Is bigger better?

[Andy27012]

I understand the idea behind not wanting to stunt discus by providing inadequate care/diet but Im not following why bigger is better? It seems like by discus standards a show quality fish is giant in comparison to many hobbyists fish. Is this just a breed standard if you will, the same as a docked tail on an Australian Shepard or are there other reasons that it is desirable to have larger fish? My second question is if anyone knows if research has been done to see how feeding these animals so heavily impacts their health? I have worked a lot with reptiles and bred Burmese pythons for a while and with the exception of the burms all the other species I worked with had to be restricted in how much you fed to prevent turbo feeding. If this was not done you would wind up with a very large very young animal with a greatly shortened lifespan. I don't know if fish are the same way but being that they are both cold blooded it seems reasonable that you could push unnatural growth out of them by feeding often and raising temps to speed up their metabolism.

[John_Nicholson]

Every creature has genetic limitations but generally the healthier the fish the bigger they get. The reason that NADA set the size the way we did is because that is a reasonable size for a quality fish to achieve. I tend to have large fish and I have had several that lived into their double digits. There are lots of people that think a 5 inch fish that lives 3 or 4 years is how it is suppose to be, In reality the life expectancy of a domestic discus should be at least 8 years and a 5.5 to 7 inch total length for females and a 6 to 7.5 inch total length for males. Does that mean you should never have a female shorted than 5,5 or a male shorted than 6? No. This is where the genetic limitations comes into play, but they should be more of the exception and not the rule.

-john

[Larry Bugg]

There is a HUGE misconception here. All creatures are genetically predisposed to reach a certain size and given proper health and feeding that is the size they will reach. "Heavily" feeding a creature is not going to make it exceed this size. It may make them fat but it won't cause them to exceed their height or in this case length. Discus in the wild average the same sizes we try to achieve in our tanks. Selective breeding can be used to try and increase size but feeding isn't going to do it. Most of us don't try to force our fry to eat more than they should be eating. I think the misconception comes from us talking about water quality. We say the water quality goes bad fast because of the heavy feedings but this doesn't mean that we feed more than they should be receiving. It simply means that they are living in a closed system and any uneaten food left in that system spoils the water quickly.