Great read, I have always kept my tanks around 78 until I got into rays. So much mixed info on what you should and shouldn't do. I have always felt cooler water meant hardier fish. I keep my ray tanks around 80-82 so I did give in a little to the warmer water idea. I will have to defend some of us novice ray keepers when our babies do get sick and we over react. We may not know what kind of bacteria has affected our rays, but we do know that it is bacterial. Most people are not set up or have contacts to find out what kind of bacteria is affecting our stock. So we really have no choice but to treat it with something (right or wrong) or sit back and watch our rays get ate up and die. I realize prevention is the best option possible, but things do go wrong and we are limited as to what we can do at home. My marble pups developed disk rot and I am treating with Nitrofurazone at the bottles recommended dosages because I have no other means of helping them. So we come here to asked the veterans who have kept there share of rays and have ponds full of our dream rays. Then we get mixed answers from the veterans which confuses us even more. That is why I loved the KISS thread Nic posted because you can do too much too soon and you can over react and make the situation worse than it already is. This thread goes along with Nic's, keep it simple and don't over react. Replicate there native waters the best we can and let them be happy. The other thing I learned is to slow down on buying and selling rays, even with QT you always run a risk adding and removing rays. Buy the ones you want, acclimate them, then let them be. No one wants to kill a ray, but when you do, learn from it and move on.
