the end of black line?

the original super black hm line seems to disappear, unfortunately. the last batch was contaminated and had to be terminated -- plus we were really busy last couple of months and they got neglected :-(.

there are some new crosses from this line to standard melano, but the F1 fry seems to be carrying all melano (2 month old now). perhaps F2 and F3 sibling crosses will yield better result. there is 1 super black hm female left from the line, hopefully we can use her to cross to any of these F1 in time.

dragon giants hmpk

we're in process of developing full dragon giants. early indication has shown that the dragon scales inherited nicely and what's more, the spread is awesome! some of the fry had shown very nice shiny scales with outward branch (8 or 16 rays) of full 180 degree.

rosetail genes seems to be contributing for this branching though, but it's just awesome to see how vibrant they are and how active when they snap foods...

will keep updating when not busy :)

lost account

we lost the access account to our web for a couple of months already. we're still trying to find ways to gain access to it. in the meantime, if you'd like to buy some of our fish, email us direct at mybettas AT gmail DOT com.

update on green x cambo

good development, half fry cambo and the other half green-red. tail spread is good, length is amazing abt 2 inch. cant wait to see them grow faster. running out of food lately but will feed them up soon

Green mask x cambo red giants

Long time not updating, been busy these days.

anyway, the green giant hmpk spawned with red cambo giant hmpk female twice. the combination should produce huge giants, but colour wise may not be ideal...male is 8 rays and female is 4 rays (from 8 rays spawn). should have plenty of 8 rays on next generation.

tried to spawn the male to the green female but he managed to kill her (again!). Sometimes I wonder why this male always manage to kill good females.

will see how the fry turn out, but so far they've covered 2 full tanks, should be about 300 or so of them...

giant exchange meeting

yesterday was quite exciting for us. a bunch of us finally has time to meet and bring the biggest giants from our spawn. i was presenting my green mask with length of about 9cm (3.5" or 3.6") and red giant of 3.5". This is not so bad considering their young age and their parents were about that size (with exception of the red that was about 4.2"). I would expect them to further grow but I'm not sure if I can keep up with them. The amount of food they eat and the aggressiveness in the tank sometimes is a bit worrying to me.

others come with average of 3.3" to 3.7" and we were quite happy knowing our giants get to that length.....considering they are all just 4-5 months old.

That's all for males....for females, i showed case my 3" red female but this was beaten by a 3.2" blue female from NG. Somehow, he always managed to get the biggest ones. This blue is awesome, very nice bright colouration and vibrant. He's having the same problem as I am, having to beef up his males so they can spawn with the huge females :)

anyway, i've got a donation of green mask as well yesteday. i only had 1 pair left of the giant green, the rest went to our charity-sale, and from this 1 pair i failed to get them spawn. The male managed to kill the female :( .... anyway, now that I get a not-too-distant cousin of his on the tank, i can try it again. if this still fails, i just have to spawn him with my red (somewhat having a mood for multicolours these days)

i contributed back to the group half of my red giant spawn, the ones left behind after charity-sale. there are only about 10 males left there and 4 female, all of them the biggest of the spawns. i figured, i better keep some of them for stock, in case the current red breeder decided to kill his partner :)

oh, another thing....if all goes well, i've been promised to get very nice melano giant pair ;) i will have the chance to select a very best of the pair as i like :D :D

giant size

some people still wondering how big a giant looks like.
here are some pictures, on left you can see a standard size HMPK being compared to some giant HMPK. As you can see, even the female giant is at least double to triple the size of the standard betta.

The female in the picture is about 2.7 inch in length while the males are averaging between 2.9" to 3". Large females are not in the tank as they're currently spawning, so you can't see their size, but they're reaching 3+ inches very easily.

giant trend

i quickly browse some sites selling bettas and notice that they've gone to fancy giants now. The price is ridiculous though. they're trying to sell $100 usd for a giant male that may not even get to 3 inches yet. I wonder if I should have made my money by selling all of my giants, considering they are about 3 inches now.

some fish sold are either barely HMPK or if they're nice 3 inches would cost about $150 usd....even so, many sellers won't even sell females, at least not a very large one :)

how big the giant can get

i've got a number of conflicting info about the size of giants. some said that they can get up to 7 inches for full giant, but many have said that they never seen such size. the ones that are quite rare already are the 5 inches giant, and even that i've never seen it.

my giant only get up to 4.3 to 4.4 inches. that's courtesy of heavy eating habit. the problem is, i dont even know how old they are when they reach that size. so far, a lot of my giants are about 3 inches, and they're 4.5 to 6 months old at the moment. It seems, the 6 months old ones are not growing any longer, but rather getting their size thicker and bulkier.

