Discus are extraordinarily elegant creatures and they easily surpass the size with almost the same shape of a saucer for your table. They move with regal restraint unless startled and then they take off faster than blue bullets.
Note: the one pictured above is not one from the Hazel Hideaway Project but looks quite similar.
Watching them cruising in a tank of at least fifty-five gallons is an obviously beautiful thing but where it gets supremely fascinating is when we observe two of them have formed a pair and these were Wilson and Aretha.
Raising Wilson and Aretha was a highly-focused campaign by the Mystery Lady and I back in the Hazel Hideaway for music and fish. They were the only fish in the tank and deliberately so because we had observed them engaging in what appeared to be breeding behavior and, at that time, breeding discus in home aquaria was regarded as a high maybe even a wizard art.
As we watched it became clear they were searching for just the right place to lay eggs because it must be a flat surface of the right consistency, etc for them to select it. In time they did find a place they found satisfactory and the female then laid the eggs while the male made passes over them to fertilize them afterward.
That set off the alarm since, oh wow, now what do we do. There was already some readiness since the Brine Shrimp Farm had started up in old two-liter Pepsi bottles which were sawed-off and an aerator had been added in water suitable for raising them by seeding them with eggs. In days there were baby brine shrimp and the fry (i.e. newly-hatched fish) can eat them. Harvesting the brine shrimp was just as annoying as you would expect it to be so that part isn't interesting; that which happened in-between was fascinating.
Discus parenting is subtle but you can watch them to see how they take care of the eggs by hovering over them, maybe because that fans water over them for some reason. They bolt easily and may well eat the eggs if startled so everything stayed very cool in the Discus Hatchery. The water was kept probably around eighty degrees because Discus are from around the Amazon.
Note: there was use of a high-quality water filter but there was no UV radiation of the water to sterilize it or anything of that nature. Water changes were done periodically but not religiously. They seemed to do quite well in that environment.
The really fascinating part comes after the fry hatch since an almost imperceptible cloud of them will flock immediately to the nearest parent. They hover closely by the parent because they can feed from a 'slime coat' on the parent which sustains them until they're ready for the baby brine shrimp.
We don't know, maybe science does by now, why it happens that one Discus may 'tire' of having the herd of fry following all the time. The answer sometimes is to eat them. Maybe they decide the environment just isn't right and, poof, they disappear almost immediately. It's surprising to discover how much of a heartbreaker that becomes because they work so diligently to create them but then suddenly wipe them out. This happened many times but slowly they went longer as we got the environment tuned how they like it the best.
That's still not the fascinating part since the other alternative on 'tiring' of the herd is to swim by the other parent Discus and then swim away, as quickly as possible, so the cloud of fry is left behind and momentarily confused. Immediately they latch on to the other parent and they're not really attached, they just hover closely. They will stay with this parent until that one 'tires' and then the repeat the process.
That behavior continues and it's really a delight since by that time we could see them growing and then it gets like this:
Flash, as always, is a horror for accurate color but the main thing is the cloud of young ones which, by this time, are taking the baby brine shrimp but still they keep hovering close to one of the parents. Finding this kind of sophisticated behavior in creatures with brains smaller than peanuts is such an exquisite thing and sometimes it's even beautiful to watch.
Since we were relative novices to raising Discus, there were casualties and eventually the herd thinned down to the Blues Brothers. The pictures in the blog today are not the ones we were raising although they share many similarities.
Wilson and Aretha and the Blues Brothers became, hopefully, long-term family members. There were no children but there was always a dog, multiple cats, sometimes even birds, but never was there anything like this and we got quite attached to them. They grew to a surprising size and this really looked like Discus Heaven.
Regrettably, there isn't a Happy Ending with this one we hope those Discus did wind up in Discus Heaven but it wasn't in the Hazel Hideaway. We will skip the tragedy part which may sound like poetic license but it really was a crusher for both of us to see it didn't work out and they weren't going to make it. We tried every kind of fish science we could find but it just wasn't happening. Eventually we decided we are Shameful Discus Killers so we did not continue with it. There's not usually a personal association with tropical fish but that came remarkably to both of us with these.
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