Collapsed fins on fry

This question comes up a number of times. Why, and what to do when, your fry has collapsed fins?

In our experience, there are a number of reasons for the collapsed fins, and if you treat it sooner, usually your fry will recover without any apparent damage.

The solutions depend on the reasons and could be any of these:

• water too cold - bettas are tropical fish, make sure you have water temperature around 20-25C at least.
• water too hot - don't boil your bettas. any water temperature above 28C is not good.
• overcrowded - your fry won't like it when you try to cramp too many fish in a single tank
• mixing with more active fish - if you mix your fry with other fish which are either larger or more active (e.g. move too fast), they'll get scared easily and tend to collapse their fins
• too much disturbance - did you turn that air pump too strong? slow it down or turn it off! Don't turn on the lights 24/7, fry need to sleep too, u know!
  

Hope we don't forget other things, but if we do, let us know so we can include it to the above.

Happy caring for your fry

Some females like them rough!

Spawning is one of the most exciting experience to watch, if you have the chance to. It can be pretty brutal where the male betta will chase and attempt to impress the female betta through a series of show offs.

The chases usually end with the male nipping bits and pieces of your gorgeous female's fins. Prime candidate would be caudal and anal fins, but dorsal gets the same treatment nonetheless.

In our experience, females will only be submissive when the males show that they are physically and genetically (at least felt by the females) superior and they are indeed deserving to be the father of the females' fry. Spawning and courting are just the proof of survival of the fittest concept as practiced by bettas.

What you don't see everyday is when the female has a little "doubt" on the males' suitability to father her offspring. Some females will challenge the males to see whether they are worthy of such crown. These challenges come in the form of a little bit teasing here and there, fighting back to the male during the courting, or simply giving the males that flare to entice him more. Usually the females are convinced on the males' capability when the males started to chase and nip the females.

These challenges occur very frequently when you try to spawn giants. The reason being, we believe, is because the giants have a much larger body size, hence the females are typically not afraid of the males. "You can fight and I can fight better!"

However, what if the females are still not convinced? You will see some brutality where the females would overcome the males, and sadly the males will run off. That's the end of spawning for most case.

When the two poles are in roughly equal strength, you will see some brutalities on both sides. Not only the female will be torn, the male has to enjoy the same :)

Aggressive females, in our opinion, are very desirable. We believe the offspring produced will be of high quality - active, beautiful, and strive to harsh environment (e.g. less sickness). This seems to be indicative of their mothers too, since we noticed that very few of the aggressive females were sick, despite the extent of their injuries. Sometimes we see quite extensive damage to their bodies (predominantly because the giant males delivered extreme blow to the females' bodies) and yet they recover well so that they can spawn again.

Enjoy this video, courtesy of KH (their owner). In it you'll see how the female challenged the male. Not only she challenged him, she even ate the torn pieces! At the end, she was convinced that the male is more than good to father her fry, so they had good spawning.

The 3 minutes movie (cut off from the original as it run well too long)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk7e3cjpHgM

PS. if you WTB (want to buy) these ex-breeders, contact us. KH has indicated that he's more than happy to sell them for the next person who'd like to spawn them. There are reasons why you'd like to purchase ex-breeders, as we posted previously. We highly recommend these bettas if you're dying to get your hands on very good quality giants (and breed them, of course). Sigh....if only we were not too busy, we'd snap them fast :( These bettas are for sale in a couple of days time - we suggested to KH to keep the males longer with the fry ;)

Envy what other people have

When you don't have bettas of your own (or can't afford to have them one way or another), then you can always admire and envy other people's bettas.

Here is a couple of beautiful pictures of KH's bettas... They're all giants and beautiful ! The things that really impressive about them are the fact that they're long fin giants with 32 rays splitting. You don't get that kind of bettas everyday ;)

PS pictures posted on their respective owners' permissions. Some of the photos were taken at our place when they're in transit, others were taken at KH's.

This one is a chunk of tail ripped from a female's caudal. There are 2 root-rays that came out when the male rip her beautiful caudal, your turn to do the counting on how many rays she has ;) This is from the green female...






These are pictures of the copper females. She is OHM with beautiful 32 rays. Next to her is a HM male (about 3 months) for comparison of their sizes ;) Check out her rays too....





This the pic of 1 of the males, HMPK. Thickness of his body is amazing! What's more, look at that dragon scaling ;)


We're still waiting for some more pic, fingers crossed, there should be more to come....

Spawning any of these guys will definitely a lot of fun in producing awesome giants. If you're game and interested in them, give KH a shout (contact us and we'll pass you to him).

Why you should purchase ex-breeders

This question has been asked a couple of times. Should you or shouldn't you purchase ex-breeders? Why would you purchase them anyway?

Our society has been accustomed to purchasing items new. Lots of people don't like used items. In betta breeding, there are reasons to go for one over the other.

