Breedings @ MyBettas

Reflection on current giant batches

2010-10-07T12:43:00.004+11:00

It's good to record it somewhere of our reflection on the current giant batches. In a simple words, what's good, what's bad, and what needs improving.

The bad first:

anal fin is a typical HMPK, a tad long, making it shorter would be good
some long fin has SD caudal, not quite HM

The good:

very nice, broad and high dorsal. Some HMPK shows dorsal broadness indicative of DT despite no DT gene
HMPK has awesome form, nearly 100% shortfin males are HMPK with close to perfect D shape
body is thick and big, pretty strong indicative of giant genes
rays quite thick

What can be improved:

more colours would be good, currently all are blue/red, green/red, copper-ish, black orchid, green, blue, marbles.
ray branching varies from 2, 4, to 8. Majority males are in the area of 4 branches. Not sure if they'll branch further (cause parents were 16 rays). Indicative of fresh new bloods in this line, still unstable as far as ray counts go.
caudal for long fin needs improvement by crossing to siblings or another good-caudal fish
while majority is large size giants, only small (maybe 20%?) will be true giants. Crossing the largest ones will improve the odds further.

Top ten Mastercart betta commercials

2010-09-30T14:36:00.001+10:00

Yes, the title has that mistake on purpose :-)

10. A pair of bettas $150, tank setup $200, your bettas finally spawned, priceless.

9. Gold giant pair $250, deluxe breeding tank $80, your bettas decided "be friends", priceless.

8. New barrack $350, DYI sump toolkit $55, mobbing your floor in the morning, priceless.

7. Gravel $20, new rainbow lighting $12, betta caught on artificial plant, priceless.

6. Heaters $200, (overdue) electricity bill $600, melted frozen food, priceless.

5. Live blackworms $100, home-made chopping kit $3, watching your fry choking on worms, priceless.

4. Buying MyBettas' 10 fish $100, DYI barrack $150, finding 4 dried bettas on the floor in the morning, priceless.

3. Imported pair $150, tank filter $40, your only-10-survived fry eating BBS, priceless.

2. Spawning ebook $10, buying that gorgeous HM male $100, looking his tail shredded by your 'female', priceless.

1. Moving house $500, taking your in-laws to dinner $400, their cat munch on your bettas, priceless.

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

2010-09-25T14:12:00.008+10:00

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...

Advanced breeding technique - conquering "let's be friend" bettas

2010-09-24T02:01:00.000+10:00

Nothing annoys you more than buying very expensive pair of bettas only to find that they're more than happy just "be friend" rather than doing the real spawning. This surprisingly happens very frequently to many beginners (and also advanced) breeders.

Typically, you'd have male and female eager to spawn, flare like crazy, but when you put them together, they're not getting into any actions even after you've left them for a week or two there. Sad story is, they may get tired and given up on spawning :(

There are multitude of reasons why they like to be friends only, and that's for you to analyze and figure out. Some techniques such as putting another male in the tank (to get his ego up and charging up), or pairing with another female, etc are left for you to try out. On this blog, we're going to explore one technique based on trisome experience that has been quite successful for us from time to time.

Why do you want to still pursue the spawning for them? Well, perhaps because they have very nice genes that you like, but whatever the reasons, it has to be strong enough that you want them to spawn. One example when we wanted our pair to spawn was when we desperately wanted to get the male's gene since he was the last of his line and the female was the best that we've got. That boy was sulking, practically ignored the female after 2nd day of meeting, and the same goes for the female...Definitely not a good sight particularly when you have such a high hope for them.

So, in order for this technique to be successful, you need to make sure that both the male and female are still interested, they still flare occasionally or at least there is intention from them to show off and perhaps get into spawning at later stage - go ask your bettas direct, they'll tell you up front of their real intentions...

What do you need? You need another pair of bettas. This is the rundown list of their conditions:

Let's call Male1 and Female1 are the pair that you really wanted to spawn
Let's call Male2 and Female2 are your bait.
Female2 has to be smaller and inferior than Male1. Male1 has to feel that he's macho again, and female2 is interested in spawning with him. Female2 can come from any line, anything that you don't really care much about (or less important than your female1)
Male2 has to be aggressive and brutal. He doesn't have to be the best looking betta that you have, so long he's aggressive, you're good to go
Condition them well, they won't breed if you don't feed them well, no matter how big or old they might be.

Now, say you've known that either the male1 or female1 has that history for being friends. Now you need to make sure that male1 builds nice bubblenest, spawning has to happen when there is bubblenest on most occasion - some odd couple may spawn without bubblenest, but the nature has dictated that they ought to use the nest! How do you get the male to build the nest? Well, pair him up with female2, your bait female. As said, female2 has to be smaller than male1, less aggressive etc. Only when you get a good nest that you can try this technique, cause otherwise you might as well put your male for display purposes only.

When you notice that male1 has built half of the nest, a good small spoon size, you need to put female1 with male2 in another tank, and let her get beaten up. She has to feel submissive and ready to release that eggs. We don't care if male2 has built nest or not, but typically he would have built a nice nest too. So, while the 2 pairs seemingly progressing their spawning attempt (male1 trying his best to build his nest, male2 trying his best to beat female1), you need to watch for both pairs on 2 conditions (usually they come very close to happen on the same time):

male1 has built nice nest, bigger and thicker, but you predict that he'll "be friend" again
female1 is nearly submissive and wanted to get wrapped by male2

Once the above condition happens, which typically happens on 2nd or 3rd day (or longer, depending the nature of your pairs), you can do the swapping. Take female1 out, put her into male1 tank, remove female2 from the tank. They'll get a bit of dancing again, and by this time the male has already got that nice nest and the female is beaten up. You may notice that the female would try the water again by flaring to the male, but usually she'll get into action within a good an hour or so. After all, she's holding all of those eggs and they're about to burst out, she usually won't have much choice ;)

This technique requires you to monitor them closely. You don't need to be expert in bettas spawning to do this technique, but it does require you to get a good feel on the timing. If your timing is not right, you won't get them to spawn. If you take out female1 too early to join male1, she may still have that strength to hold the eggs and therefore she's not going to release them. A good time to introduce her to male1 typically when you started to notice a few eggs started to fall off, or she gets into spawning wrap with male2.

If you notice that male1 is ready to get into sulking mode before female1 is ready, you can take out female2 out of his tank and left him alone there. He needs to be alone, don't let him get into sulking mode or "be friend" mode. How do you know he's getting "be friend" mode? Well, you notice that he doesn't want to maintain his nest anymore, or they go their separate corners of the tank, or he no longer chases the female or tease her. Just take her out of the tank. If you're concerned that he's not maintaining his nest anymore, you can introduce another male there just to get him flaring again (usually this is not enough to get him maintain the nest, but at least he won't be sulking). After a period of no-female there, you can re-introduce the female or new female, just to get him build/maintain the nest. Ensuring this male maintains his nest would be the most difficult step for this technique, since you need him to spawn successfully.

Anyway, once you've introduced female1 to male1, you may notice that female1 will be eager to get spawning done (after all, she's ready to do it with male2 when you interrupted them). Male1 may not yet ready though, he's basically only done half of the job - building bubblenest. He's not mentally ready to do the wrapping yet. So, you'll notice that he chases the female initially, but then you also notice that the female is a lot more submissive now, she'll come under the nest willingly, and that usually leads to successful spawn :-)

What's another lesson that we learn here? Don't throw away your bettas simply they don't fit into your plan. As you can see, you need the help of male2 and female2 to do the right job for your male1/female1 pair. Keep as many pairs of bettas handy, no matter how ugly or unsuitable they are for your plan, you need their help one of those days. Perhaps this is also a good reason for buying bulk ;)

So, there you go, a technique that you can try yourself, if you find that you really want to get something out of your precious pair :) Happy spawning, don't be afraid to experiment, you don't have anything to lose - well, your pair had decided to be friend previously, what worst than having an expensive display pair when your main goal of purchasing them was to get a spawn!

Breeding bait - getting pairs for free

2010-09-21T23:57:00.002+10:00

We've given this some thought and perhaps you'll be interested in it too.

A simple question: what does it take to get you to start breeding - apart from our top 10 reasons?

Well, here's the proposal. You purchase any of our fish (whatever lot available at any time when we have a sale, such as from current sale), and if you manage to spawn them and get some fry, if you would like to cross the fry to one of our currently-for-sale bettas, we'll give our bettas (that you're interested in) for free! Limit 1 pair per customer per line of bettas you've purchased from us (it doesn't mean that 1 customer only can get 1 pair, you can get many pairs so long you've spawned whatever lines you've initially purchased from us).

Basically the steps would be:

you buy any bettas we have for sale (call this F1).
you spawn these bettas (amongst themselves or with your existing bettas)
you record the spawning in a blog, forum, pictures of their progress, whatever way for verification
when F1 fry is big enough, and if we happen to have some bettas for sale that you're interested to cross your F1 fry to, let us know.
we'll give a pair of bettas that you're interested in for free...
you'll spawn F1 fry with the new betta(s), and if successful, you can claim yet another free pair from us when your F2 fry is ready (and we have more stock for sale), loop back to step 3.

No restriction on what you spawn your bettas with, so long at least 1 of the bettas ought to be coming from us - we're interested on how the line continues too, and perhaps wanting to buy from you ;) Also no restriction on which pair that you're interested in to get for free, so long we have them for sale, you can have them.

In order to qualify for the next free pair, you need to spawn F1's fry to one of the bettas that you've got for free (as mentioned on step 6). Same procedure applies. So, practically, you are helping us to keep the line going and we're helping you to supply your stock so long you're interested in breeding them. Win-win, don't you think?

Let us know if you're interested and happy breeding. For those reading this and had purchased from us in the past, yes, you're qualified to get your free bettas if you'd like to cross your spawn to any of ours - provided you've got your spawn log handy.

Everyone loves a bargain

2010-09-20T22:47:00.004+10:00

As that saying "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys", you need to invest a bit to get good stock. We've known so many buyers who are strapped for cash (or so they say) and therefore they negotiate heart and soul over every little things. Perhaps in some ways they save that extra $$$ and on the same time felt good about the deal, but what they ought to remember is that the sellers typically don't make much money over the stock they're selling, therefore the buyers' win is nothing more than imposing the sellers to consume the lost.

Most betta sellers are no difference, they sell their stock (or sell other's stock) with little margin. Squeezing the price isn't helping, particularly if the bulk of the cost is not on the initial price of the stock but rather on other associated costs such as importation or shipping. Sure, there are greedy sellers who'd charge an arm and a leg for their stock but that's what a free market is about, you have the choice to get whoever offers the most cost-effective and yet appealing bettas to you.

Why do we mention this? Well, not because we frequently challenged in such situation, which we do, but because a couple of sellers from o'seas are complaining on this issue too. Bare that in mind when you do your bargaining, don't over do it, or at least don't impose too much. Demanding too much from the sellers is simply a turn off and giving bad image to the rest of us.

If you really must bargain, at least you need to know whether they are a breeder or a reseller. Some have a clear status but the bulk of them are difficult to guess. Statement such as "from our farm" doesn't mean they really have a farm! These are common misconception since a reseller considers their source as their own farms :) Breeders have tendency to give good deals whereas resellers need to make a bit of profit from their purchases, hence you may not get much bargaining power with them.

Overall, the price of the goods reflect their quality. Most of giants sold for instance are sub-standard within their categories, but that's the way it is, the economy is tough and therefore quality sold needs to balance with what's affordable.

Serious breeders typically only purchase good quality stock. You either need good eyes to spot the good quality ones, or you know the stock quality of the sellers'. We've had our fair share of mistakes in spotting good vs bad quality stock, but over the time we'd like to think that we've learnt from our experience.

When a deal is too good to be true, then there usually is a catch with it. On the same token, when the deal is too expensive, there is a chance someone is ripping you off :) So, either way, you're stuck in the middle trying to figure it all out...

Go, hunt for good bargains, be honest to the sellers and get a win-win situation. When both parties achieve win-win, the relationships will carry on to the future purchases and it eases your trouble on identifying trusted sellers.

Biosecurity Australia - the last defence against whatsitsname

2010-09-19T22:29:00.004+10:00

Or so some people think.

You can cut them a little bit slack, they don't care so much about hobbyists, what matters is the security of our little wiggly tailed fish in (commercial) ponds throughout Australia. Some joke heard includes "who the #$%^ cares about fish in rivers/ponds and who are the idiots who'd import fish to feed local fish". Well, you can scream your heart out, but the pollies aint gonna hear it - they've got their headphones on.

It will make life a lot harder to get your bettas, not to mention it costs more and more than what they are today - even today's standard is way too high already!

It brings back the memory of voting, you don't like both sides but you ought to stand for something. For those who'd like to put a little bit of resistance, you can go to online petition. If you don't have a clue what it is, chances are it won't affect you yet, but nonetheless you can show a bit of support and fill the petition anyway - who knows you'll be into bettas/cichlids/etc soon and by that time it'll be too late for your vote to count for anything.

The odds are not good, so don't bet on it. What you can bet, however, is to be self-sustain as soon as possible. If you haven't started breeding yet, start now. If you haven't stocked up yet, buy more bettas and be ready. We all know that the tsunami will come, but it seems to come a lot sooner and you're running out of time to save the hobby by not doing anything :(

Anyway, if you seriously want to do something about it, you'll find ways. As for us, we'll give you hands on breeding if that helps at all. Give us a shout ;)

Top ten reasons to start breeding bettas

2010-09-18T13:00:00.003+10:00

10. You know you want more of them, the genes must be preserved!

9. If the parent costs you $100 a pop, imagine how much $$$ will you get for all the offspring!

8. Seriously, how hard could it be to get these two to spawn!!?

7. He's kinda lonely there. Wouldn't it be fun to have a full house of these so called fighters?

6. I dare you to do spawn them! Did I hear chicken noises?

5. Do you believe that liar? He said black crosses white produced red, blue, and green - you must try it out!

4. You can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? Go breed bettas and show us what you meant.

3. Revenge of a loyal customer: you've bought enough from pet shop, time for them to buy from you.

2. When you've spawned successfully, you get green belt. Spawn more to get black belt - we bow to you O King of Bettas.

1. You ran out of money for the dope, selling the other kidney is not an option, time to make more of this fish and sell them.

Why buy bettas bulk?

2010-09-15T15:49:00.003+10:00

Lots of people keep asking why we only sell bulk and rarely per individual bettas. A very common reason is that we don't have time to deal with individual betta (taking pictures, sending per fish basis, etc).

Things that you are not aware is that we sell bulk because learning from our experience as buyer we always wanted the seller to sell bulk!

The thing that you may not be aware of is that, if you want to delve into breeding bettas, which is what we're hoping you do, then you need to buy bulk. Breeding requires trial and error, particularly for new breeders, and lots of the time you fail with 1 pair and may get very successful with another pairing. If you only buy 1 pair, then you will soon discover that you need to purchase yet another pair and start the process again.

