40 days old trouble forecast

Usually we don't have to worry about fry till they're really about 2 months old. These guys are growing so fast that we have been splitting them up into 3 tanks, got half of them killed due to over-lengthy worms, and yet we've got too many of them to take care of. Today we notice that many of them have started to flare, so that's another headache to figure out where to put them....

Now, here's your chance. We need to clear up them all and will only keep about 20 or so of them, the rest can go. This is your chance to get potentially good genes (well, the parents are awesome, but we're yet to see what the fry will turn out).

They are for sale, for lots of 10 random. Their colours range from multi, lavendar, to a few mustard gas. Unsexed (though there are some apparent males already). All long fin (or apparent long fin, since parents were long fins, check parent pictures below).

They are 40 days old today, with length about 1 inches.

Cost: $40 per lot of 10.
If you purchase at least 2 of our other fish (only a few copper gold HM, green red HMPKs, dalmatian HMPKs left; check http://mybettas.110mb.com), you can buy each lot of 10 for the special price of $20 (half priced).

Now here's some pictures of them.





Their last week picture at age 33 days:


One of the fry at age 40 days old, marble. Not sure whether male or female (your guess?)


Their parents, the male was an OHM.


Mom was a nice HM.



As you can see, their parentage has very nice genes. They should be giant geno, both parents are giants (and their growth rate and size are indication of giants anyway).

If you're interested, contact us at our email. They need to be sold asap while their finnage still "intact" :). Given nice feedings, in 2 weeks time you'd be looking at very nice lot of bettas!. You can still keep them in community tank, provided they have large space (not crowded like what we've got here).

>> Update on some pictures.

The smaller tank view.


One of the boy, with 1 slice torn on anal. Must have been flaring with another one sometime ago.


One of the MG flavour.


Green boy.


Flaring a bit.


Another boy.

Fry roster, who feeds what and when

Ever since we've been breeding bettas, and other fish -- but we failed at them :), we've developed a certain ritual or rather habit. It's gone the days when we breed 3 pairs per week and even up to 10-15 spawnings per month. We are getting older, busier, or simply lazier. These days, we only breed about 3 pairs per month and the breeding period usually only last for 2 or 3 months.

Pretty much not interested anymore in crossing all different combinations in the hope to diversified the lines and doing "divide and conquer" approach. We'll just pick the best 3 pairs, cross them, and wait for another 2 months to see the outcome. Some of the initial fish still remain with us, in case we're developing further F2/3/4 on the line.

Perhaps this is the natural progression of the hobby. In the old days, it's so difficult to produce a successful spawn. The aim was to get as much milk, ooppssss...fry, as possible out of the parents. These days, we're more focused on which male to be crossed to which female, ignoring how many fry they'll produce (if we're lucky to get them spawn to begin with -- giants are just so difficult in spawning them). In fact, the number of fry produced, as long they're about 100, that sounded good already. Getting 300, 400, or even more fry is just unwanted outcome :) Who's going to take care of them? It requires a fulltime 2 person to really handle so many fry. 3 people rotating on taking care of them is still manageable, but it sure works out funny sometimes.

AD loves to feed the females a lot more than the males. He likes the females bigger and stronger. He is the morning guy, who'd wake up at 4am to give a nice round to all fish (females more) before he's off to work. VZ only likes fry under age of 2.5 months in the community tanks. She feeds them with mozzie larvae and sometimes chopped worms. She'd sit in front of the tanks for at least half an hour on every feeding, just watching the fry trying to catch the larvae :). She has more flexible hours but usually starts off at 9am, again before her work. I need to pick up the slack doing the roster in the afternoon on making sure every fish got fed, otherwise we had the old incident of "why is it so smelly here?". That's when we realized a fish in a container somewhere had been dead for a couple of days and no one noticed it (well, partly because it is hidden in the stacks of containers, but also because everyone else assumes someone else had feed them!)

Increasingly frequent, we found a container full of live worms but without the fish ! Everyone then got busy trying to figure out where on earth the fish went to....Usually we'll find him either on nearby container, or dry on the floor somewhere.

