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		Ari & Scott
		Page 3 of 7	Pages: 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7
		JE: Are you presently breeding any discus or is it something you plan on doing? Ari: We are not breeding them at the moment. Every now and then, we would pull out a pair and let them raise a spawn or two. Scott is too busy and I am too lazy. It is not hard to get them spawning and raising a spawn, but far harder to raise the babies to good size... A lot of work involved. We are lucky though, to have perfect tap water.... The water is coming out of the tap at 28deg C (at the moment in summer), and very soft with the pH of 7-7.2. So, the discus loves it!! I think, we will get into breeding, because most of our adult discuses are well and trully ready. At one stage, we had 4 pairs spawning in our community tanks at the same time!! It was interesting to watch the dynamics of the tank... And they all do partner swapping and all...lol. It was definitely fun to watch though. Scott: I wouldn't call what we're doing breeding in the true sense of the word. We have 5 pairs of mismatched discus that breed in our adult tank (which just happens to be planted), but so far we've only raised 2 spawns. The first (SSxMR) was culled completely since they runted out, and the second spawn (RSGxSS)is too early to cull yet. I have a lot to learn about culling, and only cull the obvious deformities. A real breeder would be much more ruthless in the pursuit of excellence. It's more of a learning period at this stage. I currently have a white pigeon paired to a blue turq that continually raise wrigglers in the adult tank, so they are in the brood tank with a clutch of eggs at the moment. Should hatch today actually, so we'll see what we wind up with. Long term, I'd love to develop my own strain, or at least "fix" some of the existing strains. I love the red whites, golden whites and blue whites. If I could fix the strains to breed true, I'd love to name them!! There are so many discus out there with arbitrary names, you never know what their parent were. And even if you breed brother to sister, you wouldn't get 100% of the offspring looking like their parents. I'm guilty of crossing discus strains, but if it looks like a pigeon or a red turq, that's what I'd call it. JE: What do you feed your discus? How do you have your filtration set up? Ari: We feed beefheart, frozen bloodworm, frozen brineshrimp and tetra bits. Nothing fancy. We can't get cheap and good source of live blackworms, so we are staying away from live food. For our big community tank, we have wet and dry filter. Great filter!! We absolutely love it, and the discus seems to like it as well. And for other 2 juvenile tanks, we just run cannister filters. I know they are a pain to clean, but we never have any problem with them, and they require less maintenance than those AC filters, so we stick with them. We also put a sponge filter in each tank. For pairs and babies, we only use sponge filters, without any mechanical filtration. Scott: Our discus get frozen blood worms, frozen brine shrimp, frozen beef heart and tetra bits (not necessarily in that order)! Every now and then, they get red wrigglers from the compost heap. We have live bloodworms breeding in a bucket outside, but the rainbows eat them at the moment, along with mosquito wrigglers. I'm still hesitant about live foods, but I'll experiment with a cull to see how they go. If I had access to CBW, I reckon they'd be eating those as well. The filtration on the adult's tank is wet and dry (20% of the total volume) and a hydrosponge. The other 55s are on canisters and hydrosponges, and the brood / growout tanks are on hydrosponges only. We also have a couple of internal power filters we use for the quarantine/hospital tanks, be they are essentially high flow compact hydrosponges . Water changes are semi-automated using permanent syphons. Our water comes out of the tap with 1° of hardness, neutral pH and this time of year, at 28°C. We filter through a domestic ceramic/carbon filter to remove chlorine, and fill tanks without water aging. Water changes are 50% per week on the adult tank (planted) and 50% twice weekly on the BB tanks. Growouts are done daily or at least every other day @50% We have mostly via-aqua heaters and one tronic. No titaniums as yet, but I expect our dream tank (8 footer!!) would use those in the sump of the wet & dry. more...

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