Bulk buying is also advantageous if you want to make sure that you get the 'best' genes out of the line. It's akin to choosing the best of the brood in a spawn of 300 fry. One of the fry would be the best of your choice to continue to the next level, why settle with something else? Spawn them as many times, choose the best of any combination, and move on. Chances are, you will not be able to go back on your decision once you've spawned them. It takes a good 2 or 3 months till you know the outcome of your pairing choice :) Buying bulk gives you that choice to choose from the pack and therefore prioritize your breeding plan.

Sure there are other advantages such as saving shipping money, getting them bulk also saves you lots of money that otherwise cost too much to buy them individually. Some people buy bulk cause they want to populate their display tanks, after all, bettas are very beautiful fish to display. Why pay the premium for individual fish when you can get lots of them cheaper ;)

The beauty of buying bulk, as we like to enjoy it from time to time, is getting surprises on what you get. In most cases we won't know what we sent you, they're too young to judge on their quality. There are times we realized that we've sold our best of the brood unknowingly till the buyer shows the fish at much later stage. Basically you get the first pick (randomly through us) of the brood. Some buyers were even willing to pay higher price so long they can pick and choose what they're buying. That's more than acceptable so long they stick with the agreed number of fish per transaction - remember, selling bulk helps us to reduce the number of fish in our stock.

One of the question raised was whether buying bulk of 10 is good enough to "cover all bases". We don't believe so, no. In order to get a pair of the best of the brood, you will need more than 5 pairs to see what kind of pairing is preferable, and with the trial and error (with failure is taken into account) you will need at least 2 of the same males for every plan that you have. If you simply want to "just spawn" a pair, then yes, 10 is a good number to start. But if you are being choosy or simply have plans then you may want to consider to get more than 10.

Reflecting back, we were much more delighted if someone would be able to sell us bulk, if only importation cost isn't so high. Locally available stock can't satisfy our needs/goals and most of the time we ended up importing the necessary fish.

Advice on breeding bettas

2010-09-12T03:46:00.005+10:00

There are just too many questions asked over the years, something along the line of "I want to start breeding bettas, but I'm too ..., what are your advice?"

Well, there are too many advices that we (and many other people) can give, perhaps it would take weeks for you to understand/read them all, so we better boil down to bullet points :)

The Nike's approach
The "just do it" is perhaps the best we can offer. You don't know how it feels until you do it. Your first try could be a great success, but there always be something to learn even if it was the greatest failure. It's a journey of self discovery, you get to know your bettas as well as you get to know yourself (of your nervousness, patience, happiness, sadness, anger, etc).

Calm yourself down
Nervous is common but be prepared. Don't over-prepared since that usually triggers more nervousness on your part. Prepare a basic check list, so long you know how/what to do with things not in the checklist, then you're good to go. Trying to work out the best lighting for breeding is the wrong priority in the list!

Commitment
You need lots of it. Don't breed if you are not willing to commit time, money, resources. Not knowing where to dump your bettas is not an excuse, cause you always can approach your LFS to sell them off. Many LFS are happy to buy bettas locally. Sure, you may not get much from them but was that the excuse of you not breeding?

A lonely journey is excruciating, get a friend!
No one asks you to go through breeding experience alone, make sure you always have friends to help you out, giving you advice, encourage you, or basically pat you in the back "you're doing just fine". There are forums with similar minded people, join them. You're reading this blog, aren't you, so you know we're here as well ;)

Get a map
This is just an analogy. Breeding bettas is similar to driving through unknown city. The first thing you'd do if you want to drive through unknown city is to get a map. But even when you look at the map of the city, most of the time you don't have much a clue what the 'real' road condition looks like. So, before you breed, you need to map out the journey. Start writing your map. You are "here", you want to get "there", here are the main intersections, how do you know what certain events/intersections look like, what do you need to do when you get to that point, should you take a left turn or the right? To get an idea of what your breeding map looks like, read articles on the net/forums/blogs/etc.

Find a reason, a desire
Don't start breeding "just because". You need to have a goal, a desire, a strong reason why you think you'd like to start breeding. The reason could be as simple as "I want to get to the next stage", or it could be as religiously as "I'd like to improve Australia's betta quality". Some people settles on "I'm fascinated with their vibrant colours". Without strong reason/desire, your breeding will fail. Not because your bettas failed spawning, but simply because you've given up too early. Breeding bettas is very challenging, at times very frustrating, but also very rewarding when you are successful. Reminding yourself of your reasons/desires will keep you motivated and strong during the stressful times, and you gonna need that!

Be creative
Some people said "I don't have the right environment (tanks) for breeding". These kinds of excuses are just that, excuses. We've bred bettas in all sorts of environment, from a small 10cm x 10cm cube, to a 4 footer, to a 2 footer that we 'split' into 10 compartments with plastic boards, etc. If you have the desire to do it, anything will do. You need to be a little creative in solving your problems. Remember the Nike's approach ;) If we gonna wait for you to get all the necessary gears in place, we may ended up waiting till next year, and by that time your desire is all but gone...

Other than the above, you only need to know the basic checklist for breeding bettas. There are too many articles written on this (including numerous covered in this blog), just grab one. Simple checklist on "choose good male + female", "cage female in chamber", etc, should be a common knowledge to you by now. No need to get worried over tiny details, you should be ok so long you do draw a good "map".

Good luck on your spawning.

Giant active bunch

2010-09-07T09:22:00.017+10:00

Just a short movie of the current spawns. We merge them to a big tank yesterday since they have the same hatch date. That saves all of rearing time for us :)

What interesting from this bunch is that they are just a month old but seems to be very competitive. Coming from HM giant lines, there may also be a small few HMPK thrown in. Both males and females flare :) Slightly difficult to differentiate between males and females for some of them, but there are some outstanding males and females sprouting already. We noticed some OHM form there too, that's a good sign. Branching is at 4 at the moment with some few already at 8. No rosetail gene that we're aware of, but we shall see how it turns out.

It's always amusing to watch them flare on every feeding time - since that's the only time we are around. Guess how frequent we need to change their water...Every day! These guys produce so much gunk that every night we have no option but to change their water first before feeding them, they can't see the food! They have consumed a full 1L live worms in 2 weeks time. Growing them would cost a leg and an arm, but that's the nature of these giants.

They are yet to be jarred, perhaps tomorrow or the day after. Lots of jars to be cleaned before they can be occupied.

Enjoy the movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAJFZV5qbvg

They are available for sale, for those interested. Random 10 bettas at $100 including shipping. Buy more and you've got discount too, of course. While stock last and our apologies again: we can't take individual pictures or select any particular fish for your order - there is simply no time for us to do that. First come first served ;) And before we forget, you *may* see a nip on your ordered bettas, watch the movie and you'll understand why we can't control such small nipping. Definitely no major nipping yet ;)

They grow extremely fast, barely a week ago they were not even sprouting and flaring much yet :) We're more than looking forward to getting good giant genes out of them.

If you want them, email us.

>> Update, here is a sample picture of one of the boys. Most of them are of similar quality, nice form :)

1) avail, bonus

>> Update, for those looking for HMPK, it's confirmed. Some HMPK in the batch. Enjoy their low resolution photos :)

2) similar fish avail

3) similar avail

4) similar fish avail

>> More pix as they're freshly jarred...Some lucky ones will depart very soon :)

5) similar avail

6) similar avail, bonus

7) avail

8) similar avail

9) avail

10) similar avail

Some have requested that they'd like to choose what to be sent to them. We thought "fair enough". Here's your chance, have a choose from the above pictures, you can only choose 3 from the above. If they are avail, then they'll go to you, otherwise we'll let you know if something similar avail ("similar" refers to form, not to colour - when we say they are similar, you will get same exact form). So, 3 of your choice, and 7 randomly from us. The random ones will come from newly jarred bettas and if they are females, they will come from the grow out tank. First come first served, your chosen fish may be offered to the first person who wants it and pays for it! Keep watch of this page, we'll post more pictures of the males AND females! Yes, there are some very promising females seen in the tank and they'll be made available too. Remember, we haven't even reserved them for our stock yet, hence you'll get the first pick of some of the very best :)

Also, apologies for those who felt disadvantaged on the above offer (those who purchased from us previously and didn't have the chance to get the pick). If you would like to purchase more from us, you get to pick up to 5 of your choice out of the bulk of 10.

Some pictures above are marked "bonus". You can pick 1 as your bonus provided you buy 1 lot, for free, while stock lasts. They are free because there is something wrong with them! It could be torn anal fin (picture could be taken prior to the torn), it could be SD form, it could be slight imperfection on one of the fin (imperfection in our eyes, which usually very minor in other people's eyes), etc. Only about 5 fish available as bonus. Contact us if you want to know what's wrong with your chosen one.

>> Update, took a few more pix of newly jarred ones, a bit of accidental fight on one of them... Can't take pix of females, running out of jars :(

11. Only a few of black orchids, here's one of them.

12. Also very few copper green marble, nice colouration...

13. This one is nice pattern with great attitude too. Definitely one to watch for.

14. Can't get enough of this guy, aggressive and moving fast. Slight OHMPK.

Body thickness for the boys above (and their females) are really nice. Over the weekend we'll need to sit down and properly select a few for our next generation. In the meantime, any of the above that you're interested, you better yell fast before they're gone! Special note to those HMPK fanatic, they are bloody good form, go get them now!

Our apologies for those who have special requests (e.g. choose X, Y, or wanting to pickup/visit us), time is not permitting and that's why we cover the postage to get a quick sale without much fuss....Thanks for understanding.

>> PS. For those intrigue on the size and progress of these batches, we've picked 1 male above and started to track his development size on this post. It'll be updated every 2 weeks or so, so you better follow it to see or compare what you've got there with what we've got (and how we grow him).

>> Warning: DO NOT try to spawn them yet, despite their perceived standard adult bettas size. They're only 1.5 months old atm. Instead, feed them lots and lots of food and you'll be amaze on how big they'll get...

Question: can I spawn giant with standard bettas

2010-09-05T00:14:00.004+10:00

> i have giant male and female but fail to spawn them, can i spawn each giant
> with normal betta?

This depends heavily on their sizes. If the size of the giant male is slightly bigger than the female (e.g. he's still young or he's only half-giant), yes, they will spawn. If your giant male is way too big compared to the standard female betta, then chances he will fail at wrapping her. She'll just pass through the big loop. On the same logic, usually if you try to spawn a giant female against standard betta, you will fail due to her too-big size for the male to wrap. You may be successful if you manage to find a slightly bigger HM male - wrapping in this case would be challenging but you will get a small percentage of hatched eggs.

In the world of bettas, you will only have successful spawning when both male and female are ready and interested. Giant is no difference, but you do need a lot of interest from them above your typical standard bettas :)

Good luck on the spawn.

C7WJNM83KTXP

Shocking betta spawn size

2010-08-03T00:07:00.005+10:00

From time to time we assist others to successfully spawn their pairs. This one is particularly amusing, since the owners still shocked from the fact that their pair successfully spawn, but also because what they were into when they see the outcome!

We helped JT and his friends to get starter male and had chosen one of our females to match the boy. The deal was simple: they paid all costs associated with the pair, we'll just give some advices on how to spawn them successfully (remotely through emails), and in exchange they'll give any number of the offspring that we like - not that we want many...

As with many new breeders, JT was more than anxious when the pair spawn. He practically took a Friday off in preparation for the spawn, despite we've told him that the pair was not going to spawn for another couple of days. We gave him a visit on Sunday to see how things went and surprise surprise we managed to wait a bit to see the first few wraps.

Here are the pictures of the spawning. Wrapping, wrapping, and pick those eggs.

The male is beautiful blue. 3 inches with nice overall form.

JT still couldn't believe his eyes and we thought you should share his amusement. Here are the pix of his spawn. Talking about over crowded! These fry pix were taken when they are 3 days old.

That was just one corner of the tank. There must be between 300-500 fry there. Good luck on raising them folks :)

The funny part was that he and his friends imported a couple of other giant males, and now they've seen what 1 single pair can produce, plans to spawn the others are stopped!

This is a fair warning to others that when we said we can help you spawn your bettas, expect large spawn! Be ready but don't get too nervous, they are extremely entertaining to raise...

BTW, for those of you who are looking for good giants, JT and his friends had indicated that they want to pass the pairs to the next person to try spawning. They have 1 HMPK pair (above), 2 copper red HM giant pairs (never spawned), and 1 pair of blue/green monkey-face giant HM pair (never spawned). We helped them choose these giants, and we thought they're just amazing. If you're game, don't let this opportunity pass. Let us know if you're interested, we'll pass JT et al detail.

As for our service, if you need our help on spawning them remotely, we'll be happy to do so, again we only want 1 or 2 pairs of our choice of their offspring in return. Give us a yell.

Giant females sale

2010-07-28T02:03:00.005+10:00

For breeders out there having difficulties on getting absolute top-notch giant females, here's your chance to secure some.

We have breeder-quality giant females HM and HMPK lines, aged 3 months. A couple of their characteristics:

guaranteed to produce giants of at least 2.5-3 inches in 3-4 months of age
guaranteed at least 30% of their offspring to be giants.
guaranteed to produce at least 80% HM/HMPK 180* spread in their offspring.

Of course the above guarantee will only work if you have equivalently good male, however the lines above produce very consistent outcome so far, hence you should not be far-behind if you cross them to good-enough males. Check out distribution of giant genes for reasoning why the above characteristics are important...

No males from these lines available, all of them sold.

The size of the males to be suggested to spawn with them will be at least 2.7 inches. Any smaller males may not be able to wrap them.

Here are a sample picture of the females with 1 standard-size HMPK female as comparison.

>> Update 29 July: added 1 more pix of the mustard/lace marble female, 4 or 8 rays.

>> this one shows comparison of the standard HMPK female swam semi-vertically, while the water barely covered half of the body of giant HMPK female. As you guessed it, pix taken during complete water change time :)

>> this one on-hold for SM, the longer fin copper female.

>> These 2 are just another MG marble, waiting for buyer to spawn them ;)

You are advised to get them now when they are considerably easier to spawn or they will grow much much larger at later stage.

Each female is available for special price of $100.
There are 3 outstanding HM females with 1+ inches of caudal tail available, each $150.

If you have purchased the males from the same lines above and considering to get the females as well, we will cover the guarantee for 3 months after date of purchase (assuming that would be sufficient time for you to breed and grow their offspring). Money-back guaranteed, less shipping cost!

Email us for any questions/clarifications - given limited time we've got online these days, serious buyers only please...

Youngster clearance sale

2010-07-28T00:45:00.009+10:00

Time for us to clear the tanks, there are just too many of them to manage at this point in time. It's your opportunities to get good quality giant-geno to start your own line :)

Check out these batches and these batches for sample pictures.

