Considering Discus

[stiffler69]

I have recently bought a pair of discus who were originally in a community tank, i soon stripped the tank down and it now only has the pair, they are in my living room in front of my front window and right next to my desk probably the busy place in the house and yet they still lay eggs and go about their buisness, they managed to hatch a batch last week but it was quickly eaten up by the few community fish i had left.

They are now the only occupants in the tank and sitting on watching over another batch of eggs what are ready to hatch any time now.

All the things i was told about discus have been completely wrong these have been hassle free very friendly and not the shy fish i was led to beleive.

I only ever do water changes with treated tap water and i have only been cleaning the tank water once a week

The fish are perfectly healthy eating great have great colourations and are breeding regular for me they just need to get the hang of it.

 

[shortymet55]

what size tank?

 

[white-worms]

well i've never kept discus before, we're contemplating getting a pair for our community tank, just wanted opinions on the validity of this set up.

we're not in a position where we want a high maintenance tank, so we're not gonna be going down the whole RO water highb tech side of things, I appreciate there is a lot of knowledge out there that say's you can't keep discus in anything but RO, you must have super soft water which is spotlessly clean or it won't work. However there also seems to be a lot of information around saying providing you get good quality locally bred stock you can keep them in hard water etc with no problems.

So our tap water pH is around 7.2-7.4. We've quite a high KH so softening through peat or anything like that isn't going to work. We're lucky that tap water nitrate is 0, the tank is reasonably heavily planted so nitrates never climb up much higher than 10/15ppm even with a heavy stocking of fish. I'm prepared to do large water changes, but not more than once a week, I travel with my job so can't always be at home to do maintenance more than once a week.

If that sort of set up won't work for discus then don't worry we're not gonna bluster in and get them regardless, we know we can't compromise on the maintenance of the tank which means if the discus won't fit into the set up we won't get any.

The tank is semi stocked at the moment, we're building up to something along these lines.... tank's 60gals, I aim to stock somewhere around 1.5" per gallon so that's 90" or so. So with this lot and a pair of discus it would be fully stocked to a bit over 1.5" per gal. The tank is well filtered with two externals, can't remember the models but there's an eheim and a fluval, both capacle of filtering the tank by themselves.

8 nannacara anomala
10 cardinal tetra
10 harequin rasbora
5 ottos
10 praecox rainbows
15 panda cories
5 chain loaches

So yeah.... any thoughts?

Well from what I can see, you seem to have the right tank mates to keep them with and good filteration in two external filters. You say you have a PH of around 7.2 - 7-4. To be honest my daughter is currently keeping discus using tap water and there doing fine a month later on. And she has a PH of around 7.4.

Most young discus these days are reared in a higher PH because they grow faster. It's only when you want to breed them does the PH 6.5 to 6 come into play. And if you have two mature externals, they will bring the PH down anyway.