What multivitamins for fish ?

[Midwater]

+1 for no beef.

 

[A201]

The first time I ever heard of feeding beef heart to fish was back in the late 1980's.
Discus breeder Jack Wattley recommended feeding his home made concoction of beef heart & egg yolk to juvenile Discus.
At the time the new Wattley Turquoise Discus was all the rage and of course I bought a few. I chose not to go the beef heart route.
In my opinion feeding beef heart on a regular basis has the potential of really fouling up the water quality.
My Discus did quite well eating various Cichlid pellets, frozen brine shrimp & bloodworms.

 

[Midwater]

I have got cats (and dog), and raw feed them. I include beef heart as it is high in taurine.

Fish get gut loaded (quaranteened) tilapia fry and ghost shrimp.

 

[neutrino]

Agree with some of the previous comments. Feeding beef heart and/or excessive protein is what sets discus (and most other fish) up to be higher maintenance. For one thing it produces more nitrogen waste. I kept discus for years, never fed beef heart (to discus or any other fish), and mine were healthy, robust fish that grew to good sizes by primarily feeding flakes, small pellets, and some brine shrimp. A closer to natural diet meant fewer water changes, no need for an added vitamin mix-- the vitamins are already there in a good quality pellet or flake. I didn't have to do the frequent medicating/deworming or some of the other gymnastics some discus keepers seem to find necessary. A whole different, lower maintenance way to keep them; personally, I wouldn't do it any other way.

This, from the link RD. provided, should be very telling regarding a natural diet for discus. Contrary to popular belief, they're NOT primarily carnivorous and, generally speaking, when you look at aquaculture nutrition studies, protein needs for most fish is often lower than some people think:

The alimentary canal of Symphysodon is characterized by a poorly defined stomach and an elongate intestine, some 300 mm long and 3 mm wide (in a 180 mm SL specimen). This intestinal morphology is typical of a cichlid with a dominantly vegetarian, detritivorous, or omnivorous diet. Predominantly piscivorous cichlids such as Cichla and Crenicichla exhibit shorter alimentary canals with well developed stomachs (Zihler, 1982).

Bleher (2006, p. 510-595) reports detailed observational notes on the diet of discus, taken over many years of field visits to the Amazon basin. He undertook stomach content analyses on over 8,500 discus specimens and also made direct observations of feeding in the wild. Although most of his findings are reported qualitatively, Bleher (2006) presents some quantitative data for the volumetric dietary intake of S. haraldi (although numbers of specimens are not given, p. 593). During the high-water period he reports average stomach contents of: 12% algae and microalgae, 44% plant matter (flowers, fruits, seeds, leaves), 6% detritus, 16% aquatic invertebrates, and 22% terrestrial and arboreal arthropods. During the low water period he reports 25% algae and microalgae, 39% detritus, 9% plant matter, 22% aquatic invertebrates, and 5% terrestrial and arboreal arthropods. Data for S. aequifasciatus and S. discus indicate a larger proportion of algae, plant matter and detritus both for during the low and high water periods.

 

[A201]

I'm somewhat puzzled why the majority of current Discus keepers maintain bare bottom tanks & make big daily water changes.
Other than keeping an elevated temperature, which Discus truly require, my Discus tank had a gravel substrate & did well with one weekly 50% water change. Maybe I just had beginners luck.

 

[Joshuakahan]

Sounds like one of the many quasi-intellectuals who sully the term "teacher". The much-vaunted human intelligence...of which they are so especially proud and which they claim to exercise so strenuously...virtually demands that at some long-ago time in our evolutionary past a primitive human or pre-human got sick and tired of listening to the relentless squawking of a newborn whose mother was unable or unavailable to provide milk. As he reached for his club to ensure some peace and quiet...his eye fell upon one of the semi-domesticated goats in the crude adjoining corral. A newborn kid was nursing noisily at its mother's udder. Behind our hero's shaggy, cliff-like brow...a dim prehistoric light bulb flickered. He rose and moved towards the goat-pen...and thus took the first steps on the path leading to today's dairy industry.

Along with other simple yet essential ideas...stuff like fire, tools, language, cooking, warfare, etc...which our ancestors developed and used to build today's society which allows people to just sit on their asses all day, claiming to be thinking instead of doing, feeding our young the milk of other species seems like a stroke of genius. Like other aspects of human nutrition, it has helped us to grow bigger and stronger than would have been otherwise the case, and has absolutely decreased infant mortality. Comparing the idea of one mammal species feeding upon the milk of another mammal species to a fish eating the flesh of a mammal is ludicrous. Cattle and people are practically evolutionary siblings compared to the vast gulf between mammals and fish.

Correction, I was comparing one adult mammal species drinking the milk of another much larger and faster growing mammal species . Milk is meant for newborns regardless of the species. You could make a case for fish eating mammals. How many mammals die in or get washed into rivers and lakes after dying. Do you think when those dead mammals are rotting in a lake that fish are going to check a phylogenetic tree before they eat it?

 

[neutrino]

I'm somewhat puzzled why the majority of current Discus keepers maintain bare bottom tanks & make big daily water changes.
Other than keeping an elevated temperature, which Discus truly require, my Discus tank had a gravel substrate & did well with one weekly 50% water change. Maybe I just had beginners luck.

My contention is many discus keepers set themselves up for high maintenance by feeding beef heart, overfeeding protein, or overfeeding in general, typically because they've been convinced by others they won't otherwise grow properly. I never kept mine in bare tanks, didn't do daily water changes, wasn't deworming or medicating all the time like some do, and I had great success with them. Aside from whatever opinions or debate about beef heart, what I know from experience is it's just not necessary.

 

[jjohnwm]

The case to be made is for any species of animal to exploit a food source that is available to it. Intelligence allowed primitive humans to exploit the milk of ungulates as a food source, so naturally that's what they did. The reason it worked is simply because that milk, by happy coincidence, provided an abundance of nutritional elements that the human body could utilize...except it isn't coincidence. That milk was produced by animals that were relatively closely related, which made it very likely that it could be useful. Of course the milk was an evolutionary adaptation for feeding the young, but that didn't prevent it from being tried by adults...and it seemed to work out okay, so they kept using it.

I'm sure that primitive stone-age aquarists would have tried to utilize the body-slime secretions of their Cave Discus in the same way...but it likely wouldn't have worked out as well...

Are you seriously suggesting that dead mammals washing into a lake or river make up a statistically significant portion of the diet of any fish in nature? If so...perhaps we should include rubber suction cups in a complete balanced diet for RTC and other big fish? They eat them...so... ?

 

[neutrino]

Do you think when those dead mammals are rotting in a lake that fish are going to check a phylogenetic tree before they eat it?

Yes, but it's the caiman, piranha, carnivorous catfish, carnivorous plecos, etc. cleaning them up and eating them, not discus, severums, oscars, etc.

 

[RD.]

See attached photos......

Not necessarily. Water changes are dictated by bio-load, so what one feeds, and how much, and how many fish are in a specific volume of water, will be the deciding factor regarding water changes. A local breeder of 40 or so odd years did 50% weekly water changes, once he stopped feeding beef heart. As he said, warm water + beef = beef soup.

The fish below were some of his last Stendker discus that he was raising out on 50% weekly water changes, 100% pellets, before his untimely death. RIP Don.


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