10 random-coloured bettas for $100. You can mix and match giant-geno HM, giant-geno HMPK, standard betta, dwarf bettas, etc. We'll try to get you equal number of pairs when possible. Colour ranges from blue/green, mustard gas, multi-colour, copper variants, deep-sea blue, etc. All fish in the sampled pictures are included in this deal as well (if they're still avail). Shipping $25 or pickup meeting can be arranged.

The bettas you're getting aged between 2 to 3.5 months old. All giant-geno has thick and larger size than their counterpart standard bettas. Giant-geno HM line may show SD finnage but we'll try to get very-close-to-HM sent to you.

>> update 29 July:
Pictures of 2 SD males, taken yesterday. They're not the best looking form for an HM line, but they are fairly large in size, considering they're not even 2 months old yet. Some of the ray branching get to 8. Crossing them with any of the females will get you that some nice HM, if you're game on breeding them.

They're temporarily on-hold for WR, pending confirmation, but if you're interested, do let us know.

These 2 (white and copper) are temporarily on-hold for RD. Again, let us know if you want them and we'll pass them to you in case RD doesn't want them....

>> For those looking for very nice giant HM, this 3 months old serenade boy (a name coined by nicebetta) is available for $40, or pair for $70. He's been a bit neglected and the gunk affect a bit of his caudal, but he's still very young and full of potential. Thick rays, nice tie, and semi-masked platinum eyes.

Giant, bubblenest, confirm!

2010-07-23T23:27:00.003+10:00

We were intrigue when seeing some recent auctions of giants HMPK which show some pictures of the males with bubblenest and in the image you'd see "bubble nest confirm!"

We thought we'd shoot the seller the question. What's the big deal about bubble nest and what does it confirm. Well, it boils down to very simple fact. He was just trying to say that he doesn't sell old aged giants which may not be able to spawn anymore. The bubble nest is a good confirmation that the giant he's selling is still very active and can be spawned. It makes you wonder, whatever happened to the giants that he's selling without the bubblenest pictured, does that mean they are old giants? ;)

We told him that most if not all of giants that we've bought and raised made bubble nest, so that's not really a good confirmation on anything :)

In a way, it was a statement that many if not most of the giants sold in the market are too old. This is understandable since most true giant HMPK will only reach 3 inches length when he's 8+ months. Sure you've got the exceptional ones, but majority will be around that age. Dont you ever trust that advertised aged written on auction sites. No way you can get a 3" giant aged 3, 4, or 5 months old, particularly if it looks like an old giant!

Old age is not so much big deal if you are experienced breeder. You only need one spawn to get to the next stage. However, you will need several tries if you are inexperience and that's when it matters in choosing appropriate breeder fish.

Surprisingly this is a well kept secret from buyers, but there you go, you know about it now ;) Think twice before you purchase that giant, check the picture in detail to see indication of old age. Get your fish from trusted sellers...

Top ten reasons you want to be a betta addict

2010-07-19T14:21:00.004+10:00

10. There are lots of bettas greeting you at any time of the day when you come home.

9. They'll forget all the bad things that you've done to them once you give them a feed.

8. You get a very lively flaring show on every un-carding.

7. You will be the talk of the neighbourhood with your beautiful bettas.

6. You are not so scary to the kids anymore.

5. When you are strapped for cash to buy birthday present, there always be your bettas as gifts.

4. Your co-workers are eager to open your parcels, despite they are labeled "Live fish" or "Worms".

3. Monday is really your sickie day - you stayed up late night to show spawning techniques to your bettas.

2. Pretty girls (or boys) like you more when they see your bettas - now it's up to you to take that advantage!

1. You are god since the dictionary defines Betta-spawning: An activity of courting 2 bettas in an act of god-like pursuit by a human.

Top ten signs you MAY be a betta addict (but you didn't realize it)

2010-07-16T11:45:00.002+10:00

10. You know every betta acronyms and use them in conversations.

9. You find faults on every betta that you see, even pointed out the 1-scale misalignment that nobody noticed.

8. You read all the spawning posts on the net and actively give spawning suggestions despite you never spawn your bettas.

7. You only have 3 bettas in your 10-chamber custom-built tank.

6. You meticulously measure water quality despite using aged water.

5. You buy 2 copies of a betta poster - 1 for bedroom and 1 for living room.

4. You have boxes of smelly microworm culture weeks before you started spawning your bettas.

3. You drove 3 hours to an LFS when you've heard they've got new imports despite you can't confirm if bettas are part of the imports.

2. You panic when the bbs doesn't hatch and started crying when you realize it takes 2 days to prepare new batch and by that time the fry will starve to death.

1. You have only 1 betta but fully prepared with all medicines mentioned in the forums.

Top ten signs that your partner is a betta addict

2010-07-16T11:35:00.002+10:00

Change he, she, his, her, appropriately to the gender of your partner.

10. You only win an argument after a threat of doing harm to his betta.

9. Lots of discussions on dinner table revolve around his latest betta addition.

8. He skipped church complaining being tired only to find him in the fish room at a later time.

7. You shop guilt free after saying "You can buy that pair of bettas you've always wanted, dear...Can you pay this for me?"

6. He named his bettas, still remember their names after the bettas long gone, and yet he can't remember your friends' names.

5. You heard him mumbling "stupid fish" every time he comes out of the fish room - it must have been a failed spawning.

4. He boasts about his biggest fry in every tiny detail despite you can't tell which fry he was talking about.

3. You discovered one day that half of the items in freezer have "fish food" labels on them.

2. He insisted to get broadband "It's for the kids' school work", but half of the time you saw him online on betta forums.

1. He refused making love because he wants to witness his bettas spawning!

Dwarfy's dwarfs

2010-07-15T16:13:00.003+10:00

Remember dwarfy? Well, we decided to play with the dwarf genes, and spawn them. It was a difficult spawn since their size was incredibly small. But to our surprise, it was a successful one.

Not particularly large spawn, about 20-30 or so of them. But they sure was entertaining. The size of the brood is consistently small. A small few are standard size HMPK, but majority is small. Note that we didn't do anything special with the spawn, no starving, or any tricks. They have ample of foods, just not growing any bigger :)

They are about 6 months old now, about 1 inch in size. Definitely a bit more difficult to distinguish male/female, but there are some clear winners there.

If you want to purchase them just email us. We do not encourage breeding dwarf bettas but at the end of the day it's your decision to make. On the bonus side, there is nothing physically or genetically wrong with any of these guys, so you know you're getting healthy bettas.

Beautiful youngsters

2010-07-15T15:42:00.003+10:00

While we're extremely busy these days, breeding still continue, at least behind the scene and in a very much smaller scale.

Interesting that we now can control the number of offspring that we'd like to have in any single spawn. If we want small number, we simply spawn any of the available adults without much warming up. Large numbers can be attained by properly preparing the pair and carefully calculating when they need to spawn.

Anywho, enjoy the below pictures. Their size is slightly larger than your typical HMPK but you guess it right....they're giants. The key is knowing their age, then you can appreciate their size ;)

They are about....1.5 months old, hatched on 6/6/10. Always entertaining to see these youngsters grow. Looking at the picture, one would thought they're your typical HMPK/HM at much older 5-6 months. Always hungry, but at least with much great attitudes too.

Top ten signs you are a betta addict

2010-07-14T23:30:00.002+10:00

10. Your method of falling asleep is by counting how many bettas you currently have in your tank.

9. You rush to betta section of your LFS, despite it has been displaying the exact same bettas for months.

8. You sit for hours watching your betta/fry swim as if their next moves will be the best performance that you don't want to miss.

7. You talk to your bettas and always believe that they understand what you are saying all along.

6. Your wallpaper is a betta despite constant criticisms that you should put the picture of your children/partner instead.

5. Your lounge room has only 3 furniture: sofa, coffee table, tv - with betta tanks on the coffee table and the TV on the floor.

4. You spend a good half an hour every day to decide what to feed your bettas.

3. You rushed to LFS to get medicine when your betta sneezes - or so you thought that he was sneezing.

2. Your entertainment room has been converted to bettas room and your partner is prohibited to enter it.

1. You pay your partner's shopping at the checkout and utter silently "that would have been X pairs of gorgeous bettas that I could have bought...".

Mid-year sale

2010-06-29T11:00:00.003+10:00

For those interested in our bettas, we've posted some for-sale videos on youtube. Lighting isn't on its best, nor the cleanliness of the tanks. Furthermore, the fish were shocked when we put the light on top of their tanks, hence expect them to be a bit confused :) Fish in real life is a lot better than what's shown.

They are all giant-geno. Body thickness is very promising. About 2.5 months of age, being separated only 1 week ago. Females available as well.

Contact us on our email (see on the right-side link for email). There are more fish avail, just ask us. Shipping only within AU (sorry for folks from o'seas, but you know the drill - no o'seas shipping possible due to gov't restriction).

A quick run-down of the avail fish:

Mustard HMPK and copper gold HM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhJmeCdhH4E
CopperGold HMPK & Green BF HM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nf7Ct9yBr0
CopperMustard HM & Green HMPK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNlFhQKMIOY
Green SD & Red Maroon HMPK http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hjso0lNlfXs

Semi lame picture of one of the mustard boy:

Question: how to cure open-gill in bettas

2010-06-24T15:38:00.002+10:00

> i have a male betta with one gill open, do you know how to cure this and why it happens.

This is considered a defect in bettas in our book. Most of the time your bettas will live a normal life, that open-gill wont bother them at all. Spawning-wise, if the open-gill is on one side, then it's ok too. They learn to spawn from the good side ;)

We believe there are 2 reasons why bettas get this problem:

genetics
environment

If your bettas have genetics abnormalities, then there is no way for you to cure it. It's there and inherited. Usually your fry will have a perfect gill when hatched till about 1 month old. Then you started to notice one or both of their gills to open up wide for a much lengthy period of time. Before you know it, you're too late, the gill got stuck and stays open forever. This category theoretically is not really "genetics" since it will only happen at about 1 month old. The gills are used to pass air bubble (if you watch your fry for some time, you'll notice how the air bubbles come out of the gill). Some bettas have weak gill muscles where the air bubble got stuck in the gill, forcing it to open for a much longer period of time. Long exposure of the gill seems to cause the muscle to tear and that injury shows up as your open-gill problem... Many people attributed this to simply bad water condition ;)

The second cause of open-gill problem is caused environmentally. For instance, we regularly use rough fishnet to scoop bettas. What we noticed in small and big bettas, if the gill got stuck on the fishnet and the bettas do not recover from the injury, they will end up with open-gill problem too. You can avoid the problem by changing the fishnet to a cloth-based one, for instance. On rare occasions we see adult bettas develop this problem by flaring for too long period of time. The gill is no more than a constructed muscles, tear happens...

Now, as for the cure, there is no real cure for it. Knowing the cause of the problems usually help you to devise a cure. For instance, we have cured a couple of adults that starting to develop open-gill problem by giving them a good rest after flaring exercises. This has to be done as early as possible, when you notice they're developing it ;)

Question: HM cross HMPK always result in HM

2010-06-24T15:10:00.002+10:00

> will all my fry become HM if father HM and mother HMPK? all of them long fin?

Depends. Many people believe that halfmoon genetics involve multiple genes. So, if you cross 2 halfmoons (either HM or HMPK), theoretically you will get some halfmoons. Now, the percentage of halfmoons in your fry depend on the goodness of quality of their parent genes. These days, if you have good eyes in picking pairs, you most definitely can get around 80% halfmoons in the spawn. Note: some breeders only quote the percentage on their males, others include the females as well. We typically count both males and females.

Failing to choose good breeders will yield to....Super Deltas and Deltas. In fact, in the early days of halfmoon development, it is common to get SDs from any halfmoon pairings that you do, irrespective how wonderful the parent fish were! Over the time, the gene pool of halfmoons in bettas getting better and better thus increase in your chance of getting halfmoons as well. You will still get SDs fry if new gene pool is introduced to either of your parent fish (e.g. one of the parents being crossed to non-halfmoon line).

There are lots of ways to increase tail spread including crossing with DT, rosetail, feathertail, and of course a fish with lots of branching. Note that you can get a betta which is rosetail DT or a DT with lots of branching and yet not a rosetail nor feathertail.

As for the fin length. Yes, majority will have longer fins, longer than plakad if that's what you meant by long-fin. The length of the fin depends heavily on the parent's HMPK gene. If the HMPK were a cross from an HM, then you can expect a standard long-fin fry. However, if the female HMPK comes from a pure HMPK lines (assuming it has never been crossed to HM line), then your fry will have a medium long-fin. A medium long-fin is typically longer than your standard HMPK, but not-as-long compared to a full HM fin. Lots of people collapse this category as simply long-fin. We'd rather call them medium-fin for clarity (do you get offended when people refer to SD as HM?)

It is safer to assume that the fin length outcome is the result of permutation of the parents' fin. So, you get 25% HM, 50% medium-fin, and 25% HMPK. So, in majority (75%) you will get short-fin and those medium-fin fry which look very much like short-fin ;)

Question: why some fry bigger than others

2010-06-24T10:40:00.003+10:00

Continuing question/answer time, here's another follow up.

> why are some of my fry is bigger than others, and some are too small.
> It seems the smallest fry wont grow at all.they also show slower growing rate.
> is there any related to the food?

If you've done spawning a number of times, you notice that the above problem seems to reoccur frequently. There are a number reasons for it, but it boils down to 2 things:

genetic - you never know what the history of your fish. This is hardly likely, since if it was genetic, you would expect most if not all of the fry to be small
environment - the most likely cause

Genetic can play a role in making stunt fish, however we dont have much knowledge in this field as yet to say anything conclusive. One thing that we notice though, many extreme feathertail/rosetail will have smaller body compared to their siblings. It seems that the gene that produces excessive branching on the rays also affect other cells on the body, making them slightly smaller.

Let's discuss the 2nd reasoning. Basically, your fry develop on slightly different pace. Assuming you always provide ample food for all of them, there will always be some slow learners in the pool. (note that if you don't provide enough food for the fry, it is pretty obvious that some of them will starve and grow slow).

Feeding experience is important to the fry. Getting them used to the competition of fighting for the food and eating vigorously will ensure that most of your fry develop fast and large. The negative effect of that would be some "shy" fry will be stunt when they see others being too aggressive. If this is continued for longer period, there is no way for you to help those stunt fry to grow any larger.

It is therefore important for you to monitor the fry and separate the big ones to another tank as soon as possible. Usually this happens on 3rd week or earlier (or otherwise you're too late!) Removal of the big ones from the rest of the brood will relieve the pressure for those possible-to-be-stunt fry. If you do this early, the rest of the normal-sized-not-so-big fry will grow and prevent/reduce the number of your possible stunt fry.

