I recently bought a humerosa and retic ray for my 220gal. tank. my parameters are perfect as I do a water change every 3 days or so. there is no problem with the estes sand substrate and there is plenty of swimming space. so here is the problem. they will only eat blackworms. they wont eat chopped up troutworms or krill. im not sure that they even ate the bloodworms i threw in. however, my motoro (who is being sold in a year) is thriving. is there a trick to getting a ray to eat krill or other foods? i dont want to use the starve technique because they weren't cheap, but if that's what works that's what i'll do. i even bought this feeding stick to "hand-feed" them. i put a search in for this but didnt find any direct answers. sorry if this is a F.A.Q.
expensive problem
- Thread starter downset21
- Start date
try shrimp... mine love shrimp and they were exclusively fed blackworms by the guy I got them from
how big r they? if they are big enough try night crawlers (earthworms) when i got my 2 retics they only ate blackworms, then once i thought they could eat chopped up earthworms they were on it like hotcakes! right now my female will eat shrimp and earthworms but my male only eats earthworms, so try earthworms. also maybe the motoro is picking or being to active and stressing them out, look for that. i recently had to return a motoro because he was way to active for my lazy retics!
Ghost shrimps are pretty good as feeders! Most like to pounce on them its pretty funny to watch actually. Try them or go the starve route if they are fat enough. As long as they are nice and healthy plump then they should be able to handle a few days with out food. But I wouldn't push too long.
they humerosa is bigger than the motoro, and the retic is a runt. they seem too skinny to try to starve, i'll try the cut up worms again. i did it the past 2 days with no success and had to take the cut worms out.
my motoro was a juvenile/baby but he still pushed his weight around and my retics only ate enough to get by! maybe 1 worm every other day, btw my male retic is 8-9" and my female 10". so they were monsters compared to the 4" motoro! keep trying the food and maybe seperate the motoro to see if that helps, also seperating the motoro will help you better gauge the food intake of the other 2. if i could nail it and as you say your water is perfect ph, ammon, nitrate, nitrite, i bet its the motoro! the reason they grow so fast is they are aggressive feeders! i dont know about humerosas, but retics are not
davo;576319; said:
an epiphany, i was thinking this last night and thought it wouldnt work, im giving this a try right now.
hmm, maybe it's time to sell the motoro now then, the idea was to grow it up and sell it if i didnt have my ray pond running by the summer. i wanted to build my own to try my hand at breeding and wanted to start with motoros.