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.