What we noticed is that stunt fry will result in a number of conditions:

tank is too big, fry scattered everywhere, difficult to find food
tank is too small, fry bumping to each other, some bumps harder than others
wrong food for wrong stomach - vinegar eels or microworms are not as nutritious and can't be the regular food
dirty/smelly tank full of gunk
extreme tank temperature (too cold/hot) rendering your fry to be inactive

As you noted, once they are stunt, it is very difficult to get them un-stunt. You can feed them lots of food, they wont grow any bigger! In fact, we have been experimenting with some of these dwarf to see if there is genetic involved - similar to the theory of giant gene being unstable we suspect dwarf gene exists too and producing semi-random occurrences. We would like to see the outcome of crossing 2 stunt fish (provided we can identify if they are male or female to begin with!)

The rate of stunt-ness varies. Sometimes you get an extreme rate where majority of your fry to be small. Again, assuming genetic is not playing any role, we would suggest you change the way you feed your fry :) In our case, we have around 3 to 10 fry stunt in a 100+ fry, and this is totally acceptable in our dictionary anyway... Most of the time, you wont care about the stunts, just let them be :) So long they're happy...

Question: how to develop to any type of fin and colour

2010-06-23T09:31:00.005+10:00

It's been awhile since we're posting, so let's start this with this question below.

> how can i develop some of my betta into any type of fin and colour that we
> desired for?
> for example i have a solid blue OHM males with female plakat with brown body
> and red fin..what will be the fry after i have spawn them?

Before we start the discussion, let's assume that the bettas in your hand support your goals (e.g. there is a chance for the line to achieve the goals). We're not talking about "how to produce super red fish if I only have melano pair" for instance. Despite this is still possible, it will take a much longer route to achieve (read more for background reasoning on this).

Those are 2 *different* types of development and typically very difficult if you want to focus on them on the same time. It is much easier to focus on 1 type first (e.g. the fin) and then continue the development to the 2nd type (e.g. the colour).

So, for instance, it is easier to focus your development to get the "perfect" fin that you are aiming for in, say, 4 generations. If your goal is to get straight nice fin of OHM in 80% of the spawn (e.g. 80% of fry will be OHM with nice fin), then you must develop this line by crossing OHM males with HM or OHM females. Most of the time, crossing it with plakad is not going to get the fin that you want! During this phase, you may need to buy suitable females from other breeders. Be patient, you don't want to waste your "line" by crossing the male with just any female. Each of your male (or female) is so valuable that you must make sure that when they spawn, they will bring you closer to your aim!

Now, say, you've achieved your first goal. It is time to improve the colour of your line by searching for other females that can deliver the colour that you want. You may get the females from one of your spawn, but chances are, you will need to buy suitable females. Note that when you introduce a new female, you never know what the genes this female has, so, on your next spawn, usually you will degrade your first goal (e.g. if you had consistently got 80% OHM in your spawn previously, when you cross any of your males with this new female, the outcome may result you to get only 30% OHM in your brood). This kind of "2 steps forward and 1 step backward" is very common when you introduce new genes. However, this time it is easier for you go to get back to your first goal (of getting 80% OHM in the spawn) - you only need to cross the F1 females of this new line with their "uncle". Remember, the "uncle" has the desired goal (80% OHM goal), hence crossing with them will guarantee that you maintain your first goal while pursuing the 2nd goal. You need to know the timing for when to cross out your bettas.

Short answer for your question. If you cross your OHM male x plakad brown/red female, you will get.....super deltas. if your female is HMPK, then you may get HM fry and of course HMPK (I'm assuming your OHM male also carry HMPK gene; most HM has been crossed to HMPK during its development). Colour-wise, you will get multi-colour. Usually in the form of blue with red-wash (e.g. blue red) and green red. Depending on the genes of the males and females, you may get mustard gas variation too. If any of the fish has marble gene (may not show on the current fish, but they can carry the gene), then you will get marbles thrown as well. Multi-colour is the best starting point for colour-related goal, since you will get a lot more chances of mix-and-match to see if your fry will end up with the good colouration that you're looking for. Consider yourself an artist, use your brush and start painting. You will need a lot of practice and experimentation and it may takes a long time to get the most gorgeous painting in your life, but you'll enjoy the process and the outcome :)

BTW, this has been discussed as well on "tips on achieving your betta goal". If you are focusing on giants, the discussion on distribution of giant genes may help you figure out whatever happened to your spawn :)

Comments welcome folks.

Collapsed fins on fry

2010-04-28T12:41:00.000+10:00

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!

2010-04-19T12:29:00.001+10:00

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

2010-04-15T16:10:00.004+10:00

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

2010-04-15T11:34:00.003+10:00

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

2010-04-09T14:35:00.003+10:00

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:

male1 and female1
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:

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.
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.
Now, scoop your female2 into male1 tank. They will do their usual dancing again and then they will wrap.
At this point, you get male1 and female2 spawned successfully, congratulation !
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.
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.
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 !!!

Advanced breeding technique - extremely low water

2010-03-29T12:36:00.000+11:00

Scenario: you've got pair of bettas doing dancing and wrapping, trying their best at spawning.

Problem: they are very eager pair to spawn, but the male can't seem to wrap the female nor the female knows how to put herself for a complete successful wrap. They may wrap, then somewhat slip off, or the female got pushed aside and the male sank like a rock to the bottom of the tank.

Solution: read on ;)

The above problem is quite common when you're dealing with 2 conditions:

the female is equal or way too big for the boy to wrap
they're inexperience

You can do a number of things, but we'll discuss one approach that we applied ;)

you can switch the male/female with more experienced one - in order for this technique to work, you need to move the female to new male (rather than moving the new male to female's tank). We've done this a number of time with great success
continue with the original pair, fingers crossed they may learn the technique before any of them giving up or the female dropping eggs
continue with the original pair and "force" their environment to work better for their lacking in technique

We've applied the last technique for a pair of K.H.'s giants. The female is big (more than 2.5 inches) and the male is bigger (more than 3.2 inches). The problem is that the female has a very bulky/large body width, the male can't wrap that body with ease. They've been trying to wrap for more than 2 hours without success. The female was exhausted and she was dropping some eggs already....

Applying the last technique to the pair, we've seen successful wrappings at last!

What did we do? Quite simple really...we lowered the water with this formula: male's total length + 1 inch. So, basically we have them spawning in a barely 4 inches height of water! You can use airline tubing to suck out the water, just don't disturb the nest...

Now, you may say, well, that's pretty much a normal water height for spawning, isn't it? No, not really. We typically spawn bettas at about 5 inches of water if they're short fin. Long fin HM usually get about 5 to 6 inches, not much different really. However, these are giants and they're very big! Try to keep your giants in a 5 inches of water, they'll be going crazy. You can see how the male becomes difficult in moving about.

The good thing about this technique is that it forces the male and the female on that confine depth, hence remove the possibility for them to "slip off" during wraps. Basically, once the male wraps the female, the male sinks to the bottom of the tank and with him he carries the female! If the female is somewhat "slip off", at least she's still within very close distance from the male.

You need to watch out for a couple of things though:

don't lower the water too much, they can't even wrap if it's too low. As a guide, measure your male in a complete flare position, make sure he has at least 1 inch space to maneuver (e.g. bending his body to wrap the female)
don't worry if their movement destroys a bit of the bubble nest. if there are too much erratic movements, you better wait till they're really in "wrapping" mode to lower the water (not lowering the water when they're in "dancing" mode)
Obvious enough, you can't apply this technique if the male's nest is obstructed with plants or other things in the tank.

If you notice that either one of them is feeling uncomfortable with this technique, you better increase their water height until they're feeling happy. Sign of uncomfortable varies, so you better watch your fish closely :)

If you're game and want to try this technique (or you know you have failed pair that you want to give another try), you better contact us for a chat to make sure you are ready to apply this technique - time is of the essence during spawning!

Betta hobby: barriers for entry and solutions

2010-03-02T12:14:00.005+11:00

Too many people are turned off to betta keeping. Main reasons are all well-known such as:

too expensive
not enough time
not enough stock available

Too expensive

If you're getting your bettas imported, then yes, it will ended up to be too expensive. Importation cost usually is equal to the cost of your fish if not more! Purchasing a USD20 fish will cost you around AUD25 to AUD30 to import. Don't forget your shipping cost as well, that would be around AUD20 to 25. The old mathematics of "purchase more to reduce cost" doesn't actually work here since the more you purchase, the more you're paying for importation cost anyway. If you purchase a betta, would you just purchase one? Rationale governs that you purchase more than one, or perhaps just a single pair. On average purchasing 2 pairs of bettas costs around AUD220 (USD40 per pair, AUD100 total import, AUD20 shipping) - the hobby is looking more and more distant for everyone to afford...

Sharing shipping cost can reduce your cost a little bit, hence do that whenever you can to share with other fellow buyers.

At the end of the day, you are at the mercy of your importer/transhipper. Unfortunately nothing can be done about that, except if your importer/transhiper would be so kindly reduce the fee ;)

Your best option would be to join similar-minded people in the hobby, such as SSS, or any betta forums where you can find established breeders selling their stock for more-than-reasonable price.

Not enough time

You either need to make the time, or organize your timing better. Sometimes this is very difficult choice when mixed with family, job, and life in general. Surprisingly, if you take care of your bettas on a strict routine/regime, you may find that they don't actually take much of your time.

For instance, we have been successful on keeping bettas on the following schedule:

5am : first feeding, quickly check any bettas needing attention
7pm: second feeding, time to flare them and enjoy for a good half to one hour

This doesn't work lately because of job traveling. Of course we need to adjust the above if we are spawning any of the bettas.

When you spawned your bettas, you need to be able to commit yourself to 3 or 4 meals a day for that tiny fry of yours. Usually this is required for the first 1.5 months, then you can relax a bit and let them join the adult feeding regime.

Some have been quite successful in feeding their bettas every other day (i.e. once every 2 or 3 days). We usually don't suggest this unless you're feeding a 4+ months old bettas, but then you need to try to see what works for you.

Not enough stock available

What can we say, there always be not enough stock, despite you may have browsed through your forums or auction sites. But if you're a bit relax on things, you may find a similar, or good enough stock. For instance, if you're looking for that awesome dragon, may you settle on full-mask perhaps? You only need to cross the full-mask to a poorer-quality dragon to produce that awesome dragon that you've been dreaming on. Creativity helps here.

Looking back the hobby for these past couple of years, it has been apparent that it will remain slow and a lot of work is needed to attract more people into the hobby. The funny thing about the hobby is...it's a hobby, which means there shouldn't be needing any attractions to begin with! Unfortunately the barriers, particularly the cost, is way too high for some, even if they're experienced breeders like us. We look forward for other initiatives such as CBS or plain old let's share the cost together.

Until then, give us a shout if you need any of our stock (only when we do have some). Hope we can share them with you and together we can ease the entry barrier.

Bettas breeding venture, anything is possible

2010-03-02T11:24:00.003+11:00

When we thought to give breeding a rest, an offer comes from KL, his partner BR, and their friend JN, to help them out in breeding quest - something similar to CBS, but confined to them ;)

They offered a very nice deal. We've got to choose a new set of breeders (and current breeders that we have; something that *they* and *us* like), they pay for the costs, they have all the tanks prepared, and we come once a week to see how they go with the fish (simply because they're in a short driving distance from us).

The reward for us would be up to 20% of the fry produced ;) We'd rather have some best pairs from the spawn than that kind of number of fry, nonetheless it's still nice gesture...

Given we don't have much of the time to care for any of our fish, it's refreshing to know that we still can breed bettas despite they're not "our own".

They have large tanks, it's a little bit worrying on the very large number of spawns and fry to be produced, but they seem to be committed to it and in their own words "we've got plenty of time to prepare for the foods".

We have chosen 3 males and 3 females for them coming on the next shipment - mixture of HMPK and HM giants (geno at least). Pending all is ok, the breeding should start in a few weeks time.

Pictures coming soon, once all has been confirmed.

Early breeder identification

2010-02-03T11:16:00.003+11:00

Continuing from prev topic on identifying breeders, let us show one of the fish that may become breeder.

The prev discussion mainly showed giant bettas and therefore fairly easily identifiable as breeder at young age. What if you're having "just that typical betta" and yet you'd like to find out if your fish is a breeder or not?

Well, here is an example:

Now, the boy is nearly 2 months old. Sure, you may have some of your fish look just like him, but then what would be the criteria that we considered to be good breeder off this boy?

First of all, notice that the boy has very nice wide-spread fins: caudal, dorsal, and anal are all wide, nicely spread. Secondly, if you're focusing on green/turq, he's a bonus, since he has no red wash (nor any of his siblings). He's a clean turq...Furthermore, he is very aggressive, this is always a major requirement for any breeder.

Let us pay attention to his fins. On all of his fins, you notice that they all have that "white edges" that indicate further growth of the fins is about to come. Although all young fish will have their fins growing further, the white edges/tips on all-rays usually indicate a further growth AND branching.

The anal fin is a nicely spread fin, square in shape, and not too long or too pointy. Slight length on anal fin (compared to caudal) is typical unless you're aiming to get symmetrical plakats (short fins bettas).

The boy will end up with slight heavy branching and by all means this is one of the preferred breeders in our categories. He may show up as OHM, just a tad, at later stage.

Note that this topic identifies breeders based on form rather than anything else. Your goals could be completely different than ours and therefore you may not agree completely with this topic. Hope you have some fun identifying your next breeders :)

New year and slowing down

2010-01-28T12:53:00.005+11:00

d We've been slowing down on bettas lately, mainly due to work and family commitments. However, it's not to say we stop altogether ;)

Lots of stock had been cleared last year, what's left is only a handful of breeders that, none of which unfortunately, we have time to breed :(

Anyway, time to clean up the tank after a much-deserved holiday. Here's whats in stock for clearance:

4 males of adult HM, ready to spawn, never spawned before, age 6-8 months, each $30
2 males of ex-breeders HM, 50% giant, active and eager to spawn again, each $10
10 pairs of HM juvies (well, maybe 1 HMPK), 1.5 to 2 months, see pix below, each pair $20

Shipping to east coast $25.

Some pix of the juvies, dirty tanks and blurred, they're much better up close but good enough for your reference. Colours avail (you request or get random sent to you instead): copper red, copper greyish, turquoise.

Here is a sample of adult HM boy (carry giant):

Beautiful Copper Gold. He has very nice straight caudal rays, something that you may look for a breeder for a show fish ;)

The juvies, turq, active and bubbly...

This one just couldn't stop building his bubblenest...Just love the size and thickness of that nest :)

Some notable quality ones, perhaps will turn out as breeders. For now, they're just as awesome as the rest.

Last one, a heavy feathertail, for those who are interested in using him:

OctoberFest Juvies

2009-10-28T13:42:00.001+11:00

Fresh from the grow up tanks, nicely coloured with great attitudes. They're the top of the batches with the rest of the clans catching up in sizes and forms. Copper, blue, green, and mixed colours.

As usual, if you want them now, email us.

