Last week we talked about adding my Pearl Stingray to the Rainbow fish aquarium.
Now, she's supposed to go into the 2000 gallon aquarium eventually, but she's simply too small to go in with the big guys
just yet! But again,
I just feel like it's not fair to her or us to leave her in my house down in the basement in this grow out tank
all by herself while she puts on some size big enough to go into the 2000 gallon.
Now we already removed all of the planted tank soil from the back and all of the other plants, however
I needed to clean up the sand, but that was extremely difficult, so I got most of it,
but it's not perfect. When the Ray gets in here, and she's fluttering all over the sand,
she'll bring it up and it'll get sucked into the sump where I can take care of it there.
However, even then I didn't feel like this was good enough for her.
I wanted to create more space around the woodwork, as well as not only in front of it and behind it,
but underneath it as well. So I did just that. It took me a while to kind of
manipulate things and get it the way I liked it, but I think it turned out quite well.
I've repositioned the wood so it's closer to the center of the aquarium and
kind of rounded it off in the back, so it looks like the woods kind of coming out from a certain spot.
I think again,
it looks good. This might not be the preference of everybody, but I think it looks good,
and you know at the end of the day if you think your tank looks good,
that's all that truly matters. Before we add the Pearl to the tank though,
I think it's advisable that we feed the rainbows simply to distract them from the pearl when she's added,
otherwise they might be just a little bit too curious. Now these guys diet consists pretty much of two things.
They get a generalized flake, just like an all-purpose flake.
This is for some of the smaller ones that can't really handle pellets and then for others,
I'll go ahead and feed them pellets.
I think pellets are definitely a more compressed food and
over time if you're only feeding flakes to fish all the time, they might start displaying some deficiencies.
A lot of the times though, flake food and pellet food has the exact same ingredients.
It's just you need to feed an awful lot of flake food to match what a pellet can offer and a lot of the times
It'll create a mess in your tank,
as opposed to pellets, where it's just one little morsel of food they can bite it
and it's easy to remove. The flakes can soften up,
break apart, turn into a dust, just distribute all over the aquarium.
So as soon as my fish are big enough to accept pellets, and I am feeding them a dry food,
I switch to pellets as soon as I can.
But man these guys are looking
absolutely amazing! A lot of the males are colouring up. It looks like I have more males two females which is good.
However, we still need those females for the males to really have a need to want to color up and display to those females.
With that said, again these guys have such a long ways to go in terms of their color development as well as size,
but overall I'm really happy with this tank.
But I think it's gonna be even more interesting when we add the Pearl,
which we're gonna do right now. So to move this little girl,
I'm gonna take a bucket, put some water in it, just a little amount. I'll scoop her up,
toss her in there and
this will make acclimating her to the new aquarium quite simple.
I'll be able to add water to this slowly, acclimate her to the temperature as well as if there's any
differences in the parameters between this aquarium water and the water outside. I have to say that the water
will be extremely similar, but the other one has had
soil, it's got wood in it,
it's got a few different things, so I'll spend maybe 15 minutes slowly acclimating that to her,
but for now we'll just get her in the net and
put her over. Given that she's so small too, this will be a relatively simple move.
So, given her small size and that even though she's in really great health right now, that doesn't mean she's not sensitive.
She'll be sensitive to changes in water, as well as her environment. Things could stress a Ray out to the point that they
actually die. So when transporting Rays we not only have to respect the fact that they are venomous and can inflict
extremely painful injuries on you.
But they're also such a delicate creature.
You know, it's a balance between beauty and beast with these guys. So what I'm going to be doing with this is...
every couple of minutes, I just take a little bowl of water from the main aquarium and pour it in.
One thing you got to remember about Rays as well though,
is that these guys can jump if they want to. The more water I put in here, the more of a runoff
she has. So, I'll have to be careful with monitoring her and making sure she doesn't get hurt. So if you can when netting Rays,
you'll always want to try to get them to go in head first. You don't want to get their barb stuck in the net.