Night is the only blissful time when all of us able to sit down together, sitting next to 2 big tanks enjoying the small fry flaring. That's also the best time to feed the fry again, with mozzie larvae this time. At least VZ can sit down and started to pick her favourite colours. Oh yes, did we mention that we also play the game "guess whether it's a male or female" on the small fry. It gets very challenging specially when the fry is barely 1.5 or 2 months old. It's only a matter of weeks till we knew who win the game :)

Did we mention that all of this roster has to be done while we're taking care of the kids too? Now, that's tiring and yet so relaxing (such oxymoron is surprisingly "understandable" amongst breeders and parents).

Yo-yo on temperature

Last couple of days had been nightmare, for us and for our fishes. The heat wave made us can't sleep at night, or day for that matters. The garage/shed which acts as the fish room must had heated up close to 40 degrees or more. Some casualties happened, a couple of males (and females) stopped breathing altogether, must have been because there wasn't much oxygen in the air....Putting 3 large fans didn't really help, the air was hot ! The shed is facing west, so sun exposure is worsen till late night.

This year had been worst than last couple of years. Two or three years ago, there were a day or two of summer, but back then things weren't so bad. We moved the fish to the house, turn on the aircon and all was well...This year, aircon is broken, fan was no help, the freezer did its best on producing small ice cubes !

Yes, we put the ice cubes in the tank, that helps a bit on the community tank. Breaking the ice cubes, without proper tools, for male containers is much trickier. That's when fork comes handy, but still some males were silly enough to "stick" to the ice. Perhaps they liked the taste of the ice better than the water in their containers...70 or so containers were easily moved into the house, at least it was a couple of degrees lower than the shed.

Interestingly enough though, some males made the biggest bubblenest on hot summer. What's going through their tiny heads is anyone's guess. While majority of the males didn't even bother to flare, let alone swimming around, some managed to kill the time by building their nest :)

Yesterday things getting better when the temperature dropped to manageable level. But today, it gets cooler again. While we can cope okay for such change of temperature, wonder how the fish manage this sudden change...We've noticed clamp fins and whitespot/ick on smaller fish, that's not a good sign....So today, we ended bring up the heater to the fish room. Just wanted to gradually lower the temperature till they're stable enough.

When one think about this, one would laugh on how silly sometimes we're doing *anything* just for the sake of the fish. Some of the silliest things heard about. Now, that's what's called "hobby" folks.

Careful in dealings with sellers

As with any adults, white lie typically considered okay. But where would one stop? Recent dealings with some sellers had lead us to believe that they are not totally honest on things.

Here's a quote (cut off XXX due to privacy reason):
"you can have them if you can send money to my paypal now at XXX but must be right now since i need money to pay for my son tuition tomorrow or they will not let him take a final test".

It sounded like one of the email scam we've been hearing on the news these couple of year...

Normally, we would symphatize with such situations, after all, many people including us had experienced how stressing it would be when times are tough and totally cornered with very limited options. Yes, we've helped previously as the reasons made sense, and we gave the benefit of the doubts. However, this time, the reasons are WAY different from the previous ones, and they were only a couple of days apart ! Surely one wouldn't be hit by a series of bad luck, but who knows...they could be on the downturn if not sliding way faster than a landslide.

If they told the truth, we may be more willing to listen...Supposed they tell the truth, would you wait till last minute (really...last minute!) to try find that tuition fee? If you do, then boy, you really need to smack your head for being ontime. We kinda wondered how much would that tuition fee be, particularly they were asking couple of hundreds usd. Child education these days is just getting out of reach, even in the third-world country, or could it be *because* it is in the third-world country!

Suffice to say, be very careful on every dealing you're having with sellers. They may have the goods, but interestingly they may come up with all sorts of stories to make you feel sorry for them. Talk to other people, us, your transhippers, etc to find out if they knew something is odd about a particular seller before you drag your sorry ignorant a** (sarcasm doesn't always work here, but you get the point).

How sad that one's action could cause distrust to the community.

Mozzie larvae and swim bladder

In one of the tanks we've exclusively fed mozzie larvae to the fry started when they're 2 weeks old. We noticed that half of the fry had difficulty with their swim bladder. It seems some of them have difficulty swimming to the bottom of the tank, as if their bladder is full of air....

It got us thinking, could it be that the mozzie larvae is full of skeletal bones rather than nutrient...Or perhaps they're just lazy cause mozzie larvae like to float on water surface, hence a lot easier for the fry to snap them without much of exercise.