The one month older boy, MG + blue

Accidental purple

2009-09-18T10:55:00.003+10:00

There are a couple "blue" males in our tanks and we always thought they're quite special. The blue colouration is different from the typical steel or royal blue. They have a black body, with a white base colour (courtesy of copper), and a very nice deep purplish colour. A not-so-good sample of them is here (this one is a bit over-exposured and blue background!).

Perhaps this is a way to produce a purple colour? If you notice, many purple colouration is actually a lavendar variant. They have strong red in the body. Well, what would you need to produce a pure purple colour without red in it?

Talking about pure random thoughts, perhaps we can mix some ideas to see if we can produce that purple....

The nice thing about copper (specifically copper green), they have the shiny purple colour if you shine torch to it on different angle. Now, if one would be able to extract that purplish colouration and mix it with blue, over some generations you'd create a purple wouldn't it? Well, not really...since both blue and copper are not technically compatible. You'll get lots of red-wash. The blue produced from this mix is what we're seeing as "super blue" or any of the metalic blue variants.

A completely accidental that we've done was to mix copper, lavendar, and green variants. Whoala, F3 produces a nice set of deep purplish colour with clean non-red showing up. F4 may not inherit these colour though, since we'd expect copper/multi variation will be thrown, but surely a couple of them will produce consistent purple...Time to experiment to see if we can achieve this.

Virgin and eager to spawn

2009-09-14T16:26:00.002+10:00

This poor boy has been lined up in the spawning tank for sometime. We haven't gotten any time to spawn him - not having much time to care for his fry.

Seems to be a perfect match for one of OHM females. Wonder what the offspring would look like.

This male has 32 branches at least...no, nothing is wrong with his body, it's just that he bends when pix was taken.

Introducing "Dwarfy"

2009-09-10T16:27:00.003+10:00

Dwarfy is part of a few bettas in the community of dwarfs from one of our spawn. He has the length of about 2cm (about less than 1 inch) at the age of nearly 2 months old. His half siblings (from same father but different mom) are at least double if not 2.5 times longer than him.

Here are his pix with the same age half-sibling boy. The half-sibling is 1 week younger or so, dad was a hard-working betta ;) ...

New breeds of potential

2009-09-10T11:45:00.002+10:00

Some of the youngsters in our tanks at the moment. Looks very nice though still way too young. Will be 2 months in a couple of days time. All of them will be HM and OHM pretty much soon, the tail spreadIf you're interested, they're $20 each.

Time to choose breeders

2009-09-04T16:34:00.004+10:00

There are some nice batch coming up soon and this reminds us on this issue: when is the best time to choose your next breeders.

Well, we find that the best time would be when the fry has started to flare. Give it a good couple of days separation and let them flare, then you'll know which ones you'd like to keep as your breeders. This happens usually around the age of 2 months old, sometimes earlier at 1.5 month but could be as late as 2.5 months. By the age of 3 or 4 months you should know clearly whether your choice was correct :)

This approach of choosing breeders leads to some of the very best and largest of your batch being chosen. Sometimes, although very rarely, you may want to choose smaller fish as your breeders. For instance, we currently have a very nice OHM female and she's definitely a breeder with no doubt despite her size is still smaller than her siblings. Yet, we also have her largest sibling male as breeder since he has all the quality that we are looking forward to.

There are times when you have all-same-quality batch of bettas where every fish is quite similar in quality to every other in the tank. If that's the case, then you don't need to be picky. Any of them is good for your breeding.

Quality of breeders that should be showing when your fish is about 2 months old in HM:

all fins (caudal, dorsal, and anal) have to be as long and as large as possible.
vigor - your fish should be active and agressive
when you've got that 'spark' in your heart whenever you see them

Usually, your breeders will make tons of bubbles in a matter of couple of days. You'd like him to be showing off the beauty and yet being territorial - nothing more territorial than having a nest of his own.

Update 07/09:
Some pix, all will be 2 months old next week. The red boy is a good breeder ;)

Market dictates ST, breeders use DT

2009-06-23T20:44:00.001+10:00

How do you improve finnage? That question is asked way too many times !

Go and cross your HM to DTHM, that will improve the finnage.

Funny how we treat DT. If you look at DT on auction sites, it is rarely filled with posts. Not that many people sell DT. It's just not "hot" enough. But what you need to consider is....you need DT if you'd like to improve the finnage. So, you may not be able to sell it, but you need to keep it to improve your "other" lines, so that the "other" lines can be sold better. How ironic....at least that's how many other breeders have been treating DTs...

We personally love DT. Some of our best fish were DTs. However, it is difficult to get good DTs these days and our goal of experiments didn't involve much DTs, hence much lesser chance for us to play with the gene.

Thin giant or short fat one?

2009-06-23T20:33:00.000+10:00

Interesting observation on our current HM giant lines. There are 2 types of giants, so it seems, despite they are half siblings.

The first line has very thick body, but surprisingly shorter finnage. The bulkiness of the body is good sign, but why would the finnage shorter? Note that both parents are all extremely lengthy finnage...This makes these guys look like fat & short giant.

The second one is the opposite. Body-wise isn't particularly thick. Sure, the body is long, longer and bigger than your standard HM, but not to the extreme. We would love them to be about 1.5x to 2x in terms of body thickness....Finnage-wise, they are long and excessive, what we expect of a giant. This second line seems to be thin-body giant, more like a giant on a diet.

This same observation is also noticeable on HMPK giants, but because their finnage is already short, a lot of people didn't really pay much attention to it. Look at some of the giants available, you'll notice that there are some HMPKs with extremely large body but somewhat the finnage is way too short !

Things seem to be different if you have half-giant HMPK or 75% giants HMPK. Many of them look quite balanced (we're discounting those giants mixed with long fin betta, some of them come out with longer-than-usual finnage).

What do you have on your stock?

Some pix from last few days

2009-06-19T22:45:00.000+10:00

Having cleaned up, sort of, the tanks, we took the opportunity to take some shots.

This one is an interesting one. He is one of the smaller spawn with a few melano marbles. He is a giant geno, but by the look of it he's only carrying the gene of 25%. What's fascinating about these melanos is watching how they turn their colour from a complete black melano to some patchy one. This one is the extreme version where he only has some dots left :)

This one is coming from old line of copper mixed with lavendar. Not surprisingly the colour comes up as multi with lots of copperish. Nice ray branching though, starting to feather.

Again coming from copper line, this one is copper giant geno crosses. He's the only survival one from the spawn unfortunately as the parents, particularly the female, were extremely large, hence a difficult spawning. The beauty of this boy is on his colouration, a mixture of gold and red intertwined throughout the body and fins, pretty consistently. His spread isn't bad, body is pretty thick, but the boy is very naughty and managed to had a good fight with another male, hence all the torns in his fins.

Finally, still admiring this boy, he's a very nice breeder-quality one...We've posted his pix when he was small till the size he's now, overall it's nice to see how they form and grow. Here are the pix again from small to big, just another flash back and waste of your bandwidth :)

As mentioned, any of these guys you're interested in, shoot us email ;)

Large tank vs small tank for breeding bettas

2009-06-18T20:27:00.001+10:00

This seems to be a topic commonly asked by new beginners, should you choose largish tank or the smaller ones if you intend to breed bettas?

The answer really boils down to your preference and somewhat the personality of your bettas. Some bettas dont care really what kind of tank you provide them, so long the water condition is good for breeding. Some bettas are very fussy, they get "lost" in big tanks, grew tired of chasing the female and ended up on a prolonged dating. Such dating will only turn out as successful spawn when the female is ready to accept the "invitation" from the male.

What you also need to consider is that breeding is a lot easier if done in smaller tank. Anything as big as 10" or 12" tank (about 20cm in length) will do. The advantage of using smaller tank is that once the eggs hatched, you don't have to get headache on feeding them and they will find foods much easier, hence contributing to faster growth on their part. Note that once upon a time, when they are about 3 weeks or 1 month old, you can (and must) move them to larger tank.

So, the suggestion is...start it on smaller tank and move them to larger one as they grow.

BTW, if you're breeding extensively large giants, say those 4+" HM ones, then you need double the size of the tank mentioned above. The large giants dont like small tanks. The small tanks are mostly applicable for HMPK (giant or otherwise) and standard HM bettas.

Happy breeding :)

When to cross out your bettas?

2009-06-12T23:54:00.001+10:00

This question comes up a couple of times already. You may have a good line going on for awhile and wondering whether you should or should not cross out. Typical risks of cross out include introduction of unwanted traits into your line, but not crossing out isn't helping either.

So, how do you know that it's the time to cross out?

We usually cross our lines out as soon as F2 but on average on F4. There are occassions when we cross them out as soon as F1, but that's not the norm.

These are some indications when we cross our lines out:

the new introduced fish is fitting to the plan and carry good quality
your current line is starting to show some bad traits or defects
your lines are no longer "strong", e.g. they are easily sick

Note that it takes long time to develop the line, so there isn't a point to abandon it straight out just simply few bad traits are starting to show up. Just as the good traits are accummulated over a number of inbreedings, you can cross out to get rid of the bad traits.

Lots of mistakes are done when people afraid of doing inbreeding. There is tendency of crossing the fish out right away. While that is true and good if you'd like to start a new line, it is devastating if you don't know the history of your fish. Remember what's seen on the surface isn't necessary the genes you're ended up getting. But if you're only chasing the fun of breeding, by all means, take the best 2 of any fish and get them dancing :)

In short, develop your line to the point you know you "nearly" there, and only cross out when you have to or when you know crossing it out will get your much closer there. Crossing out frequently is fun, so from time to time do it...

Interested on this boy?

2009-06-03T21:22:00.000+10:00

For those who've been wondering to purchase something from us, here you are....

He has thick rays, large & heavy volume finnage, and only about 3 months old. He's giant geno, and will definitely make a very good breeder. Sibling female available if interested.

Offer your price on email ;)

Post easter betta sale

2009-04-23T23:33:00.006+10:00

>> Update 29/06/2010. Please check our main blog entry on http://breedingsmybettas.blogspot.com for new fish offerings.

We're releasing some of our stock that are not on hold. If you're interested, contact us via email. Shipping $25 as usual.

Here are the availability:

$50-$60 per pair, giant-geno, HM, 2 months + 3 days old as of today, sample male is on this movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1qrq1l3b0I
each $100, large giant HM female, adult, 5-8 months, 2.5 inches to 3 inches, again sample picture on movie above. most are 8 rays if not 16 rays.

For the pair, there are only very few available due to their young age and size - but also because majority are already accounted for...Furthermore, please note that the line of young pairs above turns out to be overly aggressive, hence you need to take this into account for your breeding plan, whether this is for good or for bad. The aggressiveness has caused 2 of the males to break a few rays on their caudal, though the breakage is very minor.

>> updated 25 April
Additional pairs available, here samples for the batch. This is giant-geno, age 2 months, body is thick.
Cost: $20 per pair or $75 for 5 pairs

Dark pix just showing green/red and the white opaque males (only 2 opaques avail).

Another green/red male

Green boy

>> updated 4 May
Only very few males left, some females still avail. only 3 large giant females still avail. Price varies from $20 per pair to $60 per pair, email us.

>> updated 7 May
This boy has lots of potential as breeder. He's one of the few left, keeping some of the potentials till last ;) He has nice bulky body accompanied by thick finnage. On top of it he has a matching attitude. 2.5 months old. He's available for $50 with sibling or half-sibling female, your choice. Giant-geno of course.

For those who contacted us asking for pix of the melanos, here's one. Not the best pix but will do. He's avail with sibling melano female if you like to do your own experimentation or with one of his melano/black orchid marble for a bit of fun. There is a gold melano female avail for him as well.

Comparing giant female

2009-04-23T23:18:00.001+10:00

As promised, here are some pix comparing one of our giant female against a female and 2 males. Forgot to mention, she's the sibling of the giant boy in comparing our boys.

The giant female is about 8 months now. As you can see, she is a copper marble. She's not terribly the "fattest" in the lot, nor she was the biggest - we've given some of her siblings which are bigger and fatter than her before. She comes from majority 8 rays but somehow she only has 1 branching with 8 rays and the rest are 4 rays. Her size is 3 inches. She's still a virgin and there isn't any males in our stock can spawn her, so if you have any large enough males, perferably 4+ inches, then give us a yell...

Here is her comparison with a giant-geno HM female. This black orchid/marble female is 2 months old. She's very fat :) She has the size of standard HM female of the age of 3 or 4 months, so hopefully you get the idea of their comparison.

As you can see, the small female is about half length of the giant female, but pay attention to the body width/height...That giant female is extremely thick ;)

Now, here is a comparison of the female to a green/red HM male. This male has just shocked being placed there, so he's a bit sulky, but notice the size difference :)

Now finally, a comparison of the female to a flaring red HM male.

Anywho, admire the giant ;) Their size is extremely large. If only it is easier to find a match for them :( The sibling male of 3.5 inches length can't even handle this female...Hopefully we can find a good male for these ladies.

If you are interested on seeing how this female FIGHTS against the red BF male, here is the link to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1qrq1l3b0I. Watch it, it worths your time! The male is just awesome, but the female isn't about to let him bully her either :)

Poor man's solution to betta barrack

2009-04-19T13:16:00.001+10:00

Here is the sample of separating and growing our juvies where 1 male is let roaming the bigger tank freely but the rest of the others are caged in cut-off transparant containers.

They have a good exercise for awhile until we then have to break it off by replacing the transparant cage with non transparant ones, such as cut-off milk bottles. This way, all of them can rest for sometime and then they'll get into the exercise mode again when we return back.

If you have small number of males, you can do this fairly easily while saving some of your electricity bill.

Word of caution. Watch out for those jumping males. Once a male jump off from their cage to the outside tank, you'll have very vicious fight which pretty much means at least 2 of your males will not be in their tip top form anymore.....

Producing fertile melano female, part I

2009-04-16T12:37:00.002+10:00

Continuing our discussion about fertility in melano from the previous post. This time we have the chance to do another experimentation, perhaps in 2 months time anyway, of testing melano fertility.

What difference this time is the source of melano. Current line produces some melanos, despite parents only inherit melano gene indirectly from their ancestries. There are currently about 5 melano males, 2 melano females, and 2 steel blue lace females. Other siblings are multi colours, therefore it can be said that the majority of the spawn is fertile.

So, the question is whether the crossing of 2 melanos from the majority fertile F1 will yield to a fertile F2? We hope that this type of crossing to be slightly different from the typical melano spawns (most melanos are produced by crossing a melano male to either steel blue, blue, or green females that yield to all melano females in the spawn infertile).

It seems, even the melanos produced in this spawn have hint of black orchid or steel blue lace. Perhaps there is a chance after all to produce a fertile melano female. Fingers crossed....We'll continue this topic to Part II in about 2 months time, when they're ready to spawn.

Avoidance of bent dorsal

2009-04-16T12:18:00.001+10:00

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.

