dimebag

catfish are fine with discus. you may get a rouge one now and again that likes to latch on to the discus, but generally they are great. i have whiptails, bristlenose, banjos, corys, iquito tiger plecs, and hoplos in with my discus and theyre all good. used to have a royal whiptail that liked the taste of discus, but i think they got their own back as he mysteriously died one night...

maybe you didnt wash the sand enough? if you didnt it will still clear but will take a lot longer

not sure what causes it jason. have u tested your tap water? make sure u let it sit for a while, dont test it straight out of the tap. honestly man using ph up or down i believe does more harm than good. a ph of 6 is fine for most fish, as long as its stable.

hey andrea, i dont think theres much chlorine in tga water, if any. wouldnt bother using anything. how much water are u changing at a time?

i siphon out the door, then hose water through a benchtop water purifier. these apparently remove chlorine and other stuff. i dont bother with heating, water goes in cold but over a 20-30 minute period. i find the temperature only drops 3 or 4 degrees, and all the fish including the discus seem to enjoy the fresh cold water coming in. works for me.

should be fine to put fish in, sniff the water, if you can smell chlorine then theres still chlorine in there. are you not able to take a bit of filter media out of your other tank to speed up the cycle a bit?

yep, id agree with ron. how big is the fish? the bigger it is, the more likely it is to recover.

i find sand is great for plants ,best if you have an inch of aquatic mix (daltons or a proper aquarium stuff if youre rich). if you dont want to paint your tank you can get a backing thats black on one side and blue on the other. waterflow- anything you mentioned will work.

awesome mr pleco well done. please keep me in mind when they grow up as i have 2 females and would like to try and breed them at some stage

corys? maybe a couple of banjo catfish? both these do better with a sand substrate.

think luke was meaning this thread? http://www.fnzas.org.nz/fishroom/photo- ... t8161.html

honestly first thing id do is get a bigger tank. hard work growing out small discus in a small tank, and hard to keep things stable. i have found buying the biggest possible fish to start with makes things easier.you wont always pay heaps more for a 6-7cm fish, for instance in the weekend i picked up 2 for $15 each, that even though theyre smaller than the other fish in there, theyre big enough to hold their own. hope you have some sucess with them mate, every fish i bought at that size didnt last long at all.

yep u can fully submerge them

old age? ive had this happen quite a few times with biggish females, guppies dont have a very long life span in my experience. wouldnt really worry bout a couple dying, they always seem to leave a few replacements behind. :roll:

ha cool when that happens, i have a banjo cat which ive seen twice in the year and a half ive had him. bought another one a couple of weeks ago and out popped the other one

nice fish, and very hungry i estimate my one eats about 40% of the food i put in. they grow fast too

if it stays stable at 6.4 why not leave it at that? my tank is always at 6.4, even though the water i do waterchanges with 2-3 times per week is 7.0ph. dont really know why it drops but its stable and fish are happy so yeah thats how it stays

sorry to hear dude thats a heap of fish to lose in one go

i would disagree with that plants use up nitrates. if you want a couple of plants to start u off, i can spare a couple of crypts and a bit of stargrass

i feed JBL Gala Flake, Tetra colorbits, shrimp pellets, and the occasional bloodworms and brineshrimps(frozen) discus are hungry constantly and i reckon they will eat whatever i put in there

i used a cm of sand as well, and yea just a sponge filter and heater. when i was breeding them i would drop the tank level to about half in the morning, then fill up with cold in the evening, and then by bout lunchtime the next day they would have finished laying, and i would scrape all the eggs out with a razor and raise them seperately with good sucess rate.

you will probably find that when he gets bigger he will go for a albino female, when i had both in the same tank the albino girls were way more popular. not really sure why this is the case, but the normal female got no action

do you have a male at all or 5 females?

do a water change, the algae fix stuff is pretty strong and can be hard on the fish, it will probably do more harm than that the algae. if you can post a picture of the algae, not all algaes will be fixed by the bottle stuff

yes you could use one of those digital timers. you would also need to hide it away somewhere where its not going to be bumped/played with, incase it turned your filter off for a day or longer. if you are running 2 filters then just put it on one to be safe, and feed at that end