Why Beef Heart.

[chris]

Hello, im just curious to find out what is the attraction with beef heart
Is it a cost thing
Is just really good for em
I prefer the frozen variaty of food.(brine blood worms discus dinner) Just easy

[Ben]

Chris,
I have wondered the same thing for years!
i think it is like flare jeans, someone came up with the idea and it has stuck forever! no....on a serious note, beef heart is very lean and has the smallest amout of fat out of all the organs.
my self, i rarely feed beef heart as i believe the hearts bought from my local butchers or coles, are not the best quality. You would have read a post by me, "back to beef heart"
I feed live blackworms, mysis shrimp, live and frozen brine shrimp and are expermenting with chopped up live foods like meal worms earth worms and white worms when i can get them.
I need to buy a mincer but i would like to try the recipe from ladyred.
cheers, Ben

[weird]

I don't think anyone feeds 100% beef heat although you can buy it in your LFS. Beefheart is usually a mix, where beefheart is the base ingredient. Discus dinner is a beefheart mix. And as a base ingredient it is incredible cheap, lean and very very high in protein.

[africandiscus]

Cost related. Beef heart costs $2.5/kg

It will cost you less than $15 to make food for at least 4 months.

[ozarowana]

It puts size on fish and not just discus either.

[chris]

Please tell more

[Merrilyn]

Beef heart is a clean, reliable, cheap source of high quality protein. Our discus, being carnivores need a high protein diet for growth. But on it's own, it does not contain the required vitamins and minerals our discus need. So beef heart should only be used as part of a varied diet. I have heard of breeders using lamb heart or turkey heart for the same reason.

[kalebjarrod]

Our discus, being carnivores

discus aren't carnivours there omninvores arn't they (eating both meat and veggies)

Beef heart was used as a cheap form of food in the very early years of discus keeping

it was found to put great growth on and be a cheap and easy source of food

it also lead to health problem with lack of trace elements

we now use it as a stable base for a multitude of personal recipes including B/H fish veggies and vitamins

[Merrilyn]

Hi Ryan, yes, you are right. I should have qualified that statement by saying that discus are PRIMARILY carnivorous. They have a mainly meat diet but do ingest a small amount of vegetable matter.

In their Amazonian homeland, discus feed on small freshwater crustaceans. These crustaceans eat vegetable matter, and so the discus get a small amount of vegetable matter in their diet from the gut of these crustaceans.

[kalebjarrod]

Discus being mainly meat eaters IMO is a bit of a myth

although the major part of they visable diet is fish, freshwater crustaceans etc this is the part that is easly seen when observing discus in the wild

the amounts of algee they eat must be significant in the wild to produce such wild colours

they also eat loads of minute floating plant material, picking at it all day

this is one of the fundimental problems early discus keepers had to deal with and learn to understand and hence our modern day sucess and mordern day B/H mixes