Distribution of giant genes

2009-04-16T11:41:00.001+10:00

Many people are wondering how the giant genes really distributed in bettas. Would crossing *any* giants produce a giant? Continuing from the baking lessons, let's explore one theory that may answer this.

First of all, let us put some assumptions. Many agree that giant "gene" is probably made up of multiple genes and no one knows for certain how or what these genes are - if they knew, that wouldn't much fun, would it?. Furthermore, let's take the definition of giant size as mentioned in the baking lessons to be applicable here - different breeders have different definitions of giant size.

For illustration purposes, let us consider 2 scenarios here.

Crossing 100% giant male to 100% giant female

It is known that if you have a pair of 100% giant - e.g. if HMPK then they are 3+ inches in length, if HM then they are close to the infamous 7" - then you will only get small proportion to be true giant in your F1. This proportion varies greatly between lines, but majority of breeders agree that it is between 3% to 10% of your spawn. What it means, if you have a spawn of 100 fry from a 3+" giant pair, chances you will only get 3 to 10 fry turning up to be 3+". So, you can see why it's so troublesome to work on giants.

The rest of the spawn, usually is a mixture of half-giant (50% giant), 75% giant, and even 25% giants which are just slightly larger than your typical bettas.

Now suppose that you like to continue the line to F2 and F3. What you need to do is:

pray that you've done enough spawning such that you have your chance bigger than the dimmed 3%-10% ! Cross the parents 2x, 3x, heck 10x if necessary, get as much juice out of them and see if you hit the jackpot on getting 1 or 2 of their fry to be 100% giant
have a good eye to identify which one of those buggers fit into 100% giant size. Remember, you need to choose them when they are young, and chances are they are not even big enough to be categorized as 100% giants. Most 100% giants are identifiable when they are about 4 to 6 months old - the longer time you wait, the more certain you are
have lots of spare tanks for the buggers, at least to last for 6 months, otherwise you don't know which one of them is your lucky winner

So, with the finite resources, spaces, and tanks you've got, most probably and seems to be certainty that the ones you've chosen to start your F2 won't be the magical 100% giant. Can you see why this is so much fun? :)

Crossing 100% giant male to standard betta

So, suppose you like to cross your 3" giant HMPK to a standard HMPK for instance. On F1 you will find that majority of your fry would be standard HMPK size, 25% giant size, and upto half-giant. This means, the biggest of your spawn can only be about 2.3" in length max. What you are further forgetting is that the statistics is still the same, there is only 3% to 10% of the fry to be half-giant. The rest is nothing more than 25% giant in size. Remember that the fry only inherit half of the genes from each of their parents !

Now, suppose that you choose very carefully and believe that one of the F1 to be half-giant, fingers crossed, then you cross it to the parent 3" giant. F2 statistics is not improving greatly. You still will only get about 3%-10% of the F2 to be 75% giants. The rest are merely half-giant and 25% giants. So, fingers crossed again, if you have a large spawn of 100+ fish, then you may see those 75% giants, otherwise you better off betting on lotto and hope to win cause majority of your fry would be just half-giants.

Lessons learnt?

It's a tough and hard to work on giants at the moment, even in Thailand. They are well-known to be capable of mass-producing bettas and yet there are only sporadic introduction of giants available. Perhaps in the next 3-5 years time we will see giants everywhere, just like we are seeing HMs and HMPKs everywhere today. In the meantime, the fun is on us to produce and experiment on different techniques to produce the "nice" giant line. Remember, everyone is pretty much on par and on the same level of playing field here ;) You may very well, with enough luck and diligent, produce the holy grail of giants :)

Broken rays, defect in bettas?

2009-04-15T17:31:00.001+10:00

There seems to be 2 cases of broken rays happening in bettas as explained soon. We noticed this on 2 unrelated spawns. It doesn't seem to be genetic but rather environmental. Could this be the defect of inbreedings in giants?

Here is a sample of broken rays, typically happening on the caudal fin.

On one occasion, we noticed that the male - yes this broken rays typically happening on males - was overactive, which causes his caudal to bent too sudden and therefore break them off. This is pretty much similar if you try to swing your hand too sudden and you either sustain injury to your muscles or even break that bone if it hits something harder than your bone.

This type of broken rays is usually quite evenly distributed, forming a half circle on the caudal, which indicates that all of the rays protruding from the caudal are pretty much screwed.

On another occasion, we noticed that not only the caudal is experiencing the broken rays, other fins such as dorsal and anal are experiencing the same. This indicates that either it is caused by genetic or the environment. In our case, there is only 1 single male of the whole spawn experienced this, hence safely to assume that it is environmental. Another interesting thing about it, since it is "evenly distributed" to all fins, this brokenness forms a pattern. Analogy to this would be the pattern formed from tree trunk due to the growth of the tree. Over the time/years, tree forms circles in its trunk/girth. Water condition must have differ too greatly affecting the growth of the fins. The above example image seems to be of this 2nd type.

The troublesome concept of this broken rays is that we seems to experience this more on giant HMs rather than the standard HMs. The question is whether it is more prominant in giants compared to standard HM. One theory goes by saying that the weight of caudal fins is so great in giants - e.g. too heavy due to their size/thickness.

Time to monitor them and experiment on different water flow. Would stronger current affect this as well? It is known that strong currents can affect bend dorsal rays but is it strong enough to even bend/break rays?

Change Windows 7 background!

2009-04-14T17:12:00.000+10:00

For some of you who are into techie stuff, get it working. We want to see if you can change the windows 7 background which currently features a blue/red VT to other betta pictures !!

If you're good on doing photoshop etc, get it cracking. We'll supply you with some pix :)

Here's what it looks like now.

C'mon, surely someone can do it. The background can be used for any operating systems as well, not necessarily Windows.

Overactive and super aggressive

2009-04-14T13:16:00.001+10:00

One of the best moments in bettas is when they are just juvies. Lots of things to enjoy. Here are 2 movies of them, you'll sure appreciate their energy and ego :)

These guys are 2 days jarred, and by the look of it, they'll be bringing a bunch of happiness to those who watch them (and breed them and care for them...). Not having much of the time to take all their movies, but majority of them are like the crazy boys here...

We are always amazed on the youngsters, particularly those who are just about to sprout. 7-15 weeks old are the best moments to see this in action. So, for those who are not into breeding yet, get on the act or you'll miss a lot of this action! :)

Apologies to those wanting to see the melano ones. They're not in the movies for now. They are so dark, we decided to take their movies when we can rearrange the lightings, perhaps next time...

Here's the 2 boys. Reminding us of "Kill Bill" movie ;) The right hand boy is the one pictured on previous post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymlJEUXmfJk

Now here's another one. A true assassin against a confused marble (also check his pic from prev post). Don't ask whatever happened to his jaw, apparently he doesn't feel a thing at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwrnOed36jE

The movies are a lot longer but the aggression is pretty much the same...They can go on for a good hour if not stopped.

Tips for those who are looking for breeders. These are the kind of betta attitudes that you should be looking into, if you'd like to have a strong healthy line. Unfortunately you can only see this on movie, not on static pictures.

As someone said "There is a show off, and there is a crazy ass" :)

Marble and multi boys

2009-04-13T12:50:00.001+10:00

Another 2 shoots of the new juvies. Finally they're catching up with their age ;) At 7 weeks old, 2 days separated, they manage to flare beautifully. Very active in the tank, making it all too difficult to take pictures.

While the previous melanos we took with flash, this time we're not using flash. Lighting isn't helping much but nevertheless they're quite pretty.

This multi boy moves so fast causing all the worms, gunks, debris fly all over the place :)

Marble boy, perhaps of blue lace. Only 1 so far identified, could be just a one-off colour.

Holiday and feeding bettas

2009-04-13T00:56:00.001+10:00

Suppose you'd like to have a month long break - holiday, work, away, etc - and no one is around to feed your bettas, what would you do? The easiest way would be to find someone volunteering to take care of them, but there are times when either letting people into your home isn't the option or sending the buggers are too cumbersome, so here are few ideas.

Fry
If you have fry of less than a month old, then tough luck. We can't figure out a better way to feed them except by using bbs and you need to prepare for the bbs every single day. Vinegar eels don't help, too thin and not sufficient nutrient. If you're lucky to live in warm climate then you may just okay to put them outside, with lots of plants and mozzies (this is applicable to adult bettas too!).

One alternative that we have never tried is to use automatic feeder, good quality one, but instead of putting pellets in there, you put crushed pellets. Small fry eat small pellets, bigger ones will eat larger pellets, everybody is happy. If you noticed that your water goes foul quicker, then keeping a snail can help to clean up the tank.

If you have large tank and you don't mind a bit of algae, putting rottifiers may last your fry for sometime. Just make sure you don't get dragonfly egg in there, or else you'll be seeing a very empty tank when you return from your break :)

Juvies
If you only have small juvies of say 1 month old, chances they are ready to pick on live worms, hence you can try to put X amount of worms in their tank and if you calculate it properly, the worms could last for a good 2+ weeks. There are some tricks on this of course. First of all, once juvies started to eat worm, you'll be surprise on how fast they consume the worms. For instance, our 100+ juvies can consume a good 100ml worms in 3 or 4 days time. If you have smaller number of juvies, then that kind of amount of worms can last the holiday.

One thing that you have to be aware is that you *can't* just put lots of worms in a tank, they'll die very quickly. They need aeration, a strong one. Also, you need to make sure the tank is large enough, say one of those 100+L tank (4' would be good). If you don't have such a large tank, then you need to split your juvies to smaller tanks and apply the same technique below.

Another thing is that worms can't be placed in constant warm water, the warmer the water, the more active they are and hence the faster they die. Notice how fast your water foul if you don't listen ;)

For the temperature control, we have been using electrical timer so that the heater is turned on for 15 mins for every 2 hours. This causes the water temperature to be slightly lower, perhaps in the lower 20s C, enough to keep the juvies happy and the worms not getting into panic mode. Put the heater near aeration output, it'll distribute the heat to the rest of the tank faster.

If you use pellets, then you can make use of automatic feeder. We found it was difficult to get the right frequency/amount for the pellets. Remember that in the early days of your juvies, you may be okay to feed them a little, since they're still small. But when 1 or 2 weeks has passed, they get hungrier all the time and therefore you need to take this into account. Automatic feeder is difficult to be adjusted for this reason, hence you may get some skinny and malnutrient bettas when you get back from your break.

On the last week of the break, if there isn't sufficient amount of foods available - or nothing left at all - then your bettas will fight and start cannibalizing their weaker/younger ones. You'll be lucky when you returned they are simply skinny, sometimes you'd find majority are sick, dying, etc.

Note that you can't repay back the missing foods. Starvation will cause your juvie to stunned and once they're stunned, there is no way for you to make them un-stunned. So, keep your feeding frequency regular, otherwise you may not get the quality you want.

Adult Males
Adult males are more difficult to take care of. Simply because they are jarred into their individual tanks. With the appropriate measurement of worms, you may be able to keep them alive for a good 1 week, and then you can only hope that they will not die of starvation for the remaining weeks. Alternatively, buy lots of automatic-feeders and accustom them to pellets.

A single male in a 12" tank - 20L - with sufficient worms should last him well for 2 or 3 weeks. Males are not terribly interested in foods. However, this means you need to get appropriate tanks, you can't just keep him in the beanie box since the size of the box is way too small.

Adult Females
Best way would be to either put them into large tank and feed live worms, just like juvies - knowing that they'll eat twice as fast as the juvies - or get an automatic feeder. Feeder would be simpler for females, they are usually not really fussy as to what they eat. Unlike the juvies, adult females eat "constant" amount of pellets, hence the feeder is good enough. Lack of foods will make them thinner, but at least they're still alive and well when you return back.

We will be experimenting with all of the above to see how long the worms survive in our tanks or the frequency needed for the pellets. It might come handy when we're on the break ;)

Upcoming melanos

2009-04-12T22:04:00.000+10:00

Surprise that we've got melano in the spawn, about 5 of them or so. Both parents must have had melano gene (female was carrying melano, but male wasn't confirmed).

These 2 are the sample. Caudal spread isn't great yet, but they'll be HM very soon, perhaps in 2 weeks time after proper exercises and growth. They are just 1 day jarred.

This one looks like an HMPK, but perhaps because he's smaller than the other one. We shall see. Very dark colouration. He loves to run around the tank, funny little fella.

The aggressive one, he's steel-mask melano. He could flare for ages.

Will take more pictures later, or even upload the movies. Nice to know they are very active and aggressive, looking forward to their development in a month time :)

Tips on achieving your betta goal

2009-04-10T01:21:00.002+10:00

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.

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??
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!
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?
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!

Feeding experiments

2009-04-09T16:55:00.001+10:00

One of experimentations that we've been doing is to feed the fish on different ways. It has been known that giant needs lots of food, but what does that really mean? Some considered feeding once everyday to be "lots" already, others feed them 2 or 3 times per day. What about feeding them once every couple of days? Sure that's regular, but not terribly lots...

On one tank, we've got the contenders having abundance of live blackworms, they don't have to worry about food. These guys surprisingly grow slower compared to the 2nd experimentation. The reason why they grow slower is perhaps attributed to "it's plenty of foods around, no need to worry of eating, hence no urges to keep eating". They are healthy with no apparent diseases, belly not terribly large, aggression isn't showing.

On another tank, we feed them 3 or 4 times a day, whenever we're around. Each feeding makes their belly nearly blowing up. These guys are larger than the 1st experiment. Some even double the size! They are much more active and aggressive. 1 or 2 of them are bloating right after meals, indicating that they ate excessively - the symptoms don't last long of course, once they're hungry again they'd hunt for more food. Not much nipping happens between the fish, indicating that their aggression was only towards foods. Females are terribly bouncy, with very apparent eggs deposit.

On a separate tank, we feed them once a day. Very similar to the previous tank, they're active and always hungry. Scouring the tank for foods, flaring, and terribly happy whenever they see us - but disappointed since we fed the next tank rather than them.

It seems that experiment #2 and #3 are suitable for giants where their growth needs to be supported with frequent feedings. However, caution needs to be practiced. Once they are larger, say 3 or 4 months, the frequency of feedings needs to be reduced. Otherwise they have the tendency of becoming "obese". Obesity in bettas, though mostly not showing up in males, can be easily noticed in females. Nothing wrong with obese bettas, they breed as usual etc. However, we believe that obesity reduce their lifespan. Perhaps along with the theory "eat more and die faster". Basically confirming that their metabolisms are higher with the high intake of foods and lack of exercises.

It is interesting that the older they get, the lesser they need feeding. While females want foods every day they see you, males can be fed once every other day. They worry about their manhood rather than the foods. So long you give them good exercises, they will simply focus on the guy next door.

Update on the green + copper

2009-04-03T15:50:00.001+11:00

Just thought to post their pictures coming from the green & copper spawn. About 100+ of them there. Their growth is somewhat slower than other giants, perhaps slower 1 or 2 weeks, but other than that they seem to be bulky and very promising.

