Breeding experience, free fish!

A recent request just reminded us on how precious sometimes to gain the "experience" to spawn bettas. We've taken spawning as granted and forgot how difficult it was to do a successful one (or even a failed one). Still remembered a long time ago when a group of us had to travel back and forth to aquariums every single week (for months!!!) for a wish that we find the "right" fish. Heck, back then, any HM line was seen as gold. In fact, these days, it is still the same!!! Try to
go to LFS and hope to find an HM line male or female, tough luck....Chances, if you ever see the female, it would either be plakad, veiltail, or some sort that you never know.

Nostalgia....Still remembered how we hold our breadth when they wrap, how we waited those long hours just to see the eggs falling, and agitated we were when the male didn't pick the eggs at all, or frustruated we were when the bubble kept bursting despite the best effort that we did with all the heater and tank preparation....ahh, those were the good times :)

Anyway, here's the offer. If you would like to experience spawnings, we are offering our fish for FREE! Each person is limited to get up to 2 pairs. They won't be the greatest fish you'll ever seen, but they carry good genes (heck, otherwise there won't be a point for us to spawn their parents to begin with!). Most of the times the males would be torn-fin because they fight, but that shouldn't deter you in spawning them, would it??? Long fin males most probably be Super Delta (SD). Females usually quite okay, may not be perfect either with little torn here and there. Of course you will never get deformed fish, that's out of the questions. All fish would be either HM or HMPK lines (your call which ones you like -- as long we have stock). You would be very surprised on the offspring later cause they actually carry very good genes (but we won't spoil your fun, find and discover it for yourself)....Lots of colours available, but we either pick them
randomly for you or you specifically say what your favourite colour and we see if we have them in stock :)

We don't want anything back from you. They are given to you as FREE. Perhaps we are hoping that you'd support us in the future by buying our stock (that helps reducing the cost of providing these great bettas to others), or better yet, perhaps we hope that you also do the same deed to others.

However, most of our fish are very young at this point in time, so chances you will need to keep them for at least 2 weeks to 4 weeks before you can spawn them. The ones avail for sale are quite big and ready to spawn, that's provided you'd prefer the "better" ones.

If you are interested, contact us on email. If for some reasons you were unlucky with your given pairs and would like to keep trying, give us an email and we'll arrange something (happy to sell some pairs for very reasonable price).

How do you get them? We're in Sydney, so if you're in sydney too, meeting could be arranged (though very much difficult on timings, give your phone #). Shipping can be done as well if you live in other cities, cost $25 to eastern coasts.

Spawning experience is one of the reasons why we've been in bettas for awhile. The excitement, the disappointment, the success, and the failure. Hope we can share that experience with you too.

PS. We still encourage you to support fellow breeders (including us) who are offering their stock for sale. Consider this offer as supplement to those with cash-strapped pocket, hopefully the offer takes a bit off of your stress or allow you to experience breedings :)

Good luck and happy breeding.

Giant gene to enhance bettas

Some have asked whether this is true. Well, yes. Giant bettas, if you choose good ones, will enhance your typical bettas gene.

See, the trick is in the sheer size of the body. This will improve the size of your bettas and increase their form as well.

Of a particular experiement, we've found that normal bettas will increase in size once bred to a giant and this will stabilize on at least 2 generations, e.g. F1 will give you lots of 50% giant with improved genes already, F2 will get back to majority of "normal" bettas, but with slightly larger size. Robustness of the bettas also improve.

Interestingly though, if any of the fry carry (and reflect) heavy rosetail trait, then their size is no difference than normal bettas. This is perhaps the effect of extreme rosetail. Furthermore, while "normal" rosetail will have detrimental effect on bettas' size and health, a giant that carries rosetail is in fact seems much healthier and active (though this could be just a particular spawn that we have -- we need to monitor and do lots more experiementations to see this).

Another interesting observation is on the thickness of their finnage, or rays. Normal bettas with very weak rays can be improved by crossing it to a giant. It improves the strength of the rays.

As with any spawnings, you need to choose your breeders carefully ! After all, the spawns will inherit the good and bad traits from the parents.

beaten HM

just one of those days, when 1 of our giant HM male is beaten by a female....failed in spawning, of course.
he's still flaring, looks to be still okay, but isn't really in any good shape to continue the spawning attempt. well, that's the outcome of getting one of our 2.8 inches female to be crossed to long fin 3.7 inches male, a big failure. instead, we have the female happily snapping bits and pieces of that beautiful long finnage of the male :)

resting time for this male, just for another try, perhaps with much smaller female

copper red and reverse BF boyz

The copper red boy doesn't have that white patch on his body (that was just the unclean tank). We may want to keep the copper red boy and sell the reverse BF boy....still not sure as yet. that reverse BF boy forms a very nice triband already. A bit of growing, hopefully he will turn out great :)

Quite exciting to see their progress later. They are barely 9 weeks old and their size already equivalent to standard HM betta of 3.5 or 4 months old. Notice also that they're very naughty boyz, lots of nippings already! In fact, they started doing the nippings when they're about 6 or 7 weeks old, we ran out of dividers, so they're just left in the growout tanks for awhile.

Branchings seems to be good too. Started on 8 rays, but hopefully will get to at least 16 rays.

These guys are only available on very limited number. There are only 4 pairs of them on each spawn. Well, there were only that few hatched to begin with, due to the extreme size of their mother and father. Their mom was the 3.5 inches HM giant and the dad was 4.2 inches in length. We will keep at least 2 pairs, and may offer the others for sale. Offer us the right price, their siblings could be yours ;)

Edited: sorry, the images didn't show up before, fixed now (we think...testing with FF). server host doesn't allow hotlinking, oh well...posting the images somewhere else then ;)

dilemma dilemma

being able to get giants, very large size ones, is difficult enough.
spawning them is pretty much impossible. knowing that the larger the
giants, the chances of them being old is also greater. most giants
offerred barely makes 3 inches even for HM. 3 inches!!! in case you're
not aware, a true king giant betta of HMPK should reach 2.5 inches at
the age of 2.5 to 3 months easily. they typically get 3 inches in 4 or
5 months time. so, having long fin HM giant to only get to 3 inches
including tail at, say, 4 months time is very disappointing.

there are some giants on offer for quite reasonable price (well,
they're still expensive, but at least not one of those exaggerated
price of 300 bucks), however if you notice it carefully, they are
"old" giants. i wont be surprise if these giants are at least 8 to 9
months, if not 1 year old. sure, someone maintain their water well
(you can see this by the beautiful finnage that they're still having,
despite such "old" age). these giants typically 3.5 inches in length
including tail, but what you gonna do??? that's the "best" on offer.

we're lucky enough from time to time to get some good connection with
breeders. they're quite willing to sell us much larger giants, say 4+
inches. these giants, again, won't be surprised if they are 1 year
old, but at least they HAVE large size.

now, all of the above are males. what about females? well, females are
much smaller in size. this is in contrary to what we experience in our
breedings for short fins giants. our hmpk giants have large size
females compared to males. maybe because we feed them very well, with
all the live food and all. getting back to long fin giant, you will be
lucky to find anything closer to 2.8 inches. but hey, you may wonder,
isn't 2.8 inches female giants hmpk are pretty easy to find??? YES!!
that's the disappointing part. we have produced many 2.8 inches female
hmpk, so that size isn't so much special for us at all anymore. we
would expect HM giant female to reach at least 3.5 inches. indeed we
found some of this size. how old are they? again, perhaps 1 year old.
they certainly seem and behave "old". how do we tell? well, the older
fish has less desire to flare, specially gaints. they're so big, they
won't even bother to flare to smaller fish (i wouldn't bully smaller
fish myself, if i were giant, just a waste of energy). they flare okay
with larger males though, in fact not only they flare, they fight them
off!!

this is the problem with us now. getting very large giant female will
mean we are on the quest to find suitable male. none of those males on
offer is suitable for these females (same experience that we've got
with our 2.8 inches hmpk females -- would be lucky to find any males
who can wrap them up). the problem is, most giant genes aren't
"settled" yet. spawning 2 giants won't mean you get all giants. mostly
you've got big fish, but there would only be about 30% pure giants,
the rest are larger fish (the so-called 50% and 75% giants). so,
spawning the largest giants you can find on earth would mean, if
you're successful in spawning them, you are producing a much bigger
chance of producing "pure blood" giants. this is particularly one of
the biggest challenge that we find with HM giants. in fact, this is
the same problem faced by the thai people as well...do you notice any
surprisingly large and beautiful HM giant? if you keep your eyes
peeled, you'd notice "no"! so, at least we are on the same position as
the thai on this problem. inability to produce very large giants. one
of the dreams of ours is to produce the infamous 7 inches giant!! full
hm with good forms, of course.

