Girls with beards!?

[Hadoken Kitty]

Originally Posted by bethyMT

That first girl (the gray/red, pardon I can't name betta colors well yet)...doesn't look like a girl to me. I'm thinking boy, just based on finnage and those full ventrals.

My boys, both of 'em, have fake "ovipositors." Another clue, I think, is to look at the fullness of the beard. If it reaches all the way under thier chin and is huge, you're prolly dealing with a boy. When my girls flare, thier beards are smaller and don't reach all the way around the chin, or the lower part of the head area. In males, it's almost like the two gill plates are large enough to almost touch under there. In girls, you won't have anything like that...just plates flaring out to the sides.

Please pardon me if all of my advice turns out to be nonsense. The only cred I have is that many of my 16 babies (I had them in december, now down to my stable 6), had no ventrals, and I had to figure out how to sex them using other factors. One that I thought was female was actually my beautiful boy Norbert, and I had a lot of the same observations/questions as you have now.

Thank you, there is a group on FB full of IBC members who are all telling me that "she" is actually a "he". I took him out immedietly. I'm in the process of figuring out if my other "girl" is actually a guy as well....