Dasyatis sabina -- Atlantic Rays -- Anyone keep them?

[ewurm]

I added a Marineland C-530 canister filter and created a steady current by placing the intake on one end of the tank and the output on the opposite end. I also replaced the bio-ball level with 2" of ammonia chips (turned MacGuyver for a minute and used non-bleached coffee filters to cover the bottom so it wouldn't fall through the slats to the level below it). Flow is perfect and it did wonders for the nitrite levels and the last remaining cloudyness from the sand! The top level of the canister still has the ceramic bio-media and my other two filters on the back of the tank have inserts over the outflow to grow pos. bacteria, so that's still all covered. So, now total filtration is at 1530gph on a 125g tank. This should keep her happy and cut my water changes down to 75% once per week or 50% 2 times per week. She seems to be happier with the increased water flow, I catch her cruising and sticking her "face" in the stream from the output. I skipped a day of feeding and tried scallops again to see if she would take them if she was hungry enough, and she shredded them & made a mess, but didn't eat them. Talk about playing with your food! LOL! She did like the redworms though so now she's on those + shrimp. Would she be able to appropriately live on that or does she need more variation still? I kept some worms to start raising my own so I have control over what the worms eat, thus what nutrients they would pass to her.

I never thought a fish would be more work or more expensive than my German Shepherd, but she's seriously worth every dollar and every minute spent. I made my dad jealous (Mr. I've-Been-Keeping-Fish-For-20-Years).

I'd try to vary the diet more if you can. Soak the shrimp in Zoecon to add nutrients and bulk. Glad to hear you are starting a worm farm. Use very dry dirt and feed them green vegetables. Do not put any potatoes in the worm farm, you'll have a potato farm as I learned.

 

[PinkLady]

Thanks for the tip! Although I love potatoes, so maybe that should be another project. LOL! The ocean perch was a no-go, she snubbed it. I tried it a second time a day later after letting it sit in the baggie with the thawed shrimp overnight (I defrost and chop shrimp every 72 hours and store it in the fridge until feeding times)...nope, didn't like that either. She snubbed the redworms now too. Maybe I just spoiled her by giving her shrimp right off the bat??? One of the websites I was reading last night said 50% of the diet for these rays is snails found in the riverbed, so is there any kind of moderately-sized snail I can buy that she might eat? If she likes them, then it wouldn't matter if they bred in the tank because she would just eat them. I also offered her some guppies from my colony (I line breed guppies for certain colors, patterns, etc. and sell them to pet stores and online -- I know, I'm lame), and she inhaled them. So she does like fish, just has to be living I think. Are there any feeder fish that would work for her that would be better than goldfish/guppies? Or are guppies not so bad? It would put a use to the deformed babies that pop out in random litters or the males I cull whose tails get too big and bow their spines (I'm trying to breed that out of the bloodline).

I ordered that Mazuri shark/ray diet, should be here this coming week. I bought the powder that you mix with water to form a gel. Do you guys just drop it in there as blobs of gel and they eat it, or do you inject it into other food items?

One of these days I have to get a video of her eating, it's so cool when she shakes her head to shred it like a shark does.

I thought I'd add this for anyone else looking to get into keeping D. sabina -- these are the best info sites I've found on them thus far:

http://zipcodezoo.com/Animals/D/Dasyatis_sabina/ -- only error I found in this one is that the Family paragraph states that these animals are not used in the Aquarium trade...which is obviously false considering how many people have them and how many I've been seeing in breeder collections and pet stores.

http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~pmpie/dsabina.html

http://www.elasmodiver.com/atlantic_stingray.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_stingray

http://www.sms.si.edu/irlspec/Dasyat_sabina.htm

http://www.ecofloridamag.com/archived/stingrays.htm

 

[Nic]

I'd try to vary the diet more if you can. Soak the shrimp in Zoecon to add nutrients and bulk. Glad to hear you are starting a worm farm. Use very dry dirt and feed them green vegetables. Do not put any potatoes in the worm farm, you'll have a potato farm as I learned.

if your going to soak shrimps etc... you should use freeze dried as they will absorb more nutrients...

 

[Deaths Sting]

My experience with Motoros so far has been the opposite. I haven't had any problem with activity level and it definitely isn't shy.

+1

same here

 

[PinkLady]

So I tried something new today, Hikari freeze dried krill. Macy went nuts for them, she was so excited and sucked them down like popcorn. I grabbed a couple that didn't want to sink and offered them in my hand, and I still swear that is the neatest feeling -- she's so soft and gentle. She seems to know that my hand being in the water usually means I have food for her, and she comes over right away and uses her pointed nose to investigate and see what I have, then moves her mouth over it and takes it. She's such a laid back fish. I also brought home a couple more goldfish from my parents' pond and she massacred them, it was kind of funny. 12 quarter-sized goldfish toast within 15 minutes. I bought Hikari's sinking carnivore pellets too but she's not digging those, ended up scooping them back out. That brand also makes freeze dried bloodworm cubes, freeze dried brine shrimp cubes, and then something similar that is a freeze dried cube of combined things, plus frozen versions of those as well as squid, fish, etc. -- would any of these be readily eaten or be good for her? Her diet seems to be very different than what S. American rays prefer so I'm trying to vary it up more.

