My feeding plan

[Cjbear087]

So I know discus need a variety of foods, and this is my food plan. In the morning, I will feed a portion of Seachems NutriDiet Discus Flakes, midday I will do some FROZEN brine shrimp, and in the evening I will do a portion of LIVE blackworms. This, every single day. And I’m assuming this will be okay for juvis and adults? Feel free to critique. Thanks

[Willie]

Feeding live blackworms is asking for trouble. Heavy bacterial load will lead to greyish fish with cloudy eyes. Not recommended.

[Cjbear087]

Is there anything I should switch it with?

[brewmaster15]

So I know discus need a variety of foods, and this is my food plan. In the morning, I will feed a portion of Seachems NutriDiet Discus Flakes, midday I will do some FROZEN brine shrimp, and in the evening I will do a portion of LIVE blackworms. This, every single day. And I’m assuming this will be okay for juvis and adults? Feel free to critique. Thanks

I have always found pellets better for discus than flakes (IME) and pellets work better in Autofeeders... something to consider for that college future you mentioned. So I would try some various pelllets and find one you and the fish are happy with. Some peoples discus do fine on flakes...I only use them for small discus.

Frozen brine shrimp is okay.. frozen mysis would be nutritionally better if they eat it.

Freeze dried blackworms are a convenient and healthy food. If you have them availible near you.

A homemade frozen beefheart or seafood mix is a great option for frozen.

Hth,
Al

[Willie]

...Frozen brine shrimp is okay.. frozen mysis would be nutritionally better if they eat it....Al

[jwcarlson]

You can make all the plans you want, but your discus are going to probably have some preference that you'll have to either break them of or play into. Mine have absolutely zero interest in pellets, but they'll eat flake. I've tried so many different things, but have settled into mainly freeze dried black worms, some Cobalt flake, and occasional frozen Hikari blood worms.

[Willie]

Mine go crazy for VibraBites.

[Cjbear087]

I have always found pellets better for discus than flakes (IME) and pellets work better in Autofeeders... something to consider for that college future you mentioned. So I would try some various pelllets and find one you and the fish are happy with. Some peoples discus do fine on flakes...I only use them for small discus.

Frozen brine shrimp is okay.. frozen mysis would be nutritionally better if they eat it.

Freeze dried blackworms are a convenient and healthy food. If you have them availible near you.

A homemade frozen beefheart or seafood mix is a great option for frozen.

Hth,
Al

So do you reckon I could do pellets / flakes in the morning (good point about the college thing btw), frozen mysis at midday and freeze dried blackworms in the evening?

[jwcarlson]

So do you reckon I could do pellets / flakes in the morning (good point about the college thing btw), frozen mysis at midday and freeze dried blackworms in the evening?

One thing I wish I would have done is bought less food for my discus right off the bat. Figure out what you want you staple to be. If it's beefheart or FDBlkW or whatever and make sure you're stocked up on that. You might have discus that refuse to eat whatever flake/pellets you have and never take a bite of mysis shrimp. Eating is an indicator for a lot of stuff, especially early on and screwing around with food might make things difficult to understand if you're feeding something they hate and expecting them to eat everything ferociously. I was hoping to feed flake primarily and boy was that a bad idea. People talk about beefheart being messy, but try feeding the same number of calories of flake. And there's some minimum size of flake below which a discus won't eat. So there's a billion small pieces of flake floating around. It does make a lot of snails, though.

[fljones3]

My discus would not touch mysis shrimp regardless of no food for 3-4 days. Agree with Jacob. Decide on your primary food and stick with it.

[Cjbear087]

I have heard that this thing called Goodheart is very good (the place I’m gonna buy the discus from use it) so I might use that. I think it’s easy to portion and has other stuff in it too.

[gimaal]

There are so many quality food options out there. Any particular reason that you are locking yourself in to these three? As Jacob said, once you have your fish you might want to remain open to keeping your plan flexible. I feed frozen brine shrimp from time to time but offer more variety of foods than you are planning on. But I use spirulina-enriched brine shrimp which improves the nutritional value. As far as mysis is concerned, my Tefe Greens ignored it; my Icas gobbled it up. Again, a reason to remain flexible.

[jwcarlson]

All I'm saying is don't go buying ten pounds of everything thinking the fish are going to feed exactly like you think they're going to. Mine won't eat any pellets, for instance, but I got a small packet of vibrabites in the mail yesterday because my cat got into the last bag I had probably over a year ago and I just never got any more. The discus were VERY excited to see them again and ate all of two separate pinches. Nutritionally, I don't know if VibraBites would be a good "staple", but I haven't run into very many fish that do not like them. I fed them to everything except my rams last night and everything including baby bristlenose were eager to eat them. And fish eating something is the baseline for if a food is good for your fish. You can, of course, ween them to/from a food. But I have found that to be a bit of an exercise in frustration sometimes. Especially starting out.

The best advice might to ask the shop you're buying them from what they feed them and then get enough of that to get you through a couple months or so. Bonus points if you can get them to feed the fish while you're standing there and make sure all of them are taking bites and swallowing food. This does a couple things... first, it lets you know they were eating before you bought them. And second, you can avoid purchasing fish that aren't eating or that are "too shy" to eat. In my experience there's a fine line between shyness and not eating and I don't have enough experience with discus to understand which is which. Early on I held off treating for hex and when I eventually convinced myself that was what I needed to do, two of the first were very far gone. I lost one, but did save the other.

[Cjbear087]

Yeah that’s a good idea. So are the things people say about beef heart false?? Ruining livers and whatnot

[jwcarlson]

Yeah that’s a good idea. So are the things people say about beef heart false?? Ruining livers and whatnot

I'd say that there's a lot of trumped-up information about most fish feed. There's a contingent of people who seem to have an axe to grind against beef heart. There's some overlap with the "natural feed" people with the "when does a cow drop its heart into the Amazon River" argument. I think it's valid to a certain extent, but when does a freshwater fish encounter soldier fly larva, brine shrimp, or any of the host of other foods we feed fish? What I don't agree with is the notion that a wild animal is somehow optimally fed based just on what its stomach contents were. Go take a walk in the woods and look for coyote poop, you'll find lots of fur sometimes... lots of berries/seeds other times. The same is going to be true for fish, if you study discus stomachs in the dry season, I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you're probably going to find a lot of "whatever is laying around or floating through the Amazon".

Additionally, no one is studying the livers of discus raised on beef heart (or at least I assume no one is because... where's the money in a study like that?). Conversely... I highly doubt anyone is studying the livers of wild discus and seeing if they're somehow more healthy based on what they eat. Because... again... there's not really money to be made doing these things.

The bottom line is that if you're buying any of the commercially raised discus, you're almost certainly buying a fish that was fed a beef heart based diet. Couple that with the number of breeders and hobbiests who feed it almost exclusively and you can probably form you own conclusions. I'd bet a lot of money that beef heart isn't on the top 10 causes of mortality in discus even if it isn't "ideal".