it saves the lives of my blue spot stingray

i went through a un commented number of them after I got my first, the
tank is outside,
and they would not do well, I bought that tank used, with the ray, it took
only a few days
to kill it, and the next ...... there was very very little stray voltage
leaking from
something but it was bothering him, now the probe, and cooler temps and
ive been keeping
the same one for a while ill have to dig out dates but I think its over a
year now.

So you are saying, that grounding water column and leading much stronger
electric current out of this failured device to ground, through the water
and
the stingray was better than leaving voltage not grounded? It does not make
sense - try to imagine birds sitting on a 20kV wire hanging between
hig-voltage
poles. Do they feel stray voltage around them in the air? On their legs?
NOT!
They would certainly feel it when somebody would aproach them with a
something
like a "grounding probe". Their would become a nice, birdy fireworks :-)
The same works with water, stray voltage in the water, and leading these
voltages
to ground with a grounding probe. Basicaly, the interest of normally
grounded
human (shoes?) putting his hand into the water and acting as a poor
grounding
probe conflicts with the interest of fish inside the tank. Fish do not want
any
grounding probe in their tank, like birds sitting on 20kV wire do not want
any
grounding probes near them.

I would suspect that a grounding probe **WITH** a GFCI would do a good job
at sending that
stray current away from the guy with his hand in his tank, between the
time that the shock
occurs and the GFCI trips, but read into that third word suspect in this
statement as I
have no proof either way. just seems the probe is a much less resistant
path then a guy
with his arm in a tank

As I said - there are two different aspects of this issue and both need to
be
discussed separatelly. In my opinion, I am sufficiently protected against
being electocuted by the GFCI plug and I do not need additional grounding
probe. In this case I would not install one to not put miliamps not tripping
GFCI
going through the bodies of my fish inside the tank. Yes, I will risk being
stung
by the small voltage not tripping GFCI normally, showing itself as a stray
voltage,
but I would take this risk just to not make any currents flow in the water
column.

Bottom line: GFCI - big YES, Grounding Probe - big NO!