The Puffer Forum

I posted this over on SD and didn't get much help. I know that at least one of you has discus so hopefully I can get more concrete answers over here

Several months ago (I think around 3-4) we picked up what we thought were a male and female discus. Our tank is 65gal and has some BN plecos and cories. We didn't want to overstock the tank so we thought we'd try a forced pairing. The male is quite active and perky, always has a lot of full colour. The female however is dark a lot of the time, she doesn't seem as if she's adjusting very well. The back of the tank is black as well as the substrate. She's quite active, eats very well, and is showing no signs of illness, nor has she ever. She and the male get along very well, they're together almost all of the time and they've never shown any aggression towards each other. The male has been trying very hard to woo her for a while but she shows no interest in him.

My main questions are:
1. Does her behaviour lead to the assumption that she is not doing well in a pair and needs other discus?
2. With 11 sterbai, 2 rams, 4 BN plecos, and 1-2 SAEs, can we comfortably fit 3 more discus in that tank with 75% weekly water changes? If not what water volume would be recommended for that stocking? I could ask about putting in a sump.
3. How bad would it be to have 4 discus in there instead of 5 (or 6 gulp, definitely don't think the tank can handle 6)?

We could get rid of some plecos and have only one SAE but it'll be really hard to catch the cories that we would want to get rid of, probably close to impossible.

I am not a discus keeper. But i have questions - as usual.

What do you want from the pair and from the tank? is it strictly show, or do you want to breed? To me those are quite different tanks and would have quite different set-ups. For example, for breeding i consider it way overstocked right now. All the SAEs should go at least - they are workers only when young and a major hazard to flat-bodied , heavy slime coat fish when mature, and are then a major hazard to both adults and to fry (adult SAE are high-protein eaters, only the young make do with algae/veggies). Ditto most of the others. The cory cats are likely okay if they can handle the heat.

So, define your goals for us and you will get better - more useful and to the point - responses.

My friend who breeds, keeps his in a BB tank with only a spawning terra cotta pot & a sponge filter. He does 100-200% WC on them daily.

I've been having my own discus problems lately... After keeping them for many years, I lost 5 of them in the past year. They get thin, dark & then just waste away. Treated their food with prazi several times. Just got metro for them but the last one passed after the 1st treatment, so I'm not much for giving advice on them.

Hubby (who is always in the same room as them), reports to me that the largest discus is always bullying the others away from the food. Might be the issue, I'm not sure but boy is he big & beautiful! I'm considering making him the showpiece & just adding smaller fish in there.

He certainly is gorgeous!

The point of trying the forced pairing was so that we could keep discus and avoid overstocking the tank. The idea was to have a pair of very healthy large gorgeous fish rather than have a small school of stunted or less healthy ones. I did a lot of reading and knew that there was mixed success with forced pairing but that breeding pairs do well for years when kept only as a pair. I just want them to be happy, healthy (err... comfortable?), and live a full life. She may just be trying to blend into the background as she's nice and bright when she comes out to eat and such but their attitudes are so different from each other, I think she should be more social and that worries me.

We have no current desire to breed them, they're the display pets in the display tank. The thought of raising discus fry exhausts me Apparently they'll make beautiful babies but that's definitely not in the cards anywhere in the near future. If we were to every try that we'd move them into their own tank.

I'll have to do more reading about the SAEs. I've always read that they're great algae eaters. They are the true SAEs, from the genus Crossocheilus. What you're describing sounds to me like false SAE or Chinese algae eaters. I'll look into it more. They're currently still in QT thankfully.

The cories are sterbais so they'll be fine with the heat. They're absolutely adorable. Some of the plecos can go, we raised them to be resold, it's just a matter of catching them. They're calico so they also stay an inch or two smaller than normal BN plecos.

I took some pictures of them, I'll try and get them up later today.

Nope, the true SAE are higher protein as adults also, but not nearly as aggressive as CAEs. they just stop grazing alage and prefer meatier foods* (almost all prepared foods are high-protein these days, even foods supposedly designed for mbuna).

Ask any long-term planted tank person - they almost invariably will say that the adults are worthless as workers, but by that time have become pets, so are fed like any other fish. But Discus keepers tend to trade them off early to avoid their developing a taste for slime coats. i used to hang around with two discus breeders - their whole house was double plumbed - one water system for them, one for the discus. The fish got one one or two large-volume partials daily from aging and oxygenating vats in the basement. You see, I learned my insanity early and well.