Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)
Hi,
John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.
I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.
With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.
I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.
If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.
I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.
I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.
Thank you
Darragh Sherwin
discus breeding
Look underneath between the anal fins and the pelvic fin.
The distance between the fins is proportionally longer and has less of an angle in females than in males.
But that is not always easy to determine.
But, if you can get to see the genital/anal region. The inner concentric circle tends to be larger and closer to the outer circle in a female. The male inner circle is clearly further away from the outer.
However, in breeding Discus the best option is place young ones together with the hope you have more than one sex. They will select suitable mates from within that group.
It is not always a matter of putting a male with a female and expecting them to act like rabbits.
I have, in the past, bought a male and female and put them together and they have successfully bred and raised babies....so it can work.
As for spawning, if you keep you fish in good discus conditions, a mated pair will spawn.
Lots of good food and good quality water is essential to discus keeping anyway.
Raising the babies? well not every pair are good when it comes to raising babies....but that is a hurdle to jump when you come to it.
ian
Irish Tropical Fish Society (ITFS) Member.
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Ian, Why would discus eat their own eggs the minute their layed?
That is all part of life's mysteries.
We can speculate though....
some pairs may eat their first batches of eggs, yet eventually raise them after several spawnings; some pairs never eat any eggs; others may always eat their eggs.
The reason for eating the eggs could be something inherited or simply a general reaction to an environment (eg 'better to eat our eggs than let a predator eat them' or a mix of the two.
There is an in-built mechanism to eat eggs anyway if the parents feel that the eggs are not viable. Now, that brings multiple reasons for that behaviour....maybe the water makes the eggs unviable, maybe one of the parents is infertile, maybe the parents are unable to detect viable from non-viable eggs.
Some believe the parents will be trained in time, but there is no real evidence for that....just a number of guesses of parents seemingly learning to take care of the eggs.
If you have egg=eaters, and decide to raise the eggs artificially then one would have to ask if that is producing a new generation of potentially duff discus?
ian
Irish Tropical Fish Society (ITFS) Member.
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as ian said Sexing discus has always been problematic at best. However, I recently read an article in Diskus Brief which describe a method for sexing Discus. The method described uses "geometry" to determine sex ... Picture a discus facing to your left ... you would be looking at it's side. Find the Dorsal (Top) and Anal (bottom) fins and look where the fins slope down toward the Caudal (tail) fin ... make sure you're looking at the fins after they have curved back toward the tail. The Dorsal and Anal Fins become (almost) straight after the fins curve down (or up) toward the Caudal Fin ... extend an imaginary line along this straight section of the 2 fins back toward the tail which just touches the Dorsal & Anal Fins past the Caudal Fin. These two imaginary lines should intersect behind the fish. The key to sexing the fish is where the lines cross the Caudal fin. If they pass through the Caudal Fin, the fish is most likely a FEMALE. If they miss or just touch the Caudal Fin, then most likely it is a MALE.
dave.
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I will check my 2 breeding pairs against this method and let you known what I find.
The tank lights are out now so I will look tomorrow.
Thanks for sharing this.
Greg
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What camera are you using.
When I take photos of my fish they are always slightly fuzzy due to their movement.
They just wont stand still for the camera
Greg
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i found my discus very shy and using flash you just wouldn't get them all same day.
ISO 800 and aperture arround 4 maybe.. try waiting till fish is a bit further from the glass, so you get more light shining on to the side you are picturing, have your glass clean ~ish
(helps with autofocus, cose it can focus on the dirt on the glass).Lack of light and/or shaky hands will make your pictures fuzzy.
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