Wild Xingús

**NanDiscus** · 11-06-2015, 08:14 AM

Originally Posted by rickztahone

That is one huge tank. Please keep us updated. My lifetime goal is to get a 10' tank. However, 30" is a little too tall for me, I'd hate to have to clean that thing lol.

Clean? I'm not planning to do that much at all. Each tank will have a gross volume (with the filter and buffer tanks underneath) of about 1100 gallons, that's like the national debt of the US according to Reagan - big enough to look after itself.

N./

**rickztahone** · 11-06-2015, 09:22 PM

Originally Posted by NanDiscus

Clean? I'm not planning to do that much at all. Each tank will have a gross volume (with the filter and buffer tanks underneath) of about 1100 gallons, that's like the national debt of the US according to Reagan - big enough to look after itself.

N./

That was really funny

Thanks for the laugh.

**NanDiscus** · 11-07-2015, 06:11 PM

I have been giving you teasers for a while, now it's about time for me to deliver some things in detail.

First of all, there's this pair I've been trying to breed since they arrived in May and up to this day they only got as far as the female laying eggs 4 times and the male eating them 4 times as they were getting laid. He did sometimes do a few runs over the eggs, but he ended up eating them all the time. Also, when the female was not laying eggs, the male showed no interest in her what so ever, 99% of the courtship and funny moves were performed by the female. We're nowhere near the letter "L" marking our fish, but this one I named Limpy. He's absolutely beautiful with a not-quite perfect shape, yet the most amazing colours I've ever seen on a Xingú discus - see the pics posted earlier.
Well, today Limpy had to go. I decided to take him back to my friend and put him back into the same community tank he came from about 6 months ago. The transition went really well, literally just 5 minutes after he rejoined the old group he looked comfortable, ate some whiteworms and started showing off to the F1 female which grew up in that tank from egg.
The fish I'm trying to work with are rather old by now, and I knew this when I embarked on my mission today to drop Limpy off and collect a different male to put in with the fantastic female I have swimming around here. This new male I brought home is a very different build, he's very skinny (especially when compared to L.), but he has a much higher forehead and back line and when in his prime, he is possibly an even more amazing fish than Limpy was. Whether or not we will ever find out is still a question.
As I'd placed him in the tank, the female almost immediately attacked him and chased him into the top-left corner at the back, right between the glass and the roots that hang into the water. After giving them some rest I tried to lure him out and divert the female's attention with a couple of tasty earthworms. It didn't quite work. Neither one of them looked interested, but later on the female decided to go after them, but not failing to keep the new boy in check.
I raised the temperature from 27.5 to about 29C, trying to speed things up a bit and make them more interested in food. Tomorrow I'm giving them a 30-40% w/c and feed them excessively for the next couple of days. Apart from that I just keep hoping the female will eventually accept the new guy and we can move on from there.
Pics will follow soon, I just don't want to scare you with pics of a skinny boy hiding behind a bush of white roots.

The second piece of news is actually a recap of what exactly is happening in our tanks, what it is that we are working with fish-wise.
In the beginning I got 7 wild fish. They were males A,B,C and females A,B,C and D. I raised F1A and F1B (ten each) to sub-adult size and passed the lot on to András.
(In the meantime a friend of ours -Peter- received a shipment of cheap, kind of 'general purpose wild brown discus', which turned out to be Xingús. What a bargain it was too!)
Since András has been in possession of the original stock, he bred (male x female) F1A X F1B, F1A x wild B, and F1B x wild C.
Also in the meantime we've lost wild female B due to old age and Achim, the male of A is also leaning onto his stick quite a bit these days.
Péter's fish kept spawning in the community tank, but with no intention or infrastructure to breed them he ended up with the one F1 female mentioned above. His fish were considerably older than mine when he got them, so along the way he'd lost all his females (3) and one of his males out of the six fish he had in total. He was left with two males that were not related to the F1 female in the tank, but we wanted to give the boys a choice and ourselves some fresh blood, so we moved wild females C and D into his tank about a year ago. Female C eventually spawned with Limpy in the community tank twice before we moved them into my breeding tank here. You know the rest of that story.
András currently has 21 fully grown fish, no intermediate sizes (due to the reconstrucion and expansion works in his basement fishroom) and two hand-raised batches, both from the same F1A x F1B pair, which are growing slower than how fast Rome was built. They are now 8-weeks-old and averaging about an inch in size. Which ain't a lot.
We have very little (I actually have none) experience in artificial fry raising, but after the initial failures András quite got the hang of it and on his third attempt he managed a survival rate of about 80%. Those fry have been fed well, were given more water than anything ever, only very few of them were lost until this day and even that must have been due to overeating. Some say they will catch up eventually, but neither of us are over the Moon at the moment.
I am now in with Skinny and wild female D, the latter being in such an incredible condition that I'm sure it's almost unheard of for a fish of her age. Remember, they arrived as fully grown (yet reasonably 'young') fish in December, 2008, so coming on to 7 years now, plus their first 1,5-2 years. That makes it 9.

