Had a slight crisis ray stabbed in eye..

Came home after a few days away on business. Went into the ray room and found my adult male henlei with my female's stinger stuck in his eye and his pectoral fins and tail forced straight out backwards and upwards. I thought he was dead as he looked stiff. Luckily he was stabbed literally just over the eye ball in the eye socket but none the less he did incur damage to the eye ball. I think he was attempting to breed her, and her already loose stinger caught him just right. Anyhow i caught him and yanked it out. Turned up the flow on the water changes and dosed with melafix and salted. He looks to be making a promising recovery now 3 nights later. When i was going through this i remembered some other ray keepers in the past having bad injuries and how they responded as for treatment so i did the same. Luckily i remembered all this as MFK website was down!!! I didn't get pictured of the stinger still in the eye as my main priority was catch him and pull out the stinger.
You can see where the stinger went in. It entered about 1/4" or maybe even a bit more.









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Ya scared me. He was in so much pain that i wasn't sure if he was going to come out of it. I am counting my lucky stars.


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Hey Jim
He is actually doing exceptionally well. His eye is still somewhat sunken down but I know he hasn't lost his sight as he came over to see me the other day and only that eye was in a position to see me. So that's great. The day after I removed the spike it looked like the eye ball may fall off but healed up well. I feel very lucky.


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Terrible fishdog. Its hard to know exactly what the best way to remove it is. If its comes out the other side its best to follow through with pushing it through the rest of the way but when its entered partially it doesn't leave you much choice but to yank it out backwards. Its just really painful tearing the flesh of the fish and creates a lot of bleeding.


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