Cardinal nuggets...

[Joshcat]

I've read and I've read about how cardinals are great tankmates for discus. Every time I have tried to introduce them into one of my tanks, they have been dinner (lol). I bought a group of 50 about a month ago and I'm down to about 18 to 20 now. I thought the group looked depleted, but they swim so fast consistantly they are impossiable to count. We never found any bodies doing our daily cleaning or vacuming.

Two days ago I was watching the tank and one of the cardinals strayed from the school and swam in front of about a 5" butterfly. Needless to say that was all she wrote for the little guy.

Thankfully we got the cardinals at a steal of 50 for $25, from Jack Wattley's hatchery, making them not much more expensive than feeder fish.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact they eat live blackworms once daily, so they get live food in their diet?

Regards, Cathy

[susantroy1]

Don't think that has any bearing on it. Law of nature....Big fish will eat little fish. Natural Instinct. My cat eats like a horse and he still can't pass up a citrus rat, bird, lizard.... well you get the point. Can't take the predator out of a species.


All The Best

Troy

[Eddie]

Yeah, unfortunately the little tetras are lower on the food chain for discus. I've heard that the best option is to have very young discus get raised with the tetras but I wouldn't really know much about that. My discus will devour any fish I put in the tank. They've even battered and killed a cory......:(


Eddie

[Darrell Ward]

Were the cards young when you introduced them? If so, that may be your problem. When I got my group of 50, they were small, about three quarters to an inch long. So I put the group in a separate tank, and grew them out to adult size. It's been almost a year now, and I still have my group in with some adult discus that are 6" to 7" in size. I feel that had I not put some size on the cards before I put them in with the discus, I may have not had many left by now.

[Joshcat]

They are only about an inch in size, the discus in the tank range from 2 1/2 inches to about 6 inches in size. Although in the past I have had the same problem with full grown cardinals as well.

Cathy

[Ryan]

It really comes down to your individual fish. I've had discus go after bigger tetras. I've had others that wouldn't touch livebearer fry. Some just seem to have more of a hunting instinct than others.

My suggestion would be to try something larger like lemon tetras and see how that goes. If they have a taste for cardinals, there's not much you can do to curb that.

[Discus-Hans]

I ordered with a few boxes of wilds also 5,000 XL to XXL Cardinals.
No IF everything comes in this time, we are planning to grow them at least for weeks to get them on a good size before selling them for Discus tanks.

I think that's the problem with a lot of Cardinals, you buy them cheap (and small) but loose most of them, what makes the few that are left pretty expensive again,

Hans