Sawfish, Tarpon, and the Prehistoric Fish That Still Live in Aransas Bay

There is a 17-foot sawfish painted on the side of a barbershop in downtown Rockport. It commemorates a 2,000-pound fish caught in a shrimp trawl in 1927. The last confirmed sawfish in Texas waters was a 5-foot juvenile pulled from a gill net in Aransas Bay in April 1984. The mural is still there. The fish is not. This episode goes deep on the prehistoric, strange, and vanishing fish of the Texas Gulf Coast — the creatures that shaped this coastline and the ones that disappeared from it within living memory. The sawfish is not a shark — it's a ray with an electromagnetic hunting antenna for a nose and 2,000-pound adults that were common in Texas bays within the last century. The tarpon built an entire town: Port Aransas was called "Tarpon, Texas" until 1910, and President Roosevelt signed a tarpon scale at the Port Aransas jetties in 1937 that still hangs on the Tarpon Inn wall. The alligator gar solved being a fish 100 million years ago and has basically not changed since — and in the 1930s, the State of Texas tried to electrocute every last one. Some are gone. Some are still here. And a few of the strangest ones are living on the oyster reefs and pier pilings of Aransas Bay right now, doing things that shouldn't be possible.

Available August 21, 2026