The skin was burned by stomach acid and fell off little by little and the jaw was just a pair of bones with nothing in between them. On my oversight, its head spent some time in a tummy of an apurensis catfish tank mate, the gar was found impossible to swallow and was spit out and the catfish promptly removed, but the gar lost its skin pouch on the lower jaw altogether. They are only ~14"-15" today after 1.5 years.
The 3 common tropical gars have been feeding ok but growing very slowly. They are clumsy, slow, both slow-moving and slow-witted. The tropicals that I got are kind of ill-suited for captive life. This was my first experience with the tropical gars. The tropicals were about 9"-10", the mexican smaller, ~7" and the florida was small, ~4". IIRC, there is also an issue of (man-made or natural or both?) hybridization that complicates this further. Location of capture is said to be the most reliable indicator because their ranges do not overlap that much (?).
The gill to eye distance described in a science article is said to have been proven unreliable in the ID, or so some experienced MFK-ers are saying. On top of being largely unavailable, they appear to be immensely hard to tell from FL gar, especially at smaller sizes. I've never had a real spotted gar and I am still looking.
$200 for 3 tropicals (picked up the mexican one was a freebie) and $40 before shipping for the FL gar. I got 5 gars in Aug-Sept 2015, 4 tropical (three common and one mexican variety, I was told by the vendor) from Primo Aquatics in Orlando, and 1 spotted gar from Shark Aquarium's George Fear that I believe turned out to be, unfortunately, the very common florida gar.
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