Body is thick, caudal points outward, but anal seems to be shorter than other long fins. Again, this is perhaps because we are analyzing them too early. Wait for another 1 or 2 weeks, we should see them starting to sprout.

Note that both their parents are long fin, though male carries short fin, hence there is that tendency of getting shorter fins. Majority should be long fin and this will be interesting to see what the outcome is going to be.

Some are starting to have red coloured caudal, giving indication that maybe we will get a number of them to be copper red. Some golden sheen is showing off as well, metallic is in the gene :)

Red HMF giant geno

2009-04-03T15:42:00.001+11:00

This female is the best looking, in terms of rays splitting, out of the whole bunch. The caudal is started to split and form feather due to the heavy branching. It makes the caudal bending, just not enough space for the branchings, perhaps....

Here her pix. She doesn't want to pose beautifully nor we have any time to wait for her to pose, but this pix should suffice.

Here is a zoom of her tail.

On quick count, it seems she's branching 32 rays if not more (64??), with average ray branchings to be 16 and near the end of caudal to be 8.

Note that none of her siblings are DT, hence her large caudal is purely because she branches too much.

Any expression of interest for her? Let us know. She's avail if you're interested. We figured, it'll be at least 2 months before we start another tank for spawning....

Missing infamous betta lines

2009-04-01T13:30:00.002+11:00

Hobbyists come and go. With the economy turmoil, this is more apparent in betta business. While there are more sellers selling bettas in auction sites, it becomes more difficult to find a distinct "line" of individuals. Those people who were well-known for their particular lines are no longer seen in public scenes. If you attempted to contact them, many would not even reply back, indicating they have not monitored their means of communication anymore.

Interesting enough, we contacted some of these guys and in rare occasion only to find that the original infamous persons are no longer there, but someone else is doing the business on their behalf. The quality sold is completely different - that reminds us on selling your eBay's account when you no longer need it but it has lots of positive feedbacks ;)

True that many of them only do bettas as a side hobby, but given they've produced very nice line, one would have thought that they'll keep developing the particular line, given a long list of enthusiasts who are still willing to pay large sum of money for their lines.

Some of you may still remember when the first halfmoon was introduced, or that first gold colour, or that copper gold, or that special colours. Many, including us, were simply admiring others when they purchased those $300 per piece of luxury, but that was the very admiring times. Invention of the new colour, bringing overwhelming feeling of creativity and what one can do with such bettas.

There is another group of people who like traditional colours of red or blue or turq etc. They mostly aimed at improving the structural form of bettas, getting that high dorsal, improving caudal or anal, and working darn hard to make sure there is a greater meaning to the hobby.

The reality is, it's a hobby, albeit it's a very expensive one. It gets put aside when other "important" things come along. Producing a unique and distinct, and sometimes subtle, line is very difficult. Not many people appreciate this. Looking at some of the infamous site for bettas, surprisingly they still survive, with some loyal followers. Sure they still charge about double for their fish, but at least the buyers knew exactly what they're getting.

On average, buying 1 pair from these guys is equivalent in cost to buying about 5 fish from other sellers. But one wonders whether there is *really* any difference between their lines and, say, your other bettas that you've acquired from auction sites? This reminds us on the discussion we've got about "designer" or "boutique" bettas, in the middle of this importation post.

Perhaps the law of economy dictates that they ought to disappear. Just like our jobs started to disappear to other countries such as India and China. It's a laugh these days if you can find Australian-made goods when 90+% comes from China. There are too many cheap goods available, and for those that are branded and expensive ones, they still come from China! What would the consumers want? Anything that is affordable. In tough times junk-food outlets makes a lot of money, that shows the sentiment of our consumers.

So for those infamous betta people out there, where have you gone to?

Spawning a dropsy betta

2009-03-31T23:56:00.001+11:00

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?

2009-03-30T23:51:00.002+11:00

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?

2009-03-30T17:18:00.002+11:00

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?

2009-03-30T15:55:00.002+11:00

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

2009-03-29T23:52:00.001+11:00

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.

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.
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.
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

2009-03-28T15:36:00.002+11:00

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

2009-03-28T01:43:00.002+11:00

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

2009-03-18T16:34:00.002+11:00

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

2009-03-18T12:49:00.002+11:00

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....

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
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!
water temperature too high or too low. not in the mood, they won't do it
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.
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.
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 ;)
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....
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.
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

2009-03-16T16:55:00.002+11:00

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

2009-03-15T13:58:00.002+11:00

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

2009-03-13T17:56:00.001+11:00

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...

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.
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.
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).
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

2009-03-13T17:27:00.001+11:00

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?

2009-03-12T17:32:00.000+11:00

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

2009-03-08T01:21:00.001+11:00

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

2009-03-08T01:06:00.001+11:00

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

2009-03-05T21:10:00.001+11:00

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

2009-03-02T23:30:00.000+11:00

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!

2009-03-02T23:29:00.006+11:00

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.

Update pineapple boy pics

2009-02-28T02:23:00.000+11:00

Just thought to update pineapple boy pics. They were taken couple of days ago. His movie also avail on right panel, for those interested.

This pic is not so good on lighting (flashed), but shows better spread of the boy :)

A fairly cramped picture below.

As mentioned, he's avail as part of the breeder-quality on sale. When we have time, we'll take pic of the female, very nice one ;)

Breeding technique

2009-02-28T01:03:00.001+11:00

A number of enquiry came about breeding techniques. You may want to read our spawning 101, that should get you started. The problem with us at the moment is that we've spawn successfully so many times that we forgot how to make failed spawning, so bare with us when we retrace our steps.

For start, conditioning. Nothing really special that need to be done. if you feed your fish with frozen, flake, or live foods, then keep it up. We usually prefer live food, a lot easier to handle and less cleaning. Make sure the male doesn't see any females for couple of days or weeks prior the spawning. Do the same to the female, don't allow her to see any males (she can live in community tank, no biggy)

Tank size, between 5x to 10x the length of your fish, with width about 3x to 5x. Usually we do spawning in 16" tank, but 12" is ok too, so long your fish comfy.

Many people made mistake of spawning their fish in established tank. While this is sometimes ok, we usually spawn our fish in a brand new established tank. The water has to be aged (or dechlorinated) but typically the tank is newly established. Remember that we don't use gravel, plants, etc, hence this kind of setup is fairly easy to do.

Selection of males and females. Of course you need to get 2 healthy ones. Males need to be able to make bubblenest, and very active. If he's not active, you need to find ways to make him active. If your tank is too cold, or too hot, males won't be happy there. So, a nice 25-27C temperature is good. Nothing more important than getting your male comfy. If he's eager, you are half-way through already. Next get eager female too. Female size should be wrappable by the male. Too larger female is no good. Too young bettas also not good, they lack the readiness or experience. Usually a 4 or 5 months bettas would be best, they're more than ready.

Introduce and cage the female. You need to pay attention to see whether the male and female are interested on each other. Male should be making nice bubblenest in 1 or 2 days time, if he's not, then you know he's not ready yet. Female needs to be flaring back to the male, that means she's interested. If she's not, you are not going to get successful spawning unless the male extra super agressive.

Some females will jump up and down the tank when chased. That's normal. Make sure you *don't* have anything for her to anchor into. For instance, if she's scared of the male, she will have tendency to jump over a leaf, or anything above water. If she gets to this mode already, and you do not stop her (by removing those objects that she can anchor to), then you will *not* get successful spawn. Why is that? Well, because the female is too young ! She's still immature and scare of the males. She doesn't know what to do but running away.

If you follow the above technique, hopefully you get good successful spawn. If you want big large spawn, then feed them a lot, extend the introduction period. If you want "manageable" spawn, then you can simply introduce the female right away, knowing she has sufficient eggs there and she's healthy.

In most cases, the female will be torn to pieces, unless you've got very gentle male.

Good luck in your breeding :)

Observations on the HM giant-geno line

2009-02-28T00:40:00.001+11:00

Perhaps the most joyful experience so far on doing bettas is in getting the outcome from current spawn, there are just so many wonderful colour turns out in the spawn, all of them active with nice spread. True that some of the offspring have thin finnage, but majority is very nice and thick.

While crossing multi pair won't get you solid coloured bettas, you get some very unexpected colouration thrown at you. Not knowing the outcome perhaps is the best medicine, particularly for those who do not expect much from the colour department. Check out our previous posts to see some of their beautiful pictures.

It's also interesting to find out how some of them turn out to be HMPK when majority is very much long fin. In fact, they are so long, the fin can be considered excessive length. The plus side is that the fin is not even feather tail nor rosetail !

Some of the breeder males are just awesome, show quality (wondered whether we have show happening around -- have heard about QLD show, that's still on?). Would be nice to send them off for a show to compete. They'll lose on colour, but the form is great :) Too bad they're still young though, could easily be beaten by those older fish, but hey, fun is fun.

While many of our previous spawn have decent pectoral fin, width is reasonable, length is slightly shorter than anal, many of the current breeder-quality males actually have very long pectoral fins, not to mention long anal fin to match it (and of course caudal also long). It does seem that they've got tendency of very long fin, hence our confusion when we find some HMPK being thrown in the spawn. About 10 of the breeder-quality females are 8 rays (if not 16, just can't count them as there are too many splits). But that's not only it, the fins are also excessively long, at least for their age and body. So we're kinda waiting to see what they'll turn out in a month time. Currently the 10 females occupy the full tank on their own, large 3" tank. They flare to each other but in a kind way. Big bouncy tummy, so fingers crossed we'd choose 1 to be crossed with D&S half-giant (still sometime to get them ready for F2, they still need proper growth).

Perhaps one that we're still complaining about is the tendency of their finnage to be "too long". This has detrimental effect when environment isn't as clean and water changes not happening too frequently. When environment is not supportive, their top-cornered fins can become bending (either top dorsal, or top caudal). This is particularly noticed when we have some of them being placed in small tanks, the bending happened whenever they go to the water surface where dorsal fin would be folded. Is this genetic? not so sure either. We experimented a bit and noticed that the smaller tank males do have this tendency, while the bigger tank ones are quite free of the problem. Interestingly, some females have shown this as well, initially we thought "oh, crap, it's genetic", but then upon closer inspection, it wasn't actually bending. The females that show this "bending" are in fact have heavy branchings such that the most outer caudal rays are being "pushed" aside, hence it looks like as if they were bending. The females would swim naturally, and when they flare, you'd notice that "bending" went away.

The $64,000 question is then whether they will turn out to be giants after all. While some will not be giants (most giant spawns will yield certain percentage of "regular sized" bettas that carry giant gene), some half of them do seem to be giants or at least carry it. It's not as thick finnage as you'd want a giant to be, but that could very well be because of the "line". The size and growth, however, are impressive. A set of breeder-quality males, for instance, are the size of a standard full-grown HM now, and they are only about 3 months old. Their size beat easily some adult HM males, but funnily you can really see that they're just "boys". They've got the young smaller face, that innocent face.

Health of the spawn has been great. None of the fish sick with anything whatsoever. They don't have those typical problems with HM, such as collapse fins, fin rot, etc. All in all, there had been no issue at all with these guys. This is considered special, since in their early days we had quite frequent interruptions to our electricity, hence nights could be pretty cold at times and yet they were not affected. Other lines, including our HMPK giant lines, were affected by such interruptions, so these guys can be said as the winner of the breed for now. Hot weather and ice block didn't seem to worry them as well.

Are there any SDs in the spawn? Yes, of course, there are. There are 3 SD noticed so far. The real number could be larger (don't know if any fish sold were SD or HM cause we sold them young). Their body is quite large, but that could be attributed to large tank. The one thing that we found weird about these SDs are their finnage branchings. They are actually 4 and 8 rays branchings. So the branching is actually quite nice, but somehow they stayed at SD. It could be that they lack the necessary exercises, our fault really, cause we didn't have enough tanks for all fish, hence they were neglected for awhile and their finnage being torn during flaring. While the number of SD is, hopefully, low, it does seem that this line require constant flaring exercises to build their fin. Once they've got to be HM or OHM, lesser exercise regiment can be done without harm. Some of them have very straight finnage, which means without any exercise they'll always be HM or OHM, they form the typical D shape needed for desirable HM line. Oh, they don't have DT line ;) Isn't that great outcome? Such nice spawn without the help of DT.

So, what would we like to improve on the current line? This would be the list:

get bigger giants, the bigger the better, with longer tail
exteme branchings, also like this experiment
some OHM females would be good ;) We've got OHM in males, but would love to have on females too
crossing with our copper, to achieve yet bigger giant
get one of those "sky hawk" dorsal, that would be awesome
improve the strength of the rays, perhaps crossing to other stronger finnage giants
anyone has nice dragon giants? that would be a good mix for this lot ;)

Looking for nice blacks and reds

2009-02-27T23:22:00.001+11:00

One of fish from D&S died today :(
It's a nice black dragon female. The colour brings back memory of our own super black line, terminated awhile back.

Anywho, if anyone out there has nice black line, preferrably pure black (double black, super black) or nice black dragon, let us know. We can always exchange our stock ;) Wanting to start black line again.

Not looking for melano, though double black or super black from melano is good so long the female is fertile.

Alternatively, if you have nice blood red or super red, we like them too :)
Not traditional red, nor cambodian red (at least not showing any of cambodian flesh).

BTW, only looking for long fin HM or HMDT, no short fin, finnage has to be acceptable, hence picture would be nice.

Betta posters

2009-02-27T23:05:00.001+11:00

Today when we went pass local petshop, we noticed that they've got very nice betta posters. A couple of them, some from Thailand, 1 from Singapore, and 1 from Indonesia. Amazing combination of PK, VT, HM, DT and wild. We asked whether they will import the bettas from those countries, but no one knows. The posters apparently belong to one of the owners and he wasn't there.

Perhaps next time, when pass through there, we'll see if we can get him to get more bettas. They only have VT and CT. May even offload some of our HMs to them ;)

Interesting posters though, may need to start hunting as to where to get them. Would be nice to be placed in the fish room, oppsss garage.

Fresh air and rain help soothe the soul

2009-02-27T22:30:00.000+11:00

Picture tells a thousand words:

Green & Copper Spawn

2009-02-25T22:02:00.000+11:00

New spawning happened last week, but we've been busy, so only have time to update it now.

Male, from D&S, nice half-giant

Courting video, cut off cause it got really rough! Spawned on same day, 20th Feb. Female was introduced right away to the tank without proper introduction ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=em1UX0yJ9oY

The eggs, male taking care of it (can't really see the eggs, but he's busy there)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt47x5eH6cI

Not large spawn, but that's the whole purpose (can't handle yet another large spawn!). There are about 200 or so of these fry.