Luckily, starving them for a day solves the problem, they started to scour the tank on every corner.

This is different compare to feeding adult bettas with "large" mozzie larvae though. Unlike small larvae, it seems large larvae is a lot more active and alert, hence has tendency to run off whenever something is getting closer to them. Very good exercise for any bettas :)

Warm weather and bubblenest

These guys build bubblenest fairly quick, in a night. Yesterday we changed their water, and they've been at it flaring since then :)



Though young age, they're ready to spawn ;)

Seems the heat wave helps them a lot, or it could be just our feeling...

Small bettas

Remember when we discussed the david and goliath of bettas? Comparing "micro" HM vs giants?

Well, we've got our own share of small bettas. All of their siblings are normal bettas and giant geno, but a couple of them managed to be very small. We believed they are "stunt" cause we only got a small number of them but this is the first time we've seen these guys on any of our spawns. Perhaps it's because stunt bettas had tendency of not surviving?

There are many reasons why some bettas stunt, in our case perhaps because there were so many of their siblings and competing for food doesn't seem to be a skill that these guys are good at.

This boy, for instance, is nearly 3 months old, but has a size of merely 3cm (1.5 inches). Amazing how small this boy is, cause he actually looks quite "normal". He doesn't seem to have rosetail gene, with very nice tail length.


This boy is definitely rosetail. He has some nippings on the caudal and anal fins, but surely that will grow back....He may grow bigger, just slightly, but still pretty small. Measuring at the moment at 3.3cm in total length, he looks better than when we picked him up from growout tank couple of days ago. Look to be OHM if he spreads that caudal.


What kind of dwarf males without their companion females? Here they are the females. Measuring at about 2.5cm and definitely carrying rosetail, the females have spread 170+ degree caudal.


Anyone interested on these guys, let us know. They are $10 each ono (donate the money!) and we'll hand you the fish. By no means we're encouraging dwarf or micro HM bettas, but who are we to decide which direction evolution will take these guys to? As long they are healthy, you're on the right track...

Breadthtaking betta

Once in a while, we see some interesting bettas. Have a look at this boy. He may very well be one-off in the spawn, but he sure looks very nice! For those who are interested, the boy is still available for another couple of days (contact us and we'll provide the link).

(permission given by breeder for image reproduction)


This boy reminds us of the spanish flamenco dance, the flamingo :)

Now, if only all HM bettas have this nice volume and trait....Something for breeders out there as challenge to produce and improve the quality of bettas!

Another nice one is this platinum BF boy. Nice balance BF coming from a platinum line, that's not seen everyday... :)

Sample of OHM female

Well, the picture isn't really showing OHM, but you can see that she doesn't spread to the max as yet ;)



She's carrying rosetail by the look of it. They were a couple of rosetails OHM in the spawn (5?) but this female is the only one standing up of the rest. For start, she has longer-than-usual finnage. FYI, most rosetail females have shorter finnage, despite they may be full HM lineage. This female has full HM long fin finnage, so that's a good news, sort of....

Furthermore, this female is very nice since she can close/collapse that caudal (well, all of the rosetails on this lot can collapse their tail). We shall see what will be her match, but it seems she wont be mating another rosetails ;)

Colour-wise, this female isn't so attractive. She is either a blue orchid or just merely blue lace. Eitherway, it isn't so interesting aspect of her. Scale misalignment doesn't seem to be too extreme on her, which may explain why she looks more "normal" for a rosetail. Did we mention that she's either a 16 rays or 32 rays branching? The branching is so thinly spaced that we lost count on it, not even after we zoomed on the picture (wished we took fine quality pics).

Her sibling brother, a rosetail long fin OHM, had just died, injury due to fighting. Increasingly we've got more fish fighting these days, they just love to do some jumpings. Can't be avoided really, there are so many containers stacked and not enough lids around.

The plan is to have this female crossed back to her half sibling. Particularly to the "lame" SD giant boy that we had :) Hope they will improve the line. This matching should produce some giants but we'll see.....

