fun/educational survey - Rules to (and not to) break

[bogia99]

This is meant for a fun/educational survey - not for a heavy discussion, right/wrong or +/- impact of it. As a general perception, drawing from my own experiences, that the more experience you have , the more willingness that you will break a certain rules (discus or fish in general). By no meant reckless, but perhaps, that you already know the consequence of breaking that specific rule and you may even already formulated a solution if the consequence come about. It will be great if you can identify two rules - one that you stretch often , and one that you will not break. Here are my two rules:

Recommended: feeding amount to be eaten within 5-min ; Stretched version: 30min-60min or more sometime --> Excuse: some of my fishes are slow eaters :)
Recommended: 2ppm general PP treatment : Non-stretched version: thou shall not exceed --> Excuse: do not want to kill any more expensive fishes :)

[Elliots]

I have a lot of bottom feeders that hide in my plants and driftwood so I feed enough so no food is left after half an hour. I do admit that my fish tend to have bulging stomachs after feeding but all my fish are young and growing. I have noted this and as my fish hit full size I will reduce the amout I feed.

[pastry]

Huh? bogia, are you saying "any" rules or just the two you break? If so, I guess everyone knows I'd have a list :)

[bogia99]

Elliots - that would be difficult in my opinion. One of the pleasurable thing about raising fishes is to watch its eat, until it choose not to eat any more. Starving your favorite fishes is just like torture :)

Pastry - you can add a zero to my list to make it more realistic/personal; but that is another subject. I don't want to list it here because I don't want to violate the rule "do as I said but not as I do" thing :). So what are your two ?

Top contenders to stimulate the "confession":

* 10G per "adult" fish
* QT
* WC routine
* treating with med as soon as seeing something
* shotgun med approach

[Keith Perkins]

Recommended: feeding amount to be eaten within 5-min ; Stretched version: 30min-60min or more sometime --> Excuse: some of my fishes are slow eaters :)

As much water as I change, forget rule 1.

Recommended: 2ppm general PP treatment : Non-stretched version: thou shall not exceed --> Excuse: do not want to kill any more expensive fishes :)

The BIDKA instructions say you can go to 6, though the author doesn't recommend going beyond 2. I'll go to 4, on older fish, never beyond 2 for small fish.

[mmorris]

As I understand it, 2ppm for 4 hours does the trick. Why do more/longer? I don't know who recommends that discus should be allowed to feed for 5 minutes only. It's not their style!

[shawnhu]

I think I've broken the 10g per fish rule, by a lot.