Socializing Discus

[Me76]

My husband has always wanted to set up a Discus tank, and recently we found a Discus breeder near our town who sold us 2 Brilliant Blues for $10 each. All of his discus were at the front of the tanks, checking out everything, really social; he even had some he could take out of the tank and pet. After we got the discus home, they hid back in the back corner of the tank under the heater. After two days of this, my husband lost all interest in them, and they now have become my fish to take care of. I feed them 2x day, a frozen mixture of blood worms, brine shrimp, and beef heart, I mixed myself, based on Jack Wattley's food. I do a 75% water change every week, check the ph daily, keep it at 6.0, have low light, and the most I can get them to do is come out for food if they haven't been fed ontime, and if I sit real still next to the tank afterwards, they might venture out a little, but the slightest move and the scram back to the back corner. I've read that having just 2 discus is bad in a tank, and we plan on getting at least 1 more soon (we wanted to try 2 cheap ones to make sure we could keep them alive first.) We want to get a leopard discus, do you think this will help bring them out of hiding all the time? Any suggestions would be helpful. We only had africans before this, and they are really social, so the discus are quite disappointing, specially after seeing how social they were at the breeders.

[jonah]

I don't have any experience with discus, but I have had cichlids that only hid except for feeding. It was solved by adding some dithers to the mix. A dither is any fish that will be active in the open most of the time like cardinals or danios. The fact that these fish aren't afraid to be in the open seems to convince the hiding fish that all is well so they'll come out too.

[Ross]

Discus tank was my first tank I. I started the tank with other smaller fish before I added the discus. They are not hard you just have to start the tank the right way. I used RO water and added what was needed to the water. I started with a 55 gallon and went to a 140 gallon, a bigger tank is much easier to keep stable than a smaller one. The tank was well planted ph was kept at 5.5 to 6.0 and temp 86 deg at bottom and about 84 deg at top (I had a heater in the bottom of the tank). I was very picky when I bought my fish and kept them in a 20 gallon hospital tank for about a week to ten days at higher temps before they went into the big tank. I had about 13 Discus, about 6 corys, various tetras, a few rams and some otos. I never had a discus die. I feed them blood worms and flakes. I spent about 3 days "prepping" the worms before I feed them to the fish. I only changed about 10 gallons of water a month and RARELY RARELY RARLEY vaccumed the substrate (soil), mother nature works! I feel the constent water changes stresses them out. For me I think the low ph, the temp and the plants where the key to mainting good consistant water chemistry When every one of the discus grew much larger or became to aggressive I would sell or trade it back to the LFS.


Ross

[PhishNFilly]

Ross are you still around the hood anywhere? I know its years lol but wondered if you still are into these guys? Or is 2002 pushing it lolol. I feel another hijack coming on. Julie:ugly1: