giant exchange meeting

yesterday was quite exciting for us. a bunch of us finally has time to meet and bring the biggest giants from our spawn. i was presenting my green mask with length of about 9cm (3.5" or 3.6") and red giant of 3.5". This is not so bad considering their young age and their parents were about that size (with exception of the red that was about 4.2"). I would expect them to further grow but I'm not sure if I can keep up with them. The amount of food they eat and the aggressiveness in the tank sometimes is a bit worrying to me.

others come with average of 3.3" to 3.7" and we were quite happy knowing our giants get to that length.....considering they are all just 4-5 months old.

That's all for males....for females, i showed case my 3" red female but this was beaten by a 3.2" blue female from NG. Somehow, he always managed to get the biggest ones. This blue is awesome, very nice bright colouration and vibrant. He's having the same problem as I am, having to beef up his males so they can spawn with the huge females :)

anyway, i've got a donation of green mask as well yesteday. i only had 1 pair left of the giant green, the rest went to our charity-sale, and from this 1 pair i failed to get them spawn. The male managed to kill the female :( .... anyway, now that I get a not-too-distant cousin of his on the tank, i can try it again. if this still fails, i just have to spawn him with my red (somewhat having a mood for multicolours these days)

i contributed back to the group half of my red giant spawn, the ones left behind after charity-sale. there are only about 10 males left there and 4 female, all of them the biggest of the spawns. i figured, i better keep some of them for stock, in case the current red breeder decided to kill his partner :)

oh, another thing....if all goes well, i've been promised to get very nice melano giant pair ;) i will have the chance to select a very best of the pair as i like :D :D

giant size

some people still wondering how big a giant looks like.
here are some pictures, on left you can see a standard size HMPK being compared to some giant HMPK. As you can see, even the female giant is at least double to triple the size of the standard betta.

The female in the picture is about 2.7 inch in length while the males are averaging between 2.9" to 3". Large females are not in the tank as they're currently spawning, so you can't see their size, but they're reaching 3+ inches very easily.

giant trend

i quickly browse some sites selling bettas and notice that they've gone to fancy giants now. The price is ridiculous though. they're trying to sell $100 usd for a giant male that may not even get to 3 inches yet. I wonder if I should have made my money by selling all of my giants, considering they are about 3 inches now.

some fish sold are either barely HMPK or if they're nice 3 inches would cost about $150 usd....even so, many sellers won't even sell females, at least not a very large one :)

how big the giant can get

i've got a number of conflicting info about the size of giants. some said that they can get up to 7 inches for full giant, but many have said that they never seen such size. the ones that are quite rare already are the 5 inches giant, and even that i've never seen it.

my giant only get up to 4.3 to 4.4 inches. that's courtesy of heavy eating habit. the problem is, i dont even know how old they are when they reach that size. so far, a lot of my giants are about 3 inches, and they're 4.5 to 6 months old at the moment. It seems, the 6 months old ones are not growing any longer, but rather getting their size thicker and bulkier.

anyway, if anyone can tell me how big they can get their giants, that would be awesome! no, i don't mean the hearsay on sizes. i mean if you really see it or somebody can vouch for what they say on the size!

i'm going to keep a couple pairs of my giants till they are about 2 years old and i'll see if they can get any bigger. hopefully they're not giving up on me yet when they get about 1+ years :) somehow i manage to shorten their lifespan cause i have tendency to keep spawning them....hence exposure to tiredness, diseases, etc.

getting the mood on spawning

weird sometimes that fish also has mood on spawning. 1 pair of black didn't have much mood previously, despite the male always eager to spawn. It yields to a number unsuccessful spawns. this is because the female is way larger than the male, pretty understandable....

but these couple of days, i noticed that they spawned a number of times with lots of fry in the tank. it seems, once the "cycle" begins, they just keep doing it....just like a number of giant spawns

at the moment, 3 pairs are having the continuous spawnings and i just dont bother to stop them. another 1 pair is getting to know each other and may spawn tomorrow, otherwise the female just gonna burst with eggs :)

could it be that the female is getting horny when she sees how capable the male was (proven by a bunch of fry around him), or is it just the weather and mood affecting this spawning experience?

no doubt, the experienced breeders would just spawn right away. that's pretty much given, but the newbie seems to have their own ups and downs so frequently, i started to think that it's the combination of weather and experience....

black marble

Quite excited these couple of days knowing that I've got another extremely black fish in the crowd. He is a very young 1.3 months old youngster that started to chase every other fish around. Seems to be a combination of long and short fin though as the parents carry long fin. Just have to wait for another month or so to confirm it.

Also, there are some portion of the fish that are marbling. The marble is not the typically no-colour marble. It's the chocolate colour marble. Just awesome...

Lots of sibling sisters are either melano-based or black charcoal. I'll wait for another month before trying him up with his sister. Want to see if the melano female throws fertile ones. At least the black charcoal is going to be fertile definitely.

giant difficulty spawnings

Giants, just as any other bettas, sometimes get very difficult to spawn.

I've lost a number of females during spawning....they're dead....attacked by the males

But if they survive the males and happen to fall in love with them, they spawn quite fast and quick.

The challenges are the ones with "imbalance" male vs female. I've got some huge females on stock for example. Their body alone is bigger than any males that I've got. Typically, this type of female is very pricey on the market (if happens to have someone trying to sell them to you). Now that I have them, I don't even know what to do with them since none of the males can handle these females...

These females dont seem to pay much attention to smaller males. They're not afraid of the males. In fact, I dont think they respect the males at all :)

Oh well, I'll try them on some of the largish males and we'll see how it goes :)

giants and bubbles

I've been busy lately but still have the joyful of watching some of my giants making bubbles.

What is it with giants and big bubbles? I've got 3 pairs of them in the tank, they make huge and high bubbles. Typical bettas would just make large bubbles, i.e. large surface. Some of these giants, at least the ones I'm check out, have very high mountainous bubbles.

Just for the sake of curiosity, I destroyed the bubbles this morning to see if he's going to build another one. I bet he would :)