help

[ChoclateBetta]

Micro Worms, and FFF.

[tpocicat]

Live foods are best. Black worms, flightless fruit flys, etc. Since it's not summer, I won't recommend live mosquito larva, but you might be able to buy some frozen ones at your local pet/fish store.

[ChoclateBetta]

FFF are great because in the wild Bettas would naturally eat food like that.

[inareverie85]

I condition with lots of frozen foods (mosquito larvae and blood worms) and GPs (Golden Pearls).

[LadyVictorian]

Also do not forget once the female is done laying you have to take her out of the tank with the male or you might get her killed because the male becomes very protective of the nest and will attack intruders. Some time after the fry become free swimming then you will also have to remove the male or he will cull down the bunch to only a handful of babies.

Also know that breeding can take a LOT out of fish and sometimes fish die, you need to consider that. You also need to consider where you will send the babies once they grow. Fish can have up to 300 spawn so you need 300 homes planed out at least either that or you have to cull yourself (kill the babies) to a more manageable number for you. Also once the babies are old enough you need to jar them by themselves or they will start attacking each other so you need to have between 200-300 jars for that or again cull cull cull down to a better number.

[Oldfishlady]

True that you can have hundreds of offspring, however, as bad as this may sound-you should cull these numbers to a more manageable number.
IMO- Quality is more important than quantity.
Plus, you usually will have natural die off as well as larger fry that feed on the smaller and weak fry...natural selection/culling.

Usually with new hobbyist as well as experienced-you end up with 50 fry more or less and this is a good number, however, this number should be culled down by half IMO.

As with anything alive-you can have luck involved and you can end up with more fry than you know what to do with too.

Death and culling is all part of it when you make the decision to breed. Hard choices have to be made for the best interest of all the fish. Culling the weak, deformed and what doesn't meet your goal is part of responsible breeding IMO. And if you can't do this-IMO, you may not want to spawn more than once. This all falls in the line of supply and demand/over saturation too.

[LadyVictorian]

I recently learned about leaving the males in with the free swimming fry and letting him do all the culling but normally he culls down into the 10's or less depending on what you keep them in. Does this mean he normally only leaves the largest and healthiest or could you end up with the 10 sickly ones that all die off? In other words does he do random culling or is he pretty much culling for the healthiest fry he's got and giving those few the best chance?

[Oldfishlady]

In my personal experience with keeping a male long term with his fry (using a more natural spawning/keeping method)-I didn't see the male culling all that many fry-I would have fry of all different sizes and even deformed fry that he left alone. On average I would get roughly 50-75 fry that I would have to cull down myself. I would even see him feed the fry or at least that is what it looked like to me. He would take in food-give a little shimmy-the fry would swarm and he would spit the food out and swim away

Even with the experiment I conducted with leaving the male and female long term with the fry. The female or male didn't eat any fry- and I watched the female suck in a fry on more than one occasion when eating then spit it back out, however, I did see a lot of the older and bigger fry eating the smaller/younger fry or at least swimming around with one sticking out of its mouth. But I have also seen this in fry only tanks and watched bigger fry attack and kill smaller siblings.


While its really hard to tell for sure if the male is culling since I don't count eggs and you can have hundreds of eggs to start off with-but I always ended up with fairly large numbers of free swimmers and fry in the end-that varied in size and condition when keeping the male long term with his brood.

[ChoclateBetta]

When I start Breeding Bettas I only plan to have one breeding pair so I can provide bigger tempary tanks maybe a gallon or two which I know will take a lot of space but is the average betta spawn seventy?

[LadyVictorian]

Hmmm, that is very interesting. I'm sort of interested in natural spawning and rearing now but I'm sure you would need very docile betta's to pull it off properly. OFL would it be cool if I messaged you more about natural spawning/rearing?

Also Choc, something I just thought of today was cutting the top off a gallon milk jug and sticking males in there and if any breeders ever used them. They seem cheap and give plenty of room. Maybe in your future breeding rather than get say 50 1 gallon tanks just collect 50 jugs and modify them for the fish, maybe mesh tops, and clog up the handle part with something so fish don't get stuck in there.Just a though I brainstormed today.