I do see the wisdom in what you say, again I totally respect the efforts of the people that over the last 50 years have allowed discus to go from rare and very difficult to keep to widespread and feasable for everyone (willing to give them what they need). I also aggree that mimicking what is found in the gut of wild fish is not only unpractical but probably also not ideal (particularly during the dry season in the Amazon they survive on very poor diet). As yoy said now there is a bewildering choice of fish foods so we can be picky. By logic I will be inclined to chose the ones with less carbs and with whole fish as a source of nutritionally good proteins. If I start preparing home made food I probably will be inclined to use fresh fish and possibly cricket flour as the main source of animal protein. I think that fishkeeping is constantly evolving and folks are using new and different combinations of equipment, food, etc. At the moment I also have 2 similarly sized mbuna tanks and am in the process of installing an algae scrubber in one. If it helps to mantain better water quality I will fit scrubbers to other tanks and possibly once the discus have grown, not while I am doing 50% + daily wc, maybe even the discus tank. Still have a year to figure things out, main conundrum will be what strain to chose, the breeder has fantastic reds, he won second in the category at France discus in Arvert a few months ago...
This is a bump, but I have been away from the forum for a while but since I was mentioned in the OP i will also give my 2 cents here.
My main two subjects of interest in fish raising is nutrition and fish diseases. I frequently read the developments published in peer reviewed journals to see whats new. There is a lot of progress done in the aquaculture industry that can really benifit the ornemental fish hobbyist only if someone takes the venture to offer it to us.
I have been manipulating my disucs food mix and playing with additives until I reached what I believe to be a complete mix. It is not only complete because it grows fish but -because thats only one function of the food- servers several purpouses:
When I was choosing my additives I thought of what do I want it to achieve and I listed the following:
1- Provide the sufficient nutriens for the fish to grow without any deficiencies
2- Grow the fish faster!
3- Stimulate the immunity of the fish
4- Enhance the gut health
5- Protect the fish from disease
So IMO a perfect food will not only make a fish grow and spawn, but also enhance the rate of growth, increase imunity, gut heath and resistance to diseases.
I believe that I have sucessfully formulated such a mix I have tested it with my fish and they have grown from fry to breeding without falling sick once. I have also sent out samples to farms in thailand and malaysia for their feedback. Most likely I am going to launch it as a product soon.
On the other hand I believe we do have good commercially available foods in the marked, the best in my openion are Dr. bassleer biofish food (pro version) and Diskus Soft by Dennerle. I have not tessted them personally, however, they are theoretically meeting most of what I prcieve as a "Perfect food".
I wish you well in your enterprise, the more choice of foodstuffs the better. There seems to be a trend towards an improvement in the quality of ingredients (I am thinking about Northfin, NLS, tropical softline just to mention a few) with more single species ingredients (rather than generic fish meal) and less fillers like starches and yeasts. It would probably be even better if they used fresh fish rather than fish meal and used a low temperature manifacturing process, but probably starting with already partially dehydrated fish meal makes manifacturing a lot easier, and helps to achieve a higher protein %, maybe insect flour or proteic extract of bacterial origin will find their way more and more into fishfood. Intersting times ahead. Ciao
It's easy to write off starches and yeasts as "fillers" but there are some very well researched reasons these ingredients are included in fish feeds. I think a problem bigger than fillers is the way the ingredients are listed on the foods themselves which allows the manufacturers to game the system. Two fish foods can have the exact same ingredients and protein percentages listed, but varying amounts of soy, fish and wheat gluten contribute to the the protein total. That is a bigger problem than fillers. If we hobbyists demand this information, I think the foods will improve even more.
Would be interesting and not very hard for a hobby breeder to plumb several systems together for water quality normalization (can still do daily 100% w/c or whatever the person likes), and split a few clutches evenly between tanks for growout and feed each tank different foods at the same time and same quantity and record color and size for a set period say 6 months. Do this for enough clutches and you could do some statistical analysis and see if the food type tested really even matters at all. I personally doubt there would be any significant differences is using a decent beefheart blend or commercial food with discus.
Now start getting into harder to keep fish like Moorish Idol and I think one would see large changes in survivability let alone growth.
Hi Paul, What did you end deciding on for your fish food recipe?
These are ingredients I've researched and use in varying combinations for various reasons when I make discus food. Each batch I make is different with different ingredients.
Recipe:
Beef heart
Fish (saltwater)
Shrimp
Egg yolk
Astaxanthin
Lecithin
Garlic
Paprika
Spirulina
Vita Chem vitamins
Gelatin
Brewers yeast
Gluten powder
Liquid calcium
Discus trace
Banana