we find that breeding hmpk giants are easy now, it isn't much of a
challenge anymore. sure, too large females mean difficult spawning,
but at least we can produce consistently large giants in our spawns,
and that's very much good for us already. their forms are very nice
already, colour may need improvement, but then we aren't focusing on
color sometimes either.

breeding largest HM giants, with very good (if not the best) form, is
the biggest challenge now. we only see 1 giant over this couple of
years being produced in very perfect form, but that was a "one-off"
spawn. the breeder is no longer able to produce that kind of giant
anymore. this giant had the size of nearly 2x standard long fin HM.
now, that's about 4.5 or 5 inches, for those who are wondering.

oh, did we mention that the "older" the bettas, the more difficult
they are to spawn? they are no longer active, their eggs got older
too, and the males typically got tired very easily (what do you
expect? he has to drag that large tail of his everywhere!).

but rest assured, we're still determined to get, first of all,
successful spawn of large giant HM, followed by raising their fry to
extremely large size!!!

if you're asking, how much would be the price for the fry, we would
say EXPENSIVE!!! it's the difficulty on getting the spawn to begin
with. for every successful spawn that we've got with this large
giants, there are usually at least 3 to 5 unsuccessful ones. these
unsuccessful ones typically involve different pairs!!! now, try to
figure out how much money involved to get them imported etc, only to
find them wasted cause they fail in spawning....happy if you'd like to
buy the failure ones from us ;) ;) ;)

right, enough chatting...better get to watching the fish. figuring out
how to successfully spawn them.

Summer is coming, but that's not easier for breedings

In the hope that warmer temperature will stimulate (better) breeding for the giants, we tried out 2 giant pairs in the tanks. They're more than eager, but typical difficulties with giants still exist. Either the female is too large for the male to wrap, or she's not interested in the awesomeness of the male.

It would be easier if we had chosen smaller females. But this time, we really wanted to try our breeding skills against much larger female. The two females in the tank are both 2.8 inches and 3 inches. They are massive for such young age (3.5 months now). In fact, they look like the "big momma" (Lawrence) movie, but in a much bigger scale compared to their standard bettas counterpart. These females are paired against their sibling brothers, each of 3 inches long as well. The males are more "skinny" on the tummy, whereas the females are at least double the size on their "waistline".

Unfortunately, this is day 3 already, lots of nipping of female's tail, but no eggs. They are still dancing and flaring continuously. If they were the typical bettas, we would expect them to successfully spawn by now. Oh well, perhaps just another wait and see.

It is still interesting to discover that we are just as newbie in giant spawnings. They are challenging beasts. Pick them too young to spawn, they ended up being very aggressive (though usually successful spawning), but we dont know if we've picked the largest-eventual-giant from the pool. Pick large ones to spawn on much later time, in the hope of producing yet-much-larger giants, usually yield in disappointment cause the darn thing won't spawn at all !!!

Usually the males are to blame though. Their body is not big enough to handle the body of the female. Dying to hear back from the experts out there as to how to spawn giants the "easy" way. Let us know if you know a trick or two.

youngsters for sale

check out our stock sample at http://mybettas.110mb.com. There are some new stock uploaded. These guys are very young, 2 months old, but has been quite a headache to keep, as most of them are very agressive. lots of nippings already happening. both males and females flare very frequently.

if you're interested, they are available for $100 for a bulk of 10 (5 pairs), random. You will get a mix of long fin and short fin, various colours. nippings exist but not very extensive, most nippings will heal in short amount of time. they are HM and HMPK. Some come from giant gene line as well, hence expect their size to grow much larger.

Shipping to east coast is $25, otherwise please contact us to see if some meeting time can be arranged (shipping is still preferred).

Email at mybettas at gmail dot com