Woke up this morning and saw my gar face down; yesterday he was fine... today the disease must have gotten hold of him;
As you can see from the picture he had a prolapsed rectum (diagnosed by some fellow MFKers). It kept getting progressively worse when otherwise from previous reports said it would have gone away. One thing that puzzled me, he acted fairly normal, had a hungry appetite, seemed extremely normal. I thought if I kept up my water changes, once every 2 days (35-40%), added salt with the addition of bumped up temp would have been enough. From what I read, Gars are react bad with medicines.
Not entirely sure how this happened, my water condition is great and I used to do twice a week water change (40% -45%); Diet was strictly on frozen tilapia but now Ive switched to frozen raw shrimp.
My other tankmates are: Fire eel (less than 10"), another Florida (about 12"), Delhezi (8"), Senegal (8") and CK (8");
The gar was by far the biggest in the tank (about 11"), so no bullying around.
Note: Not sure, if its relevant or not, but I did for a time feed them raw catfish from WalMart; I stopped after a week once I realized it gets somewhat greezy.
Also, my other gar was having early indications of the same condition, but it went away shortly; I've stopped feeding them everyday, to once every other day; while the gars took food handily (handfed), the others would just wait until the middle of the night to eat the food; in other words, the food would just stay in the water for up to an hour before its eaten. I reckon that it could reduced further the water quality. Lastly, I increased the flowrate for my tank.
Hell of a way to start off your week...
As you can see from the picture he had a prolapsed rectum (diagnosed by some fellow MFKers). It kept getting progressively worse when otherwise from previous reports said it would have gone away. One thing that puzzled me, he acted fairly normal, had a hungry appetite, seemed extremely normal. I thought if I kept up my water changes, once every 2 days (35-40%), added salt with the addition of bumped up temp would have been enough. From what I read, Gars are react bad with medicines.
Not entirely sure how this happened, my water condition is great and I used to do twice a week water change (40% -45%); Diet was strictly on frozen tilapia but now Ive switched to frozen raw shrimp.
My other tankmates are: Fire eel (less than 10"), another Florida (about 12"), Delhezi (8"), Senegal (8") and CK (8");
The gar was by far the biggest in the tank (about 11"), so no bullying around.
Note: Not sure, if its relevant or not, but I did for a time feed them raw catfish from WalMart; I stopped after a week once I realized it gets somewhat greezy.
Also, my other gar was having early indications of the same condition, but it went away shortly; I've stopped feeding them everyday, to once every other day; while the gars took food handily (handfed), the others would just wait until the middle of the night to eat the food; in other words, the food would just stay in the water for up to an hour before its eaten. I reckon that it could reduced further the water quality. Lastly, I increased the flowrate for my tank.
Hell of a way to start off your week...
