A fish loving goanna. Yum yum.

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Sdaji

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Soon after ovipositing, this goanna was very greatful to get a face full of fish :) (this picture was taken a while ago, yes, the eggs have now hatched and yes, babies are available :) )

The lizard is Varanus gilleni, the fish is a noxious but highly nutritious pest (Gambusia holbrooki)
 
good work feeding it those pesky fish!!! Any probably soooo good for the Liz, all that Omega 3? :D

My friend used to feed his beardy gold fish occasionally, werid weird :)
 
Nice pic Sdaji,

Seen something like that before, only with Chinese Barbs :wink: !

Great little monitors(highly recommended).

Cheers,

Varanus.
 
Awesome,

I actually got some feeder fish at the pet store, gonna see if my little guy likes em tonight..

Is that dude hiding inside a Sheep Spine?
 
She is hiding inside the brain cavity of a large cow skull, poking her head out where the spine attaches.

Lots of things love to eat Gambusia, they're great for turtles, frogs, many types of lizards and some snakes. Cheaper and more nutritious than pinkies :)
 
An introduced fish which has wiped out most populations of small native fish in most standing bodies of water in southern Australia. Virtually any permanent body of standing water in Victoria has them, I'm not exactly sure how far north they go. I find most of them in my freezer, I usually keep a few thousand on hand.
 
Great stuff Arj. Good to know goannas eat them as well. My turts either eat guppies or die of starvation. I bought 13 guppies and now have about 100 in the pond. When I was in Qld I saw a notice that said you can be fined up to $100,000 just for owning them.

Not sure if they are the same actual species as the one in your shot because it looks very big compared to the ones I have.
 
They're very similar to guppies, they have the same shape, they're the same size and apart from the males' tails and the pretty colours, you could easily mistake them for each other. They're reasonably distantly related though, they come from different genera etc etc and Gambusia are far more cold tolerant. Your turtles won't know the difference :)
 
I'm not exactly sure how far north they go.


All the way.
Peter, where grew up we commonly called them guppies.
A agree though, that one in the goannas mouth does look bloody huge!
Biggest i've seen a pregga female would be about 5cm long and maybe 1/2 a gram.
 
Sdaji, awesome pic mate. If possible post full body shots of your gillens, love to see them. After all they are the parents of my little fellas. :D
 
Sorry to take your thread slightly off topic, but those who feed gambusia, do you clean them out (flush toxicants) before feeding? I only ask as when i was about 10 i caught some and tried to keep them as pets, but for a week or two they made the water go an opaque white, which in hindsight was probably due to the sub-standard conditions of the water-way from which they were caught. Im just interested in varying the diets of my lizards some more, and they would be cost effective and nutritious but have concerns about their ability to pass on pollution to my herps.
 
I wouldn't think that toxins in the water the fish came from could do that to a tank of water. Could it be Overfeeding? or a lack of Filtration? If not change the water and I would think they would be fine. I had about a ba-jillion of them as a kid when I caough some and put them in my backyard pond. Fed them to my oscars along with anything else that moved and I caught in the pond (toad tadpoles were a regular on the menu).
 
aren't guppies little fish with colourful tails? At least that's what they are in SA, you can just buy them from petshops, although it would be an expensive feeder food
 
re A fish

Thats a big gambusia sadji,the gambusia around sydney arnt that big unless you grow them up in a pond for a while,the first ones i saw was at canley vale in the 60s.They was in the gutter water cause the roads were not tar,after that the abundant frogs diappeared,great to see you are putting them to good use sadji :D
 
ihaveherps said:
Sorry to take your thread slightly off topic, but those who feed gambusia, do you clean them out (flush toxicants) before feeding? I only ask as when i was about 10 i caught some and tried to keep them as pets, but for a week or two they made the water go an opaque white, which in hindsight was probably due to the sub-standard conditions of the water-way from which they were caught. Im just interested in varying the diets of my lizards some more, and they would be cost effective and nutritious but have concerns about their ability to pass on pollution to my herps.

No, I don't, they're frozen very soon after I catch them. Gambusia won't turn the water opaque, you'll find that if you set up a new aquarium, especially if you're using new gravel, the water can go opaque, even if you don't add fish. This is probably what you experienced. A couple of girls from the lab I'm based in are doing research involving Gambusia, they travel all over the state to get them from as many locations and water qualities as possible, there are often about a dozen aquaria in the lab crammed full of them (several hundred in a 2ft tank etc). The water is always perfectly clear.

Nina: yes, guppies are little fish with colourful tails (well, the males are, sometimes the females are rather drab). Gambusia are not guppies, although some people use this common name for them (here we go again with common names causing confusion). Their most common common names are Gambusia, Mosquito fish (they were originally brought in to control mosquitoes, which has a dismal failure which you'd think a five year old could have predicted), Plague Minnow and Guppy. It's probably best to call them Gambusia.

Incidentally, some people who have obtained Varanus gilleni from me sometimes feed them Guppies (true Guppies, Poecilia reticulata).

The picture seems to be a bit decieving, it's not all that huge a Gambusia, I often get them twice as large. I think it looks larger than it is because on most monitors it's coming up larger than life sized and the image is reasonably sharp. Occassionally you do get a monster Gambusia about four times the size of that one, and for some reason I always get excited about them :p
 
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