anyway, if anyone can tell me how big they can get their giants, that would be awesome! no, i don't mean the hearsay on sizes. i mean if you really see it or somebody can vouch for what they say on the size!

i'm going to keep a couple pairs of my giants till they are about 2 years old and i'll see if they can get any bigger. hopefully they're not giving up on me yet when they get about 1+ years :) somehow i manage to shorten their lifespan cause i have tendency to keep spawning them....hence exposure to tiredness, diseases, etc.

getting the mood on spawning

weird sometimes that fish also has mood on spawning. 1 pair of black didn't have much mood previously, despite the male always eager to spawn. It yields to a number unsuccessful spawns. this is because the female is way larger than the male, pretty understandable....

but these couple of days, i noticed that they spawned a number of times with lots of fry in the tank. it seems, once the "cycle" begins, they just keep doing it....just like a number of giant spawns

at the moment, 3 pairs are having the continuous spawnings and i just dont bother to stop them. another 1 pair is getting to know each other and may spawn tomorrow, otherwise the female just gonna burst with eggs :)

could it be that the female is getting horny when she sees how capable the male was (proven by a bunch of fry around him), or is it just the weather and mood affecting this spawning experience?

no doubt, the experienced breeders would just spawn right away. that's pretty much given, but the newbie seems to have their own ups and downs so frequently, i started to think that it's the combination of weather and experience....

black marble

Quite excited these couple of days knowing that I've got another extremely black fish in the crowd. He is a very young 1.3 months old youngster that started to chase every other fish around. Seems to be a combination of long and short fin though as the parents carry long fin. Just have to wait for another month or so to confirm it.

Also, there are some portion of the fish that are marbling. The marble is not the typically no-colour marble. It's the chocolate colour marble. Just awesome...

Lots of sibling sisters are either melano-based or black charcoal. I'll wait for another month before trying him up with his sister. Want to see if the melano female throws fertile ones. At least the black charcoal is going to be fertile definitely.

giant difficulty spawnings

Giants, just as any other bettas, sometimes get very difficult to spawn.

I've lost a number of females during spawning....they're dead....attacked by the males

But if they survive the males and happen to fall in love with them, they spawn quite fast and quick.

The challenges are the ones with "imbalance" male vs female. I've got some huge females on stock for example. Their body alone is bigger than any males that I've got. Typically, this type of female is very pricey on the market (if happens to have someone trying to sell them to you). Now that I have them, I don't even know what to do with them since none of the males can handle these females...

These females dont seem to pay much attention to smaller males. They're not afraid of the males. In fact, I dont think they respect the males at all :)

Oh well, I'll try them on some of the largish males and we'll see how it goes :)

giants and bubbles

I've been busy lately but still have the joyful of watching some of my giants making bubbles.

What is it with giants and big bubbles? I've got 3 pairs of them in the tank, they make huge and high bubbles. Typical bettas would just make large bubbles, i.e. large surface. Some of these giants, at least the ones I'm check out, have very high mountainous bubbles.

Just for the sake of curiosity, I destroyed the bubbles this morning to see if he's going to build another one. I bet he would :)

how much water would you like with it?

nice sometimes to heard people complement about the way we ship fish. i particularly ship fish with just sufficient space and water for the fish, that's it. some other members of the group would like to ship with with tons of water.

i think, as long as the fish is comfy in there and they are not lack of water/oxygen, then that's good enough. one time, due to shipping mishap (which happened very frequently with some courier btw), my fish was held for more than 3 days. the shipping was meant to be a 1 day trip for the fish, arriving on tuesday, but our dearest courier decided to keep the fish longer and they arrived on friday instead. well, the minimal water/oxygen that i had been provided for the fish was more than sufficient for the fish to last a couple of days trip, that was proven when the new owner happily (but very nervous) opened the bags and found they're alive and well.

on the plus side, of course there is no problem shipping more water with the fish, but i just couldn't see the point. it's not as if the fish will be happier with more water. to the contrary, more water will mean the water is going to be colder (so I believe) when they arrived, no matter how many heatpacks you ship it with....

are you still on sale, say in 3 months time?

from time to time, we've got that kind of question. this always make me smile...

