Keeping Discus Fish Healthy Article

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Keeping Discus Fish Healthy

Keeping tropical discus fish is really not that hard. Keeping to a view rules or guidelines is a necessity not only to discus fish but also to all fish or even planted aquariums.

Author: Jan Gebhardt

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The first thing you want to do is plan. Plan the aquarium setup size and even decorations. Keep in mind that a fully-grown discus fish will require between 30 and 50 liters of water per fish. And they will do better if there is 6 or more fish in a tank. The only time I have less fish is in the breeding tanks, where there is only the two breeding discus fish in. if you keep that in mind you will need a tank of minimum of 300lit to keep discus fish. To be save I keep it at 50lit. Discus fish prefer deeper water so anything between 45cm up to 60cm in height will be nice. And bigger tanks are better because the water is a lot more stable than 20lit tanks.

I do believe in personal experience that a sump filter (trickle filter) works best. They add extra water to your tank setup making it more stable and they tend to keep nitrite down. They are less work to maintain and even easier to do weekly cleaning.

Water is surely the most important thing next to the discus fish. Keeping water clean and free of nitrite and nitrate is all easily done by regular water changes. Doing a 40% change a month is required for all tropical fish but I do prefer to do 20% daily on display tanks and up to 80 – 100% daily on breeding tanks. That is the key to safe discus keeping. Yes there are a lot of factors but this is the main one. Don’t fool around with ph to much only when you breed with them do you want the ph little bit lower sometime so that eggs get time to be fertilized. If ph is to hi the eggs turn hard to fast. I am in Pretoria South Africa and my tap water ph is 7.8 and I never had any problems.

You can feed your discus fish up to 8 times a day if you have the time; just remember to take out the left over food after 15min. I do feed my discus 3 times a day with the following:

Morning Beef heart,
12am they get Tetra Prima
6pm they will get brine shrimp, bloodworms or mysis.

Here is a more detailed database :
http://www.sadiscus.co.za

Jan Gebhardt

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Tropical Fish Breeder

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