Copper red update

This guy has developed a fair bit, though still not as grande or large as his dad. About 3 months at the moment. He has nice branchings, though certainly weird caudal. Somehow the caudal branches like he's having feathertail or CT gene. None of the parents is known to have CT gene, but the dad had feathertail, so that may explain it (this lot seems to be stronger feathertail gene though).





There are only 10 fry from the whole spawn, due to the extreme size of both parents. Most eggs just gone fungusy. This makes this spawn one of the most expensive successful spawn that we had. It was so rewarding to finally had the parents "make out" and the joy that we've got when we saw *some* fry! Out of the spawn, some die off (about 6 dead?). There are only 4 males in the lot but currently the count down is going to 3 on last count. The other 2 weren't developing as nicely, more like "reject", which is very disappointing.



2 females (1 having health issue) are similar to this boy, awesome colouring and branchings. 1 of the females is stunted. She grows and behaves quite normal, but the fins had been collapsing or at least isn't growing as beautifully as it should be...The others are quite great with very promising size, some are 2-4 branchings if not more.

Interesting to see that they had initially very fast growth rate but seemed to get slowed down on the age of 3 months onwards. With this kind of rate, pessimistically we may only dream for them to get the size of their parents in the age of 1-2 years old, if they ever be continue growing!

We've got long plan for this spawn. Thinking of keeping them all till they're large and see if we can strike better luck on them. Was considering to offload these guys to some breeders too (they were fully booked; sorry), so we'll see how it goes...

Update pictures

Spent couple of hours yesterday (might as well, before the shift started) and here are some pics of the fish, updated. Only managed to drag out about 10-15 of the containers before totally giving up on taking pictures, just too many of them

This is one of the female that we forgot to include previously, she's a giant female. rays seemed to be having CT trait though most of the discovered lot had this (and none of their parents had this, so it could be just environment or something else). This female is 4 branching, also pay attention to her scales. Carry rosetail? but the tail is not ruggerised at all....or could it be because they were starved for so long that the body "shrink" and the scales fused together with that kind of pattern? Eitherway, it will be interesting to see the outcome of her fry.



Multi boy. This one is fiesty. If no one wants him, we may want to keep him and see if he grows bigger. He is giant geno, but the size looks like 50% giant, maybe because he's just too young and still growing.



Sample of a reject. This copper gold has nice spread caudal though it is bending on the top. Our fault really, his tank was small and shallow, hindering his tail spread whenever he flares...if no one wants him, happy for us to keep him, just for the sake of seeing how large his tail can grow.


Again, sample of reject boy. He's an SD, fins growing already (didn't notice that he was torn to pieces previously, did you?)


Again, a reject SD. copper black red. very active and nice, just not spreading as we want him to be (and again, he was torn to pieces previously, still can notice his healed caudal)


Nice SD. reject. caudal bent on top. again perhaps due to container. we only had 2 bent caudal on the whole spawn, so that's good indication that it may very well be environment.


Previously never pictured boy. just scooped from growout tank. anal is a bit trimmed but healing well, caudal is fairly large for hmpk, but also spread nicely. JG may like this boy?


Agressive dalmatian boy. 2 of his pictures, just for fun. currently reserved to JG.



Another dalmatian for JG.




And another...(doh!)


Another multi giant, agressive and ready to breed ;)


Green red boy, he makes lots of bubbles :)


Green bf, reject, anyone out there like him? He has bent dorsal, but otherwise nice SD.



Female giant hm geno. reserved. caudal branching is disappointing, but anal is very nice. so, hopefully keeping her for awhile we'll see how she grows...



The rest of the clan?? Just not having any luxurious time to take their pictures and our photography skills still not improving :(

One-sided albino?

Couple of weeks ago, we noticed that one of our female has a single-sided albinism. She has red-eye on her left side. Initially we thought that this wasn't something special, perhaps because she's a marble and we all know how marbles can work wonder on any colouration. The beauty of her is that she's behaving totally normal. She picked on others, grab foods as fast as others, etc. It turns out quite beautiful to see how one of her eye glow red with white dot in the middle while the other one is a perfect black colour.

Today when we go to check on her, sadly she's been lying on the floor, dried. She must have jumped out of her tank (a decent 4 inches height from water surface)....We put a piece of paper to close the container but had since found the paper lying on the floor too, perhaps she exercised rock climbing or one of those extreme sports :(

Anywho, we're wondering if the rest of the spawn (dalmatian marbles) carry this trait, or where it came from....Perhaps if we further cross them, they'll give further evidence of this albinism.

