Silver needle fish

Common name/s: Silver needle fish, needle-nose gar

Scientific name: Xenentodon cancila

Family: Belonidae

Origin: Common throughout Asia

Maximum size: 12"

Care: Not a fish for the begginer! The fish is timid and easily frightened and will attempt to leap from the tank if startled. Neutral (pH7) moderatlely hard water is preffered and temperatures from 22 to 28 celcius are tolerated. The fish is a out and out predator, tankmates should be equal sized or larger to avoid becoming food. It is a schooling fish and should be kept in groups of 3 or more, the minimum sized tank for a group of these fish would be 75 gallons (48x20x20"). When doing maintainance in the tank be wary of the fishes sharp teeth, they can give a painful bite and inflict nasty wounds.

Feeding: Live foods only, fish, river/ghost shrimp, crickets and tadpoles will all be taken.

Breeding: Breeding is simple as long as suitable male/female pairs are kept, initiate spawning by feeding large ammounts of small live fish and doing large daily water changes. Raising the fry is difficult as they will only take live food and are canabalistic, day old livebearer fry make the best foods.

picture showing the fishes large gape and sharp needle like teeth

picture taken from baensch volume 1

I have 3 of these....and yes...the part about inflicting nasty wounds....is true....freaking thing nearly bit my finger off once. They are wonderful to watch tho. Very good hunters.

Hello, first off i'd like to thank you for posting an actual profile on needlenose fish that has CORRECT info!
There are some things i'd like to include/correct.

Feeding: One of the biggest misconceptions about these fish is that everyone only expects them to eat live foods. Infact, if they are starved or have other needlenoses in the tank eating "dead foods" they will quite readily go after freeze-dried krill, shrimp, etc.
Some foods mentioned to be cautious of: crickets...make sure NO BLACK ONES. They have harder exoskeletons and have certain "juices and acids in them" that the brown ones don't. Tadpoles....not the best food. As a snack ok, but pretty nasty little buggers that don't usually get eaten. I've had mine kill them and almost get disgusted by them and spit them out.

The second is that they are labeled gars, infact, like mentioned, they come from the family belonidae (needlefish). The only reason they are called a gar is the almost extreme likeness between the the familes belonidae and leopistidae (don't feel like looking up the spelling).

Breeding, when you have them spawn once they usually do it quite readily. Here's a pic showing some 'breeding' colors. I enhanced the pic just a tad to really show where the colors show up:

(will add pic in a bit but not enough time to look for it!)

Here's a (bad) pic of mine. It will pretty much only eat live foods. But as it's already been said, you must keep their diets balanced and MAKE SURE YOUR FEEDERS ARE SAFE.