DISCUS Membership

King of the Amazon

There is no other fish on Earth about which has been written and published so much, or which has been filmed, painted, or photographed so often, as the discus. A quite inconceivable flood of information in more than twenty languages. There are by now more discus clubs and associations than for any other group of fishes.

Now it is not easy to provide concrete reasons for this almost incredible mania for discus. But the unusual form of the fish is undoubtedly at its root. Discus, as almost everyone knows, is the word (of Greek/Latin origin) for a “throwing disc” such as was already in use in the athletic games of ancient Greece. And because the fish is likewise flat and normally round, the Mannheim naturalist Johann Jakob Heckel, working on its description at the Vienna Museum in 1840, was reminded of a disc (Subdisciformis. “Die Gestalt ist beinahe scheibenförmig,…”). He thus gave the new species the name discus and placed it in a new monotypic genus, Symphysodon. No other fish, whether in fresh or salt water, has this sort of disc shape.

Biotope correct Discus keeping