Wild Rio Negro Conditions Information

[Apistomaster]

Dave,
It is very nice to have you join into the overall Heckel Discus discussion.
You are adding a fresh perpective to "our problems."

I used to buy Cardinals in box lots and would immediately put them in quarantine, as i did with all my new shipments, but in addition to keeping them warm and clean, I also was able back then to treat them with chloramphenicol, an antibiotic no longer available in water soluble capsules. I also fed them newly hatched Artemia nauplii so it would be difficult to say which factor was the most important. I only cared back then that I was able to minimize my losses to very low numbers. Before implementing my procedures it was not unusual to suffer very high losses.

One of the difficulties of creating a variable temperature schema into Heckel Discus in the home is controlling the lower end temperatures. The room temperatures are not low enough for a large volume aquarium to experience nightly cooling as effectively to open waters where temperature losses ae facilitated by the water cooling through radiation into space. It could be done, however, if we were to incorporate aquarium chillers into the aquarium filtration system. That concept is about as alien to wild Discus keeping as one can get but it would allow us to simulate nightly as well as seasonal cooling.
I am no longer keeping Heckels after I sold my adults I raised from adolescents.
I still have some wild S. haraldi which I have not spawned yet but I have bred wild S. haraldi in the past. They are far more adaptable to life in captivity than Heckels. I think this same idea would be useful in the on-going attempts to breed Pterophyllum altum, something of the equivalent of what Heckels are to Discus breeders, P. altum are to wild Angelfish breeders. I know of successful breeding of P.altum by some grad students in Venezuela but those were incidental to their main project which was the attempted breeding of Panaque suttonorum. These were in outdoor ponds supplied with running water. Very recently, some progress in Germany and Czechoslovakia has been made in captive breeding of P. altum but few details are available; it is not in the breeders' commercial interest to share their methods at this time.

[tcyiu]

One of the difficulties of creating a variable temperature schema into Heckel Discus in the home is controlling the lower end temperatures. The room temperatures are not low enough for a large volume aquarium to experience nightly cooling as effectively to open waters where temperature losses ae facilitated by the water cooling through radiation into space. It could be done, however, if we were to incorporate aquarium chillers into the aquarium filtration system.

Larry, I don't mean to butt into an expert discussion, but a thought occurred to me upon reading your text above.

If the average room temperature is somewhere between 70 and 78 degrees, would not an evaporator be able to get the temperature down? The evaporator I have in mind is a wet/dry trickle filter with forced air. I would imagine there might also be a night time heater in the sump to help set the "floor" temperature.

Just a thought.

Tim

[BWDave]

A trickle filter with forced air sounds a lot like a cooling tower. It would work (and humidify the room). However, I don't try to make drastic changes in temperature, so in my case the added complexity isn't necessary.

I am just trying to produce fairly subtle day/night variations in my system. I have a 180 gal tank with a trickle filter and a bubble bead filter. I watched last night when the daytime heater shut off. It took almost 3 hours to lose one deg F, but IMO that's ok. The water dropped 4 degrees overnight and the nighttime heater was on in the morning. If I wanted to go lower, I could just run the daytime heater fewer hours per day. It only takes a few hours for a 500wt heater to get the water back up to the daytime setting.

Tank temps this month: 84 deg day, 80 deg minimum.
Room: 70 deg days, 64 deg min.