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. 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. 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.
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, so hopefully adding that to her shrimp diet will better benefit her.
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.htmlhttp://www.elasmodiver.com/atlantic_stingray.htmhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_stingrayhttp://www.sms.si.edu/irlspec/Dasyat_sabina.htmhttp://www.ecofloridamag.com/archived/stingrays.htm
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Topic: Dasyatis sabina -- Atlantic Rays -- Anyone keep them? (Read 1868 times)