my bad, didn't realize that the head is really big! I've seen gars around 5.5'-6' long, that head is about the same size of a 5-6' gar head!
New Project: Castle Gar-Skull...
- Thread starter E_americanus
- Start date
-haha great comments/discussion so far all. yes, the HEAD itself is ~14" long, the fish was likely around 5.5-6.5' long...will have to check if we have specific records on that specimen. for those of you who have only seen the photo in the OP, i have the series of photos from "Phase 2" HERE.
here is one of the shots from Phase 2:
here is one of the shots from Phase 2:
I hand feed my gar all the time, tilapia filet is the easiest thing to feed because you can cut it into long pieces which you can avoid getting bite!
Lay the head outside for a few days on an ant pile covered with bricks or something to keep animals from dragging it off. The ants will clean out the muscle but leave the connective tissue. It wouldn't hurt to take a good knife and cut out large chunks of meat, then take a wire and scramble out the brains. Once the ants eat it and everything else dries, scrub and wash the head then let it fully dry again. Then seal the neural arch with hot glue and dip it or do a bunch of heavy brushings of polyurethane to fully seal and protect it. I kept the skull to my first decent sized needle nose gar that way. It lasted a long time outside until some neighborhood kids with sticky fingers carried it off.
-hi all, sorry for the long hiatus, research and teaching have really taken up all my time for the past several weeks! i finished this project about a month or so ago (or at least the main phases); will post the updates very soon. i haven't done anything terribly fancy with it yet, but i have preserved it like we usually dry preserve our gar specimens. already used it in the first day of lecture/lab for my biofishes class (students got a kick out of it)!--
--solomon
--solomon