Purchasing new bettas

• they're still "virgin", you felt happy when you see them
• they're not exposed to breeding experience yet, hence your "experience" can guide them in the best outcome that you wish them to have
• their cost varies, but usually more expensive depending on the type and features that your bettas have
• combination of their lack of breeding experience + your lack of breeding experience = greater chance of breeding failures
• your choice of bettas limited to whatever available on the market (usually people sell show fish on the market and they're not necessarily breeding-quality)
• their breeding-quality depends on how good your eyes identified their features - inexperience betta keepers will need to learn a lot to properly identify good bettas
  

Purchasing ex-breeders

• they're no longer virgin, they are used items, they are torn. you need to be able to ignore these torns and realize that these ex-breeders are going to be used for breeding again at your place, hence will be torn eventually!
  
• they have been exposed to breeding (presumably successfully), hence your experience in breeding contributes little to the success of their future spawns (presuming you provide them with acceptable breeding environment)
• their cost varies, but usually much cheaper than what they would otherwise cost.
• minimal experience on your side + the bettas' breeding experience usually leads to successful spawn fairly easily
• they are proven to be breeding-quality, at least on the eyes of their previous owner - hence it is important to know where you buy your bettas from and whether you can trust their judgement.
  
• their availability in the market is usually close to nil, you get them direct from their respective owners. many bettas breeders are not willing to release their breeders for a simple reason: you will be able to produce the same quality of fish that they're currently working on, hence introducing competition on their side when they try to sell their fish later. if the ex-breeders are used to produce the next new line, then their owners usually don't really want to release them
  
• due to the above competition reason, sometimes you need to twist bettas owners to release their ex-breeders, and the economy dictates that everything is up for sale "for the right price", hence you may find their prices are easily double if not triple your standard bettas.

Some types of bettas will make the option of purchasing ex-breeders becoming more appealing. For instance, if you're breeding giants (like what we're doing), you may have heard numerous times that "giant is super difficult to breed". Well, that saying is true. It is easier to breed giant bettas when they're small and young, but the result usually is very disappointing since your chosen young giants could have been non-ideal (e.g. they may be not 100% giants since it's hard to identify their quality when they're too young, see more discussion on giant gene distribution). It is probably safe to say that in 100 pairs of true giant bettas spawn attempts, there would be only a very small fraction of them to be successful spawning. We dare to say that the proportion to be about 20%. That certainly has been true proportion in our experiments. Note however that when we refer to true giant bettas, we refer to 3+ inches for your male HMPK and 2.7+ inches for your female HMPK. The size of the female dictates your success!

We had been asked whether we've purchased ex-breeders before. Yes, we had and we continue to do so. In fact, given a chance between purchasing ex-breeders and virgin bettas, we prefer to purchase ex-breeders from trusted betta keepers.

A lot of typical (HM, HMPK, CT) breeder-quality bettas are sold in auction sites, or purchasable direct from their breeders these days. So, this may not necessitate you to purchase ex-breeders. However, if you are presented to purchase ex-breeders from rare lines (such as giant, etc), then we suggest you to snap the chance! These rare lines are very difficult to get and usually the owners will put extended measures to protect their rare lines.

Advanced breeding technique - trisome experience

Say you'd like to spawn your gorgeous betta male with two females, but you don't want to wait for a too long gap between their spawning (perhaps you feel that the rearing time for the fry is exhausting your resources), then this blog will show you an approach to get what you want!

You will need:

1. male1 and female1
2. male2 and female2

You want spawning to happen for male1 with female1 and female2.

You need to make sure that you are there after the spawning to swap the female!

So, here's the step:

1. you need to release both pairs (after conditioning them etc) at the same time. By this time, your males should already have that gorgeous bubblenest and the females are eager to spawn.
2. Monitor your bettas closely, on the first wrap of your pair (say male1 and female1 starts wrapping), try to separate the female. You need to use a non-transparent cage such as cut off milk bottle to cage the female. Do the same thing with female2, if you notice that she's doing her first wrap.
   
3. Now, scoop your female2 into male1 tank. They will do their usual dancing again and then they will wrap.
4. At this point, you get male1 and female2 spawned successfully, congratulation !
5. Once female2 is finished spawning (e.g. she's going away from bubblenest and try to avoid the male) quickly cage female2 and release female1.
6. At this time, female1 will be waiting and ready to spawn that male (remember she saw that male already, and was ready to do wrapping etc), so from her memory, she's just continuing what she paused before.
7. Whoalla....you should get male1 and female1 spawn now, adding female1's eggs to the already deposited eggs in the bubblenest!

Since you're not really using male2 for spawning (rather you use him to beat the hell up of your female2), you can pretty much choose any type of bettas for your male2. We used PK or CT for male2 to maximize his aggressiveness.

Now, if you're intrigued, feel free to try this out. We've tried this method a number of times successfully, so we can say "the more, the merrier". A word of warning, be ready to take care of up to 1000 fry !!!