Spotted gars
- Thread starter bobtan
- Start date
Your odds of getting a true spotted gar without knowing exactly where it was collected are about as close to zero as you can get, so I say Florida gar. Locality pretty much means everything when it comes to telling the two species apart since there really is no way to tell the two species apart externally without having a ton of experience with many specimens of both species. Solomon (E_americanus) and Richard (Pejelajarto) are your best bets for getting a 100% guaranteed ID since they have the most experience with spotted gars on here, and I can guarantee that they'll give a similar answer.
If there is virtually no way to tell the difference, why would anyone really care? I have some Spotted Gar, and I am a billion percent certain they are spotted gar. Until I got on this website I never realized that it was a big deal. Are my spotted gar worth a lot of money? I can understand why Spats are worth a lot, but why Spotted? I never even thought about selling mine until I ran across all this business about most Spots actually being Florida's. what is so wrong with FLG's?
Well for one thing, they're completely different species. One reason that it's such a big deal is that some people want to own all seven species of gar and want to be 100% sure that they have all seven species rather than just six species. As I previously eluded to, Florida gars account for 99.99% of the Florida gars, "Florida spotted gars," and "spotted gars" in the aquarium trade which is why some of us get excited when we manage to obtain a gar that we are 100% certain is a spotted gar rather than the much more common Florida gar (common in the trade, that is). As for your gars, were they caught near you or where they purchased from an LFS? It's quite simple to determine the ID of the gar just from the locality, so it does matter in the end.
As for alligator gars, they're not really terribly valuable considering that they're usually no more than $60 when offered for sale at a small size. Their value is especially trivial in comparison to that of the rarer gar species in the hobby e.g. the Cuban gar and the tropical gar.
I'm sure that he caught the gar in Texas, so it is a high chance of it being a spotted!
Thanks for the detailed answer. I am just getting into gars and I was curious as to why people were so excited about something that to me seems trivial. I used to have lots of snakes, and people in that trade were the same way. Oh man, don't try to pass off a 75/25 mix Texas/Mexican West Coast Indigo as full blood Texas Indigo, not that I did, I never sold my snakes, but people will get crazy over that stuff.
I am not going to incriminate myself, but locality and population isolation could be one way I know for certain mine are spotted. I didn't buy them at a pet store or from a guy on Craigs. What is an LFS, I keep seeing that mentioned, is that like PetCo?