Spawning a dropsy betta

Dropsy is a terrible illness. Not knowing what to do with it and yet not having heart to 'terminate' the bugger. One of the bettas from D&S had dropsy. It's the first time ever we've got this over very long period of time - actually not quite sure when the last time we had it. Anywho, it was all started when he spawned and then somewhat become over-protective male, where he would guard the fry for days without eating. So, he managed to destroy his internal organs, we're not sure which one though. He has been having dropsy for a full month. It gets worst now, he moves about and still "quite" active, but the scales started to show off up to his peduncle now...So that's kinda worrying.

He started to eat recently, and that got us excited. Perhaps it's a bit too late though, but better late than never ;)

He was so active and we were so scared that he's going to pass out very soon that we tried to spawn him ! Heck, might as well try it out and hopefully get the best out of him, won't you agree?

Anyhow, he flares like crazy, build huge nest, female is all ready too, but apparently we had our hope too high. He couldn't manage to wrap the female. The dropsy, or rather the scales sticking out, has prevented him to wrap the female properly. He would position himself on wrapping position, then wrap, somehow the female went loose, and he would just slowly fall to the tank floor. No eggs, nothing :(

We kinda wondered whether we should wait for another couple of days, perhaps if he's not dead yet, to try out with other female. The problem is that we don't have any other smaller females. All of our breeder-quality females are large giants....S'pose we can only wait and see whether he'd get slightly better and we can try it out again. Fingers crossed.

At the moment we're running another experiment on curing the dropsy, by starving him and lowering his temperature to the point that many of his internal organs operate on much lower pace. Tomorrow we'll feed him some vegetables, to help clean up his internals. If that doesn't work, then chances he won't survive these couple of days.

>>> Update: experiment failed. He died a couple of days after.

When is a halfmoon isn't a halfmoon?

If you are considering of getting giant HMPK, be very aware that fish sold as HMPK is not necessarily qualified as such. HMPK or the "halfmoon" term requires specific satisfaction to the standard. Many fish with spread of 180 degree is not necessarily halfmoon! It has to have sharpe edges of rays where the caudal forms a very distinct D shape. Read more on other resources on the net as to what categorized as halfmoon.

Long story short, a large number of giants being sold as HMPK are in fact standard traditional plakad. What it really means is that if you manage to spawn them, you *will* get plakads until you work on it for at least 3 generations before you get a decent halfmoon form. This is irrespective of the price tag carried by such fish, after all the price tag is owner's way of parting from his fish ;)

As mentioned numerous times in this blog, giant developments are still in its infancy. Lots of people try to get giants by working their way through from square zero. Even some well-known breeders still ignorant in categorizing their line. Mixing standard giant plakad to halfmoon line would introduce the mutation to the halfmoon, hence in the eventuality we would expect some halfmoon giants from the outcome, however you may be disappointed to wait for 3 generations to see it :)

This topic is applicable as much to the HM giant line, however in the long fin giants such "misidentification" is easily spotted. When most of the spawn yields to SD or even VT, there is no way one can claim it to be HM ;) The categorization is somewhat blurred on HMPK since their tails are shorter and more difficult to distinguish.

Others even argued that they have OHMPK in their spawn when in fact it is no more than a standard plakad that spread over 180 degree. If it's not sharpe and straight rays, it's not "halfmoon", quite simple really...

Here is a sample that cannot be called as "halfmoon". Sure he has 180 degree spread, but his caudal edges are rounded, not straight ray.


Here is a sample of a straight rays halfmoon. Notice how each rays is as straight as it could be, from peduncle to the end of caudal, making the whole caudal forms a perfect D shape ?


Sometimes the fish doesn't spread to the max but it is clearly that he's a very nice halfmoon. For instance, this HMPK has very sharp straight rays and it is clearly visible eventhough he is not showing it.


The following male, for instance, is a non-stabilized halfmoon gene. His parentage comes from standard plakad being mixed to HMPK. Apart from the number of rays branchings (the more branchings the more likely it is coming from HM line), sometimes you can tell this from the mere fact that his rays are not smooth, quite raggerized and they look as if the fish had been crossed to crowntail (CT). Standard plakad derived fish will have the traditional plakad caudal, a very much rounded shape.


Now, there may be some halfmoon siblings in the spawn, but that's just simply reiterating the point that the line isn't stable yet, where it produces mixture of halfmoon and non-halfmoon genes (halfmoon-carrier). Continuing to work on the line till it produces a 100% halfmoon is desired, but that would requires hard work over a number of generations.

So there you go, shop wisely and be educated. A hefty price tag does not necessary mean you're getting good quality bettas and similarly, a seemingly cheaper price tag doesn't mean you're getting crappy quality, it could be that the seller is more realistic on his/her pricing ;)

Noticeable defect in giant in-breeding?

