whats possiably wrong with this discus

Hi Butcherman,

Let me start by saying that the water parameters are fine.

The lips are not swollen, this is just an illusion created by the fact that this discus is completely blue, it is what is called blue diamond and the pale blue colour lets the lips look larger when these discus are of this size.

He/she is looking a little thin and needs more food, you are not feeding enough for this one to get enough food!

What to do: feed more, and almost overfeed, so that this one also gets food and then you might have to syphon off excess food, but if you do not get food into him within the next 3 or 4 days he will be gone. This is one of the biggest problems with small discus and this is why I consistently want persons to buy more than six discus (six I view to be an absolute minimum). In nature, discus at this size occur in schools of hundreds not only six at a time. What happens in nature is that each one just tries to eat as much as possible and cannot really dominate the guy next to him, there are too many. In an aquarium with six discus, the top gun quickly establishes himself and then mercilessly hammers everything else. If you underfeed you can have one discus left by two weeks later. What is also peculiar is that the other discus get completely psyched out by the dominant one and then just stop eating and give up. This one is in this phase unless you drastically improve the feeding conditions.

On top of all of this you have one other major disadvantage with this discus. In order to select discus to get to this colour they were severely inbred, brothers and sisters were mated for many generations as a result of which this strain of discus (blue diamond) really has problems such as you have. Even if you do your best with this strain, you normally have problems and losses.

You can see that you are going to have to work hard at getting food into this fish and quickly. My advice would be to increase the temp to 32 C but increase aeration as well as the oxygen levels drop drastically at these temps and then feed a lot more. There is definitely no disease here and no meds are required.

Kind regards,

Dirk

 

Glad to hear the discus is improving and water changes are always good for discus.

VERY DEFINITELY DO NOT separate him from the others, you will stress him whilst catching him, he will be on his own in the other tank which stresses him even more and you will have to put him back into the tank with the others and then he will be the new fish in the tank again and whilst recovering from his move he gets hammered again.

You can keep the temp up for about a week, but then you should reduce it because this high temp pushes up the fishes' metabolic rate which is not good for longer periods.

Kind regards,

Dirk