How do you know if it's really a giant?

This question has been raised so many times and recently this has been raised by a particular buyer (again), so we thought we better explain it here and explore this further. We'll update this blog as we go in showing the growth and progress of 1 particular male...

Before we delve deep, let's talk about the logic behind it first. If you buy adult giant, then there is doubt, it's easy to measure them. Just get your ruler, see if they're bigger than 2.5 inches for HMPK, and you're set - they are giant. Whether they are 75% giant or 100% true giant, that's different story, but at least you can be certain that they are giants. A couple of example of such large giants are shown here for males and females or our current for-sale females. On rare occasions, we could be lucky to show such pictorial comparisons - when we have standard HM/HMPK lines going on the same time. Unfortunately, these days we can't do that, we don't have time for multiple batches of spawning, so we only spawn 1 or 2 pairs every a couple of months....

But what if what you've got is merely juveniles? There is no point of reference to compare them. The only thing that you need to be aware is their age and what size they are currently.

So, here is an example of our current giant spawn on sale. When you get them, the HMPK will be the size of your standard adult HMPK, and the HM barely gets to the size of standard adult HM.

The first comment that you'd hear from uneducated eyes would be "it's not really that big, isn't it?". Are we irritated or offended with such comments? No, not at all :-) When you have started breeding your own, you'll appreciate much more of their giant-ness, as mentioned on point 4 of this post "You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? Go breed bettas and show us what you meant."

While we can't be sure whether this particular boy is a true giant or merely 75% giant, we are certain that he's a giant. In fact we're willing to bet on it - send your wager on email, we'll start gambling racket ;). Currently he's 1.5 month old or so (definitely less than 2 months old), and he has the size of standard adult HMPK. Yes, he's not very big yet, but wait a minute....how old is your standard adult HMPK? They are at least 1 year old if not much older (many bettas sold in your LFS range from 1 year to 1.5 year old, occasionally you've got 8 or 9 months old too). So, here you have a 1.5 months old betta with the size of a 1 year old. Now, that's perhaps a strong statement only understood by people who breed bettas - cause you won't have a clue what a standard 1.5 month old betta looks like unless you've bred them and rear them! For those who wants to know, the average 1.5 months old standard betta would be so tiny, you can't even yet identify whether they are male or female.

Anyway, rather than trying to explain everything through words, we thought we'll show you the progress of 1 single boy from the current for-sale batch. No, he's not the biggest of them all, nor he is our next choice of breeder. He's just an ordinary giant betta being pulled from the for-sale lot for the very reason of this comparisons.

1.5 months old, size of standard adult betta.


We'll update this in the interval of 2 weeks, till he's about 2.5 inches or more. This should take a good 1 or 2 months of update :-)

For those who have standard HMPK that you'd like to compare to this boy, shoot us email and we'll see what we can do to compare them side by side. It sounded silly to go to LFS and purchase an HMPK just to do such comparison, particularly if we're not interested in maintaining pure HMPK lines...