Fry at 1 day

Fry at 3 days

Fish Tycoon game, addicted and fun

2009-02-24T15:23:00.001+11:00

Just thought people may like to try this out. We had been spending some time with this game, it really takes your mind off all the stress. Suffice to say it is very addictive too :)

The game is called "Fish Tycoon", it is available on lots of devices ranging from PC, MAC, or even to mobile such iPhone. The purpose of the game is to collect the 7 rare fish by crossing 1 fish to another. you breed the fish, and sell the excess on the shop.

It's so cool, the fish grow as the time passes. You breed a fish now, go away for lunch, by the time you get back, you've got plenty of baby fish :)

The trial version only allows 1 tank plus 1 sale tank and max 7 fish per tank. Paid version allows up to 21 fish per tank with an extra 1 tank.

Go get it, it's so much fun, you can set the timer to run as normal or double the speed. you can buy various items for your fish. Just promise not to cheat (lots of cheats available on the net), cause cheating will ruin your experience :)

Unfortunately, the fun only lasts till you find the 7 fish. Once that's done, the whole game will just continue forever.

Blood still boiling over Black Saturday

2009-02-24T12:14:00.001+11:00

There had been enough sadness lately, with all those stories of bushfires. Flood over QLD has been seen as "less" devastating in comparison. Lots of anger up in the air on the state readiness (or rather unpreparedness and lack of coordination) to handle such disaster, despite everyone knew it will come eventually (who's the idiot that couldn't predict that will happen when you've got a full week of 40 degrees happening). On the same time, this has been forgiven with all the open-hearted aussies who had been digging deep to help them, including your kind donations! So, thanks again, we can't stress this enough.

Having said this, the drama isn't over yet, rebuilding processes just starting up. We will eventually see that those brave firefighters and volunteers to get rewards they so deserve, and those who were incompetent (on part of the government and their agencies) to pay the hefty price.

We still vividly remembered how the rep spoke on national TV on Friday, the day before black Saturday fire, to say that they'd be "acting on it tomorrow morning", and that was barely Friday afternoon. He clearly played down on the whole thing, showing how incompetent he was (and everyone who supported him). He dared to say so when he announced there were 14 people died, and he was expecting only about 40 people! Maybe he thought the number were still small enough, so another night won't do much harm (note to him: 40 degrees for days, it aint getting cooler at night!)

What was the suggestion when the fire started? "stay inside your house". Oh, well, no wonder we had so many people died. Where is the evacuation plan? Are we the only idiots living on the planet, when fire is ravaging so closely to your house, you'd think staying in house will save your life or whether your life is worth more than all the material you're trying to protect? As you can see, our blood is still boiling with this event.

That wasn't the only incompetent thing they've done. Bureau of meteriology had been saying how the wind will change etc, and yet, they did backburning sporadically, resulted in, yes, you've heard it, bigger fire! Now, we aint pointing fingers to the firefighters that started the backburning, that wasn't their fault. The lack of coordination and planning is sooooooo sad. It's as if the many firefighting organizations are not even communicating to each other.

It's so sad to see our fellow aussies die needlessly, just because we took for granted those who supposed to protect and give "good advice" to us.

Sure, the easiest solution would be to point fingers to those who start the fire to begin with. Heck, for all we care, just give them capital punishment for causing so many deaths. That solves the problem. Their lives shouldn't be more valuable than those whom they destroy, why would they get the luxury of being jailed? What's the point apart from wasting all our tax payer money.

Having said this, those who were incompetent also need punishment. No, we're not talking about "review of processes" or restructure here and there, that's lame! They shouldn't even dare to say that's the "only" lesson learnt from this! It's about time this government (and all state governments) to be accountable for all of their incompetence. We paid them high salary not simply to sit there doing nothing, if that's what they think of the job, then they better darn be sacked.

Here is the things we encourage others to do as well:

donate (time, money, effort, whatever)
make sure this won't happen again (point the fingers, raise your voice, get them accountable)
capital punishment -- one has to be responsible for one's action, no leniency, or otherwise others will take for granted of the leniency (law should be there to protect the victims, not the offender!). okay, this maybe still too many controversy, but something ought to be done with our law. year after year we still see people starting fire, that just means our law isn't working

Hhhh......now we felt a bit better, we've been keeping this deep inside. We know this post won't help much to those who were hurt, but hopefully it serves as acknowledgement that we are not leaving you behind. Thanks for reading, feel free to correct us.

Last remaining stock

2009-02-10T12:38:00.007+11:00

We are raising the money for Victoria bushfire and QLD flooding. For those interested in our stock, please consider to donate the money to help our fellows aussies and we'll send you off the fish of your choice (below).

Procedures:

choose any fish you like here (confirm with us that they are still available!)
donate the money to appropriate charities (redcross.org.au is recommended) or call 1800 240 667 (Victoria bushfire) and 1800 173 349 (QLD flood)
we'll send you fish once you've let us know

If you dont know/want to donate direct, you can send the money through us. You need to include the shipping charges ($25) to your donation (and donate it on our behalf).

Fish available (all giant-geno):

3 lots of juvies (unsexed; see sample pics on this post); each lot is 10 fish for $40; 2 months old
2 lots of large HMPK juvies (see pic on bottom of previous post); each lot is 5 pairs for $60; 2 months old
1 lot of large HM juvie (see sample pics on previous post); 5 pairs for $75; this lot is on hold but register your interest and we will inform asap if the holder decides not to take them; 2 months old
1 lot of adult HMPK of 5 pairs (sample pics on http://mybettas.110mb.com) for $100; 4 months old
5 breeder-quality HM giant females; each $100; 4 months old; large size, suggested to only breed these with large males; sample pics

Please note: in the unlikely event of DOA, we may not be able to provide replacements if we don't have any left in stock. However, rest assured that DOA rarely happens (fingers crossed).

Contact us direct on our email (find the email on right hand panel). Thanks for all the support.

>>> Added: just for fun, here is a sample of lavendar HMPK juvie again :)

>>> Added, more pictures of HMPK juvies, taken 18th Feb.

Chocolate/Coffee bean boy

marble

A couple people had been looking for a sample of MG, here you go. not good lighting, but still...

pineapple boy is the easiest one to take pictures :)

>>> Added 21 Feb:

The following left in stock now after caging all fish in the smaller tank:

1 lot of hmpk juvie, 5 pairs, $60 (2 green MG, 1 blue MG, etc)
1 lot of hm juvie, 5 pairs, $75 (1 opaque marble, green marble, etc)
large HM juvie for breeder (both male and female for breeder), each pair $100
large HM giant female, 4+ months, $100 each

The above would be all stock currently held, finally we managed to clean up the tanks. Thanks for all who have supported the effort, much appreciated.

Here's sample of green marble boy, he just got isolated for couple of days and had grown considerably :) He is part of the hm juvie lot above.

Here he's again, funny boy, he likes to cruise the whole tank when flaring

Sample of 2 breeder HM juvie males are avail on these movies (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6DBBAs6UjA and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4BAHYY-pvY). Both have grown much larger since the movie was taken. These breeders are part of a 6-pair breeders we kept for ourselves, but we've decided to only keep 1 pair for ourselves. Your chance to get very nice breeders. Finnage are very nice for both males and females. Note that they are about 2.5 months only, so they will be growing to a much large size. Breeder females are matching the size and branchings of their males ;)

Updated picture of the pineapple/chocolate/black bf male, nice size and very active boy :)

>>> Added: here's a movie of pineapple boy, taken a week/two ago but only had time to post it now (compressed to 1 MB)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90C8cQbEMak

Quite nice spread and pretty agressive (the opponent was dark, hence difficult for him to see)

Clearing out stock

2009-01-30T02:14:00.022+11:00

Been awhile not updating things. Heatwave is still hitting hard for most part of the country, poor Melbourne and Adelaide ppl. Temperature here isn't that great either since last week, but at least now we are settled to 27-29C to early 30s. West is still awful, upto 10 degrees higher.

Here some shots of our HM juvies from our giant spawn (update of the 40 days trouble forecast), taken last week. They are separated into individual tanks now, and have grown much bigger and prettier. If we have time, we'll take their updated pictures during the weekend. They are 2 months old today (yesterday?), we should have taken their pics for celebration :)

They are very active and are showing large finnage.

We've still got some left from last sale, and we've got to clear out the stock quick.

For those who are still interested on them, here are the deal, do contact us quick cause they are priced to sell and they have to be out of the door in a week time.

5 pairs of HMPK $100. Check http://mybettas.110mb.com under stock for sample. Ready to breed, all HMPK or OHMPK.
5 pairs of "bigger" HM juvies $75, sample pics above, pics to be updated later
10 random of "younger" HM juvies $60 (approx 5 males & 5 females)

With every purchase there always be a surprise bonus :)

Shipping to east coast $25. Shipping to Sydney will be same-day delivery, other cities should be 1 day delivery.

Oh, free shipping when you buy more than 2 combinations! Our email is on the right-panel, in case you're looking for it.

>>> Update some pics below. Most are not spreading to the max, but you get the idea, with little exercise they'll be HM easily soon. In case you've missed it, they are all coming from giant spawn at age of 2 month atm.

Slightly decent pic of the red marble, he moves too much :)

Pic of the pineapple boy, just couldn't resist him.

This one doesn't want to pose nicely, but he's actually slightly OHM, only just :)

PS. a number of enquiries came. If you're interested on buying more than 1 lot, any subsequent cheaper lot (2nd, 3rd, etc) will be half-price. Hope that helps in expanding your betta collection...

Further note, it seems there are a very few (3-5 noticed so far) of HMPKs in the spawn. This indicates that the parentage inherited their giant genes from HMPK somewhere. While the vast majority of the juvies are long fin, we can't guarantee that you'll get all long fin (specially when females are involved).

>>> Added: YouTube video of 2 males, 2 months old. Warning, size: 15MB (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6weEX4VRRA). There is a 70MB version of it, but that's way too long and large for uploading

>>> Added: found 2 lot of "large" juvie HMPKs in the tanks, for those interested, they are $60 per lot (5 pairs). Here is a sample of lavendar boy HMPK. Colours range from pineapple, lavendar, green lace, etc.

Extreme branchings for HM giants?

2009-01-23T22:58:00.001+11:00

Just occured to us that 32 or 64 rays branching may not look too great on normal HM, but wouldn't it be awesome on giant HM? This type of branching would suit the body of a giant, when everything is so big. Just pondering....

Of course one would only find 50% giant on this type of branching, if lucky, but it's still something interesting to see.

So far we've seen 16 rays, perhaps 32 rays males on 4+ inches, expect to see a lot more :) Wonder how the fry will turn out, just like the dad/mom?

Giant female breeders

2009-01-21T16:47:00.000+11:00

Definitely not the best pics, but it's so difficult to get good lightings for these guys and they keep moving/dancing too fast. But we thought it would be better to take their pics now before they're off to XL, otherwise they'll be gone forever :)

2 females here, at the back, flaring against HMPK boy. All fish are 3.5 to 4 months old. The females are mostly 16 rays branching, with some branchings perhaps at 8 rays. Both are very close to HM spread.

The comparisons with male may not be appropriate, would be better to compare them with normal HMPK female, but you get the point. Comparing them with male shows how they are larger than the male. Comparing them to standard HMPK female would have been showing how they are easily double it :)

We've been keeping these females as reserved for sometime as part of another 10 or so females, XL finally wanting them :) Certainly going to miss them....

Remind to self: do not be tempted to spawn them!

Cool toys for blogging

2009-01-20T13:06:00.001+11:00

Non-betta related, but just thought to mention to you guys. If you have any comments on this blog whatsoever, feel free to leave feedback. We've just installed some new widgets for the posts:

the usual comments/opinions feedback, if you want to say in length or even argue with the post
quick and easy "Readers say" where you can just tick the relevant option (let us know if you think there ought to be more options)
quick and easy "rating" system, if you find any post to be of any value
the email icon is also useful if you'd like to forward the post to someone

Anywho...feel free to leave as much or as little feedback on the posts.

Finally, some skin layout arrangements of the blog, hope you find it easier to read them. Search button on the right panel is good if you can't quite nail down which of those posts discuss certain keywords that you were looking for.

Some ideas for dotted bettas

2009-01-19T22:25:00.001+11:00

Interesting how people call their bettas, or their strains, and come up with all sorts of names. We've called some of our bettas "dalmatian" cause they really look like dalmatian dots to us, at least their appearence does resemble one :)

A similar dotted pattern for instance is called "orange dot" or "dotted orange" when it appears on orange-based bettas. This doesn't get fancy name to it, since no one can figure out what it resembles. A variant to "orange dot" seems to be "orange polka" or "polka dot". Again, this name is not catchy enough and people have difficulties of relating to it (who's in the textile industry these days?). Calling the bettas with fruity name such as "mandarin" isn't really attractive either. Similarly, a yellow-dotted on melano doesn't really get fancy name either.

Another name, though not related to the dots, used frequently and becomes strongly associated with strong yellow colouration is "yellow banana". Perhaps, banana in some countries are really strong yellow. It refers to "intense yellow" but it seems "yellow banana" sounded better?

Now, what about orange-dotted on chocolate bettas? Recent name to it, which seems to fetch ridiculous price, is called "armageddon". Not sure what the history of that name, it doesn't really look like the end of the world, but it sure is catchy.

As with most dotted fish, they are inherited! So, it's kinda funny when the seller tries to reassure that the offspring will be armageddonized. In fact, it is so strongly inherited that it is difficult to get rid of the gene, just like marble ;)

Talking about armageddon, it seems the line comes from black orange being crossed to dotted orange. We're not quite so sure what was the fuss about. Surely it's fairly easy to produce these days, but why would the price be ridiculous?

Anywho, what kind of dotted fish would you like? How about some of the ideas here:

dotted copper red - copper red with with orange dots. you could try to cross copper gold with dotted orange or dotted black orange, it will produce copper red and hope that some of the fry carries orange dot. you may ended up with dalmatian or red marble, but that's pretty as well :)
dotted MG - MG crosses with black orange dotted, you get multi but some will be MG and black orange too, just a matter of placement where the dots ended up. maybe this is the way they've got armageddon initially!
dotted red - surely they can try to cross dotted orange or dotted black orange to super red (or extended red). c'mon, we like to see the flaming red! Some multi colour are expected as well, but there may be a few nice dots in the mix
red gold dotted! - now that's something to look forward to. the golden body with red finnage, and throws a bit of red or orange dot on that beautiful finnage. you may need to get either orange black dot or orange dot and cross it with a platinum gold. The outcome should be red gold and we'll see whether the dots will show up ;) Some fry will be cambodian based while others would be black base (if you cross to black orange).

A bit of warning though, bettas carrying dots usually yield to some marbles being thrown in the spawn. So it really depends on the parentage of your fish. Nevertheless, if you're bored, and want to experiment on the dots, why not give the above a try? Worst case you'll get beautiful multi colour offspring and even some weird colours from the mix. If you manage to get any of the above colouration, do show it off to everyone!