Grow boy, grow!

That's the frustration when you're expecting a fry to show off their true potential. Unfortunately, fish is not going to grow overnight and many have realized this but still deep inside expect their fish to behave somewhat differently.

In order to get your fish growing to large size, particularly if they are giants, many breeders suggest to do the following:

• large tank for the boy
• frequent water changes or at least frequent topping up the water
• flaring activity, be it to another male or to that gorgeous female next door
• irregular feeding (boy is different than girl, they worries about their ego rather than stomach)
• don't keep a wall clock next to your tank, watching the minutes go won't help!

There has been some people saying that they keep their fry together in community tank till they are of age 3 months old. We have never been successful on doing this, at the age of 2.5 months at least they will start flaring which sadly resulted in torn fins. The opposite sometimes is worst too. Early separation causes the boy to have "early withdrawal syndrome" where he's so scared, not in the mood, stressed up, and basically stunt. Temperature plays significant role if you're separating him. We find, with less fluctuation and frequent flaring, the boy will turn out okay.

Now the challenge of getting him large size in very short amount of time is still a puzzle to us. While females are easier to handle (just keep feeding them foods), the males growth is somewhat restricted. Our experimentation has shown that males with females insight grow faster than the ones purely isolated with other males. Females with males insight will mature faster than their all-females counterpart, but their sizes are no difference than all-females.

Large tank for a single boy seems to be problematic as well. He's getting the feeling of too isolated, the tank is just too big for him, and he's lonely. Less interaction seems to reduce his growth rate.

So, as you can see, there are lots of things that we still need to learn on giant bettas, particularly the long fins. HMPK seems to be somewhat easier, their bulky body size is purely the result of exercises and foods. Finnage isn't something to worry about, they are not so troublesome compared to their long fins.

Another experimentation that we did, which was quite successful, was to have around 8 bettas or so in a large tank. Each betta is caged in a cut off 2L or 3L bottles, and a single betta is let roam free in the large tank. You'd see flaring exercises happening for a good half hour to 1 hour before you need to isolate them again. Isolation is as simple as the caging, by getting a 4L milk bottle cut off to form the cage. You can vary the number of bettas in a tank, depending how big your cages and your tank, but the point of the experiment was to show that they do indeed grow much faster and larger in such environment. Now, the only thing that you need to do is to make sure each caged betta has a chance to roam free in the tank, just re-cage the previously free betta and let another one free. This exercise not only build the size of your bettas, but also build their temperament. They will be accustom to disturbance, changes, and will flare instantly to any other bettas. Nothing more rewarding than to see your bettas flare like crazy showing off that beautiful finnage!

Unfortunately, this experimentation could not scale. If you only have a couple bettas, it's all great. If you have lots of them, you'd need lots of large-size tanks. Some bettas are very good in jumping or swimming through small openings on the lower part of your cage (if you didn't cut the cage in straight line). So, from time to time you've got "accidental" fights, which you will regret cause your beautiful bettas won't look the same anymore :)

We haven't experiment with drip system yet, lots of other breeders are having good response with this system. The problem with drip system, in our opinion, are three fold. first the waste of electricity (heater) that it requires. Controlling temperature to be around, say 27 degree Celcius, needs a 300 watt heater running all the time. Summer may help, but that's only about 2 or 3 months of the year, whatever happened to the rest of the year? States where sun shines close to all year round, such as QLD and NT, are somewhat lucky. They just don't need to worry about heaters. 2nd problem is the growth of algae on each container in the drip, sometimes rendering the whole thing to be pointless cause your bettas can't flare with other bettas. third problem is the accumulation of waste product in the dripper. Slowly but sure you'll get the dripper blocked, water pressure and distribution no longer in balance. Oh, did we forget the frequent amount of topping water? Drip system evaporates water much faster.

Home-made drip system would be fantastic, if they can address many of the above problems efficiently. We're still searching for best design for drip system. Something that doesn't cost an arm and a leg to build, last for sometime, and doesn't cost too much to run.

Anyhow, getting back to raising large boy. We haven't been paying much attention to foods and its influences to betta size. While it has been known that live foods stimulate growth and colour on bettas, frozen foods or pellets seem to deliver the same outcome provided the bettas are exercised properly. Hence, this is still an unknown area for us. Some experimentations that we did where we fed a tank solely with frozen food and another with live food didn't show noticeable differences. This ignores some side effect of certain foods (e.g. feeding frozen food incorrectly can cause bloating easily; live worms may carry diseases; etc).