First of all, here is/was my objective: I wanted to raise and breed discus. My goal was to get 6 discus and hope for a breeding pair (or two) to form. I would then move the pairs to 30 gallon breeding tanks and keep 2-4 discus in a show tank in my den. The show tank is a 55 gallon tank.

After doing alot of research, these are some of the initial question's I faced:

1) Gravel or Bare Bottom?
Since my tank was to be a planted show tank, I chose to go with Gravel. If I had to do it again, I'd set it up as Bare Bottom tank to grow out the discus. Cleaning a bare bottom tank is so easy and feeding young discus 3 times a day makes it alot of work right now with Gravel. If you have the time to spend on it, gravel is ok at this point. After the Discus were grown (and any mating pairs were put in breeding tanks), I'd put the remaining grown discus into the show tank.

2) Live or plastic plants:
I chose live plants because my other 3 tanks have live plants and I love them. My Discus tank has: Hygrophila difformis, Hygrophila corymbosa, Hygrophila polysperma, Anubias var. nana, Cryptocoryne balansae, willisii, wendtii, Echinodorus bleheri, and Microsorum pteropus. All of the plants are doing well. I ordered them thru Delaware Aquatics and was only disappointed in the Java Fern from them. For fertilizer I use is Tetra hylena crypto and florapride. I have one 40 watt Triton.

If I had to do it again, I'd wait until the Discus were established and I was sure everything was disease free before I added live plants. Adding any medicine and raising the temperature to 92 F plays havoc on the plants..especially the crypts.

3) Discus only tank or Discus plus other fish:
I like variety and chose to add other fish. After looking into what other fish will be ok with Discus water parameters, I chose to add some clown loaches, cardinal tetras, and a couple of ottocinclus. No problems at this point. The clowns are kind of active but the discus hold their own during feeding and are not spooked by the clowns. I like the fact that the clown loaches keep the gravel free of any uneaten food also.

4) Filtration:
I chose to go with a sponge filter and an aquaclear 300 with two sponges in it. Seems to work fine and provide sufficient filtration.

5) Heaters:
I went with 2 150 watt heaters. I thought that 2 smaller heaters were safer if one happened to fail. 2 150 watt heaters work fine.

6) Water conditions:
I'm on municipal water system. My PH = 7.0, my hardness is app. 150ppm. I originally planned to use Acid Buffer to alter my ph but after reading [a previous post to discus-l], I decided against it. I do not alter PH or hardness. Temp is 86F

7) Water changes:
I do 10-15% every other day and a 40-50% change about once every 10 days. Originally, I aged the water > 24hrs. in a rubbermaid container prior to adding it to my tank. After seeing what a pain this was (the trashcan was in the basement), I started going with direct tap water via a python water changer. I measure for chlorine and chloramine from the tap prior to doing changes. There has been no chloramine present in my tap water and chlorine has been 0.00-0.25ppm. I add a little stress-coat as I'm adding the water to my tank.

8) Where to get Discus:
Since I didn't know of any reputable breeders locally, I chose to go with one of the ones recommended on [ discus-l] via mail order. I ordered 6 cobalts. They arrived right on time. I opened the box and found 7 instead of six (by 6 get one free???) The seventh one almost dead in the bag and didn't make it. Of the other six, 5 looked great and 1 was kind of dark. The 5 fish come straight to the front of the tank any time I enter the room and practically beg for food. The dark one rarely eats. After leaving for 4 days during christmas, I came back to find him missing. Don't know what happened yet.

9) Food:
I've tried a number of foods and the discus like about everything I've tried! I was a little surprised at that. They love Aquadyne flakes, Wattley's discus formula, and Tetra 5 star flakes. I alternate between these 3 for my daily feedings. I tried frozen bloodworms once and the next day all my fish were scratching and gasping for air! I have no proof but I think they got it from the bloodworms. My largest one got a little bloated after pigging out on too much Aquadyne (I think it expanded in his stomach) so I had to be careful how much of this stuff I feed them. I also am staying away from frozen blood worms.

10) Disease:
The only disease I've seen in 2 months has been the scratching. I originally thought it was gill flukes. One of my clown loaches was laying on his side and gasping out of only 1 gill. A friend of mine convinced me it was ich so I turned the temp from 86F to 92F. The clown recovered somewhat but all the fish were scratching. I increased the % during my water changes. It helped but did not rid the fish of the scratching. I'm back to my original diagnosis of gill flukes. I hated to do it, but I am now treating with coppersafe. I've had luck with that in the past. It seems to be working, but only time will tell and I'm not sure if my plants will make it through all of this.

Well that's where I am today. Not sure if this is useful to any other folks just getting into discus, but good luck....

Steve Eslinger (sesling@ibm.net)