over two feet long within a year.
“The right conditions are basically like here,” David said.
But the ring levee would be overtopped when the river rose too high, inundating the entire property all at once, filling it like a bathtub.
Those floods happened sporadically throughout the 20th century, once every few decades.
Then, they started happening back-to-back — in 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2019.
“Several hundred-year floods in a row,” said Will Prevost, a director of freshwater programs with the Nature Conservancy.
“They’d have to cut the levees — or they blew out — every time.”
And every time the levees were overtopped, the farmland would be ruined.
Animals on the property — deer, raccoons — would drown.
So the landowners reached out to the Nature Conservancy.
They designed a simple structure, a box culvert with a valve that can be opened and closed.
“It allows the water on the interior of the property to rise and fall with the flood pulse of the Mississippi River,” Prevost said, keeping the river from busting through the levees.
“It also acts more like a natural floodplain, like it’s supposed to.”
“Projects like this are becoming increasingly necessary, I think, on a global scale,” said Joshuah Perkin, a professor of ecology and conservation biology at Texas A&M who was not involved with the project.
“When levees are put in place, the connection from the river to the floodplain is severed.
This is a pattern that's happening everywhere.”
Now, David is here looking for gars, to find out whether the floodplain is providing habitat for spawning fish.
Alligator gars need flooded vegetation to spawn — exactly the type of landscape that Loch Leven provides.
“If we find baby gars on the floodplain, it’s a good indication that the floodplain is serving its use as far as supporting aquatic wildlife,” David said.
They’ll age their gar specimens using their otoliths, a type of ear bone made of calcium carbonate crystal.
Humans have them too; when ours slip out of alignment, we get vertigo.
A specialized saw cuts that crystalline bone into thin slices, and the cross sections show rings, like a tree’s, that can be counted under a microscope to estimate the fish’s age.
“Although people at one point considered gars to be ‘trash fish,’ including alligator gars, they can serve as good indicators of aquatic ecosystem health,” David said.
“And it’s not just gars that we see here.
We see crappie, we see bass, we see sunfish — all kinds of other fish.
We’re just using gars as a representative group.”
And though they’re looking specifically for alligator gar, David said that’s because they function as an “indicator species.”
If the gars are doing well, that’s a sign that the ecosystem is healthy.
And because they migrate between the river and the floodplain, they can give scientists a fuller picture of the health of the broader riverine ecosystem.
“It would be great to see projects connecting the floodplain to the river throughout the Mississippi River, and even on other rivers,” he said.
“We can show folks up north the value of floodplains.”
Speakers
3speakers55%attributed speech288writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageJoshuah Perkin
56 attributed words16% of attributed speech49% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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