Accidental purple

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

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"

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

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

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 ;)