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How to Keep Healthy Discus - Page 2
2) Heat
Discus like heat. They need in water that's at least 82 degrees, and many breeders recommend 88 degrees. According to quite a few sources, heat is the secret to getting discus to grow really big (like six inches or more in diameter). If you're going to grow plants and have other fish in the tank, that's going to put some serious restrictions of what will thrive in heat like that. See our article on plants for the best choices.
3) Excellent nutrition
A good variety of foods for discus would include beef-heart, bloodworms, baby brine shrimp, a flake food like Omega, and occasional spinach or other greens. Live bloodworms and brine shrimp are fairly easy to find, but be sure to mix these foods with flake or frozen fare. Discus can get very attached to live bloodworms and if your supply of them suddenly dries up you could be stuck with discus who refuse to eat anything else. Sounds unlikely, but I've heard of this happening several times. Even if they do eat, if your discus don't eat heartily they will not grow to the size you had hoped for. Also, feeding only one kind of food opens up the possibility for a bunch of ailments that come from vitamin deficiencies.
When my recent batch arrived from the breeder, they ate only bloodworms. This was OK, because they were hungry enough to accept frozen blood worms Per the instructions of the breeder I got them from, I offered a bit of frozen beef-heart with the bloodworms. For weeks they either ignored it or barely picked at it. Then one day I let them get pretty hungry (about 8 hours since their last feeding) and gave them only beef-heart. They picked at it a little more, but over the next few hours did finish it off. I kept at it - a little beef-heart, a bit of bloodworms, making sure that they had at least one good pig-out a day, and they now eat beef-heart as ferociously as bloodworms. I repeated the same technique with flake food (MUCH cheaper) and they now eat flake food with no hesitation. I'm still working on getting them to eat the frozen vegi-mix I have (with lots of spinach), but they're not as enthusiastic about that yet.
There is a vitamin additive called Zoe that you can soak food in, then feed. It has good specs, and I have tried it, but the fish seem to eat a bit less vigorously. There's another product called "Garlic Guard" that my pet store guy (who raised discus for several years) said would make the medicated food I was offering the discus more palatable to them. I tried it, and they did eat enough of the medicated food for it to work, but I'm not convinced it was so much the garlic guard as the fact that they were really hungry.
Its a balancing act with getting discus to eat new foods. You must feed them enough to keep them growing, but they'll need to be unusually hungry to accept new foods.
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