My Albino Discus Experience

Albino Blue Snake & Albino Cobalt Pair


Albino Golden with fries


Albino Red Melon


Albino Red Melon Pair


Albino Turquoise Pair

Albino Snake female tending eggs.

Own breed albino Redwhite & Albino Redwhite snake

Albino Discus provides the next big thing in discus keeping. I got into keeping them in 2003. Started of with a pair of golden Albinos, unfortunately both turned out to be males. The picture on the right shows my male Golden Albino guarding a batch of eggs. It was extremely difficult to breed albinos. I first crossed the golden albino with a female redwhite. After a year, I successfully bred the redwhite albinos by inbreeding the F1's. This batch also gave me snow white albinos. The yield was not great, about 30% albinos and the rest were normal striped browns and redwhites. Soon , I also managed to produce white leopard albinos by crossing albinos with white leopards.

Collecting the 30% of albinos from the batch was tedious and I was soon running out of place, especially to house the intermediates. Started selling of the fries to cover my expenses, keeping a few selected redwhite albinos to breed. Unfortunately, luck was not on my side as I had 1 male from the ten I kept and it too was not breedable. Though being one of the first to breed Redwhite albinos here, I was unable to progress in the strain and soon opted to breed other types of albinos.

Bought a pair of albino snakes from Colin Heng which turned out to be a good pair that produced ten over successful batches for me. By now, I was able to breed albino to albino successfully and decided that that was the way to go so that I have no headaches with housing the intermediates. First, I used foster pairs (any brown based discus) to raise the fries. You need a few pairs for this so that you can raise the albino fries. Later, I discovered that reducing the tank water helped the albino pairs to self raise their spawn. However, this was not always successful and usually I would get a batch after about 3 spawning. Nonetheless, it was a far better option than using foster parents or using albino intermediates.

More challenges and surprises lay ahead!