After these not-so-elevating topics let's move on to something else. András - as a full (and over-) time worker, the father of a little devil, husband of a wife with a new house that has no fence yet, well, he has been doing his absolute best to keep the project afloat while I was running my errands across Europe, trying to make ends meet and also make a bit of progress in the meantime. He took down his old setup in the basement of his house, leaving only one tank in there and the 1000L display tank in the living room, converted my old 1000L tank with the blue background into a large sump and water prep tank combined, stuck a few tanks on a rack to end up with a running system of about 1300 liters in total, plus the possibility to add another 2000 liters, once the racks are in place on the opposide side of the current one.

With András busy with the fish I was ready to settle down and bought two pieces of property right next to each other in a small village of about 500 people. Nice and laid-back place about 2 miles from this massive lake here called Balaton. With the property comes a 2-bedroom cottage on one of the plots and stables, a storage room and a barn on the other. We live at a different location, but still have 5 horses at my new place (we'd been renting the stables for many years before I bought it). Some of these we will move to our current location which will free up one of the two stables completely. This is going to be my fishroom at some point. I have all sorts of ideas on how to raise money for this project, as if you're on an about average Hungarian income it's virtually impossible to make something like this happen. What I do have at the moment are tons and tons of plans and ideas, a deposit paid on a 10.000L system (including Discus Hans' very own old system he gave me in 1999.) with a 4000L water prep tank, all the kit you can imagine, big RO, you name it. On top of that -and what I've been bragging about- I bought a 2660L tank last year and the day before I just bought another one of the same size, which will be the heart of the fishroom, facing the entrance on the long wall, set side-by-side. The idea is that one of them will be a community tank for either a fresh group of wilds (if we can ever get them, it's unlikely at the moment), or a selected group of about 10 fish from András' current stock. I may also try to lure Peter into giving up all the fish he has at the moment and replace them with a group of young ones coming from András (or me). The other tank will also be a community tank, but in that one I would like to raise a group of fish from a single or maybe two batches (separated, of course) to adult age, preferably no less than 80-100 fish in total. Two tanks, two systems, in case I went berserk in a few years time and decided to order 3 boxes of Rio Negro Heckels.

On one side in the room there will be a sink and 4 cube tanks on a rack, around 350L each for breeding and rearing purposes, on the other side the big water prep tank and a brick mass stove with a heating element in it and maybe even some coil in the chimney walls too. András can do some pretty good maths on that. I haven't designed everything to the detail yet -not even in my head-, new ideas emerge as I'm typing this now, but I made a proper lame 3d drawing of what the place is kinda' going to look like in SketchUp. (Before you'd ask, those two purple blocks between the tanks are the overflow boxes. I am not going to drill the big tanks and they are also going to act as sediment traps before the sump underneath.) The total volume of water in the fishroom -not including prep- would be around 8500-9000L, depending on how I rig the 4 cubes up.
And what about all those other tanks from the 10.000L system we're buying? Some we will keep, some others we will sell off trying to minimise the investmen on our behalf as much as possible.

So, attached is the drawing (to actual scale), take a first look, throw some ideas at me if you like, I would appreciate all input and advice you may have. Bear in mind, this is going to be as low-tech as possible, and despite the fact that there will eventually be a bit of solar water heating involved along with the wood burning mass stove, keeping things simple is almost No1. priority.

Thanks for reading. I'm exhausted for now.

N./

**Second Hand Pat** · 11-09-2015, 09:39 AM

Good grief Nandi, that was a lot of typing and I am hopefully about the male getting on with your female. Also hope you can get this fishroom off the ground also. Should be a heck of a system.