If you pay close attention, you may notice that some giants have irregularities in their finnage, particularly caudal. Check your auction sites and pictures of giants they're trying to sell you. For instance, some of its rays are fused together or not having a proper branching, middle of the caudal rays being folded heavily, etc.

We speculated that this is due to deep in-breeding that they're doing to produce giant genes. As the number of available giants decreases, due to lack of availability, the breeders do not have options but to choose whatever stock they have available, hence very limited available genes produced.

This is where you have an upper hand ;) As buyer, you can select good pairing where you can choose a female from one breeder and cross it with a male from another breeder. Of course the outcome may a little bit uncertain, majority would be "normal" bettas or half-giant, but you can start your own line this way, having better advantage compared to the initial breeders. This assumes that the initial breeders hate each other's gut, and they don't share their stock. Note that some breeders form their own club and actively share their genetic pool, but they usually don't particularly have "valuable" stock that you want to have (otherwise they would have produced and sold it long time ago since they have the man-power to do it).

It always strike us odd when we asked the breeders whether they have "another" similar fish to the one that they're selling and they responded back saying "no". This could only mean 2 things: 1) the one they're trying to sell is a one-off, very much instable, and has lots of disappointing siblings, or 2) they are being honest and really don't have any other similar fish in the spawn (gosh, what's the chance of that?!). Trying to get more information from them, sometimes, is very difficult. They are very reluctant on sharing this info as it doesn't really help them selling the fish ;)

So, before you spend your money to get that beautiful giant, perhaps you should ask a bit about the history and background of what you're going to get. Picture tells 1000 words, but also hide another 1000. If they try hard to avoid answering your questions, you know where you stand ;)

How long can bettas starve?

If you no choice on starving your bettas, say because holiday or other reasons, then there are a couple of info you need to know before your bettas gone completely AWOL by the time you return back.

First, any form of starvation is not good. They can take it if done in moderation, but if it is prolonged, then you better send the suckers to someone who can take care of them better than you do !

Any living animals, bettas and us included, when starved, will have the tendency of consuming the fat storage, and possibly internal organs, before they really show up as skinny skeletal-like form. So, avoid the starvation whenever you can.

Bettas can be starved for weeks. We ran experiments on some and had managed to starve them for 3 weeks. Note that they need to be fully fed before you start the starvation. We didn't have the heart to continue on, cause they look more like bettas in the petshops now, very skinny.

When you bring back bettas from starvation, try not to overfeed them as yet. Feed them a little, let their stomach get used to foods and able to process it. After a couple of days, they should be back to normal.

When do you know that your bettas no longer able to cope with foods, due to prolonged starvation? Well, when you start feeding them, you'll notice your bettas not even eager to eat the food, or perhaps they went belly up bloated. This means, their internal organs can't process the foods and you were slightly too late in rescuing them. And yes, it's YOUR fault for leaving them too long without food !

Note that the experimentation were done to bettas in individual tanks, without any single food in sight, no plants, nothing else in there. Do not experiment this with your community tank though, cause you'll end up with reduced number of bettas by the end of your travel. Some of the tank residence will have hallucinations that there are floating foods nearby whenever they see another fish...So you'll end up with barbaric act in your tank.

We haven't been able to confirm whether prolong starvation in females will cause them to be not-viable in producing eggs. While starved females will have skinny body and sometimes missing their eggs repository, it may take sometime for them to build up egg supplies. So until someone can confirm this then we presumed females can rebuild their egg supplies given sufficient recovery time.

Lots of people worried about starving their bettas. What you may not aware, in the wild, they are used to starving. However, usually they are only starved for couple of hours to couple of days, not a full on 3 weeks! Your typical imported bettas, for instance, could very well starved for days before they even reach quarantine/aquariums. Once they've got to quarantine, had anyone ever told you that they really feed your bettas? Take their words for it, but chances are your bettas will only be fed a couple of days after their arrivals. No harm done to them with this, of course. This is when your boutique bettas had "issues" such as finrot, chew tails, or even death. They are stressed by all the travels, further stressed by not getting foods, and finally happen to stumble on that chewy-taste-not-so-bad tail of theirs. If your fish is weak during this "transitional" period, then tough luck, they may not survive a simple journey to your front door.

Keeping up-to-date with new posts

Thought we better put this hint here, as there are quite a number of questions asked about it.

If you are interested on getting updates whenever posts getting updated/loaded into this blog, there are a number of mechanisms to allow those updates being sent to you immediately. You've got updated with the latest posts everytime we/someone updates things to the blog. Here are some of the tricks, choose one that suits you.

1. RSS feeds (atom or RSS). There are links either the top of the title blog, or the right-hand panel. RSS/Atom works by informing you of the update through the so-called RSS reader. Most mail clients have these built-in. If you are using Outlook, then all you have to do is to set it up once by clicking on the RSS/Atom links, then the new posts are getting uploaded to your mailbox automatically.
   
