A question about gator gars teeth?

[Wiggles92]

This isn't the greatest picture, but you can see the two different rows of teeth if you look close.



It's a spotted gar (Lepisosteus oculatus) head by the way.

 

[ultimatejay]

Man you guys are sharp today LOL. You caught it.


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[MonsterMinis]

Ryan.. thats gross.... and its pretty cool about their teeth growth. my cuban def has some chompers on him compared to my floridas but they all have good sized teeth compared to the ones i see in lfs ( adults as well as juvies ) Be interesting to know why the captive vs wild difference.. i remember reading a thread sol, and richard discussed this more in depth.

 

[pharmaecopia]

Ryan.. thats gross.... and its pretty cool about their teeth growth. my cuban def has some chompers on him compared to my floridas but they all have good sized teeth compared to the ones i see in lfs ( adults as well as juvies ) Be interesting to know why the captive vs wild difference.. i remember reading a thread sol, and richard discussed this more in depth.

The difference stems from phenotypic plasticity. Here's a quite from Sol explaining this further.

Florida gar for sure...i am yet to see any fish on the South/Southeast Asian sites that i would positively ID as true spotted gars.

another thing to note is that gars in captivity will tend to have shorter snouts than their wild counterparts in many cases. they also tend to have smaller teeth...i think i mentioned to the OP (via the gar quiz thread) to check out "phenotypic plasticity"...anyone else curious should look into it too.

if you think about it logically, it makes sense...if you are being fed all the time and don't truly need to hunt down your food (even dropping a bunch of feeders into a gar tank doesn't compared to truly hunting down food in the wild), you don't need to put resources toward larger teeth, longer jaws, etc etc as the fish develops. this is why we see wild gars with much larger teeth than captive gars of similar age or size.

new gar quiz will be posted soon...hopefully later today--
--solomon

 

[Wiggles92]

Ryan.. thats gross.... and its pretty cool about their teeth growth. my cuban def has some chompers on him compared to my floridas but they all have good sized teeth compared to the ones i see in lfs ( adults as well as juvies ) Be interesting to know why the captive vs wild difference.. i remember reading a thread sol, and richard discussed this more in depth.

Haha, the head is from when I was taking Ichthyology, and Solomon dissected a spotted gar for us.

 

[E_americanus]

Haha, the head is from when I was taking Ichthyology, and Solomon dissected a spotted gar for us.

haha the looks on the students' faces were quite amusing...couldn't tell if it was from the sight of the gar-ssection or the SMELL...or both! i have a bunch more gars in preparation right now...here's a pic of them in the hood titled "Garchemy"