Help a lady out, every Friday my discus spawn, every Monday the female eats them.

[Smokingdolphin]

Hi everyone

I'm looking for advice from some more experienced discus keepers.
I have a breeding pair of discus who are around 2 years old, they are happy and healthy apart from the female acting like I don't feed her 4 times a day and she so hungry she is forced to eat her own eggs.
They are in a 375l tank by themselves filled with drift wood, heavily planted and a breeding cone. Water peramitres are perfect and the temp stays spot on and the water change water is pre heated and pre treated, and it's a bare bottom tank. I do daily water changes from the sump and every couple of days I gavel vac (although with no gravel it's just poop.
So here's my problem every Friday without fail they spawn sometimes on the glass but more often on the breeding cone and every Monday I watch the female eat them.

These are the things I've tried

I have tried not doing a gravel vac after spawning to see if it was me disturbing them,
I have tried covering the tank,
I've pushed all the plants around the breeding cone in the corner so she feels hidden
I've tried upping the feeds after spawning
I even got an automatic feeder and tried that so I didn't even disturb them by opening the lid

Things I know

I know they are fertilised the are dark brown accept for a couple of white unfertilised eggs, sometimes by day 3 I can even see a little movement
I know they are a male and a female lol hence fertilised eggs
I know it's the female because I watch that greedy little fatty egg them


I've heard of people covering the eggs with mesh so that they can't eat them but I'm concerned that if she doesn't want babies will I stress he out by forcing her to look after wrigglers? I love my discus and don't want her to die because of my want to have fry.
Artificially hatching and raising fry, does this equal heathy babies or am going to end up with flakey fry?

Any advice or tips from you guys would be amazing.

[sayid]

please send us a few pictures of your tank from different angles ,also your temp, kh ,gh ,ph values .
The first thing which comes to my mind is that your kh and your ph are a little high so the eggs are difficult to hatch and discus tend to eat them if they know that are not going to hatch ,having said that being in Melbourne i guess your kh is about 2 or less and ph about 6.8 and gh of less than 4 ,all being helpful for discus to breed .
Thats my opinion but i am sure other members can add to this and hopefully help you solve this problem.
sayid