2. Online RSS reader is also available if you have accounts such as gmail, yahoo, etc. You can subscribe to the posts only (without comments) as well as to the comments for the posts (have no idea why they separate posts and comments subscription, just doesn't make much sense to us either). Right-hand panel has that "Subscribe To" links.
3. Another alternative if you are not tech savvy or not having any of those RSS reader capability, you can always email us, we'll include your email to this blogger. There is a feature in this blogger such that it'll email you a copy of the posts direct to your mailbox. Privacy-concerned ppl: your emails are not shared nor used for any other purposes except to send you updates of the posts.
   

Once you've setup any of the above, you don't need to visit this blog anymore (although you are more than welcome to come!), since you'll get first-hand copies of the posts, fresh :). You may still need to come if you want to put comments, give some ratings to the posts, or plainly want to see things better online.

These technologies are getting better and handy all the time, though sometimes there are way too many choices about them and they can get pretty confusing :)

Availability as of end March

Haven't been updating for awhile about what's available for sale.

For those still interested and wondering, all breeder-quality males are gone. Breeder-quality females still available, 3 or 4 of them left.

5 males medium sized HM still available, no females, you can have the breeder-quality females if you so wish. Not having much time to take their pictures these days, but all of them are nice HM (1 is an SD, but rays are straight). Just check our previous posts to see samples, they are not far off different (oh, one of the male is an awesome marble - complete white body and black fins!). Some greens, lavendar, etc.

All are nice, active, and ready to ramba.

Contact us on email if you're interested, set your price.

These guys would be the last lot you'll be seeing for yet another 2 months :)

>>> Update: 2nd April: all males no longer available. Some females still available, either for interested ppl or our stock :)

Baking lessons, how do you "mix" to get the giants you want

It's so frustruating that after many experiments, we still fall into the trap of ego. Producing large size long fin giant is quite a difficult challenge. Not only the length of the fish matters, its width is also important. Take the current line for instance, its length is good, but it lacks the width of a giant. Sure, it has faster growth compared to other spawns, longer finnage, good spread and ray branching, but they are not getting thicker body. It's like watching "skinny" giants, whereas we want to get the hulk bulky giants.

It seems it would be easy to improve on the bulkiness, by crossing them to a seemingly bulk giant. However, many of the bulk body giants are only half-giant. Their body length is usually about 3.5 inches in total including tail, the best shown so far only reaches 3.7". This is not so bad perhaps, with most of the offspring produced would be half-giant, and if we're lucky we can get one or two 75% giants ;)

Crossing with half-giant only goes so far. It is so much better to cross a giant HMPK with half-giant HM rather than the above suggested crossing. The reason being is because at least with the HMPK crossing, you'd be guaranteed half-giant and you can choose very good females for the male. Unlike HM female giants, choosing good HMPK giant female is a lot easier, with the effort needs to focus on body size and many of them are supplied with good rays branching. Long fin females fall into the area of unknown, either the whole line is not producing HM -- you'd be lucky to get SDs on all of your spawns, or the majority of the offspring are not even giants!

After long discussion with some breeders from the auction sites, it becomes apparent that most of their long fins are in fact produced by crossing with HMPK giants. Basically, none of the long fins are produced by crossing two long fins! They don't even bother to do it since they know the outcome is disappointing. Some of them who had tried, have managed to get long fin giants but sold all of the offspring as SD. That tells you something, isn't it....

Another trick that works very well is to pick giant HMPK female and crossing her with standard long fin male. Since you can get easily a very good long fin male, you can improve the finnage and body through this kind of crossing. And since the male is long fin, he'll "manage" to wrap that female somehow, at least he has better chance than a giant HMPK male due to his body length. Some of the breeders also mentioned that they do the crossing when the giant females are younger, when their bodies aren't so big. This is even getting easier. All they've done is choose very "old" standard HM male, large finnage, impressive colour etc, and cross with that young giant female. Presto, you've guaranteed to have successful spawning and at least half of the spawn would be half-giant. What better way to get easy gaints !!!

This doesn't interest us much though. We still want extremely large giants. Not just half-giants. The target at the moment is in producing 75% giants. Once this can be accomplished, we'll be aiming at that 100% giants ;)

Now you may ask, what's the size of a half-giant and 75% giants be? Half-giant HM typically has slightly bigger body than standard HM, with thick body or longer body/finnage. We categorize it as anything smaller than 4" would be half-giant. They are typically only 3.5 to 3.7 inches in total from tip to toe, head to end of tail. You may say, that's not really big is it, compared to 3" giant HMPKs. Well, what you need to take into consideration is that a 100% giant HMPK has to be 3" minimally, but usually they are 3.5". Hence the upgrade to a long fin is about right that 3.7" being considered half-giant HM. A 100% giant HMPK can reach about 4" as he gets older, perhaps 1+ year....

