She looks fine to me.
I have a breeding pair but for some reason my female discus is turning more pale. Everytime I feed them fdbw, the male tends to eat more than the female so the male's stomach is way larger than the female. I seen her eat but isn't as quick as the male. The female swims fine, eats fine, and is active but recently she is starting to lose her color and turning more pale. I don't know if it is maybe because her color is just changing due to how she is, the environment, or other mysteries that I don't know why she would be pale. Both discus are extremely active when I turn on moonlight. I do water changes 50% everyday. If anyone has a clue of what is going on please tell me
Water paramater:
Ph:7.4
Ammonia:0
Nitrite:0
Nitrate:10
Gh:6
Kh:6
80 gallon tank
2 canister filter
1 powerhead
1 uv light(green killing machine)
2 heaters
12 panda corys(discus don't bother or get mad towards them)
She looks fine to me.
Mama Bear
Besides FDBW, what else do you feed? If the male is eating more of anything else like pellets or flakes that include a color enhancer (like astaxanthin) that might explain the difference. But maybe you're right about aging and possibly genes. Perhaps others have seen this.
I bought 2 beautiful red Albino's that were fresh imports from Malaysia. Over about 2 months after getting them pretty much all the red was gone and they were peach colored. Clearly they had been color enhanced by the breeder. Still nice fish, but no longer red.
It is possible you could be experiencing a similar causation in your fish.
Here's a before and after of mine, I promise it is the exact same fish...
20180930_073716.jpg
MVIMG_20190809_165520.jpg
70579102_426261571345366_3989927925385265152_n.jpg she just looks a lot more golden here
70579102_426261571345366_3989927925385265152_n.jpg she just looks a lot more golden here. I havent tried other food. Only did fbw and Jumbo fdw. Then i tried another frozen discus food but it just was really oily and barely any food that the discus can pick off of. Plus they didnt like it. I also want to try pellets but never got the oppurtunity to because I am afraid the discus might be alittle dumb/slow when it comes to picking food. The female likes to scavenge which may be a good thing but when the food drops they are pretty slow of trying to get it. So it will basically go on the sand and they just have to find them. Usually the male somehow eats way more than the female. Yeah my female discus used to be really golden and all of a sudden she is just being pale. I don't know if it is genetic.
Yes, huge color change. No substrate at all, and the rear glass painted black... Pretty shocking how much color potent enhancers can add, I wonder whether maybe there was some kind of hormones involved as well. A lot of the fish coming out of Asia have been hormone and color treated to enhance the size and colors for the market...
Last edited by danotaylor; 09-23-2019 at 07:26 AM.
In Asia some sellers will add what is call CR8
this enchanting food will make the Discus
yellow, CR5 or 6 will color the Discus red.
Cliff
Are they just color enhancers? They're not hormones are they? I understand that they use hormones to make their best fish very large so they can win at shows. Is that the case?
Mama Bear
Hi Liz,
Yes they are enhancing colors food as for hormone I am not sure if they contain any
methy testosterone. As for show Discus
breeders will pick out their best Discus maybe out of thousands. They may want
to juice their fish and manicure their fins.
Hormoning will mess up their fertility and
bulk their body but as far as I know the size
will be the same.
Cliff