FRY DON'T FEED ON ADULTS AFTER HATCHING.
By Jim E. Quarles
13-09-99

It is sometimes to be expected that newly hatched discus fry fail to find the slime coat on the adults.

Generally when this happens it is because something went wrong in the fry as they were hatching, bad water, or poor genetics is possible. Sometimes the adults don't build extra thick slime coats for the fry to feed on.

I have heard a lot of nonsense posted about how to take fry and using a turkey basting tool and transferring them to a non spawned pair.. In other words just catch the fry and dump them on another discus or pair. I got news for those who try this. 9 times out of 10 the non breeding discus will just make a quick meal out of the fry.

And even it they don't they are not likely to have enough slime coat to help much, the fry will be no better off than before and have a great chance of being eaten.

This is like saying when a baby is born you can take it from the birth mother and give it to any other woman and she will produce milk to feed it. What rot! Why teach bad habits when you don't need to?

What you can get away with sometimes!

If you have a pair that recently hatched out fry and are feeding them ok, you can take fry from another pair and add them to the current batch on the adults. Most of the time they will not even notice the new fry and just accept them as their own.

Sometimes even this fails to work and the pair turn and eat both hatches. If you wait to long and a large difference in size becomes a problem, then you can damage the skin on the adults or produce runts since there will not be enough slime for everyone. If you leave the fry with the adults to long skin damage is likely to occur.

Artificial Feeding With Egg Yoke.

Everyone should learn to use artificial feeding if they intend to produce discus fry. If you get a good pair or so that will tend the fry with no problem you don't need to worry about using it.

But most of the successful breeders or keepers who breed discus have found that artificial feeding is not that hard to learn and it sure beats the crazy advice of just off loading fry onto another fish or pair.

ANYTHING WORTH DOING IS WORTH DOING RIGHT.