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Thread: Beef Heart and Whirling

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    Default Beef Heart and Whirling

    Hi guys,

    I have recently really been struggling with whirling and wondered if anyone had had any similar experiences? I get beef heart trimmed and minced from my local butcher and have used it for years but over the last 6 months have had lots of problems with whirling. My old recipe was 50/50 heart and mussel meat with added vitamins, garlic and spinach, i have added white fish from time to time. I had terrible whirling problems with that mix so dropped the mussels, garlic and vitamins, so my last mix was just BH and spinach. Still whirling! If I stopped the heart and just fed granules for a while it all seemed to calm down - back on the heart, back with the problems. This affected all my fish, from old adults, through my own bred young adults to some brand new Stendker 2.5inch fish.

    I'm feeding Stendker's own GoodHeart mix at the moment, but that's all going to get a bit expensive.

    Has anyone ever come across this? Any ideas what it might be?

    Thanks loads!

    PC from the UK

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    I'm guessing that cows aren't part of the natural discus diet. If the natural diet of discus is primarily plants and invertebrates then this could be hemochromatosis. Most invertebrates don't use heme oxygen carriers in their blood so they are low in iron. Vertebrates have heme in hemoglobin and myoglobin and thus much more iron. For birds, where this is a very big problem, species from tropical zones are most susceptible. Tropical regions have low iron due to high rainfall washing minerals out of the soil so scientists speculate that birds from those regions evolved to be very efficient at iron uptake. They have to be fed low-iron diets to avoid developing hemochromatosis.

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    Very interesting, although provably there is even more irin in vertebrate meat deriving from mioglobin rather than the hemoglobin in the blood. On the other hand insects somehow also seem to have a relatively high iron contenthttps://www.scientificamerican.com/article/edible-insects-have-more-iron-than-sirloin-beef/
    In the past I had considered using cricket flour (still very difficult/expensive to buy over here) to make fish food but if it contains almost as much iron as sirloin I think I will stick to the wild salmon/mussell combo

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    Thanks for your input guys, very interesting. So I might have super iron-ey heart..... Heart is clearly a staple diet for discus - I wonder why these specific hearts have had problems? Maybe they have retained more blood when minced by the butcher? How does everyone ensure their heart is as blood free as possible? (Seriously clutching at straws here)

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    Heme iron has much greater bioavailability than non-heme iron. Invertebrates are pretty much devoid of the former.

    heme iron 1.png
    heme iron 2.png

    https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/35...coati_2006.pdf

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    Quote Originally Posted by sumocopter View Post
    Thanks for your input guys, very interesting. So I might have super iron-ey heart..... Heart is clearly a staple diet for discus - I wonder why these specific hearts have had problems? Maybe they have retained more blood when minced by the butcher? How does everyone ensure their heart is as blood free as possible? (Seriously clutching at straws here)
    I would switch to a more natural diet. Hard to go wrong with that.

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    I'd switch the Whitefish for a saltwater fish. I stay away from freshwater fish.

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    That's great, thanks for all your help. Time to look for some new food recipes!

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    Raw mussels contain small doses of thiaminase, an enzym, whcih cause paralysis, of fed too often. So this could also be cause of neural damage by your fish. Always cook mussels before feeding them to discus. But yeah invertebrates are much more natural for discus.

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    If you are looking at iron content in vertebrate muscle tissue, the issue is not so much the iron in the blood (hemoglobin) but more so that in the mioglobin. On the other hand, although devoid of both the above, insects (particulary crickets) seem to contain almost as much bioavailable ion as a sirloin steak (at least if the Scientific American is to be believed). I have so far avoided using beefheart -mostly because it will always contain fats that fish can not metabolize- and used mostly wild salmon fillets and cooked mussels, but will be phasing out the latter just to be on the safe side

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    You still have to distinguish between heme and non-heme iron.

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    That's great, thanks for all your help. Time to look for some new food recipes! Might steer clear of the wild salmon though, not sure my wallet could handle that!

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    Quote Originally Posted by Megalodon View Post
    You still have to distinguish between heme and non-heme iron.
    Mioglobin contains iron chelated in a heme group just as hemoglobin, insects lacking both the above though seem, at least for certain species, to have as much if not more iron that is actually bioavailable. Maybe the distiction should be more between organic forms of iron and inorganic sources (i.e. ferric sulphate as in iron supplement tablets), the former being up to 10 times more absorbable than the latter. Anyway the Amazon basin does not appear to be unusually poor of iron so maybe the possible link between beefheart and whirling (assuming it is not just a coincidence) is probably due to something other than iron content. Also because I would assume that the granules contain at least as much iron as beefheart, being made mainly with vertebrate protein

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    I have fed homemade beefheart mix nearly exclusively for 30 years and have never had whirling disease in my fishroom. Second Hand Pat has an excellent thread on whirling disease and wilds that would be good for you to check out. It's an extremely long thread and I'm not sure where it starts talking about whirling disease, but it might well be worth your time to look. She was finally able to deal with it after some help from Andrew Soh.

    http://forum.simplydiscus.com/showth...light=whirling
    President - North American Discus Association

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    Default Re: Beef Heart and Whirling

    It's most likely darting behavior caused by poor water quality. Beefheart mixes make the water filthy and quickly breaks down to NH3/NH4+, so when fed, it requires very large and very frequent WC's.

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