So, to get her into the actual aquarium to avoid the bombardment of all of these
Pearls or all of these Rainbows, sorry! I'm going to lower to the bottom of the tank and then let her out.
And I think she might try to get out beforehand. There she goes!
So, she looks amazing in this tank. She's almost blending into the substrate, which is pretty cool!
When adding a freshwater ray to an aquarium, especially at first, what you'll want to be looking for is that their disk isn't
curling up. That's called the death curl. That's under extreme stressful situations. Hers is fine. She's doing okay.
The move was stressful, so she is breathing heavy, but overall I have high hopes for her.
But again, when transporting these tiny Rays, you know at times it can be a roll of the dice!
You know, so there's a number of things
I know you guys are probably concerned about. Number one is what about
compatibility issues? Are they going to, are the rainbows going to nip at her, pick at her?
No, she can hide under the sand and go under the wood.
Rays are typically, you know, fine with almost anything that doesn't fit in their mouth and
Anything that's not going to really bite at them. These guys are a top swimming fish to mid water.
They have no interest in the Ray. With that said, what if they do fit in her mouth? Well she can catch them,
she'll eat them! Right now, they don't fit in her mouth.
She wouldn't even be able to hold one down. The Rainbows are probably two and a half to three inches.
And she's only four inches across, so I mean they're the Rays are not built to kind of you know take down eat fish that
big. She might be able to pin one down, maul it to death, maybe kill it, but
there's over 200 rainbows in here.
We wouldn't even notice it happening. With that said, when she does get to size.
and she is starting to munch on them, would certainly move her before it gets too serious.
As for compatibility,
I think they're gonna get along just fine. The tank is now set up for a little Ray like this.
I think it's gonna be a pretty interesting tank and I'm really happy to have her out here.
I think she's gonna do much better out here, with much more attention.
But when it comes to feeding these guys eat two different types of foods. I'm not a fan of that.
I'm not a fan of having aquariums
we have to feed a bunch of different types of food in order to accommodate all the fish in it.
I'm more so of drop one type of food in and everybody eats it. She will munch on the flakes,
maybe the pellets a little bit that these guys have, but she actually prefers a fresh diet of shrimp, tilapia
and scallops. Things like that which is diced up nicely for her and these guys won't be able to eat it.
They might get a little bit of it, but the pieces are just too big for them so in terms of compatibility and diet,
she's gonna be just fine. But then again,
she's only been added into the tank minutes ago.
So, let's give her a few days to a couple of weeks to truly settle into the tank. You know, when you add new fish
to an aquarium, a lot of people panic that their fish
aren't eating or you know they're acting different or they're hiding and they've only been in there for a day or two. You know ,give your
fish time to truly settle into the aquarium,acclimate to their surroundings,
as well as the parameters and don't stress it. As long as the fish is healthy looking and not exhibiting signs of illness or
parasites or any sort of pathogens of that nature, then they're most likely going to be fine.
The water parameters in here though, are top-notch. Water quality is good and
all of the RRainbows are doing well. Rainbow fish are not necessarily a difficult fish to keep but a lot of the tiny fish are
almost like canaries in a mine.
They will be the first ones to go.
And I haven't lost a single one since we set up this aquarium, believe it or not.
I'm excited to see how she's going to contrast with the sand though. I don't know right now, just based on the stress,
she's lightened up a little bit.
She is starting to darken now that she's been in the tank for about 3 or 4 minutes, but
she's going to eventually look stunning and I gotta say right off the bat,
she is prettier than the male Pearl that we have in the 2000, at this size when he was you know a lot smaller.
So she's definitely got a ton of potential
And I'm really excited to see how she develops, especially being in this tank and that one day going into the other,
with the other four Stingrays. If you didn't remember,
we've got three Black Diamond stingrays and a Pearl in that tank as well.
So she'll be number five and I think she'll be welcomed nicely in there.
Anyways guys, I hope you enjoyed today's video.
I'd also like to thank you for watching
and if you are excited to see the
development of this aquarium as much as I am and you're not subscribed to this channel yet, make sure you do
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I make 3 videos a week and in couple days, we'll have a new one for you.