A 75% giant HM is usually having the size of 4 to 4.5". This is difficult to achieve, most long fin giants will just fall to half-giant categories. You need very dilligent water changing, flaring activity, etc to get him to this size!

You may ask what a 100% giant HM would look like.... Some breeders boast saying they have them, but do they really? A 100% giants should have length of 5.5 to 6.5" (or the infamous 7" giants!!). The largest long fin giant females we've got was a 4+ inches. That was massive enough. Such a large giant would deem to be SD and drag its tail everywhere! Hence we don't think anyone managed to get a good 100% HM giants. If they have them, they look so disappointingly like SD that the breeders won't be sharing them to anyone as yet ;)

What you need to remember as well is that crossing 2 giants won't get you any guarantee of similar quality giants. Hence, suppose you get a pair of 100% giants, there won't be any chance in world that the offspring would be 100% giants! This is because the gene is very much instable. You may get a bunch of half-giants, and soon enough you'll lose the line in despair, unless you cross out with new blood.

As long fin giant is very much new in the market, you also find that your pool of choices reduced significantly. It is very difficult to search for good pairings for long fin giants. Most people will just ended up crossing their long fin with short fin giants. This is unlike the standard HM lines, where you can shop for the best male and female fairly easily and their price has gone down considerably. Shopping for long fin giants is painful with the outcome of pairing is a bit dimmer than your typical bettas. Hence, if you're up to the challenge, long fin giants would be giving you the best torture to your patience :) Only advisable to those who have strong will and never given up, otherwise you better stick with your typical bettas or short fin HMPK giants, no offence intended...

Also, you may notice that many short fin giants sold at 3" have "slightly" longer anal/caudal fins? That's because they are crossed to HM giants (either half-giant or the 75%). This is considered cheating in our dictionary, since it is difficult to say whether the HMPK is considered 75% giant or 100% giant HMPK. Many people just put a blind eye and call them giants, that'll do :)

Crossing to long fin to improve finnage is no secret. Try to cross your short fin HMPK to long fin HM, you'll get 50% short fin and 50% long fin. The "short" fin offspring would have a tad longer on anal and caudal, and the "long" fin offspring would be slightly tad shorter on the finnage than their parent was!

What would a half-giant and 75% giant HMPK look like? A half-giant HMPK, again, won't be much bigger than your typical HMPK. Their size is usually 1.5 times bigger, but that's about it. You may see them as 2.3". Crossing a standard HMPK to a giant HMPK, either 75%, 100%, or even a half-giant HMPK, will get you a half-giant, it's that simple! A 75% giant HMPK is somewhere about 2.5". We simply put anything  below 2.8" to be 75% giant HMPKs. So you can see many others try to "improve" the length of their HMPK by crossing to HMs, the finnage will be longer hence helps in getting that final inch.

So, if you're interested on getting any giants in your spawns, all you have to do is cross your line with a giant ;) It's only getting tougher when you try to produce a good quality giants, that's when you need to do good planning and having good eyes to spot nice pairings :)

Funny how all of this is no difference than the baking lessons. You need to get the good hands on a range of things in order to get that perfect cake. You overdo it, the outcome isn't as expected. Lacking an ingredient won't get you there either. What if you've got all the ingredients only to find out you don't have the necessity equipment (hey the oven is broken for weeks!). Patience is virtue, just don't give up!

Any chance of copper giant coming

For those asking, yes the spawned pair on speed dating and whats cooking posts is from copper line. the descendant of this copper spawn. The male is from that line whereas the female is from the current multicolour line. In two or three months time they will be available for sale :)

Currently the pair has another go on spawning since the female is still in the tank. We were trying to get one of copper red male to do the job, but he decided to commit harakiri rather than spawning! So the copper red line is lost for now :( That's the up and down of the hobby. One day you've got them, the next they just disappear.

Perhaps later, in a week or two time, we'll spawn him with his sibling female. That will throw back the gorgeous parent genes.

Reasons for prolonged and failed spawning

We experimented a bit with some spawning situations and noticed that the followings can cause fail spawning. Make sure your bettas do not have these conditions, otherwise you'll just watch them fail miserably....

1. female is too large. this one is pretty obvious, they may be eager, but if she's too large, there won't be any successful spawning. 3 conditions can come out of this: 1) female drops eggs 2) your male gets very tired and stop making bubbles 3) both get very stressed and no longer want to spawn
2. starving bettas. can you do anything when you are starving? your bettas can't either! how do you know your bettas starving? if you feed them on spawning tank, and they rush off to pick the foods, then you know they're starving!
   
