Discus Fish are king of the aquarium... Discus Fish are a Cichlid and have a great amount of intellegence and personality. It is quite common to have your Discus Fish rush to the aquarium surface and greet you... I have numerous customers who tell me of how their discus fish enjoy being "petted". Once your Discus Fish are acclimated to you and their new discus fish home they will feed right from your hands, and over time they will come to recognize you and approach the aquarium front when only there are owners or family members are present... discus fish really can differentiate between people!

Discus fish are territorial and should be housed in groups that will help reduce aggresion on weaker individual discus fish... I recommend keeping one Discus Fish per 8 gallons of water. It seems the more crowded they are (within reason) the less likely they are to set up and defend territories and it allows them a delay in reaching sexual maturity so that they can grow to be larger discus fish.

Obviously, the more discus fish you have in a tank the more waste is produced requiring more filtration and water changes. Some discus fish owners assume that they will start out with say 4 Discus Fish in a 90 gallon tank and then add more discus fish later, once these 4 discus fish have acclimated in. Bad idea... generally the first 4 discus fish that have been in the tank will have set up their territories and defend it quite viciously to the new arrivals of discus fish. One way out of this is to reorganize the decorations(territorial markers) in the aquaria before adding the new discus fish. (move a plant here or a piece of driftwood there). Or just add all of the Discus Fish at the same time to avoid this altogether. There will always be certain Discus Fish that just aren't aggresive as others. Generally these discus fish won't get their fair share of food. I have found that feeding discus fish at both ends of the tank and in the middle will help alleviate this problem.