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		Ari & Scott
		Page 4 of 7	Pages: 1 . 2 . 3 . 4 . 5 . 6 . 7
		JE: What is your most exhilarating moment with discus? Ari: Watching my first pair spawning and raising babies.... That was just magic. I was home at the time... and I just sat in front of the tank and watched them for hours. Scott: It would have to be when our discus successfully raised their spawn from wrigglers to free-swimming fry. Before that, we just enjoyed the discus, and had no intention whatsoever of breeding them. It was too much like hard work I thought! But when we started to have pairs forming and spawning in the tank, we thought we'd take it to the next step and see what happened. Seeing my pet fish covered in clouds of fry was certainly a high point in my discus experience. JE: What is your most frustrating moment with discus? Ari: When fish refused to grow at all, and then stop eating... and get disease in the end. I really hate loosing fish, but I guess some fish are doing better than others, and some are growing better too. Scott: Which one - there have been many! If I had to pick one, it is having a discus runt out despite all my efforts to make him grow. If I buy half a dozen 1" fish, it is always the cleanest or the most interestingly patterned that refuses to grow. His tankmates double, then triple in size. So I'd isolate him and try metro to kill of internal parasites. Discus do best in groups, so I'd rearrange the stock in the tanks to put him with similar sized tank mates. Even then if he perks up and starts interacting, the damage is done, and he'll never grow as well as his siblings. Sometimes they are just a sickly fish that hang at the back during feeding, and slowly waste away. These are the most frustrating moments, but if his tank mates are fat and healthy, I just write him off as an under-achiever and leave him to his own devices. We probably have 5 or 6 fish like this that I'm hoping will recover and become fat, healthy albeit stunted and pointy adults. But I'm not holding my breath. JE: Do you have any future discus plans? Ari: Well....we get into discus because we love the fish, so I don't think we will be a big time breeder or anything like that. I would be happy to raise a spawn or two every now and then. But, most of the time, we just want to enjoy the fish. We still like travelling and being a big time breeder will stop us from doing our travelling. So, we try to get a balance there. But, we will always have discus, we can assure you that. This hobby will stick with you forever, I think, once you get into it..... Scott: Who doesn't?!! Like I said earlier, I'd love to concentrate on the white crosses and see if I can breed them into their own strain. That is a long way off though. I'd like to experiment with philodendrons as nitrate removers, and fluidised sand filters. I toyed with the idea of central filtration, but in the end decided it was just too complicated and too risky. I'll leave that to the commercial breeders. And then there's the kiddie pool growout idea from Cary, John and Beth, which I think is a great idea. An aquaculturist friend of mine has worked on barramundi farms in Far North Queensland, and there is an optimum stocking level for their ponds. They don't change water, and there are no plants in the ponds. During summer, it would be an easy way of growing fry out to a saleable size. I always say that if necessity was the mother of invention, laziness was the father... more...

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