illumnae's 600 gallon planted tank

[illumnae]

The good news is that I saw 3 of the 20 peck at the beefheart today, at least 1 in each of the tanks. I'm hopeful that with this development the others will take the cue and start eating too. The bad news is that even those that ate didn't eat enough for me to feel reassured. There's now some small amounts of thick black "beefheart ****" (versus the thinner more brownish "pellet ****" my fish usually excrete) so obviously some food is being consumed, but it's been almost 6 days so I'm starting to get worried.

Should I keep up with small amounts of beefheart daily or try anything just to start off a feeding response but risk them refusing any other food as a result? As mentioned I can get live brine shrimp in a pinch, but not every day.

Here's a video taken today - other than them not eating I think they don't look otherwise unwell.

[jpm995]

I'm no expert on discus care but in my opinion i would keep feeding the beefheart. It's a time tested proven food most discus love. I would also keep offering a varied diet. It may condition them to eat 'anything' you feed them.

[illumnae]

The discus continue to act unstressed but are still not heavy feeders. They seem to prefer frozen bloodworms to beefheart so that's what I'm trying to feed them, but still take abiut 30 minutes to finish the food at each feeding. 20 large discus eating 2 cubes of frozen bloodworms twice a day (total 4 cubes per day) doesn't seem sufficient to me. Feeling quite demoralized at the moment as other than not eating well, they seem otherwise OK.

[jwcarlson]

I kept mine at 85 when they were growing out and there was a pretty marked difference between food consumption at 93/88/85/82 at their various stages. You could bump it up a little bit to 29 or 30 C and see if that gets them eating more.

[illumnae]

I bumped the temperature up to 29.5 a few days ago, which was when they started their half hearted eating. I am trying not to have to go higher as I want to keep them at the lower end of the acceptable temperature range for the sake of the plants in the display tank.

[jwcarlson]

Are they currently in the display tank?

[brewmaster15]

Thanks Al, I can purchase live adult brine shrimp but not conveniently. My concern is that discus being the finicky fish that they are eat the live brine shrimp and then refuse other foods thereafter. Freeze dried blackworms are currently out of stock in my country - our distributor hasn't restocked them recently. I'll try asking the importer about the beefheart but i doubt he'll be able to get it for me as he has to drive to the breeder's facility in a neighboring country to pick the fish (and beefheart) up. He just drove in last week to pick up my fish so I don't think he will go again anytime soon.

Its been about 9 days now since you got them. By now they should be eating with gusto if all your parameters are good. I would double check all parameters.

If you can get them eating live brine you can always condition them to other foods latter.

I would also have a talk with the seller. Find out how long they had these fish before you got them. If the fish have been eating with a strong appetite at the sellers theres no reason the whole group is off now, imo

[illumnae]

Are they currently in the display tank?

Nope they are still in the quarantine tanks.

Its been about 9 days now since you got them. By now they should be eating with gusto if all your parameters are good. I would double check all parameters.

If you can get them eating live brine you can always condition them to other foods latter.

I would also have a talk with the seller. Find out how long they had these fish before you got them. If the fish have been eating with a strong appetite at the sellers theres no reason the whole group is off now, imo

My water parameters are pretty decent for most fish. Gh 1-2 kh 0-1 pH 6.8-6.9 ammonia 0 nitrite 0 nitrate 5-10. I've spoken to the seller and he's informed me that the discus were feeding well on the breeder's own recipe of beefheart multiple times a day - this corroborates well with the fact that the discus all arrived super thick.

Things are better now than when I last posted - they are now eating 3-4 cubes of frozen bloodworms per tank (10 discus) per day. I feed 2 cubes per tank twice a day and sometimes it's all gone after an hour, sometimes there's about half a cube leftover which I siphon out. They prefer to eat while I'm not in the room so i can't check if every one of them is eating big amounts, but they all have a feeding response when I pour the thawed bloodworms into the tank. They're just not voraciously attacking the food the same way that the diamond tetras and Dicrossus warzeli I have in other quarantine tanks are.

I've gone through the first dose of levamisole and almost completed a course of praziquantel and metronidazole and thankfully no worms seem to have been expelled. Do I need to go through another round of deworming after I have weaned them off the frozen bloodworms? I'm using the Hikari bloodworms that are supposed to have been somehow treated against parasites but some people tell me to do another round of deworming because of the bloodworms. I think weaning them off bloodworms onto pellets is going to be a huge headache.

