What you should know about discus

I agree that beef heart isn't the best, high protein but too much fat. I think I made it 1 time but it made a lot for the freezer. It was gross to "trim" & whiz up in a food processor with other stuff. I offered it to my clown loaches a couple times. They tried it but were not crazy about.

I was in a discus club with some "hardcore" breeders with many ideas. I had to skim off the fat/protein on the water surface. Yes, fast growth & no stunting was the main objective. It was an eye-opening experience to hang with those folks. But it did help me raise what I thought were pretty good size discus in a year. Some of the "treatments" their fish went through were scary to me. Salt or potassium permaganate until the fish "rolled" (passed out?) was not likely something I could do even if needed.

My seafood mix was much better. Shrimp heavy (it works as a kind of binder), clams, whitefish, scallops, a bit of salmon or whatever looked good at the market. Some spinach or romaine & vitamins whizzed in a food processor. My clowns liked it sometimes too as a treat. I had to clean the kitchen with lemon before my husband got home but I often had a scallop lunch too.

I raised white worms & red wigglers in my basement for them too. White worms were more "edible" earlier than the bigger wigglers even at small sizes. I tried a start of white worms here in CA but it's just too hot...no basement cool temps. I would strongly suggest trying white worms for any medium/biggish fish, they're not hard to keep if you can keep them cool.

Back to TwoTankAmin's comments: yes, some fish like wood grazing plecos have longer digestive systems to get all the scant nutrition from it. That's why some "grazers" don't do well, they need a high fiber/low nutrient constantly available foods. They've often gone too long without proper food to recover. Some, like discus, have small stomachs & shorter digestive tracts. They need to feed almost all the time despite their large size & need mostly higher protein foods with some veg too.

Back when Discus were sold a pompadour fish, there was a lot of innovation just to keep them alive with very little technology. Homemade food mixes were one, and even though I never intend to keep a Discus again, I'm beholden to the old fishkeepers who came up with the recipes. I'll now increase shrimp in mine and use no other binding agents.
To me, Discus aren't special, and what they eat, a lot of fish eat. What you learn with them can be applied elsewhere. You tweak the foods for the digestive systems and the ecology of the fish you keep. It's not just particle size, but content, and that's easily managed.


Black soldier fly larvae are very inexpensive when bought as chicken feed. Fed crushed, they tend to leave calcium deposits where they fall, but they could mix into something like that very well, especially for insectivores like most of my current fish.

I wonder at the quality of the fish fed for extra rapid growth. Discus are worth a lot of money, so they are obvious candidates. But the Discus I see in stores border on deformed. The body shapes can be awful, and the skeletal development just looks wrong. There is a lot of unethical rearing - a Russian breeder I knew sold a lot of Discus, and he was adept at using a syringe on them - hormones galore, steroid city. We tend to blame inbreeding, but the 'processing' can be nasty.

GaryE said:

Back when Discus were sold a pompadour fish, there was a lot of innovation just to keep them alive with very little technology. Homemade food mixes were one, and even though I never intend to keep a Discus again, I'm beholden to the old fishkeepers who came up with the recipes. I'll now increase shrimp in mine and use no other binding agents.
To me, Discus aren't special, and what they eat, a lot of fish eat. What you learn with them can be applied elsewhere. You tweak the foods for the digestive systems and the ecology of the fish you keep. It's not just particle size, but content, and that's easily managed.


Black soldier fly larvae are very inexpensive when bought as chicken feed. Fed crushed, they tend to leave calcium deposits where they fall, but they could mix into something like that very well, especially for insectivores like most of my current fish.

I wonder at the quality of the fish fed for extra rapid growth. Discus are worth a lot of money, so they are obvious candidates. But the Discus I see in stores border on deformed. The body shapes can be awful, and the skeletal development just looks wrong. There is a lot of unethical rearing - a Russian breeder I knew sold a lot of Discus, and he was adept at using a syringe on them - hormones galore, steroid city. We tend to blame inbreeding, but the 'processing' can be nasty.

Click to expand...

These are mine i hope they don't look deformed - i've only had them for a year so not sure if i'm doing things right yet - btw most of my dwarf cichild get fluval bug bite which is over priced black soldier larvae (i think) I buy the bulk container and use a coffee grinder to chop it down to tiny bits - frys love the stuff and not so tiny bits for dwarf cichild.
--

In my eye, those are lovely discus.

I tend to buy bug bites in flake, because I now keep such small fish. I do have a coffee grinder for pellets though.

GaryE said:

In my eye, those are lovely discus.

I tend to buy bug bites in flake, because I now keep such small fish. I do have a coffee grinder for pellets though.

Click to expand...

I use the flakes for tetra - specifically the one with greens mixed in - the only two flakes i buy these days are omega-one and fluval but i discovered that grinding the pellets to a very fine level work better for the frys since it sinks faster and they like to collect at a leaf in the morning when i feed them. Kind of cute to see them march out (they are around 8 weeks old) when i put my fingers in the tank. For some reason the tetra really prefer the flakes over fine particles - they seem to like chasing them down in the current.

anewbie, your wild discus look great!

None of my fish much liked Bug Bites flakes. Maybe they were stale? I won't be buying them again. But I have other pellets with soldier fly larva in them & they are more acceptable to fish I have now. Hard to say, fish can be picky for any or no reason we can tell.