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Intend to keep and breed discus at home. How many fish could i keep in my 120 litre tank? i know the tapwater in this area is far too hard and alkaline for these fish to thrive. However i am unsure of the different ways of treating the tapwater to suit these wonderful fish. Could you please outline a variety of methods of adjusting the water, ranging from the simple and cheap to the highly technical and expensive?

thank you in advance for your valued advice

If you're intending that your Discus become breeding fishes, you're on a very steep learning curve vis-a-vis water quality and management.

Discus are specialised fishes that have a whole body of literature devoted exclusively to them. in the past I've likened Discus keeping to a religion with strange initiation rites a la the Freemasons, and though this was done for humour, it's only partly a joke. You'll discover that keeping Discus in conditions conducive to their successful breeding is an exercise in intensive aquarium management.

If your native tap water is hard and alkaline, then I'm afraid you're looking at getting an RO unit. An expensive piece of kit, but one that will solve a LOT of water quality issues at source, before you even start. Once you have RO water to play with, you can condition it to the fishes' liking a LOT more easily than you can your raw tap water.

Among the options you will be looking at will be peat filtration, addition of blackwater tonic to provide humic acids similar to those found in the native waters of the Discus, and you would be advised to spend a fair amount of money on a top-notch filtration system for the aquarium before you spend a penny on fishes. Eheim external canister filters and a brace of similar technology items are the order of the day if you want your enterprise to enjoy a good chance of success - water cleanliness with Discus is considerably more important than with many other fishes, as Discus will, if stressed, fall prey to disease with frightening speed.

As for space ... 120 litres is, I am sad to have to inform you, seriously inadequate for this project. You should be looking at 500 litres as a baseline for one pair ... if you're going to get several Discus and let them pair up naturally, then I would be looking at nearer 750 litres for the main home, and a 500 litre as a separate breeding aquarium once you have a pair to work with.

Be advised that you're in for a roller coaster ride. There's a LOt to learn in the world of Discus keeping, and the serious Discus people will introduce you to such delights as trace element management as well, something that is usually thought of as a saltwater fishkeeping management tool.

I admire your ambition - if you become successful as a Discus breeder, you'll have come a LONG way as a fishkeeper, and you'll be able to hold your head up high in elevated company. But that should give you an insight now, before you've spent a penny on the enterprise, of the kind of workload you're looking at in order to be successful. My advice at this stage is to sit down, and plan LONG AND HARD on this one. Every hour spent at the planning stage helps alleviate expensive heartache later with fishkeeping as a whole, but it's of CRITICAL importance with fishes as expensive, specialised and sensitive to water managemnt issues as Discus. If I was embarking upon this, I'd spend at least THREE MONTHS in the planning stage alone - that should give you an indication of the fun and games you can expect ...


Panda Catfish fan and keeper/breeder since Christmas 2002