3. water temperature too high or too low. not in the mood, they won't do it
4. no bubbles. some females are very picky, no bubbles, no spawning! some males are silly, they only care of chasing females but pretty useless on making bubbles. you may get spawning by scooping bubbles from other males, just to get them going; however, be very careful for incapable males, if they can't keep the building the bubbles, even when spawning happens, the egg/fry won't survive the critical 1 or 2 days of hatching.
5. you are ugly! some bettas are also picky about their partners. if they are not attracted to each other, then they'll ignore the existence of the other.
6. you scare the sh*t of me! if female is too small, compared to the male, and he is very macho and aggressive, the female may ended up hiding at all times. the male will brutalize her, but her trauma is not helping her on "doing it". if you let this to continue, 3 things can happen: 1) she'll die beaten by male 2) she hides forever and never wanted to spawn with any males ever again 3) male gets tired and this may lower his self-esteem, he thinks he's ugly and not attractive ;)
7. existence of other bettas in spawning tank. depending on whether they are accustom to other bettas or not, most of the time they won't share the tank with other fish. some times you get spawning happening, if you have nice anchor places for the male (and the female is attractive to him). community tank spawning is good experience. you'd be surprised, other bettas won't eat the fry, if they're well fed. mixing bettas with other types of fish is not good, the fry will just become sushi treat for some....
8. inexperience pair. as with any survival techniques, experience in spawning is a must. while most bettas will do just fine, there always are some that can't even get the technique correct. younger bettas have this tendency, so avoid spawning them too young. sometimes you see the males to be incapable, sometimes it's the female. typical problem is the position of the male and/or the female during wrapping. the female needs to be inserting herself with head a bit pointing upward and caudal tail pointing downward. same thing with male. if both males and females start off the wrapping flat horizontal, then they need to get to the angle position right away, otherwise the male can't wrap that tummy properly.
9. sub-optimal environment. your tank is too small, too large? you have that vibration next to the tank coming from pump? disco betta with very loud speaker next to it? very bright light shining to the tank at 24/7? foul water? at any rate, if your bettas aren't happy with their environment, you won't get spawning either.
   

If you notice that your bettas fall into the above situations, then you better off separating them and recondition for the next time.

Dwarf bettas experiment

Early experimentation to produce dwarf bettas, or rather the mini bettas, has shown that this can easily be done by the following technique:

• very irregular feeding, sometimes feeding only once or twice a week
• start irregular feeding early in the life of the betta, they'll go skinny (but seems healthy)
• once they reach 3 or 4 months old, you can feed as much as you'd like, their size won't grow bigger
• overcrowded tank helps, though not necessarily required
• lower temperature, turning the heater on timer for every 3 or 4 hours at night seems to consistently produce dwarf ones

We don't want to advocate dwarf bettas, but if you're into it, hope the above can help you produce nice ones. Of course, since the above is heavily environment-controlled traits, the offspring will not be dwarf. Until someone can confirm that there is such thing as dwarf betta genetic (just like there is giant-gene), then the above is the closest you can get.

The finnage doesn't seem to be affected, it'll be proportional of the betta size. If you've got HM line, then the outcome will still be HM ;)

Males are easier to get into dwarfness, than females. This is because the females are usually easier-going, they'll eat anything thrown at them.

Watchout for malnutrient though, you don't want your bettas to either get sick or unhealthy. Also, make sure your females are still having sufficient egg deposit. Starvation, in any rate, will reduce the amount of fat and eggs stored, you don't want that ! ;)

We'll take some pictures later for samples.

>>> Update 5 April
Here is a short of standard green MG (for those interested, he's avail with female for $25 !).


Here's a "dwarf" HMPK boy, marble, 4 or 8 rays splitting, slightly OHMPK.


Now here's the comparison of the two. On the comparison, the "standard" MG boy is on the other side, side by side comparison would show that the "dwarf" is about half or slightly bigger of the size of standard boy.


Again, slightly blurry.

Bettas terminology

If you're still confused with a bunch of bettas terminology, and searching the net doesn't really help you, here are some of them. The definition and meaning of these terms are not precise. These abbreviation, either invented, or stand for something that may have been used initially for different purposes, either way, they're commonly found in discussions about bettas.

