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The 7 cuban gar are about 1ft now, so that's roughly 1"/month growth rate. Continue having an enviable appetite.

Trying to train the fish to feed with moderate tank lights on, so I could see everything better and also film. Until now the feeding had been done with ambient light during the day and weak night light during the night.

Road trip to Predatory Fins, Boca Raton, Florida, USA. Swapping large fish - tropical gar, niger catfish, and oscars - for smaller fish - Lithodoras dorsalis, gulper catfish, black ear shark catfish, Aral barbel, Indo-Pacific tarpon, and Chinese hi fin loaches:

The title speaks for itself.

Great to see you haven't given up.
Let us know if anyone/overseas members can help in some small way.

Thank you. Anyone can help by an advice and a prayer. That's most important. We don't ask for material help, albeit it is welcome too of course, per the detail field under the video.

This is one of those rare occasions when I witness RTC fighting, even rarer to see two different genders involved. It looks like a hierarchical dispute of two fish in the middle of the hierarchy of 4 specimen. The biggest, the alpha female (7 yo, 4 feet), and the youngest, the beta male (3 yo, 3 feet), are not participating.

It appears the alpha male (7 yo, 3 feet) was challenging the beta female (7 yo, 3.5 ft) and got bitten up significantly over the course of a day or so, a slow-moving fight with many bouts. The female suffered damage too but being bigger and stronger gave more than received. For a while the female wasn't even biting the male and his fins, only pushing, poking with pectoral spines, and body slamming but eventually, he got her riled up by biting her pectoral fins and latching onto them so the female started biting the male back, especially latching onto his tail.

Hurts me deeply to see this but I have no way to separate them, no spare, large enough tank. I never film fights because I proceed to separate the fighters right away but here there was nothing I could do. I am also against fight filming but here the only benefit appears to be educational /awareness raising, because many peers keep multiple RTCs together, and the benefit is to show how these magnificent animals, called the emperors of Amazon, interact with each other sometimes in captivity, likely in too small a tank, albeit I am not sure this would have not occurred in a 10x or 100x bigger tank. As most, I am learning a lot as I go.

Amur catfish aka Silurus asotus, 16", minds his business, works in earnest on a piece of herring, is interrupted by a 20", 3-bar Indo Datnoid perch.

The 7 new gulpers have taken quite well to their new home, except for one, which initially was doing seemingly adequate too, for a week or two, but I am not sure if it ever fed in our care. Then it started to excrete a lot more mucus, I suppose, making his appearance milky on the top and sides. Then the excessive mucus slowly subsided leaving just whitish, milky patches here and there on the top, and finally even those disappeared. So I thought the gulper was on the mend. Yet in another week it started behaving lethargic. It is still alive today but seemingly barely, laying on a side in the open, swimming a bit at night. I don't think it will make it. Throughout the ailment, the gulper swam almost always in the open, often in the current, obviously stressed.

The rest 6 have been doing well, as you'll see from the following video. The aboriginal gulper seems to enjoy the sudden familial company. It bears some differences in the skeletal features of the head and jaws to the new guys. I assume that they might come from different regions - one from upper Orinoco and the others from Rio Negro, or vice versa. Just a weak hunch. Or maybe I am seeing gender differences. Not sure yet.

Since the other 6 have been doing so well, I was hoping the sick gulper would come around on his own, so I have not separated it, nor tried to diagnose or treat by shooting in the dark. I've no clue what affected it.