Design and set up of 125 gal for Nhamunda Blue

[Adam Robinson]

Great pics love the fact that you used natural elements that were available in your area

[Apistomaster]

Since I began this thread I since removed two pairs of the Blue Discus to their own breeding tanks. It looks like the remaining two Discus are also a pair. I plan to remove them soon.
I plan to restock this tank with 8 wild Red Spotted Green Discus.
Meanwhile I have 10 F1 juvenile Mesonauta acora I bought from Al and have enjoyed them a great deal. They are an under appreciated medium size Cichlid which have much in common with wild Angelfish and Discus.
When I added the Mesonauta, often called Flag Cichlids or Festivums after another species in their genus, the Discus became much more outgoing. They helped induce the pairs to bond more firmly and progress towards spawning. They are often found together in the wild so they are familiar to each other, having coexisted together for hundreds of thousands if not a million years.

I had to remove the 2 pairs of adult Sturisoma aureum. I have had problems in the past trying to keep Sturisoma with Heckel Discus and the Sturisoma have the bad habit of persistently harassing and eating skin mucous off the sides of Discus. Heckels are meeker than other Discus species and my hope was that the Blue discus, the most bold of Discus, IMO, were still not up to the task of defending themselves from Sturisoma attacks.
The Sturisoma spawned several times while they lived in this tank but my Sturisoma spawn all the time. I have quite a few even after I sold off about 100. Their fry are among the most difficult of the loricariidae to raise. I have written an article at the request of Shane, which will be appearing on www.planetcatfish.com in "Shane's World' section. I have a method that results in higher survival rates than those choosing to assume Sturisoma are vegetarians. They are actually mainly predators of aquatic insect larvae. The algae they eat is a byproduct of their search for their prey. I had really hoped these very fascinating catfish would be able to peacefully coexist with the bolder Blue Discus. If there was ever a pleco relative to fear regarding Discus, the Sturisoma are a Discus' worst nightmare. Here is an old photo of some of the wild caught Sturisoma I bred caught in the act of attacking Heckel Discus.

This photo also shows my other planted wild Discus tank back in the days when I did not have any facing on the glass terrace and the algae that grows on the inside face of the terrace front glass. I have since replaced the dark substrate with white quartz sand, added a ceramic facing on the front of the terrace and sold the 10 Heckels. 8 adult wild Peruvian Angelfish presently live in the tank including 3 mated pairs.

[wgtaylor]

Since I began this thread I since removed two pairs of the Blue Discus to their own breeding tanks.
I had to remove the 2 pairs of adult Sturisoma aureum. Their fry are among the most difficult of the loricariidae to raise. I have written an article at the request of Shane, which will be appearing on www.planetcatfish.com in "Shane's World' section.
I have a method that results in higher survival rates than those choosing to assume Sturisoma are vegetarians. They are actually mainly predators of aquatic insect larvae. The algae they eat is a byproduct of their search for their prey.

Hey Larry, I hope when your article is posted you come back and give us the link to the article. I just did a search on planetcatfish and doesn't appear it has been posted yet.
I would be very interested how you came about the conclusion Sturisoma aureum preferred larvae over vegetation and what you finally offered them as a primary food source.

For quite awhile I have been thinking along those exact same lines only with discus. I wrote this short unscientific piece mainly to collect some thoughts
and not sure I should even bring the subject up so not to inflame anyone's beliefs. Thought the timing might be right with your article, studies that have been
done and what I have seen in wild trout. I expect a few sparks to fly but I can't help but believe this is plausible. What do you think ?
Bill

Has anyone wondered what exactly do wild discus eat ?
I've heard they are opportunistic feeders, makes sense since they live in the wild.
The water is so soft it doesn't support crustaceans species and very little plant life so what can they find to eat ?
I have heard they possibly eat small fish, larvae, seeds, plant and possibly fruit.
I believe this was assumed by examining the gut content of discus and visually identifying the detritus with a microscope.
In the last 10 years studies have been done on the discus digestive systems.
In these studies it has shown discus injesting plant material had a negative affect on protein intake and they get no
nutritional value from sand, small sticks, and and pebbles so why whould they eat these things. The studies have shown
discus have a digestive system more like a carnivorous diet similar to a trout.

When I was a kid I loved to fish for wild trout.
I would sometimes go fishing for an hour before going to school and all day on weekends.
Wild trout would scare easy and I learned if I would sneak up on a fishing hole I could sit and watch them before deciding which one I wanted to catch.
I would try to pick the biggest trout and float my bait so it would land right in front of the one I wanted to catch.
I would clean the trout in the stream before taking them home and would always check their gut to see what they had been eating. I was surprised
to see detritus, sand, gravel, small pieces of wood, seeds and what appeared to be leaf litter. I wondered why they would eat these things and thought
they accidently swallowed the detritus while eating other things they prefer.
One day while watching them I saw a funny looking stick with legs on the end crawling near the trout and immediately one of the biggest trout swam up to the
stick and ate it. Hummm, and I have been using worms for bait. Well the more I looked the more of these funny looking sticks I found around the stream.

