Are wild discus harder to keep?
Yes, they are a lot harder to keep healthy and harder to get them to breed and raise their fry. Why? 1. They undergo a great deal of stress and rough treatment in being caught, packed, shipped a very long way, and transferred to wholesalers’ and dealers’ tanks. 2. Wild-caught fish almost always carry parasites. 3. By the time a wild-caught fish gets to you, it may not have eaten for several weeks. 4. The discus strains most breeders work with now are really domestic animals. That is, they have had many generations of captive breeding to select for the characteristics that make them best able to adapt to aquarium conditions. The ones that didn’t do well in captivity didn’t have descendants to sell in the aquarium hobby. On the other hand, wild-caught fish are adapted to conditions in the wild, where the water chemistry, water movement, temperature, physical habitat (bottom structure, plants or sunken wood, etc.), other animals present, and available foods all were different from those t
