Well, now that things have finally wrapped up I guess it's about time I gave my final update.
As you might remember after some shipping issues I ended up with 9 contest fish. I raised them all together for a good while, treating them all the same. As they grew to around 3" or so I chose what I thought were the best 6 and focused on those. They all did pretty well until probably a month to 6 weeks ago.
I started to see what I thought to be some signs of HITH (pitted faces mostly) and proceeded to treat the lot with metro, they did not really seem ill affected otherwise, still eating etc. There was one that from time to time would get pale and off it's feed for a bit but it'd come around again so I didn't really think too much of it. Well about halfway through the metro treatment I went down one day to find that particular discus dead. I guess it really did have something wrong. I don't know if it was just more heavily infested than the others so the medication was harder on it or what. Hard to say. After that they seemed to be ok. Shortly thereafter a couple started to exhibit some swim bladder issues. They were generally nose up at a 45 degree angle or so and always fighting to maintain equilibrium. However, they continued to feed so I let it go for a few days. It wasn't improving so I decided to treat with Furan, thinking it was a bacterial infection. They didn't improve, nor decline much. But after awhile I decided they weren't really having the greatest quality of life and were just taking up space in the tank and decided to cull them. (I have read that if the swim bladder is damaged as I assumed it to be, sometimes they never recover.)
And so with that I was left with 3 of the actual contest fish and I had 2 remaining from the ones I had not chosen to focus on originally. All five are now together in a 55g.
Now, I don't really know what the problem was, but I do imagine it was probably my fault. I had dropped off my tank maintenance due to life getting busier, etc etc. I imagine that opened the door for something to get a foot hold. I also had reduced their feedings to 4x pellets a day. They were getting FBW rarely basically due to the fact that I flat out couldn't afford to supplement their diets.
Like...mench I think it was, I had a hard time getting these guys to a decent size. Right now I'd say they top out at the 4-4.5" range. Up until recently they received daily or every other day 75% water changes and were fed 4-6x per day pellets, FBW, FBS and the like. I really don't know why I couldn't get them any larger. So I guess what I learned here is that I'm bad at growing large discus. :D
Overall I learned that a clean tank and varied, quality diet are key to raising nice discus. It's alot of work, and I don't know if I'd want to buy another batch of babies and grow them out. Now, if I were to get some fry of my own that would be a different story! :)
I don't have any good recent pics other than the ones I submitted for the contest so I will try to get a few shots of the tank in the next couple of days to post here.
Of course, thanks goes to Al and the Simply team that helped bring this contest together. It was fun even if I wasn't as successful as I had hoped to be, and I still ended up with some quality discus regardless. I hope others were able to learn through the trials and tribulations us Challengers went through!
two utes...Schroeder is doing well. We actually added two more pups to the household about 2 months after we got Schroeder. So, at this point we have an 11 month old, a 7 month old and a 5 month old in the house. Alot of puppy madness which admittedly contributed to my lack of focus and time on my discus. :o