Also, we had a pretty rough thunderstorm the other day and she got VERY upset -- I think she could sense the barometric pressure change and the electricity in the air from the lightning. She was splashing everywhere and knocking the glass lids open by running herself out of the water into the tops. I stayed up all night making sure she didn't actually jump out.

 

[ewurm]

if your going to soak shrimps etc... you should use freeze dried as they will absorb more nutrients...

Or inject them

 

[PinkLady]

Apparently these guys do major color changes! Last night I took a couple pics of her, then changed out her water and decided to up the temp from 78 to 82 to encourage her eating the new foods, and when I woke up today, she was 10 shades lighter and irredescent like her underbelly! Apparently when they're warmer, they turn a lighter color. Pretty neat!

Before (the white stuff is silt from the sand, it sticks to her slime coat all the time):

After:

And she has more space in the tank than it looks, the refraction is awful. I have to take pics at a downward angle otherwise the flash bounces off the glass and ruins the pic. I hope she keeps this light color, it's pretty!

 

[PinkLady]

Hey hey, figured it was time for an update. I switched out that awful sand to a very fine black gravel (CaribSea Super Naturals) and she seems to really like it. It doesn't stick to her like the other stuff and doesn't get kicked up and clog my filters. I liked the white substrate better than the black because it makes it seem darker in the tank, but oh well.

She's still doing really great, eating well on her favorite raw shrimps stuffed with carnivore pellets and chasing down feeder goldfish. I still can't get her to eat anything else, she flat out refuses, even if I offer it by hand. I'm still keeping the water brackish with the 3 filters and weekly water changes and she's pretty happy. She's grown a LOT since I brought her home, which I would assume means she's doing well. Picked out a new tank that I'm hoping to get when I move into my new house within the next month, it's 5'x5' square, which provides a ton of open floor space for her. It's a really cool setup -- with stand & hood it runs $1900. She should be approaching adult size within the next 4 inches, so it should work well for her. I definitely still don't regret my decision to get a Sabina, I see the new motoros, teacups, and leopards that come through the store and I still think I made the right choice, I adore her. She seems easier to care for than people seemed to think she would be -- it's almost effortless as long I do the water change every Saturday. I do spray off the filter cartridges every other weekend and clean the canister levels every month, just because with feeding her raw seafood and feeder fish it can get pretty funky. But that stuff doesn't take very long to do at all and I usually make a day of cleaning all my pets' gear anyway (tanks, litter boxes, cages, etc). All in all she's a really hardy fish and nothing seems to ever stress her aside from thunderstorms. I did find out that she seems to enjoy having her nose pet -- if I rub the underside of the tip of her snout, she flares it up to reach better and pushes into it, and she will seriously just sit there as long as I'm willing to do it. Maybe with the sensors and stuff that she has there, it's relaxing or something. Oh, and I discovered a very odd tank mate that seems to do well with her -- GloFish! I used to have a few of them in my guppy tank for my daughter and as one of my cats slowly caught them all, I ended up with only one red one left. I decided to take it out so the guppies could have the whole tank, and put it in with Macy thinking she'd eat it. Well apparently, she either doesn't want to eat him or GloFish are too fast for her to catch, and he's been living in there just fine for weeks now, brackish water & all! He eats pieces of her food that she leaves behind, so kind of a cleanup crew. What a weird buddy!

Everyone always asks me how big she is, so I got creative during the last water change on Saturday and put a dinner plate in the tank and let her rest on it for comparison. So she's 10" across, maybe 10 1/2 since her "wing" tips kind of went over the edge a bit. She thought this was pretty interesting, she turned all the way around in circles to investigate the smooth surface. LOL! I also snapped a decent overhead shot when the water level got low enough so that you can see her overall shape and structure.

 

[Gshock]

Your ray looks REALLY skinny, i think i can see hip bones.

 

[PinkLady]

Every Sabina I've ever seen has their ribs showing, it's just part of how they're designed and they show up easier because they're light and uniform in color with thin skin. When she's up by the light, you can see completely through most of her. They're not perfectly round rays, their discs are more like wings on a body. She eats plenty, 2 jumbo shrimp 3x daily stuffed with carnivore pellets + 2-4 goldfish per day (she eats these at her leisure). She has little fins at the base of her tail over her large pelvic fins, maybe that's what you're seeing?