My Strange Gar :)
- Thread starter TLkmDN
- Start date
yeh my gars r growing like crazy in the hikari food stick pellets (for arowanas or other carnivorous fish). it has alrighty caught up to my other catfish in the tank.
WAT! 
thats impossible though. a healthy fish wud never ever die of starvation..im pretty sure it was either sick or really really young...just a tip for the next guy - never start starving ure fish until they reach a healthy, stable size (ie. over a foot long at least)
thats impossible though. a healthy fish wud never ever die of starvation..im pretty sure it was either sick or really really young...just a tip for the next guy - never start starving ure fish until they reach a healthy, stable size (ie. over a foot long at least)my clown knife went three weeks without eating, he was 12" and would not accept anything but krill and goldfish, so definitely need to start young! he didn't die, though we eventually gave in but he jumped just a few days ago.
TLkmDN;1418792; said:WAT!
this may be a conservative rule of thumb for beginners with gars, but given their durability, i'd say it's perfectly fine to fast a gar well below the 12" size.
as long as they aren't really tiny YOY, they should be fine. say 5-6" is a stable size to start...i've done this plenty of times and never lost a gar to starvation. i'd imagine there were likely other factors at work with the fish that supposedly starved to death--
--solomon
yeh ive noticed that my gars r not fussy at all compared to other fish such as my S.A. silver arowana...my arow only eats hikari food sticks and spits out all other pellets whereas my gars eat absolutely any pellets.
TLkmDN;1433208; said:
That's great that your gar is doing well on pellets. I was reading through the whole thread and I couldn't agree more with the concensus that pellets are better for the animal anyway.
I'm pretty much in the same situation you're in...a gar that will eat ANYTHING that hits the surface of the water and a silver aro that will only eat Hikari pellets. I actually had an older gar that would just refuse to eat anything other than live and I ended up losing him from a bad batch of feeders...and I kick myself about it to this day.
E_americanus;1418937; said:
I have to agree with 5-6" to start taking off live foods. My gar was from a LFS and I'm 100% positive they fed just feeders. When I picked him up, I had 2 VATF'S eating shrimp. The first 24hrs I did not feed my Spotted Gar, but the next day I threw in some Market Shrimp pcs and he ate it off the bat!
That was the only thing he ate for a while. After several attempts on crickets and earthworms, I finally got him on them
I just had to let him get used to them before he tried them
