weight?
- Thread starter jpcampbell123
- Start date
http://www.nicholls.edu/bayousphere/Garpage.html
Use weight calculator.. I could do it for you but then that would be too easy.
Use weight calculator.. I could do it for you but then that would be too easy.
Pejelajarto;5065680; said:
Those are very interesting. I will have to see how accurate the weight estimator is when I have to move my gars next.
If that age estimator is based off of wild specimens then captive specimens really seem to grow faster.
pharmaecopia;5065731; said:
won't be that comparable as those were calibrated off wild specimens as far as we know (richard and i both know the people who put that together). wild specimens have very different levels of development in terms of weight due to sex, time of year, environment, population. captive specimens grow up in very different environments and also have more fat content.
pharmaecopia;5065731; said:
again, hard to compare between wild and captive as conditions are highly variable. also, captive specimens in SOME cases may grow faster initially, but max size is also quite less (consider the somatic vs reproductive growth patterns in wild vs captive). furthermore, i am not sure the last time that model was calibrated as it has been on the site for many years now.
in SPGs wild specimens grow faster in a given growing season than captive, but it depends on what conditions we manipulate. same can be done with ALG and likely extrapolates to other gar species.--
--solomon
they are statistical equation, it can use to estimate and only close to the real thing at some range! it said 12 inches gator gar is -1 years old, 1 in= -4 year old, ... so I think the age thing is totally wrong with fish under 5 ft or maybe it is completely wrong!
You said that hobby fish tend to have higher fat levels to them. Is there any difference in muscle development that might also skew weights. My thought behind this is that the relatively small enclosures don't provide as much "exercise" for the fish.
pharmaecopia;5066256; said:
we actually did a very extensive fish "exercise" experiment with lake trout over the first half of this year. some fish were held in high flow active swimming tanks, others were held in low flow minimal swimming tanks. energetically, there was statistically no differences between the two groups. we are still looking at other issues like lipid content, etc. that being said, this experiment suggests to us (and we controlled for quite a bit) that exercise was not really an issue with the fish.
what i would extrapolate to this situation is that it's not exercise that is leading to the fat buildup in captive gars, it's likely the food content itself and the amount of food they are getting. exercise may play a role between wild and captive fishes, but our pretty well-developed experiments did not support this. there are other factors at play. what i do know is that we rarely see fat bodies (or nearly the amount of fat bodies) in wild gars as we see in captive gars.
in general, captive gars are often overfed IMO. i feed pretty minimally with my adults (1x a week, probably bumping up to 2x this summer), and they look healthy and have no problems per se. hopefully we'll be able to further elucidate the details of this issue in the future--
--solomon