HM = Halfmoon, D-shape tail long tail, 180 degree spread on caudal of your betta

VT = Veiltail, V-shape tail long tail, rounded with end of tail dropping down

CT = Crowntail, crown-like tail medium tail, with lots of spike and very uniform, all fins are spikey

HMCT = CT that has 180 degree spread

PK = Plakad, short-tail, rounded or spade-like shape sometimes

HMPK = Plakad with 180 degree spread

CTPK = mixed of PK and CT, spikes show up but usually not uniform on fins

SD = super delta, about 160 degree tail spread

D = delta, less than super delta spread

HMx = HM-geno, genotype from HM, but most will show up as SD or D, parentage has HM gene

HMF = female of HM, usually doesn't spread till 180 degree caudal, but this is considered acceptable for females

HMM = male of HM, has to spread to 180 degree minimum

BF = butterfly, edges part of the tail are transparant or have different colouration, usually uniformly white, transparant, or black.

reverse-BF = transparancy happens on the inner-part of the tail, the edges have standard colour
triband = multi-coloured betta, involving at least 3-bands of colours. the 3 colours form layers similar to rainbow.

bi-colour = betta with 2 colours where both colours share the majority, sometimes the colour mixed on the body too

multi = simply multiple colours in the fish, randomized. if there are only 2 colours, the fish can be called bi-colour

Some combinations of the above are very commonly found, for instance, you see people discussing CTF, female of CT. Other terms are more like "fancy" terms, invented from the twisted minds of some hobbyists, in association with anything they can imagine :) For instance, "apache", "thai flag", "skyhawk", "tiger". They are not official terms, nor they are agreed by other hobbyists, hence you'll notice these terms disappear as soon as they were introduced. Different combinations of colours can produce lots of terms, again these terms are not official nor easily remembered.

If you have more questions, shoot us email and we'll add to the above definitions. If you've got pictures, that would be better, nothing clearer than a picture !

Tips for new breeders

Lots of people have been asking, what tips can you give for breeding bettas. Though we don't want to say that we're expert, there are things that we learn that may help you a bit, so here they are, in no particular order...

1. Always have more than 1 male and 1 female in your stock. You will need the "spare" ones in rainy days! Either as speed dating replacement, replacement for sickness, moodiness, etc, you're going to need it ! We always keep at least 3 pairs for ourselves, no matter what. Spawning itself is very difficult to be successful, sometimes you're lucky with your chosen pair, but many have just failed. Without spare ones, you'll just grew distress. This makes the hobby very frustruating journey for some, so, by all means, get your backups! Back in the old days, we always had backups for our fish. They were (and still are) very expensive when each pair would either need to be imported or bought from the very few individuals. It could cost from $20 to $150 per fish, many of which won't even had pictures or arrived in state that you can't differentiate from VT of your local petstore :) Some aquariums or your transhippers would help you import for around $25-$50 per fish, that's becoming the norm these days, but at least you have a "choice". This is also the main reason why we always sell you bulk, cause we wanted it so much in the old days and no one was offering it (not the one that cost you an arm and a leg at least!). With bulk buying, you need not to worry anymore about the pairings, or backup pairs etc.
   
2. Do not rush into it. Don't rush the spawning. Prepare them properly, feed them well, make them comfy (read our spawning 101 or this breeding technique if you're a newbie). Lots of bad decisions came from rushing things. Have you prepared the fry needs? Have you got their foods? How are you going to grow them later? Do you have containers/tanks/barrack? Once you've got that sorted, then you can enjoy the spawning. Don't try to spawn fish that are too young, too old, or simply too large. They need more experienced breeders rather than newbie. Sure you may get lucky once or twice but most probably you'll just fail.
   
3. Can you afford the cost, the time, and the efforts? Spawning is like raising a new family, you need to be able to put lots of efforts to it. We spent a good 2 hours every day for the fish, sure sometimes you can cut off the time by being slack on feeding or not paying much attention to them. Of course the time spent depends on how large your fish collection, but you still need to spend sometime, so put that into your consideration. Feeding, changing water, cardings, they all take time and patience. How about fitting that into your holiday plan? Who's feeding the fish? Can you use automatic feeder (which we find not suitable for bettas unless you conditioned your fish eating pellets).
   
4. Do not become "over protective parents"! Lots of people are so nervous or over-protective that they "crash the party". Fish, provided they are well taken care of, in terms of foods and environment, should be a lot of fun for most people. You can skip water changing once in awhile, they won't die. Sometimes you've got sick fish, so what, just separate and treat him. No need too stressed out about it...You didn't feed your fish this morning, don't worry, they won't die either. You can be forgetful from time to time, nothing to worry about. Should I turn on the lights? Go with your guts, if you think it's good for them, why not...if you worried about electricity, turn it off or put a smaller-watt lights. Stop buying those medicines, you won't need it if you take good care of your fish. The only meds in our place is a water conditioner and tripple sulfa (antibiotics). The latter is hardly used and had expired a couple of years ago...

Hope the above helps you. We'll add more when we remember other tips, otherwise just keep reading our blogs, sure you'll find lots of good lessons in them.

Speed dating approach to spawning

Last night, the spawning didn't happen as expected. It is clear that the male is way too inexperience (despite his large size!) on courting the girl. Perhaps it's also contributed by the sheer size of the female, making him very difficult to wrap her.

No eggs had been falling for hours. We just grew tired of them and separate them. We ran another experiment here, what happened if we swap partner during spawning, will the new male pick where the other left off?