They turned out to be fly larvae, caddis fly, dragon fly and possibly any of thousands of other types that live in clean water all around the world.
Now that makes sense, since I know trout are carnivorous they would naturally prefer these tasty morsels. However when eating the larvae they would
also ingest some of the casing that the larvae build to protect themselves during their life under water. These casings are glued together by the larvae
and constructed using sand, pieces of wood, leaf litter and any other natural material they can find. The larvae lock themselves into the casings by their
hind legs and carry the casing with them as they crawl around using their front legs.

Now I realized why there was almost always this detritus in the gut of the wild trout.

I have never been to the Amazon but reading about wild discus, the food they eat and the detritus found in the discus gut it sounded exactly like what
I have seen for years in the gut of wild trout. This makes me believe wild trout and wild discus probably have very similar eating habits.
There is fly larvae, high in protein, plentiful all year, available for wild fish to eat all over the world. Studies have shown that trout and discus
have about the same carnivorous type enzymes in their digestive tract and neither can digest sand, sticks or most plant material. In wild trout I have seen
their bowels get inflamed when passing the excrement from this detritus.

I doubt many people lay around on their bellies along side a stream watching fish eat bugs and maybe there is some people that have never heard of fly
larvae as wild fish food and some that have never seen a larvae in it's casing looking like a tasty morsel. I took some pictures and video of some I
gathered from the stream that runs through our property. After I took the pictures I returned all the larvae back to the stream.
I wonder if anyone else finds the possibility that detritus found in South American discus is possibly the same as detritus found in North American trout.

Here are pictures of fly larvae in their casing I collected recently. They clearly show the sand, pebbles, sticks and leaf litter they use to make their casings.










Here is a video of the fly larvae moving about in their casing. This is how a wild fish would be presented with the larvae to eat.

[dpt8]

Larry, Where are you buying such a set of matching wild RSG's.. That definitely would look cool. I have 6 nice wild greens but only 2 are RSG's.. Thanks and good luck.. David T

[plecocicho]

Discus are omnivores with e tendency to herbivors (mostly fruits and seeds), that was showm many times. You are right, main nutritional value of the detritus comes from varous unicellular and small metazoen animals (nematods, small oligochaete worms, small crusteceans) and algae which are all mixed in to what germans call aufwuchs and biologist perifiton. In swift streams perifiton is mostly composed of different type of algae, but in slow or no moving waters, like the lagos discus inhabit, thick layer of perifiton composed mainly of decomposed leaf littercovers the floded branches and roots. They feed on them activelly and uptake small worms, crusteceans, algae, unicellular organisms, which are important protein supplements. Crusteceans are actually the most important part of the fish diet in the black and clera water habitats, but the shrimps dominate crustecean fauna in those habitats.Worms and insect larvae are found in much lower denseties and dont have such an important role in fish diet as they have in our rivers.

[Apistomaster]

Hi Bill,
I think the article will appear in September.
You will be surprised at how many points you raised with regard to discus I discuss in relation to Sturisoma. I have had hundreds of them since mine breed all the time and it did not take a rocket scientist to see which foods they preferred. I also have a good friend from Venezuela who provided me information he gained from his own field studies of them. They are literally back yard stream fish outside Maracaibo.

I have studied trout biology and behavior in great detail, both the literature(fly fishermen write more books than any other sportsmen) and as a life long hard core trout fly fisherman and fly tier. I tie Caddis fly larvae, nypmhs and adult imitations for some of the smallest species to the largest species. There are tropical species of all the aquatic insect families found in trout rivers and lakes. Knowing how the insects live, look and are perceived by trout is the key to tying and fishing for trout with flies. Seasons, time of day and abundance are major determining factors of what trout are feeding on at a given time.

I even covered the subjects of periphyton in my article and dynamics of stream flow and the formation of microhabitats.
I am going back to my favorite stream, the one I collected my Discus tank sand from, in 3 weeks to catch more trout.
Fish eat a lot of indigestible junk when they feed. There are many possible explanations. Trout usually don't have much time to decide whether or not something in a fast current is food or not and often take non-food items. Discus may have more time but may have to graze more material to extract the smaller organisms nutrients rather than carefully picking through bottom material for individual micro-bugs. Those trout that are focusing on caddis larvae eat them cases and all. I have caught trout from lakes that were so full of large snails I could see the outlines of the shells and they felt like they had eaten marbles. I know Heiko Bleher documented the stomach contents of hundreds of specimens of all 3 species and found a lot of algae, diatoms and terrestrial fruits or blooms in discus guts. I have dissected many trout and a few discus. I find discus guts to be more typical of carnivorous species like a trout than algae eating species like Bushy nose plecos. Food moves through the Discus short intestines quickly in case anyone wondered why so much crud builds up so fast on a bare bottom tank.
The lines between a carnivore and herbivore are blurred for a majority of species. Meat eaters usually consume some plant matter ingested by their prey and herbivores eat their share of insects or whatever that live on the plants they eat. There are species at either end of the extremes which are easy to classify by diet but there are more species where there is considerable overlap, omnivores. But some omnivores are more carnivorous and some are more herbivorous.

I will post whenthe Sturisoma article is published.