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Fishes - Feeding Your Pet Stingray
Feeding Your Pet Stingray - The Essentials
of Maintaining a Varied Diet
by Brendon Turner
 Stingrays
will eat a wide variety of foods. Maintaining a varied
diet is extremely important in captive animals, as monocultural
diets incur a risk of nutritional deficiencies. Stingrays
are very active, and should be fed at least once a day,
preferably twice or even three times daily. The daily
diet can be varied in order to create some environmental
enrichment as well as balanced nutrition for the rays.
First Foods
First foods for newly acquired rays should be blackworms
or tubifex worms. These foods seem to be the most readily
accepted, and are small enough to be inadvertently ingested
either by mouth or through the spiracle, thereby giving
the ray an opportunity to taste these possibly unfamiliar
foods by chance. Foods that have been used for very small
specimens, such as the teacup rays, are small insect larvae
such as mosquito larvae, small shrimp known as ghost shrimp
or glass shrimp, live adult brine shrimp, and blackworms.
Chitinous foods such as shrimp provide less nutritional
value than do soft-bodied foods, and so should not be
used as sole food items.
The best way to be certain that your new stingray is feeding
is to watch the spiracles as the ray passes over food
on the bottom of the tank. If it is eating, you will see
the spiracles opening and closing rapidly, or fluttering,
as the food is ingested and water is passed from the mouth
and out the spiracles. Once you observe a newly acquired
ray readily feeding on black-worms or redworms introduce
finely chopped night crawlers in small quantities. Once
stingrays recognize these as food, most will readily eat
them. Later, experiment with other types of food.
Types of Food
Live Foods
Feed live foods, including blackworms or tubifex worms,
in quantities adequate to allow a small amount to be left
in the tank so the rays can browse later. However, when
cleaning the substrate, note whether a significant amount
of living worms is present; blackworms and tubifex worms
will colonize the substrate if not eaten and add to the
nitrogenous waste production in the aquarium.
Nonlive, Nonaquatic Foods
Chopped earthworms, redworms, or night crawlers and any
nonlive, nonaquatic foods should be fed in smaller quantities
to prevent any overlooked food from decomposing in the
tank. Keep in mind that stingrays have relatively small
mouths-a 10-inch (25-cm) ray may have a mouth that is
1/2 to 3/4 inch (13 to 19 mm) wide, so chopped food items
must be small enough to be eaten easily. If a ray ingests
a piece of food and repeatedly spits it out and ingests
it again, this usually indicates that the particle is
too large. Some ray species, such as antenna rays, have
extremely small mouths relative to their size.
Once acclimated, rays often develop techniques for eating
larger pieces of food; for example, newly imported rays
may have difficulty consuming even small chopped pieces
of night crawlers. Eventually, however, they learn to
eat an entire worm by sucking it into their oral cavity
without chewing. Newly acquired rays also often ignore
feeder goldfish but they quickly learn to chase down and
consume feeders, even learning where they hide in the
tank.
Commercially Prepared Foods
Stingrays may learn to eat other unfamiliar foods such
as brine shrimp, pellet foods, or other commercially prepared
foods. While there is probably no harm in offering these
foods to rays, it is best to use fresh, live, or frozen
foods as the dietary staple. Although stingrays often
do not initially accept frozen or other nonliving foods,
they may soon learn to eat these foods after they have
been acclimated. A benefit of frozen foods is that they
are less likely than live foods to introduce diseases
or parasites.
Hand-feeding
Occasionally, a well-acclimated specimen will fail to
gain weight, even though you are offering enough food.
Several things may cause this problem; the most likely
possibility is that it is not competing efficiently for
food against other fish in the aquarium, or it may have
a parasitic infestation. Stingrays occasionally do not
seem to learn where foods can be found during feeding
times, and are always in the wrong part of the tank during
those times. In these cases, it is helpful to hand-feed
such specimens. By this I do not mean feeding with your
hands. Although some aquarists do this with stingrays,
I do not recommend it because of the possibility of being
accidentally stung. Remember that stingrays are wild animals,
and no matter how accustomed your specimens become to
your presence, it is impossible to always accurately predict
their response to humans. Instead, you should always perform
the hand-feeding of specimens with long forceps or a similar
instrument. Stingrays generally avoid metal objects and
appear to be frightened by metal; however, because they
can sense metal, they will quickly learn that when there
is a metal object in the aquarium, food is being offered.
In this way, you can teach your stingray to feed directly
from forceps, and selectively feed it more food.
Simply hold a night crawler (or a piece of night crawler)
in the forceps, and hold the worm in the aquarium so that
the ray can touch it with its fin. It should eat the worm
immediately. After a few feedings in this manner, allow
the forceps to touch the ray while it is eating the worm.
It will quickly learn to associate the forceps with feeding
and soon you will find that the ray will pounce on the
forceps as soon as it touches it, eagerly looking for
a treat!
How Much and How Often
The key to having well-fed stingrays in your aquarium
is providing plenty of food. Unlike most fish that swim
quietly between feedings, stingrays search constantly
for food, looking under and around tank ornaments, moving
driftwood, rocks, filters, and even other fish! This high
activity level translates to a high metabolic rate, which
means that while searching for food rays continue to burn
energy. If they use up energy looking for food, but do
not find any, they will lose weight. To compensate for
this loss of energy, it is essential to provide adequate
food. I cannot stress this enough. Hobbyists sometimes
tell me that they feed their rays three times weekly,
thinking that this is adequate. Stingrays should be fed
at least twice, and usually three times, daily. In spite
of these frequent feedings, rays will still constantly
look for food between feedings!
When feeding significant quantities of live feeder goldfish,
it is wise to add vitamin B1 to the feeder supply. Goldfish
contain the enzyme thiaminase, which destroys thiamin,
or vitamin B1, and this vitamin must be replenished. It
should be your practice to add one 50-mg tablet to each
500 gallons (1893 L) of water every two weeks. You can
add the tablets directly to the sump of the wet-dry filter;
or as an alternative, the tablets can be added directly
to the tank.
About the Author
Brendon Turner maintains The Animal Gazette - a weekly
edition of helpful articles for pet owners. Visit AnimalGazette.com
for information about cats, dog breeds and tropical fish.
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