As expected, the old male was way confused, he wondered around his new tank helplessly looking for his nest. The female was on the same state, wondering where on earth the gorgeous male went to. Hiding? That's not very nice of him when they were trying hard to wraps!!

Anywho, the new male introduced to the tank, started to flare to the confused female. The female grew anger towards the new male, trying to send him away from the nest. So maybe there is something in the nest after all...Anyhow, the new male has been dancing with her and she's responding by flaring angrily towards him. And that's when the magic comes, in less than 5 minutes, they are wrapping and tons of eggs falling!

It is clear that when the female is about to burst with eggs and the prettiest male is 'useless', you can indeed change partner quickly to get the spawning happening. There is no need to watch the female miserable and dropping her eggs, that would be a waste to her eggs, her spawning experience (she learns from bad lesson and will drop eggs in the future), etc.

Nice after all that we're looking forward for another nice lot coming in couple of months time :)

What's cooking?

Currently there are 2 pairs waiting their turn on spawning, perhaps we will get an action sometime tonight on one of the pair.

The first pair. Male is our own boy, giant 6-7 months (if not more??? don't keep the track of his age now), size about 4 inches, he used to be nice HM till he got into fighting and started to get collapsed tail. Just an SD now. Nice thick rays and body length. Female is our own as well, one of the breeder-quality female, 8 rays, nice long fin (if only she can grow longer, that would be good), 3.5 months old. Both are first timers, so would expect fast spawning. Male is way too aggressive though, so it is expected that the female will be 'damaged'. She's also very eager and attempts to challenge the male, very nice dancing around the tank is observed this morning.

The pair, too obstructed view, but give the size differences. Male is nearly 2x the size of female if not more.


The female.


Zooming in her tail, just for fun. Not spreading large as yet, but nice long anal.


The second pair. Male is half-giant green from D&S. Female is our own from our copper gold. This may not work out. The female is too large for the male and the male sense there is impossibility of wrapping her, so, it wasn't much action happening as yet. but we could be surprised when we get home later ;) ;)

Shipping to AU only

We've got a number of enquiries about shipping our fish internationally. Lots of US and European acquaintances thought that "east coast" refer to their east coasts, no, it's Australian east coasts :)

Unfortunately, shipping international is not possible, not now, not in the future. Please correct us if we're wrong, but as far as we know, Australian Quarantine requires proper paperwork in order for such shipment to happen, hence only registered exporters can do this "officially". True, there are many opportunists who would just send the fish through EMS, but this is considered illegal. If the destination country does not do checking on such parcels, then it could be okay. Some countries do strict checking, the fish will end up confiscated (provided they arrived there on-time, some EMS could take days and some countries are having opposite weather than ours).

Anywho, unless we've got the above incorrect, shipping bettas overseas is not considered a viable option for the time being. You better stick with your importers or transhippers, they usually get your fish through proper channel with less risks involved.

Sample females HM giant-geno

Samples of the breeder-quality females. Both of these are long fin HM of 8 rays. They moved too much, hence difficult to take pictures. We'll try again when we have time. Both of them spread close to full 180 degree, we suspect they'll grow longer fins. Hopefully can get similar length as their mum in about 1 month time

This female is the one and only of the whole spawn of about 400 :) She has that fan-like pectoral fins, very pretty when viewed from sides and above (difficult to be shown in the picture). We'll try to spawn with her sibling brother later.


There are 2 of similar females to this one. Similar to her mum.


>> Added 11/03/09, 2 more pics of her, not flaring as yet, don't want to excite her too much, otherwise she'll be preparing that tummy with eggs :)




Don't have much time to take pics of other females, but some of them are very nice MG, pineapple, oh, did we mention very nice reds? Perfect for the red boy posted previously. (tempted to see if crossing 2 reds will get one of those extended red; their red colouration is just awesome; body has no indication of cambodian at all)

There are about 6 or 7 females kept on this spawn. We'll just keep 1 or 2, the rest avail for sale with their matching males, $100 per pair, for those interested, while stock lasts.

Update movies of blue and red HMs

Quick update on the blue/green boy and the red boy, HM, giant-geno, about 3 months. For those interested, they are still available for $100 per pair with sibling breeder-quality females. Otherwise they'll be staying around for another 2 or so months before we have the time to spawn them :)

Either way, looking forward to their growth and size.

Apologies on the movies where the cord is hindering the view, the cord is from XL as a gift, pretty handy to keep 2 tanks warm enough :)

blue/green boy, fairly dark but can't be helped, the lighting isn't much of a help.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJMgp9dWEhQ

red boy, better lighting and nicely shown, still love to move about too much
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1C0wSQyNrf4

blue vs red, flare boys, flare! Movie taken from side ways, showing both of them, flaring beautifully :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdOxCPFO-MU

So much enjoyment to see them flare....

