rays with catfish???

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
I had my 18" RTC in the pond with my 7" Motoro. Tell you what, there are a lot of times when my 30" ID Sharks would swim right up to the motoro to try to steal its food away, they were successful half the time, the ray holds it's ground at times. There are times also my 30" Silver Arowana, floats down and curiously swims up to the ray, the ray doesn't flinch and hold its ground.

But whenever the RTC would come near and the ray would feel its whiskers glaze against it, the ray would swim away quickly, not wanting to do anything with the cat.

The RAY knows its real enemies. We should learn from them too.

I've since disposed of the RTC for a pretty 20" Albino ID Shark. That RTC was boring as a driftwood anyway. Hardly ever swimming.
 
The bigger my RTC grows, the more I worry about what he might do the rest of the fish in my tank. He's never eaten live, and lives mostly off pellets, but he's a determined eater. Some times he'll even slide under the rays to steal food out from underneath them. My TSN has also started eating pellets and between the two of them, they can eat most of them up before the rays. I find myself over feeding to get the rays enough food.

The rays don't seem to mind the RTC or the TSN. In fact, they use them as launching pads when they swim. Still, the pond for the catfish, can't be built fast enough.
 
I have both an RTCxTSN and a large ahacara cat in with my motoros. I haven't noticed much competition for food as the cats (especially the achara) just sit around all day and become active at night which is when I load them up on Massivore pellets about 3x per week. The rays like it too because whatever the cats don't eat, they greedily gobble up :)
 
SpeshulEd;3913591; said:
Some times he'll even slide under the rays to steal food out from underneath them. I find myself over feeding to get the rays enough food.

The rays don't seem to mind the RTC or the TSN. .

Well, if you had a big fat burger on your plate and were about to chomp it down and someone sneaks up under the tables and grabs it from you, don't know if that is a situation that you "don't mind".

That is at the very least a stressful situation and environment where the ray starts to feel stress coming over whenever there is food. How big is your ray?

SpeshulEd;3913591; said:
He's never eaten live...

I suggest you do a search of that statement and figure out how many keepers stated that and regretfully realized too late that RTCs are unpredictable in a lot of ways but predictable unanimously in ONE way...they eventually eat everything that fits in their mouth!
 
My rays are 12" and my cats around 15".

But yeah, as I said, I'm starting to get a bit nervous. I have a 210g on the way and I think I might move the rays into that temporarily until the cats get their own pond to move to.

I've already broken ground on the pond, it should be up and running by spring, so that will ease my nerves.
 
do a ripsaw cat, same thing a niger, they are nicknamed the gentle giant. tigrinus are super hard to keep i managed to raise one up to 22" then died.
 
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