amazing giants

we've got a number of giant lines coming from NG and LDZ. NG gave me two pairs of his awesome green masked HMPK giants. The male was about 3.5" and the female was 3.2", aged 5 months. Another pair was smaller cause their age was smaller, aged 2.8 months or so.

A couple of weeks later, LDZ gave me a pair of his red giants OHMPK, and this pair is the most awesome of all. The male was 4.2", the biggest and longest I've seen of a giant. The female was smaller than green female, she was about 3".

These giants are so wonderful. They're soooooo HUGE! Their width is easily 3 or 4 times the size of standard bettas. In fact, they look like totally different species.

Anyway, that was about 3 months ago.

I've heard them giving me warning of how difficult it was to spawn giants. I've experienced that when I tried to spawn those giants. None of them spawned as smooth as I expected. All females were so huge and big in the belly that you'd think they'd just burst with eggs.

It took a good 3 full weeks to get them spawned! Usually, I have any of the fish to spawn in less than 2 days (that's what years of experience gave u).

Spawning experience with giants is quite interesting. Slightly different from other spawns. To start, the giants are quite slow moving fish when they're left alone. But once they meet each other, despite you can still see how slow they are in movements, they're quite aggressive and scary. The courting pretty much shakes the whole tank! I've got my standard 20L tank and the water just shaking so much, you'd thought somebody splashing the surface of the water so hard....and yes, there was "someone knocking on the front door" sound coming from the tank :)

I think, there are a number reasons why giants are so difficult to spawn. First, their size is so big, wrapping the female is just quite difficult. Not to mention the size of the female is 3 times the normal size, and the size of the male also makes him impossible to wrap his body to the female. In fact, when the male tries to wrap the female, you can see that he barely can make half circle wrap, and the female is just hanging there loose :) Secondly, the females are not scared of the males! Well, why would they scare of the males, if their size is just as big as the male, LMAO. I've seen how the males attack the females numerous times, and yet barely leave any scratch on her body. Sometimes the fins are torn, but even that is pretty rare.

I've seen other types of bettas, such as HM or HMPK. Everytime they spawn, the females always torn to pieces. But giant females are just made of steel. The attack didn't leave much scar....Each attack would make the whole tank sounded like a party....

Once they successfully spawned, the second amazing thing is the size of those eggs. They're at least double the size of normal eggs ! Well, I suppose that's logical, considering they're giants after all...

Then it comes the hatching time, and what do you see? A very tiny typical fry ! their fry is just as small as other fry. I can't quite see the giant-size different in them, although I never compared them side by side, but I was very surprised to see how small they were. Tiny little tail wiggling :)

The growth of these giants are just great. In less than 3 months time, their size at least already double standard adult HMPK. I love to see the size of the males and females. Typically, the males are larger and started flaring against each other. The females are slightly smaller but easily double the size of adult female with such dense body and tummy. About 10-20% of them are nothing more than 1.5 size normal adult HMPK, but I'd suspect it's not because of they're not pure giant genes...I think it's more to do with some "stunned" fish in the tank. These stunned fish still have giant genes though, cause I can see how rough and thick their scales are. Majority of the spawn are just pure giant size. Each spawn is split into 2 x 180L tanks. Typically I can fit a couple hundreds fish in those 2 tanks, but with the giants I only had to fill up less than 100 to make the whole tank crowded :) :)

I've selected 1 pair of red giants siblings to carry the next generation spawning. He is nearly 3+" in size and the female is slightly smaller. First attempt of spawning was 2 weeks ago and they went through the same difficulty as their dad and mom :) I've left them together in the tank ever since as I'm not bothered as to when they'll spawn. Well, this morning, I noticed a lot of wiggly tails in the tank as well as another big lump of eggs on the bubbles. So somehow, they've got their act together finally.

I think this generation of giant is slightly easier as they're still very young and the female is still slightly smaller size compared to the males. They still have some growth to do, but at least they've shown their true genes.