BTW, these movies also available on the right-hand YouTube panel of this blog. Their sizes are about 2MB each. If you're interested on the uncompressed version of 20+MB, just give us a yell.

Blue Marble Boy

Just thought to post this, not the best picture of him but we're too busy and running out of time to do proper shooting, so here he is. Good relaxing time to see him flare :) He's avail with spawn sister for $75, for those interested.

Picture, from side way.


Movie, short and blurry but will do, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfeuyrgHIgg

Huge warning!

These couple of months have been very stressful days. Natural disasters aside, we were trying to buy some fish 2 months ago -- yeah, that was a long time ago. Apart being cheated, gave them all the benefit of the doubts, but only finding out that he was cheating us after all, and trying to recoup all of our loses via PP claim system, we are also bombarded with all kinds of nasty words.

Funny how people could turn ugly when they were actually the ones should be blamed for. We paid for the fish, very large sum of money involved, waited promises after promises, requested kindly for refund repeated times, got ignored, yet another promises, no indication of the fish nor the money, and finally the bills arrived. VZ was screaming so loud, the neighbours would have heard it. So, asked them again for refund, a week pass, two weeks passed, request again, and finally said enough is enough. if refund aint coming, then see if PP or CC can do better job for us.

What do u know, once PP is involved, so far 3 accounts got locked out, all people involved scream at us asking to close the claims. Hey, we repeatedly say to them, claim can only be closed when we got our money back. we sent to their PP, so we let PP takes the money back for us. After all, the bastard isn't willing to refund us back, nor send our fish.

Let this be a huge warning to everyone. We know JLM had informed others of this, but she had been kind and discreet about it. Well, we aint care. Cheaters are cheaters, everyone ought to know about it and avoid them at all costs. These names/emails have been used in auction sites. They refer to either the same person (with multiple accounts), or same group of people who help each other and involved in the con.

List of emails/names you need to avoid (not in any particular order):

• doctor aquatic (dr. lek or dr. that)
• sawaddee aquatic (apinan sangmarn)
• patthasith
• fahad sangmarn
• the_fisheries (in the group but hadn't had opportunity to clash as yet -- luckily didn't send PP payment)
  
• watt (don't know who this is, but kept being mentioned)
• dern (same, but being mentioned)
• added, another paypal heaven: anusorn (anusorn54@windowslive.com)
• they morphed as a new name sompoch (sompoch2009@windowslive.com)
• added, ocean_aquatic (ocean_aquatic@hotmail.com; these guys really like morphing from one to another!)
• new morphing, Lucky_farm (luck_9999@hotmail.com), beware
• more morphing: diamondcrown_farm

These people are the ones behind some of the banned auction site names such as the_sea99, etc. Would have thought that the auction sites can be made safer from these guys, but then it is probably too hard to detect anyway.

We're sure the list will grow pretty soon as the drama evolves. Oh, don't you ever piss these people, you haven't heard the worst swear words ever yet. there it goes all imaginations of how gentle and kind thai people are -- may not be applicable to general population, but majority of the above is trully scary.

Lessons learnt?

• don't believe in any sweet talk -- boy, aren't they best at doing this?
• don't send your money to different paypal names -- wonder who gave the initial warning for this? wish we had listened
• when something smells fishy, trust your nose
• when they keep pressuring you on purchasing that darn awesome fish for "special" price, you know you're going to be in deep sh*t later
• don't ever ever send your money via western union or moneygram (when you've got problems, that money is down the toilet)
• do NOT try to upgrade your current transactions by buying more, make sure you've got your current batch shipped -- before you realize it, you'll be spending hundreds and into the thousands.
• don't try to be friend with them, when money is involved, things usually get very dirty quickly
• keep record of your conversations, you gonna need it in rainy days

While we have slim chance of getting "friends" with these guys, not that we wanted anymore, scare the sh*t out of us, and no possibility of recouping our money nicely -- not to mention more than half can't be recouped -- we hope we cause enough nightmare on their ends too. Serves them right for cheating. It seems, from the conversation, it is clear that they've cheated others before too. Maybe no one dares to speak out, they get away with it, and see another light to try it out again....

Looking back at this, wished we've spent that money on something else, perhaps to the bushfire victims. *Sigh*, what a miracle a sweet talk can do....

So, before you realize it, hopefully you are not the next target. Be warned. For those already in their trap or similar situation, let's share it, either to help each other or to warn others.

If you are concerned, do contact us. Happy to share some of the story/proof -- will only share to those getting trap or similar situation, not to those "curious". Our suggestion is, if you can, stay away from them unless the transactions involved are small.

"Why would the chicken cross the road? There is food on the other side". Just be very careful on your dealings with sellers, while most are decent people, some are not. Identifying one from the other, unfortunately, requires a little bit of skill.