Fry roster, who feeds what and when

Ever since we've been breeding bettas, and other fish -- but we failed at them :), we've developed a certain ritual or rather habit. It's gone the days when we breed 3 pairs per week and even up to 10-15 spawnings per month. We are getting older, busier, or simply lazier. These days, we only breed about 3 pairs per month and the breeding period usually only last for 2 or 3 months.

Pretty much not interested anymore in crossing all different combinations in the hope to diversified the lines and doing "divide and conquer" approach. We'll just pick the best 3 pairs, cross them, and wait for another 2 months to see the outcome. Some of the initial fish still remain with us, in case we're developing further F2/3/4 on the line.

Perhaps this is the natural progression of the hobby. In the old days, it's so difficult to produce a successful spawn. The aim was to get as much milk, ooppssss...fry, as possible out of the parents. These days, we're more focused on which male to be crossed to which female, ignoring how many fry they'll produce (if we're lucky to get them spawn to begin with -- giants are just so difficult in spawning them). In fact, the number of fry produced, as long they're about 100, that sounded good already. Getting 300, 400, or even more fry is just unwanted outcome :) Who's going to take care of them? It requires a fulltime 2 person to really handle so many fry. 3 people rotating on taking care of them is still manageable, but it sure works out funny sometimes.

AD loves to feed the females a lot more than the males. He likes the females bigger and stronger. He is the morning guy, who'd wake up at 4am to give a nice round to all fish (females more) before he's off to work. VZ only likes fry under age of 2.5 months in the community tanks. She feeds them with mozzie larvae and sometimes chopped worms. She'd sit in front of the tanks for at least half an hour on every feeding, just watching the fry trying to catch the larvae :). She has more flexible hours but usually starts off at 9am, again before her work. I need to pick up the slack doing the roster in the afternoon on making sure every fish got fed, otherwise we had the old incident of "why is it so smelly here?". That's when we realized a fish in a container somewhere had been dead for a couple of days and no one noticed it (well, partly because it is hidden in the stacks of containers, but also because everyone else assumes someone else had feed them!)

Increasingly frequent, we found a container full of live worms but without the fish ! Everyone then got busy trying to figure out where on earth the fish went to....Usually we'll find him either on nearby container, or dry on the floor somewhere.

Night is the only blissful time when all of us able to sit down together, sitting next to 2 big tanks enjoying the small fry flaring. That's also the best time to feed the fry again, with mozzie larvae this time. At least VZ can sit down and started to pick her favourite colours. Oh yes, did we mention that we also play the game "guess whether it's a male or female" on the small fry. It gets very challenging specially when the fry is barely 1.5 or 2 months old. It's only a matter of weeks till we knew who win the game :)

Did we mention that all of this roster has to be done while we're taking care of the kids too? Now, that's tiring and yet so relaxing (such oxymoron is surprisingly "understandable" amongst breeders and parents).