Gar Foods
- Thread starter Gmoney231
- Start date
My gars don't get feeders other than the occassional minnow (mostly because friends want to see them hunt). Their regular diet consists of a mix of assorted sinking sticks, raw shell-on frozen (thawed, of course) shrimp, and floating arowana sticks. Gars will also snap up earthworms and crickets. Although, an unfortunate breakout has caused my wife to give the thumbs-down to live crickets anymore.
Oddball;5077814; said:
x2.
You can also feed them small whole frozen fishes and pieces of fish fillet.
You will have to train the gar to accept non-live food, but it should eventually switch over to at least shrimp, whole fish, and fish fillets; getting it to switch to pellets may prove to be more difficult.
First, offer them their regular food (feeders) the same time each day and fed at the same exact spot of the tank (like dropped at the same corner). After a week, drop a minnow then, drop a stick. They should snap at the stick in the same instinctual way they snap at the minnow. They may spit the sticks out initially. Just keep offering the sticks after each minnow and they'll soon equate the sticks as being food. Once they take and swallow the stick, they can be weaned off the live feeders.
Note, the process is much faster if there is already a stick-eater in the tank. Usually, I don't have to train new arrivals. It becomes a competition among the predators to get the sticks first. Looks similar to a monkey-see, monkey-do event.
Note, the process is much faster if there is already a stick-eater in the tank. Usually, I don't have to train new arrivals. It becomes a competition among the predators to get the sticks first. Looks similar to a monkey-see, monkey-do event.
Most people say starve them when they are young but for a foot long gar is already too late to train.
kelman;5078457; said:
definitely not too late to train at this point, please do a search for converting to non-live foods and you will find plenty of information on techniques that work for gars for all sizes past very small stages. there is a lot of useful info related to this topic in the pinned topic section as well, so please check those out. good luck--
--solomon
EDIT: and check out oddball's suggested method above as that is definitely a useful technique--