Avoidance of bent dorsal

Another experiment we're running is to see whether forcing the bettas to the lower part of the tank would avoid them having bending dorsals. This only applies to those bettas that are known to be "free" bent dorsal due to inbreeding defects such as the broken rays.

HMs, particularly those with very long fins ones, are prone to bent dorsal. This is increasingly to be true on some of our lines, particularly the copper line where their dorsal would be excessively high and large - and heavy - that regular coming to the water surface seems to force the dorsal to bend.

So, what we do instead is to card the upper half of the tank such that the bettas have no choice but to flare on the bottom half. This way, they will only come to water surface for making bubbles and breathing, but a full flaring activity happens far away from the surface.



Any tricks you've got to improve bettas dorsal? Some other breeders said that the less amount of exercises they do, the better their dorsal. We don't find that to be true since some bettas would have tendency to spend the rest of their lives near the water surface, perhaps contemplating of their boredom in the tank....hence still ended up with bent dorsal.