Thank you. Couldn't figure that out. Lol.
Matteus
Thank you for the tag.
I have been following along, I was really pondering about this. Not sure if I have much that would be helpful. I don’t have much personal experience with this issue yet
what I do know is that rays have a hard time digesting their food due to their osmoregularity being off.(ability to convert salt within their bloodstream?) This means that when they poop, often it looks just like whatever they ate. So if you feed them pellets, the stool will be the same colour as the pellets, if you feed prawns and fish as suggested the stool should be a lighter greyish colour.
Some have suggested ingested barb, I have heard of many keepers finding a dead ray that they opened up post mortem to find a barn ingested. But I have not heard of them manually extracting them unless it is protruding the skin. Often barbs do protrude and need to be pulled through, which I have seen done successfully (right through their head) a few times. I hope for the ray, and your sake that their isn’t a barb buried within the ray.
if I were to take a stab in the dark I suspect it could be an internal infection in which case antibiotics would be the cure. I’m not sure what is available to you locally but you will need to act immediately if the back is sunken in and hips are showing.
you will need to get it eating something ASAP or else it may not last long. Try live black worms, night crawlers, live bearers, ghost shrimp etc. Use metal tongs to hold it down if the ray is too weak to hunt on its own. Basically if it doesn’t eat, it won’t live.
hth GL