Here is my 12" gar

[Sarcosuchus]

First of all I must say..WHAT A BEAUTY you have in there! that's a very beautiful Gar. Actually there is such thing as an active Gar, my Gar is such a swimmer, he likes to do the 'fighting my shadow' thing at every corner of the tank. If not he is either cruising around or floating at the surface, only sometimes he's lying at the bottom.

Speaking of which species of Gar you have, I would lean toward Spotted Gar than a Florida Gar. Is there any chance to take a picture of the top view of your Gar? I really like your Gar, a beauty, love the spots and the entire shape and colouration. Below is a picture of my Gar, taken recently while doing water changing. Florida Gar's snout seems to appear longer than the Spotted Gar's at a young age but this however changes as they grow with the Florida Gar's snout becoming broader..I must say my Gar, which I believe is the Florida Gar's snout has become broad since I brought him home.

I would say that you have a beautiful Spotted Gar. Thank you for sharing!

 

[Sarcosuchus]

Oh wait a minute, I didn't see Polypterus saying you have a Florida Gar. He is an experienced keeper, hmm..I could be wrong of course, from my understanding I gave my opinion. One more thing I forgot to say, you should keep updating us!

 

[Polypterus]

Oh wait a minute, I didn't see Polypterus saying you have a Florida Gar. He is an experienced keeper, hmm..I could be wrong of course, from my understanding I gave my opinion. One more thing I forgot to say, you should keep updating us!

You might be right also.....I'm pretty sure of the fish being a Florida but with these animals you really can only get to about 95% assurance in many cases. Time really always tells the whole story to the best degree of assurance. At a certian point the fish are very obvious.

One regular trend is that Spotteds seem to be disappearing in the hobby and Floridas are very very wide spread. Unless it is caught in the wild 100% of the time those fish labeled "Spotted gars" these days are Florida gars. I really have not seen a true spotted gar for sale for about 3 years now in any LFS nor have I seen any come through any wholesaler. Almost all of the fish available are florida gars as these fish are being commercially produced in good numbers these days.

 

[ethnics]

looks like a spotted gar to me. florida gars look like they have more "green" in them. and don't look as much like a spotted gar as they do a florida gar. wait that almost didn't make sense.

 

[ospy]

WOW! That was heavy! I really didn't understand what you meant till I read it backwards.

 

[cichlid savage]

I don't get the joke.

 

[ospy]

Danny Elfman was the front man of the "Mystic Knights of Oingo Boingo" better known as oingo boingo. They always had sort of a halloween scary theme about them. Not gore, but rather childhood halloween theme . Later Danny Elfman found his success doing music scores for major motion pictures like Batman....well there are tons of movies. In the middle of this success he and tim burton teamed up to work on one of elfmans hobby horse projects again when they did "Nightmare before Christmas". To fans of elfmans earlier rock carreer, this movie was very remeniscent of Oingo Boingo. Anyway, When I look at this gar and see his markings along his jawline. Its almost like painted on teeth that give it that sort of halloween pumpkin apearance. If you look at the picture below (I know they are lousy pictures) you'll notice his upper jaw is light colored with dark markings of painted on teeth, and the lower jaw is dark in color with the light markings of painted on teeth. This marking is so cool on this fish, if I can get someone to shoot a real nice picture of it, I will deffinetly share it. As for the whole Elfman thing, you'd really have to be an old Oingo Boingo fan, you know, dead mans party and all that...... I went ahead and added the picture I was talking about

 

[Polypterus]

looks like a spotted gar to me. florida gars look like they have more "green" in them. and don't look as much like a spotted gar as they do a florida gar. wait that almost didn't make sense.

Coloration differences between spotted and Florida gars is pointless.....They are very similar and highly variable. You can not determine the identification of these fish by coloration. You can use coloration as a jumping point to look in one direction or another, but without other defined traits this is nothing but a secondary characteristic and it says nothing nor has any weight on it's own.