Hi All,

Am a newly registered member on this forum, but have learnt a ton from this site over the past 6 months or so as I got accustomed to my very first Discus fish (3 diamond blue ones). Thanks genuinely .

Here's the gist of the issue: The three (one male, two females) laid eggs about 4 times now and none made it to the fry stage except the last batch - partly due to my inexperience and partly cos the dominant female used to eat the fry.
[In case you are wondering, no, I didn't plan for it - I didn't even know what gender they were and the first two batches were on the heater placed at an angle. Learnt my lesson ]

As for the fighting, I moved the dominant female to a separate tank. Watching the remaining two parents take care of the new fry was just an awesome "first" experience I can never forget. That was until the female started fighting with the male so badly I had to separate them using a divider.
Maybe possessiveness cos the male seemed more experienced and the fry seemed to like to hang out on the male more.
At this point, there were about 45 fry from the batch and I had 0 deaths. However, things started going south after the divider was put in and I had to move the female to the other tank and do rapid water changes till I managed to save just 6 now with the male parent. Things have been going okay for the past one week since.

However, 3 of the fry are much smaller than the other 3 which seem to be a bit bigger than a dime right now. The eggs were laid on Christmas, hatched on 28th, free swimming around new year's, so it's been approximately 21-25 days in total.

I have attached a few pics to show the difference. Clearly, this size doesn't seem normal for just 3-4 days of age difference. Any thoughts, pointers or should I just leave them alone and this is expected?

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The fry are still feeding off the parent only and have not taken to frozen BBS yet.