Discus doing great!!

pikwik

pikwik

Fish Are Friends
Jun 13, 2005
82
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50
Surrey, BC
Today is day 3 and my Discus is now eating whenever I feed. He is also hangin out with the Rams and swimming around with them. He has shown a couple of good speed bursts across the tank as well. I didn't know that Discus could swim so fast. Tonight he was almost eating right out of my finger tips. He also comes over and stares at me when I go near the tank. These seem to be good signs so far, lets just hope it stays this way. He seems like a very curious fish, just like my Rams. :o
 
Congrats, just keep a real good eye on him, it doesn't take much to cause problems with them.

If you have a food processor or grinder, I can give you a food recipie for him, if not, try some 90% lean beef hamburger and see if he eats it.
 
NatakuTseng said:
Congrats, just keep a real good eye on him, it doesn't take much to cause problems with them.

If you have a food processor or grinder, I can give you a food recipie for him, if not, try some 90% lean beef hamburger and see if he eats it.
Click to expand...

Could you please pm me your recipe! That would be great. If I was to feed him beef would it have to be cooked?
 
no you want it Raw. Just be sure to remove anything that goes uneaten.

1lb raw shrimp ground fine
1800mg Multivitamin no iron crushed into a powder
1800mg Calcium +D crushed into a powder
2-3 hardboiled egg yolks into a paste

Mix all of this together, a 1lb mix will fit into a 1gallon ziplock bag, at a 1/4" flat. Freeze it and either break peices off to feed or cut it up into 1/4-1/2" squares and store it back in the freezer.
 
I would never encourage anyone but a professional breeder to feed beef to any tropical fish. The fats are completely different than those encountered by aquatic animals, and can cause serious problems in terms of digesting. Mammal fats solidify in tropical waters, and the fish can't deal with it, in addition to problems for water quality this will cause in most setups.

There is a difference between professional breeder maintenance and those of hobbyists. Advice for one does not cross over very well.
 
Well tell that to the 1000s of hobbyists that feed beef burger or beefheart (with the burger being a substitute for the BH when not available, or better yet using the shrimp mix I gave, ground lean turkey burger can also be used) to their discus OG. Its probably the most reccomended diet for the fish. Outside of this forum, you won't find anyone bashing feeding it to discus, only encouraging. Just be sure you clean up the uneaten food and you'll be fine.

High protein and meaty foods are extremely important for discus, which is why the beef, turkey, shrimp, haddock, etc is very commonly used.

So, I'll continue advocating using it. Its a good diet, and not as messy as most people think, I've fed it, its good, doesn't foul the water quickly, but I do prefer the shrimp for a higher protein level, as well as other properties the shrimp has.
 
Your choice, but people also need to understand the hazards. There are lots of things that are pushed, here and elsewhere, that are not always best practice, and certainly not universally applicable.
 
:joke: Make sure to feed one inch of ground beef per gallon. :joke:

Sorry that was a bad joke. I can agree with OG on 2 points. One if you can feed them something more like thier natural diet(shrimp as NT suguests) why feed them something else that might not be good for them. Two, an experiencced breeder/fishkeeper will be able to better spot the problems which may arrise out of feeding unnatural(to the fish) foods. I'm sure OG and NT know more about what those would be than I do, not sure how experienced pikwik is, but I would sure hate to see "discus were doing great, but now are swimming upsidedown" posted next week.
 
Beef is a universal discus food around the world. Whether it be beefheart or very lean ground burger, nearly everyone from Hobbyists to Breeders use it, because its a safe, effective, and quality food for the fish.

Every commercially available food marketed to discus is beef, Jack Wattley has a food out even that's main ingredient is beefheart. Not many people feed shrimp because its a good deal more expensive than beef, I do because I get better growth rates out of it, and also acts as a natural color enhancer.

It all comes down to that its just as safe to use as anything else from Frozen brineshrimp to a flakefood. If you let anything sit in the tank of course it will rot and cause problems. The raw beef and raw shrimp takes a while to start rotting, I have let both sit in tanks for well over 6-7hrs as the discus like to pick at it, and no signs of even begining to degrade with either, the water has also tested perfectly fine with doing so.

Flake, pellet, and other manufactured foods are not the best diets period. A homemade food enriched with vitamins, calcium, and the amino acids and such found in the egg yolks is a super healthy staple diet, any fish can benefit from a targeted homemade food.
 
Ground beef and beefheart are very different products--even the leanest ground beef readily available is higher in fat than beefheart.
 
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