Baby Cownose ray
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nautical_nathaniel
Indecision may or may not be my problem.
Probably gonna need a huuuugggggeee tank, they need a lot of space to move around in and have fairly specific feeding requirements.
They're pretty big at birth - bigger than most home systems will accommodate - and as Nautical Nathaniel pointed out, they swim a lot, and need plenty of room. They're also capable of growing to several feet across ... how big is your fishtank?
The Public Aquarium where I work on weekends has a group of them in a pool that's roughly 15 x 40 feet, and a couple of feet deep. The cownose are up and swimming most of the day, and collectively eat a couple of pounds of seafood each morning. They're fun rays, but way more than my home 220 display could handle.
~Bruce
The Public Aquarium where I work on weekends has a group of them in a pool that's roughly 15 x 40 feet, and a couple of feet deep. The cownose are up and swimming most of the day, and collectively eat a couple of pounds of seafood each morning. They're fun rays, but way more than my home 220 display could handle.
~Bruce
I have no experience keeping rays. But rays have been a dream fish of mine. Given the tank size and shape required my research led me to the direction of an indoor salt water pond. You can keep form rounded, and cheaper to construct than a full glass aquarium. With the pond you could get away with only one face being glass, as well as hide the plumbing in the construction even less chance of injury as opposed to power heads.
With any fish that size and appetite you will need heavy amounts of mechanical filtration to keep the water pristine. You may also need to have a separate location for your live rock.
Your floor is going to have to be reinforced, my outdoor pond is 4’x4’x7’ and over 800 gallons. Likely will be many times that with the size mentioned by martimer , thats a lot of weight on the floor joists.
Selling this to my other half has not been a success and i was looking at much smaller species [emoji23].
With any fish that size and appetite you will need heavy amounts of mechanical filtration to keep the water pristine. You may also need to have a separate location for your live rock.
Your floor is going to have to be reinforced, my outdoor pond is 4’x4’x7’ and over 800 gallons. Likely will be many times that with the size mentioned by martimer , thats a lot of weight on the floor joists.
Selling this to my other half has not been a success and i was looking at much smaller species [emoji23].
chipmunkofdoom2
Always Making Something
It's because, as ever other poster to this thread has mentioned, they need ludicrous amounts of space. We had a cownose at the National Aquarium recently until she passed away, and she was enormous. Sources on the Internet say that male can grow to three feet wide from wing tip to wing tip, but I think she was bigger.
In addition to being large, they need a lot of swimming room. Some rays, like the ones in our Living Seashore exhibit, don't need to swim much. They burrow and don't move around that often. Cownose rays are the tangs of the ray family. They need a lot of room to swim and they're always moving.
There are plenty of more common rays sold in the hobby that are better suited to captivity. Those are a much better choice than a cownose.
I would expect females to be larger - they are among most elasmobranchs that I'm aware of.
We keep only males, as when we had a mixed-gender group, the lads would chase the ladies 'round the pool, and their fins ripping the water were ruining the floors!
~Bruce
We keep only males, as when we had a mixed-gender group, the lads would chase the ladies 'round the pool, and their fins ripping the water were ruining the floors!
~Bruce
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