so this is the male and you can see that he's a lot lighter in coloration right now
than he was previously in the other tank he is standing uh straight up he's going to do just fine
absolutely stunning fish though isn't he
beautiful one of my favorite discus is some of the solid colors
but blues have always been a challenge for me i've read them in the past but not in uh numbers as
high as i've done with other varieties of discus now of course the female look the male's already
down sucking so i'm going to try to get them into locations that are very close to each other
i don't want to break that that bonding but a lot of the times when disks move their tanks it can
induce spawning meaning that maybe they're not breeding in your tank but the minute you move
them to somewheres else a lot of the times it triggers them to do so a change in surroundings
i think these guys will be perfect in this tank the female is obviously doing a little bit better
but she she does see her mail there she's like come on up bro please get up
she's like we got a new tank we can do this oh she she laid her cheek up against them
uh so this is a great opportunity to kind of get a good look at his profile and you can kind of
see the differences in males versus females the male develops a slight nuchal hump versus the
female i don't know if we're going to see that or not and of course at times their dorsal fin will
be a little more pointed as well i'm going to let these guys settle in a little bit before we talk
any more about them but i have a bunch of things that i want to tell you about and discuss and
mostly focusing on things that we're going to be doing that will lead to the success
of breeding these guys and making sure they remain healthy and and vibrant as soon as
they want to stop pouting but discus will do that so the discus are in the tank now they
are doing fine uh of course it's been less than 24 hours so they might be a little bit shy but they
are out throughout the entire aquarium exploring it is a very large tank for just two fish and
i'm pleased to see that they've uh maintained that bond between them i also put this towel up
uh because i noticed in the last video i talked i was talking like this the bright lights were
too bright in my experience uh when you move a discus pair one of three things can happen
the biggest thing is when you have a proven pair and they're not breeding in that tank
if moving the anything in the ground in the tank or a big water change or trying to
induce breeding with live feeding like california black worms for example doesn't work
move them to a new tank and that uh a lot of the times within like 24 hours they will spawn
however it also potentially breaks the pair uh and or they'll still stick together but never
breed again so again there is some minor uh risks when moving a breeding pair of discs from tank to
tank but for the most part like nine out of ten times they'll always breed so i'm happy to see
these two are sticking together the male kind of leading the way the female trailing behind him
that's not uncommon she's showing interest when he's ready uh he will display to her encourage
her to lay the eggs and of course fertilize them and we'll go from there where they'll do
that in this tank i do not know but i do want to use this opportunity to kind of talk about
water quality and the parameters of it when getting into discus and i'm going to apply this
to everything that i keep you guys know that i have sea horses octopus south american cichlids
brackish water fish we've got puffer fish salt water puffer fish we've got fresh water puffer
fish we've got freshwater stingrays we've got asian arowana we've got uh piranha we've got
discus all different types of fish that on paper require all different types of water parameters
do they though what do you think the ph of my water is for every tank
to summarize that i don't know i'm literally asking you do you know what it is because i don't
i knew what it was about 10 years ago though when i bought this house and you get the water report
and it showed me the ph was about 7.6 to 7.8 depending on the season uh water was hard
enough to stand on and it had lovely little levels of arsenic and all these other little
flavors and spices that are in it that i don't want in it but the levels are so low
that it's no real concern being on a well as a wonderful thing because i don't have to
pre-treat the water you know buy ten dollars worth of water treatment a month but i do have to worry
about what's getting into the spring and into the well throughout the seasons in the spring
of course when all that snow melts and all the rains flushing through the earth lord knows what
it's bringing with it and it can be a dangerous time and it's the only time i've ever noticed
uh fish acting weird after a water change but you can add things that'll neutralize things up you
don't know that's in the water that maybe there's a spike in something ace accr i think it's called
fritz makes it it's a powder a little sprinkle of that i've only had to do that twice this year
i noticed that the oscars were acting weird after a water change i did a really big one temperature
was right and i thought you know maybe there's something in the water it is spring this is a
bad idea to do this big of a water change right now but they're pigs and i had to do it um you
know so moving forward for the next three months i won't do anything bigger than 30 on these tanks
so how the heck am i keeping discus in seven ph of 7.6 how did i breed so many discus in a ph of 7.6
and i hired really hard water when they come from incredibly acidic and soft water conditions well
these are not wild discus first and foremost and chances of you owning wild fish are slim to none
although a lot of the times some people that are truly against keeping wild caught fish if
i ever get to have a look at their tank some of those fish aren't being bed in captivity yet in
numbers to sustain the hobby and they sometimes have wild caught fish and don't even know it
so given the fact that these are not wild caught fish i don't really need to chase
those numbers and that's the topic of what i'd like to talk about is chasing numbers in general
why do people do it why do we constantly test ph and hardness in a freshwater aquarium
and then dump in some ph up ph down add in some buffers add this add that why do we do it
because of two reasons one it's one of the things that we could test for in the hobby
and if we couldn't test for it we probably wouldn't care about it two it's easy to
treat and uh and then test again you get to feel like a little scientist
so what we're doing here is instead of having whatever's coming out of your tap and giving
them ideal straight across the board even though it's not perfect or what they have in the wild
what we do is we have these fluctuating numbers and fluctuating everything within your aquarium
all the tanks out here um and you gotta ask yourself what do you think your
fish prefer this while you chase those numbers regardless of how you do it
uh whether you're treating the water in there and then it goes into the tank afterwards treated
you know are you buffering the water is it going to be able to come back up or go back
down et cetera there's so many things that can go wrong when you start messing with the water or do
you think they prefer okay this isn't perfect but at least it's consistently the same all the time
obviously consistency the same all the time every aquarium out here is on the same water
ph of 7.6 uh temperatures fluctuate from 25 to 28 degrees celsius depending on the water temperature
i bred the discus in all types of temperatures uh and sizes of tanks um hardness hard enough
to stand on you know there are pros and cons for me the cons with hard water is hard water stains
other than that i don't really care but when you're chasing ph one of the bad things that
can happen and one of the effects that it has on the fish and the most immediate effects is
we're not just worrying about the fish you have bacteria in your filter
and constantly putting them through acidic and alkaline conditions could potentially be killing
them off ammonia is far more toxic in alkaline conditions than it is an acidic uh so sometimes
when the the fish have uh acidic water so you're like oh no my ph is too low i better raise it
we might even have ammonia in your water and not even know it and then once your ph comes up it now
becomes incredibly toxic to them leave your water alone i guess is the moral of the story simply oh
simplicity and consistency is key i wrote that in my book
nine years ago this isn't anything new i've been applying this method of fish keeping to
every aquarium that i've had for probably 17 of the 20 years the first three years of my hobby
we don't like to talk about that or at least the first couple years you know get a fish add it to
the tank tank it's cloudy clean everything add in some carbon change all the water clean everything
constantly constantly doing that and then oh somebody taught me about the nitrogen cycle the
single most important factor of our hobby period at the end of the day we are keeping bacteria
as the main animal or organism and the fish are the food
they produce along with decaying matter in the
tank and uneaten food and whatnot but they are what feeds our bacteria
that is the single most important factor ph hardness all that stuff i could care less
now i'm not saying that you need to do this as well however if you apply
a consistent uh husbandry to your aquariums in the most simplistic manner i can assure you
your fish will be happier and so will you anyways end of rant