skynoch

My female marble gave birth last night to 2 pups but unfortunately only one was alive this morning. I'm very curious to how this will turn out with the father being a pearl ray.

Allright this is the only time you'll hear me say this. Your's is bigger than mine. Nice looking rays Tim. That male is turning quick. Can't wait to see what they will look like when they turn bewteen the more black and less black ones.

looks really good. Nice job with the tank and the thread on building it.

Good job can't wait to see what you'll do with the 25g

Those eruption leopards are amazing. Great looking discus and tank.

Stunning !!

lol sorry for getting you into more work. You've done a great job for your first tank.

Rays usually don't mature until there 2 years old. With a 6-7" disk I would guess it to be 1/2 to 1 year old. You could house the rays in your tank somewhere between 1-2 years. A motoro can also reach the 27" plus disc size but is not that common in home aquariums.

Wow sorry to hear about this. Glad it was caught in time to save some of your tank. What type of check valve were you using for two to fail?

Motoros can get fairly large but I would put them in the middle for size. You have your ceja and china rays as some of the biggest for home aquaria then castexi,tiger and flowers, followed by motoros,pearls,leo,henlie,p14,xingu sp and a bunch of other not as common rays then in what you would call small rays is te rectics,hystrix and scobina. Thses will stay below the 18" mark but still require large tanks due to how much urea they produce causing loads of ammonia.

I was hoping you would chime in Kyle. I wasn't to sure of my answer after I thought about the plywood and how well it insulated.

It will work with alot less than 1500. 900 watts should be more than enough unless your tank is in a well airconditioned spot. If you go with a drip system you don't even need a an electrical heater if you have a hot water tank and mix your drip water with hot and cold.

I have one marineland 300 heating my 300 gal right and run a second 300 in the winter. My tank is at 81 and can up to 85 right now. Mind you this is an acrylic tank with no sump and 2fluval fx5's, a koriela 8 and 2 ehiem pro 2028's. So it is well insulated and has some heat from filters too. Maybe your heater is faulty mine stays on longer than that.

If your only keeping male motoros chances are this tank will work for life. If you want females then you may run into problems in the future if your ray grows to max size. I would have to agree with RTG that 4' wide would assure a lifetime even for a large female. 3' wide would probably work. I'd also go with a 30" depth.

The aqualog book says 50cm but that is way off. I would have to say around 3' across the disk. They are very similar to tiger rays. Just to give you an idea of the size here is some adult tiger rays. http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/s...highlight=tiger

They're very similar to my tigers then. My males are proably 17" now and the claspers are growing, but slow and steady unlike motoros,pearls, ect which seemed to grow from nothing to fully rolled in a month. I'm not sure about your flowers being half the weight of your motoros they look in amazing shape.

Looking great Kyle. I cant believe you allready have the new ones eating shrimp! How big is the claspers on your original male?

Looking fantastic.

Ya there is something wrong with your water. Check your parameters. Do a 50% waterchange and add some airstones for now. Also maybe keep the tank covered for a day or two. These are questions I'll allways ask if there are problems. What is the tank size? How many rays and what size? What is your water change schedule and how much? What is your water temp? What do you have for tankmates? What are your parameters? ammonia,nitrite,nitrate What are you using for filtering and airation? Did this happen after a waterchange? Anything new added to the tank? Do you use aged water or municipal water and what water conditioner? Sorry if some of these seem basic but it all helps

I think this is the first time I've seen your pics. ....amazing, really makes me think I need to get some skills. I try to capture my rays for other people to see how incredible they are but it's just a dull lifeless pic. You could take a picture of a rock and I'd want it in my tank.

I've got a silver aro and some large bichers (Endli and ornate) :thumbs: in with my rays as well as a clown knife. I would love to try some bichers but my tank bottoms are carpeted with rays. How big are yor rays and bichers? I also have a clown with mine. My small rays are kept with discus. My favourite tankmate I think so far are fronts. There is a huge list of possible tank mates but it's up to the individual ray and tank size to see if it'll work.

Jardini I heard may be to aggresive with rays. All others are okay but make sure there as big as the ray is wide. You may be taking a chance with a big ray and small aro. I'm keeping needlenose gar with 18"+ rays and no problems yet. When your rays are well fed they tend to leave tank mates alone more. There is the odd ray that just likes to kill so anytime you add a tankmate just watch carefully for awhile. Also as Dustin said the silver may get to big for your tank. I'm not sure but Mike may have a Jardini with his rays so he could answer this better than me.

I think this is a great build and will look great when it's done. The only thing I wonder about also is the glass. With all the time and effort put into this if your budget could be expanded to make the glass starphire. I'd hate to see you regret not doing it a couple months down the road. I'm kinda in the same boat with my acrylic for my tank. I can go with an 8' x 4' window for $700 but I'm holding out to try and find a 10' x 4' window which will be about 2000+. But it would piss me off down the road being that 2' short so I'll wait till I can find one.

If your goal is just to breed then they all will breed in a home aquaria. If you are going for profit then the rectic is very cheap to buy so it wouldn't be profitable. Scobina are very hard to find and are on Brazils banned list so you would be able to charge more. Hystrix are coming in cheaper right now also but may only be available off and on due to quotas in Brazil so price could vary. And again not sure what kind of ray the laticeps would be. All are comparable at adult size. If you can find a red rectic they are suppose to be a smaller rectic. If any of these rays are captive bred they will be much easier to look after. Rays coming in from Brazil seem to be coming in with a bacteria problem with alot of them and wildcaughts also are sometimes hard to get eating. Personal preference is allways the most important.

P. laticeps is another one of those names that rays come in and can be a bunch of different rays. They can be a Hystrix ray which seems to be what they are coming in around here latey (this is not the true Hystrix but what is comonly called a hystrix in our hobby). Rectics and peru motoros are also commonly called P.laticeps. The term teacup is more often reffered to a rays size. It kinda makes it hard to know what your buying when you get one of these rays so if anyone needs help just post up a clear shot of the ray and it's tail.