Fun with extreme branchings

It has been known widely that extreme branchings, as contributed by rosetail and feathertail, will enhance greatly your bettas tail spread. However, as with any other potent recipe, one need to be very careful on applying them. We have been avoiding pairing 2 extreme branching bettas for the very reason. Sure, the offspring will be quite guaranteed to have great form, but the tendency of getting rosetails on the spawn are also greater.

It has been working out fairly well, however, crossing an extreme branching betta against a smoothly rounded (lack branching) betta. The outcome, though not as satisfying as 2 extreme branching pairing in terms of its guarantee of getting all heavy branching fry, would deliver a very reasonable set of offsprings, all of which would be "acceptable" on branching. Sure, you may get SDs as well, but at least they're not too much prone to finrot as per rosetails....

The problem is in identifying whether a particular fish carries extreme branching or not. As with any other betta features, extreme branching is represented by a set of genes (or so we believe; isn't everything controlled by genes anyway?). So, what physically seen is not necessarily an indicator of extreme branchings. Some bettas don't show much of extremities, but when spawned, many of the offspring came out rosetail, for instance.

Our suggestion in regards to extreme branching:

1. only cross a rosetail to non-rosetail
2. crossing 2 feathertails are okay, however, make sure neither of them carry rosetail
3. crossing feathertail to non-stable HM will improve the line, but also produce non-stability further (e.g. some SDs expected)

Note that there are distinctions between slight rosetail, extreme rosetail, "good" rosetail, and 220 degree OHM(PK). Slight rosetail is typically indicated by slight ruggerised of the tail, slight misalignment of the scales near peduncle. Extreme rosetail has clearly ruggerised tail (it really looks like rose petals), lots of misalignment of the scales. Good rosetails, in our opinion, are equivalent to good feathertail, where you don't see misalignment of scales, but you see the beautiful heavy branching where the last sets of branches form "new" tail extension.

As for feathertail, good feathertail needs to occur towards the last set of branches making the tail looking very similar to bird's feather. If the branches started to form feather closer to peduncle and the tail becomes ruggerized, then you've got extreme feathertail. This happens when the fish has extreme branching (e.g. 16 or 32 rays) but the growth of the branch (further away from the main branch) is slower than the main branch.

Typically, extreme rosetail will have extreme feathertail. Some extreme rosetail can't even "close" their tail. Wherever they swim to, the tail will be fully expanded and non-collapsable! Serious caution when using this kind of fish, only cross them to non-rosetail non-feathertail fish, otherwise you'll get complete rosetail meltdown in your spawn.

The difficulty with both rosetail and feathertail is in the thin line associated in getting the perfect bettas. It has been a very long while since we're seeing good 32 or 64 rays branching fish, where all of its rays need to form full circle without much (if any) of ruggerised tail.

There are a number of variations with 220 degree fish. Some of them are the result of rosetail (hence you need to pay very close attention to their scale misalignment). Others surprisingly come from simple heavy branching, such as shown in this male image. You need to ask the simple question: can the tail collapse close when the fish swim? (The male pictured can collapse his tail okay). Pictures can't answer this unless you'd like to gamble in buying the fish. While non-rosetail gene that contributes to 220 degree fish is preferrable (for show, regularity in offsprings, etc), they are NOT contributing *much* to your offspring in terms of improving their finnage! In fact, you can treat them as if you're having a regular HM fish. This may come to a big surprise to some of you. Sure, you've got 1 or 2 fry coming out OHM as well, but majority will be regular HM. On the otherhand, if you've got a rosetail 220 degree fish, you're guaranteed to get OHM on most of the spawn and some minority of HM. Furthermore, about half of your OHM would be rosetail too. You'll only get extreme rosetail in the fry if *both* parentage carry rosetail (which is something you need to avoid -- as mentioned above).

So, hopefully this rumbling about rosetail and feathertail helps you a bit on deciding whether you'd like to introduce them into your spawn.

More giants available!

Doing some cleanings in our backyard and found the broken bathtub still filled with fish! Yes, we used the bathtub to house some of our extra fry, then forgot about them (well, for couple of weeks they had nice foods to eat there, live worms, mozzies -- so we tend to just put them there and forget about them).

