Name - Steve O - This was an internet name, despite meeting him several times i never learnt his second name?
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Location - Birmingham, UK
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Fishroom location - Outside in Concrete building
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Speciality - Discus breeding.
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Notes - I first met Steve in Birmingham in 2010, i visited him to buy a lot of young discus and became friendly with him for a while, i visited his fishroom several times and he allowed me to bring my camera and record his room. He had a great setup, a lot of thought was put into water quality and the filtration needed to provide good water for his fishes! he had several large sumps full of media and several trickle towers that gave almost perfect clean water for his discus and the heavy feeding that he performed to allow good growth.
His Discus were all in very good health, his tanks were always perfectly clean and tidy and the fish room was well presented and interesting
Steve had a very neat and tidy fishroom for Discus, it was built in a space measuring no more than 12x8ft.
At the end of the room there was a 6x2x2 holding Steve's breeding stock plus young fish he is growing on for breeding stock.
You can see the wine cooler underneath the racking, Steve was growing white worm at their preferred temperature range in this fridge. You can also see the bottle of compressed oxygen that Steve used to inflate all his fishbags, he pair a lot of attention to the safety of his fishes!
A close up of the Discus in the stock tank! Blues, leopard's, snakeskins plus pigeon blood based strains.
Filtration was good, there was a sump underneath the tank and several trickle towers filled with Biological media.
There are six 18x18x18 tanks which held breeding pairs and juvenile fish on my visits.
The pairs looked to be productive! there were several pairs spawning on my visits.
Steve practiced Artificial rearing of the fry and had developed a good method of doing this, he was very successful.
The cone with eggs is transferred to a holding tank with fresh, clean water and treated with methylene blue.
The larvae are moved to these tiny six inch square tanks to be fed for the very first time, once they have been fed an artificial diet for the first few days they are started on newly hatched artemia and kept in these tanks for several weeks. They are kept in close confines close to the food, water quality is not a issue as this is managed by a large sump system, a constant flow of fresh R/O running into the system. Plus lots of technology such as UV sterilizers.
You can see lots of babies in these small tanks, Steve fed all day long and the growth rates were extremely good. The fry were always stuffed with baby artemia.
You can see the artemia in the water column, the density was kept this high all day long without water quality deteriorating .
These juveniles are still in the small tanks but you can see that they are in excellent condition and their stomachs are filled with food, at this stage dry food and beef heart featured.
These Pigeon blood discus have now been moved into a larger tank to grow on and are doing well, the quality of these young fish is high, they are grown well and are not stunted
Beautiful..
This is a 4x2x2 tank holding around 250litres of water, it was well filtered and holding 4" fish that Steve was growing on for breeding stock.
Steve had good quality broodstock, mainly from Asian suppliers, the fish had good body shape and were well grown specimens. This is a leopard Discus.
A nice Colbalt discus
This almost has the potential to be called a ring leopard, with further breeding to join the stripes into circles this strain has some potential.
Ring leopard are highly in demand but extremely difficult to breed.
Steve was breeding some nice Marlboro types.. I like the red spotting in this one.
He also bred German blue rams, these were just a few of the 100's he produced, they were a good size and colour and were still very young fish at around 5 months old.
Unfortunately Steve's fishroom no longer exists, it was closed down a few years after these pictures were taken and he was then into building and racing motorbikes the last time i heard from him.
A shame really, he had mastered the skill of artificial raising and had the potential to be a excellent Discus breeder!