Breedings @ MyBettas: Guess your betta sex

Bettas identifications have been an interesting game, when done during the early stages of your bettas, say when they are 1.5 month to 2 months old. Sometimes they are very easily identified, while other times you'd need to rely on your gut feeling or plain simply guess skills :)

While various variants of bettas (CT, PK, HM, VT, etc) may have slight variations on the way to identify them, the methods mentioned here are applicable in general.

So, here's some simplified methods. Currently we are showing methods for long fin betta, specifically HM.

The first one, is very easy to spot. This is a female. She has the egg repository clearly concealled under her tummy skin and a much larger egg peck popping up.

On a smaller female, you may still see the egg repository faintly showing off under the skin, and also a smaller egg peck. This is when you have a little doubt whether that was really a female you're looking at, or you need zoom glasses just to freeze her to check her clearer! This is when you need other clues to help you out. The easiest one would be to check her anal fin length compared to her peduncle. If the anal roughly same length as peduncle, or even shorter, then chances you're looking at a female. Short caudal fin (in an HM line) is also good indication that it's a she! Caudal fin length as a cue can't be used for PK though, cause all PK is short! Anal fin is also helpful, you'll notice that usually the height of female's anal fin is half of the male's. That is, if you measure the height of her anal fin, you will notice that she has a much shorter anal compared to the male's counterpart.

Note that on the first pictured female, and the one below, the anal fin is slightly longer than her peduncle. This is because the line is an HM, hence she does have the tendency of having longer anal.

There are times when you just have to say, "hmm....not sure about this one". Check this fish for instance, it doesn't have egg repository, it does have egg peck but we can't be sure of doing identification based on egg peck alone, cause males also have egg pecks (as we will see soon). The fish's anal and caudal seem to be short enough. Gut feeling tells us that this would be a male, though he doesn't sprout yet. Why would that be the case? Cause the caudal seems to be a tad longer than other females. The lack of egg repository is also a good guess, cause usually small females already have some small number of eggs stored in the body.

Here's another "unknown". The fish clearly has short fin at the moment. Egg peck is clearly shown there. No sign of egg repository. So it'll be a matter of time (1 week perhaps) before it shows off and identifiable.

Another unknown, due to young age. Anal has started to grow a bit longer, hence may just be a male in 1 week time.

A clear identification between males and "unknown" can be seen in the following picture. Upper fish is unknown, but lower fish has clearly show long fin trait and therefore identifiable as male.

Here is for the fun of it, another male. Egg peck is clearly showing up, but he's definitely a boy. Anal and caudal are giving away his sex, of course.