We have about 8 or 10 of them survived and surprise surprise...their size is pretty big! They are all "skinny" of course, but even with such skinny fish, you can see how massively bulky their body :) Most females are 2.4 or 2.5 inches in length. Males are larger slightly, but what's relieving is that the males are all wider than the females (except for 1 female, the cambo red girl, which we think can only be spawned by her sibling brother cause he's larger than her)...Also, 1 MG boy in the lot! Thought we lost the MG line, apparently we still have 1 of them LOL

They're available on our site http://mybettas.110mb.com under sale section (or we urge you to pay the amount to charity)

Anyway, they're available for those who'd like to start/continue the lines or would like their hands on giant spawnings. All of them produce hmpk (no long fin variants). Most of their siblings were all giants, so we know you're going to get pure giants from these guys (provided you can spawn them to begin with).

There is also a giant behind that MG boy (just didn't manage to get good picture of him...) Also, we've posted some still-picture-video in youtube on these guys, have fun watching if you've got the bandwidth.

3 giants flaring: http://youtube.com/watch?v=QvuIAPlgOUw&feature=channel

MG and redblack giant: http://youtube.com/watch?v=6VVIBDY4x3o&feature=channel


Here's some pics of them, the lost bettas :)

Xmas and charity

Xmas is coming. Time for us to remind everyone to share things to those who are in need. If there are any of our fish that you like to buy, we encourage you to offer a price and donate it to charity of your choice (if you don't have a preferred charity, we can recommend the doctors without borders http://msf.org.au). This offer is applicable not only during xmas, but throughout the year!

For completeness, let us repeat the procedure:

1. you choose the fish that you like, offer reasonable price for them
2. you donate the money to the charity (or we can do that on your behalf -- this is sometimes simpler if you also need to pay for shipping cost -- read more)
   
3. let us know once done
4. arrange meeting to pick the fish (if you're in sydney), otherwise arrange shipping (this costs you $25 on any number of fish you ordered)

Thanks for helping the needy :)

Give the credit where it's due

How many times had there been incidents when you were not given the credit for your ideas, hard work, or simply intangible things that are yours? Well, this happens surprisingly quite frequently to us :)

What would you do when it really happens to you?

Well, we've learnt to be forgiving. Just simply ignore it...After all, there is no such thing as "original" ideas or things personally bounded to a single person....Take "idea" for instance...for every idea that you have, there bound to be a couple of people thinking of the very same/similar idea. Hence you can't really claim the ideas as yours. However, there are times that when you know they "steal" your ideas (e.g. after listening/reading to your idea), then you should be very grateful that someone "listen" and agrees to you !

While we always give credit where it's due, we encourage you do the same too. This way, there would be lesser and lesser people who'd felt being disadvantaged. This also encourages other people to share their ideas more, and got the very feeling of getting involved in things, hence building an active community.

So, here we are...posts on this blog aim to this very goal: to share ideas and experiences, as such we can learn from each other. feel free to share your ideas in forums, mailist, chat, blogs, etc and even let us know (so we can re-share it)....if there are good ideas out there that everyone ought to know, share it, give credit to the owners, and distribute !!! please don't let "politics" or financial-gain affect it, you know it aint progressing when they got involve

Fry update 3

Just thought want to post their pictures. Growing strong and nice. We managed to kill about 100 of them or so though. On every given day since last 3 or 4 days, there had been at least 20-30 fry died and syphoned from the bottom of the tank. They died cause of choking, eating way-too-long live worms !! We're running out of mozzie larvae too, if anyone out there "harvest" mozzies, do let us know and perhaps we can arrange something :)

Unfortunately, usually the ones died are the bigger ones :( Oh well, you gain some, you loose some. With that kind of rate, we think we still have a good 400 of them there, at least. It's a catch 22. Without the worms, most of them will go starving when we're not around feeding them. With the worms, there are bound to be some "acceptable" deaths. In the old days, we used to have time to chop the worms into smaller pieces. These days, we're just way too busy and not having much of the luxuries to do that anymore. Perhaps it is so true, as the saying said, survival of the fittest :)

Anyway, 'nough saying, here's the pic.