I can understand that these people want to get some of our stock, and we're happy for them if they do get them. however, perhaps they don't realize that bettas can't wait for another couple of months. what's available now, usually, are in their prime condition and giving a 3 or 4 months wait will just make those bettas old. wouldn't it funny if we hold those bettas, and then sell them after 3 or 4 months wait, when the bettas are old and no longer active. i wonder if they still want to scoop their pocket to pay for old fish. i won't, but who knows...perhaps they would....

time to clean the nest

observing the giant red pair with huge nest this morning and saw him going berserk destroying the nest and building yet another big one. it's quite interesting to see that these bettas know when it's time to "clean the house".

the old nest is so thick and "dirty" that he has decided to destroy it and move slightly to the right side of the tank and build another one. i rarely seen this is being done. usually, i only saw the male has somewhat "moved" to a new location with new nest, and sometimes i can see some bubbles on the place of the old nest, as if it was just being abandoned. well, this male is different....he actually go the hard way of destroying the nest. He jumped up high on the nest trying to grab as much eggs as he can (remember he still tends the eggs in the nest), destroy some nests, go to new place, and build a new nest

the female is always trustworthy to whatever the male is doing. She just swim in one corner watching the male and then stare at me as if wondering if i'm going to be a threat to her fry :)

Continuous spawnings

Yesterday morning I've seen the giant red pair having a go on spawning again and again, lots of eggs on the nest. This is their 3rd or 4th spawns and meanwhile there are tons of fry there, the accumulation of previous spawns. The surface is full of fry already, and yet somehow the parents think they better have another go :D

It's quite interesting sometimes to see this happening. From time to time, I'd get a "compatible" pair that would just keep spawning until I separate them. Sometimes, you've got those "incompatible" pair that would need a long time to get their act together (due to immaturity most of the time).

This giant pair initially took a very long time to get their act. But once they understand each other, the females can't get enough of the male ;) ;) and she'd just come back to the nest for more....The male, in this case, also gives the female some space. Once they've finished spawning, the female will go to the other corner of the tank while the male busy tending the nest, stay there for couple of days, then revisit the male when it's hatching time. Yes, she helps picking up the fry from bottom of the tank and spitting them back up. The male doesn't seem to be worried about the female at all, knowing she is a good mom and won't eat the fry :D

Interestingly, I usually don't use such a big tank for any of the spawnings. This is because I notice that the pair has to be the "great" pair in order to spawn in such a space. Usually I use smaller tank and this resulted in sure spawn, but very rough experience for the female.

Anyway, perhaps in couple of days time I need to split this pair and stop the cycle. After all, it's quite difficult to handle 500-800 fry and god knows how many fry hanging on the nest, if they all survive...Hmm....removing the female is also going to be tricky, I'm bound to scoop out 20+ fry easily and kill some on the way when scooping out the female....oh well....

Look at huge nest

This is one of the giant pair that I'm spawning.
From time to time, I've got the luxury to amaze myself with their nests. This one has been like that since 2 weeks ago, growing and shrinking as the fry hatches. About 1.5 to 2 inches thick if not more....spanning about 25cm in diameter

wrapping like a pro

This morning i've got a chance to watch one of my melano HMPK male spawning with its distant distant niece given to me by LDZ (rooted from same line). Despite the female is a steel blue carry melano, I kinda like her since she's one of those OHM female with very nice spread. She's battered beyond recognition on how beautiful she was before the spawning takes place. she is 8 rays, so I'd expect quite a number of long fin coming out of this spawn, considering the male has long fin gene.

Anyway, it amazes me sometime to see how pro they are in spawning. In the instance the female meets the male under the nest, the male managed to wrap her, stay idle, then poof, lots of eggs coming out.

This is different with other pairs that I've seen where it took a good couple of times turning and wrapping before they get it "right".

super black and melano in fertility

I've been experimenting on spawning the blackest females from my melano x superblack line and so far I can only use the superblack female to carry the line. I've got a success once or twice in spawning with melano female (melano coming from above mix) but they ended up very weak genes.

Combination of spawn (there are other similar spawns performed on different pairs, i.e. 2 or 3 melano pairs involved):
F1a: melano x superblack-a
F1b: superblack x superblack

F2a: F1a x F1a
F2b: F1b x F1b
F2c: F1a x F1b
...

On each spawn, I took the blackest female x to any of melano male of either sibling or cousins in relationship. Other group members help spawning them and share the outcome together.

Numerous times I've got them successfully spawned with melano female but fry never last longer than 1 or 2 days after hatching. So, it seems, despite the female is fertile, the gene is not strong enough for the fry to live/develop. Disappointment comes when looking at an egg with head and tail formed lying on the bottom of the tank. It's either the fry doesn't fully develop or the process stops half way through.

Also, it's interesting to find out that there are 2 types of superblack females coming out of the above mix. The first type is a pure superblack with a hint of steel blue on its body (close to dorsal) and the second is without hint of steel blue. I suspect, the one with hint of steel blue is inheriting from melano and the one without hint of steel blue somewhat closer to the "pure" superblack. There are a number of females with half-superblack coloration, with red color not forming to full black coloration.

Anyway, will keep trying and see if the outcome is different on the next generation.