Another update for future plans is that I had another discussion with the seller and instead of the second batch of discus being the albino red covers from Vietnam, I will probably instead go with a batch of albino golden king vipers from the same Malaysian breeder as my current albino leopard snakeskins. This should prevent any issue of cross contamination between the 2 batches of discus which eliminates one of my biggest worries. I'll continue to quarantine all discus and tankmates, especially since I need to pellet train the discus anyway, but I have always been worried about mixing discus from different breeders because of all the horror stories I've read and heard. It's cute that I've now decided to go with spotted red and spotted yellow albinos, as the very first plan that I had was actually to go with solid reds and solid yellows - my wife wasa huge fan of albino Golden lollipops. Now the current plan keeps the original colours but replaces the solids with spots - which is also a nod to the wild red spotted greens that I had initially wanted too.

[jwcarlson]

If they're not in the display tank it shouldn't be an issue raising the temperature if you want to. You can bring them back down before they go to the main tank. Heat was pretty helpful getting hesitant eaters going for me. But it didn't solve any issues. I dinked around with heat too long when I should have been treating them with metro. Not saying that's your issue here, obviously. I'd take mine up to 93 and they'd eat and I'd start bringing them down and once I got below 88 or so they would stop eating again.

[illumnae]

If they're not in the display tank it shouldn't be an issue raising the temperature if you want to. You can bring them back down before they go to the main tank. Heat was pretty helpful getting hesitant eaters going for me. But it didn't solve any issues. I dinked around with heat too long when I should have been treating them with metro. Not saying that's your issue here, obviously. I'd take mine up to 93 and they'd eat and I'd start bringing them down and once I got below 88 or so they would stop eating again.

Ok I'll admit it - I bought 200W heaters for the 40 gallon quarantine tanks and in my air conditioned fish room the highest temperature that the heater is able to bring them up to is 29.5 degrees. I don't really want to go buy new 300W heaters that are otherwise oversized for the tanks just to use them for a week or so

I am on day 5 of metronidazole and praziquantel treatment today, and I've also done a 24 hour levamisole bath on them last Thursday.

[jwcarlson]

Putting a cover on them would probably allow you to get quite a bit warmer. Even just a piece of corrugated plastic.

Either way, hopefully they start eating better!

[illumnae]

I'll try to get some corrugated plastic cut to shape over the weekend.

How many cubes of bloodworms daily should i be aiming for per tank of 10 adult discus?

[illumnae]

The discus are reliably finishing 2 cubes of bloodworms twice a day now (per tank) and they all swarm to the surface whenever I approach the tank as they now recognize me as the foodgiver. I'm now soaking pellets in the bloodworm juice with garlic guard to try and start the pellet training but to no avail for now - they ignore all the pellets. Hopefully they will start to take to the pellets soon so that I don't have to starve them to get them converted

[Iminit]

I didn’t read the whole thread. So my question may have been answered but what was the breeder feeding? I’m guessing beef heart? If so it’s strange there not eating it now. Your temp seems fine unless the breeder kept them hotter.
Beautiful looking discus. Looking forward to pics in main tank.

[illumnae]

I didn’t read the whole thread. So my question may have been answered but what was the breeder feeding? I’m guessing beef heart? If so it’s strange there not eating it now. Your temp seems fine unless the breeder kept them hotter.
Beautiful looking discus. Looking forward to pics in main tank.

The breeder was feeding beefheart, but a different recipe from what is available for me to purchase locally. My understanding is that the breeder prepares 20kg of feed daily to feed his entire farm of fish so its fresh and in the form of a paste. Locally the ones prepared for sale are frozen and mixed with gelatin to bind them so the consistency is different and the different ingredients used probably made it smell and taste different too. They had started to take to beefheart reluctantly but I switched to bloodworms because they ate more of it daily than the beefheart. Now they're readily eating bloodworms, I'm trying to convert them to pellets as that will eventually be their long term food in the display tank.

For the 2nd batch of discus I'm asking the seller to get the breeder to start converting them to pellets before we import them over.