Disus under stress?

[suki243]

a few weeks ago i had one discus it was a moderate sized pigeon blood discus, they had a case of velvet and i put in some medication a local petstore subscribed, after a small water change that pigeon went crazy! it looked like it was about to jump out of the tank, but the water was lower, so my dad and i put a peice of cloth over tank turned off all the lights and didn't go in the room until the next day, and unfortunatly it was dead :'( is that a case of stress? and did the medication cause it or something else?

[wilyeo]

My condolence mate. I suffered the same fate two weeks ago. I 'lost' a leopard, 2 snakeskins. They were initially stressed after a power 'blackout' where there was no oxygen for about and hour.

I quarantined them from the remaining (a red turquoise and a marlboro red) after they turn black the next day and gave them some black disease medication and raised the temperature to about 30C.

They took turns to die two days after. Their bodies looked dryish and hardened. ???

I thought I was the only one suffering this fate. Any one care to enlighten us on the reason.

[Carol_Roberts]

Hi Suki:
Perhaps the medication itself was the cause.

Hi Wilfred:
My power goes out several times a year. Losing power for an hour or two should not hurt your discus . . . unless your tank is stocked very heavily. The "good" bacteria in canister filters may die in a few hours without power from lack of oxygen.

Discus are pretty tough - In December I was without power for 48 hours. The tanks got down to 66 degrees. I didn't lose a single discus.

[suki243]

sorry to hear that wilfred,
if it was the medication should i use it again because there is still some of the disease left and the guy down at the pet store says to add a little every time i change my water

[suki243]

i'm also having trouble getting my small discus to grow up, one of them stays the same exact size while the other grow bigger, is this normal?
Also should i take out my clown loach? and these discus are in a big tank like 200 + gallons, and it has a lot of decorations, as soon as i can i'll post picks l8r
Also is it good to fed them live bloodworms 2 times a day or do they need to be fed more?

[Carol_Roberts]

Hi Suki:
Boy it's going to be hard for you to treat anything in a 200 gallon tank full of decorations and no doubt gravel too. How many discus do you have? What type of filter? What type of water changes do you do?

You need to think of a juvenile discus tank as a feeding trough. You add lots of high quality food, clean the trough, add more food a few hours later, clean the trough . . . . AS you can see it pretty hard to do that in a big tank full of gravel and tankmates. Discus need a really clean enviornment - clean tank, clean filters and clean water. Otherwise they quit eating and quit growing.

[suki243]

There are 2 heckle green discus (Big), 2 Medium size blue diamond discus, 3 small, some type of orange, and 2 blue diamond small. I have a huge wood deco in it, and a lot of plastic plants, http://www.outeraspects.com/files/PANA0010.JPG
My Red one
http://www.outeraspects.com/files/PANA0017.JPG

It is a very bright light i'm trying to put some celephane wrap underneath it to block too much light from going in

[suki243]

my filters are fluvals 304 two of them.

[MonkeeFish]

cant read

best thing to do is get adult discus since u dont need to do daily wc and u can get away wit juss one week change a week

[Nightowl]

Suki, what was the medication? It sounds to me like the fish reacted to it :(. Also, the guy at the pet store said to add a little each time you change water.... I don't know if that makes any sense as most medications have prescribed dose amounts, how exact could the measurements be? Most pet shop people aren't up on all they need to be(please don't take offense anyone, I make my living working at LFS).
If the medication was Aquarisol, throw it away.
J.T.