Tips on achieving your betta goal

What would you do when you achieve that "goal" of yours in bettas? Say you want to get the "perfect" form for your line, and one day you've got what you want. What will you do next?

In our case for instance, in the old days we've been wanting to get a line that produces majority HMs, with wide anal, large caudal, and strong dorsal. This is easily done on traditional coloured lines such as red, green or blue. In fact, these days, you don't even need to start from scratch anymore. There are plenty breeders on sale for you to start it off, hence instead of waiting for F3 or F4 to get what you want, you'll get them right away on F1. Now, that spoiling all the fun, but for the impatience, that's heaven :)

Other goals work out pretty much the same. Suppose you want a short anal, balanced with the length of caudal. That's easily achieved as well in at least F4 of your spawn. This assumes 1 single thing, the seed is good. If your seed is not good, then you're looking at a lot longer timing than that!

Don't try to mix your goals though. Chasing different goals will just make you tired, resulting in you not achieving any of them. For instance, you may want to shorten that anal fins and yet wanting to improve the colour as well - perhaps remove that black scales. Now, that's too much. Removing black scales alone would require you to work for X number of generations. It would be easier if you work on one goal first, then once that's achieved, cross it out to another line and improve the 2nd goal, and finally cross them back into the original spawn. Whoala, you'll get both goals you wanted so much. What does that mean? You need to maintain multiple lines!

Stop dreaming, if you want to achieve your goal, you *must* maintain multiple lines. You need to have full control of the genetics of your fish. Introducing outside genes into an "instable" gene pool is not going to help you achieve what you want. This is the main reason why it is so difficult to average joe to produce good line ;)

Getting back to the topic. This is the main reason why working on giants, particularly HM, poses so much challenges. Everything is instable. Isn't it much fun? :)

Let's see what's the challenges:

• instable HM - not producing HM in majority, or throwing HMPKs when you dont want it ;)
  
• instable giant - not producing good giants in the spawn
• instable colour - this is not big deal for us, as we don't focus on colours
  
• instable form - defect here and there, particularly when the giant gene magnifies everything, every single fault!

With so much challenges, it's a salute that we have to give to some hobbyists who are working on giants. They know in advanced that they aint going to get the result they wanted so easily, and yet they try darn hard to get them :)

We are still working (and perfecting) the technique to keep us focus on what we're trying to achieve. So we're listing some of them here, this may help you as well.

1. focus on a single goal - doh, this was mentioned already! but it's worth repeating it, as it sounds so simple and yet many of us got carried away when opportunities strike. Say you want to shorten the anal, would you choose the short anal male on your spawn despite he is an SD? or would you choose the longer anal one with an OHM form? Or you choose one over the other because of other qualities such as colour, form, ray splitting, etc? See how easily you derail from your goal??
   
2. maintain 2 or 3 lines from the original parents - each line *must* be unique and trying to achieve *different* objective! Say you try to shorten the anal and would like to have a nice perfect short-anal HM. You need to at least keep 1st line that has consistently produce OHM, you gonna need that caudal later! (Let's call this line X). And also, you need your 2nd line to work on that anal fin (call this line Y). Once you have achieved a good line Y, time to cross it to line X. From that point, you should work for another 2 generations at least to get the result you want, a short anal with perfect OHM caudal ;) The more goals you have, the more concurrent lines you need to maintain. Soon enough, you'll have *lots* of lines easily!
3. Keep a good eye on what's available out there - you're going to need this. Sooner or later, you will stumble on defects on your line due to inbreeding. This can only be rectified if you cross your line to external lines. Now, this is not advisable. Instead, what you should do is to have yet-a-set-of-parallel-lines. Basically you need to have a duplicate backup copies of your current lines, but being done on different parent fish! If you keep, say, 3 lines from a set of 2 pairs parent fish, you need to get totally different parents and replicate that 3 lines so that at the 5th or 6th generations you can outcross them. This way, you fully control your fish genetic pool. See how complicated this become?
4. Don't be afraid to experiment - you don't know how to achieve the goal, why not experiment and see what it brings? You need to document your experiment, or else, with all of those lines above, god knows whatever happened to your "previous" experiments.
   

With so much work involved, this is the reason why those who are successful on getting a good line will need large amount of resources and sets of good seeds ;) The rewards are extremely satisfying though. Your line will consistently produce the outcome that you've wanted, all of those parallel lines will provide large set of genetic pools so that you don't have to worry about them for quite sometime. Pick XX10 spawn male, cross him with YY12 female, whoala, you get your outcome you wanted without worrying anymore ! Or get XX13 female and cross her to YY11 male, chances are, you will get the "similar" outcome that you wanted. See how easy it becomes?!!

On another hand, it's good to know, when many of us got too much stress on not being able to achieve that darn goal, at least we can get back to the traditional colours and be very happy to achieve some nice bettas in F1 or F2 ;) Somebody else has done the hard work for us, provided we're willing to pay for the good price of the fish...

Until then, happy experimenting!