Breeding BettasThings to Consider Before You StartBetta breeding is not an overly difficult thing to do, but it takes time and dedication once you get into it. Before you start, now would be a great time to ask yourself some of these questions: Do you have space to jar and house up to hundreds of males as they grow? Do you have time to do frequent water changes? Do you have time to feed them multiple times a day? Are you prepared to grow live food of assorted kinds to feed the fry at various growth stages? Are you prepared to destroy defective babies? Can you find an outlet to sell/give away your grown spawn? Are you ready, mentally, physically and financially? If you answer "yes" confidently to all the above questions, then go ahead, pick a nice pair of bettas and try your luck. Gather What You NeedWell, obviously, you need a pair of bettas if you want to breed bettas.
When you buy a betta based on a picture, you go by their phenotype, meaning "what they look like". Often the genetic background (genotype) is not clear. So, your best bet would be to acquire a pair directly from a breeder, after asking the person if the fish's lineage is available. Many breeders who breed for hobby and for show keep track of their spawns. And often they do multiple generations, which makes tracking much easier. The most commonly recommended setup would be a 5 or 10 US gallon glass aquarium. Some people spawn bettas in anything they can get a hold of: buckets, tubs, rubbermaid etc. Pretty much anything that holds water. The thing to remember is that opaque containers make it difficult for you as the breeder to check for eggs, or to observe the pair's behaviour. Therefore, I'd stick with a glass aquarium. So you have a tank. Now, go find a lid for it. From my experience, I find that bettas breed much better in a high humidity environment. You also prevent drafts from getting into the tank with a lid, which could chill the fry and give them pneumonia, which is fatal to the fry. Now fill your tank with water to 4-6" height, about halfway up the tank. Use dechlorinated or aged water. I mix my treated tap water with RO water (half and half) to soften the water. I don't find it quite necessary in Mississauga, but it was a must when I was in Waterloo. For the longest time my bettas wouldn't breed when I was in Loo, and I couldn't figure out why until I fiddled with the water mixing. Add some Aquarisol if you like as a preventive for parasites such as Ich and Velvet, which can kill your fry. Put in a heater (50W submersible) and a sponge filter (seeded is best). Most people say not to turn on the sponge filter at the spawning stage because it could disrupt the bubblenest. But I find keeping it on (at the lowest setting you can go, 1-2 bubble/s) would keep the water slightly moving and help with the water quality. With that said, you want the sponge filter to be of the proper size, so that it is submerged in your 4-6" tank water. Set the heater to 80-82°F (27°C). Set up an isolation area with clear divider or a glass hurricane lamp chimney. This will be used to keep the female safe from the male during introduction, while they can still see each other and stimulate spawning instincts. Put something on the water surface as a bubblenest anchor. Some people use a styrofoam cup cut in half, some use plastic lids, some use dried leaves, some use floating live plants like hornwort. It's really up to you. I use dried indian almond leaves because I find that my bettas love the shade they provide, and the tannins from the leaves are also supposed to help with deterring fungal and bacterial attacks. Because you want to keep the leaf afloat for as long as possible, I only put the leaf in when I add the male to the tank. Finally, find a light that you wouldn't mind leaving on 24 hours a day for the next while. An incandescent hood light, or simply a night light would do. It's now time for you to start thinking about preparing some live food for your fry. If you wait until you have babies swimming around before you look for livefood in a panic, you'll likely starving the poor babies. You can grow bettas with dry food only, but from both personal experience and from reading about others' experiences, mortality rate of the fry is generally higher as it becomes very difficult to maintain good water quality, and some fry just don't recognize dry food as "food". For the babies, I would suggest that you have on hand a good culture of walterworms, microworms or vinegar eels. You don't have to have all three, but each has different characteristics and you can decide which one you prefer. For example, walterworms are smaller than microworms and vinegar eels and are therefore good for smaller fry. Microworms are very easy to grow. Vinegar eels float on the water surface and therefore will attract the fry away from the tank bottom, making cleanup easier. As the fry grow (day 7 onwards), you need to culture baby brine shrimp (BBS). You have to time BBS hatching right, because if you don't enrich the shrimp, they would lose their nutritional value after 48 hours and feeding those to your fry would not do anything good. The next foods would be larger worms like grindal worms, and little bugs like daphnia or grammurus for the bigger juveniles. You can download, using the links below, culture instructions for some of the livefood items I mentioned above:
How to culture microworms CONDITION YOUR BREEDING PAIR About two weeks prior to introducing your pair for spawning, you should begin feeding the pair with high quality foods. Fatty and high protein foods, such as live white worms, earthworms, high quality pellets (Attison's Betta Pro) and frozen foods are some of my suggested food choices. By feeding your pair well, you build up their body strength and stamina, immunity, and provides the nutrition the female needs to produce eggs. The pair should be kept separate and isolated during this time, and be exercised once or twice a day. For exercise, simply put the two beside each other so they can see eachother. This stimulates the bettas and prompts the male to flare and blow bubbles, while the female responds by barring up (dark females), showing her ovipositor and becoming eggbound. A 30 minute to 1 hour exercise each time would make them happy. INTRODUCING THE PAIR Put the male in the spawning tank that you've already set up, and let him explore and get comfortable. You'll find him swimming everywhere checking out everything in the tank. Hopefully, he'll find and like the bubblenest anchor that you prepared for him, and spend his time hanging out underneath it. After as short as an hour (depends if your male is comfortable at this point, or if he's still freaking out. Give him more time if you observe the latter), you can introduce the female by placing her inside the divided section, such as the glass chimney. As soon as the two fish see each other, the fun begins! Hopefully, the male will start busying himself with bubblenest building, while darting back and forth between the nest and the female, as if to make sure she stays focused on his hardwork. The female would often shows signs of submission, with her head down, and following the male for as far as the chimney would let her. Dark females will bar up to show vertical stripes, and all females will show intensified color when they're ready. Signs for "not a good fit" would be stress bars (horizontal stripes) or unresponsive or freaked out females. At this point you know you shouldn't push your luck and should just give up this spawning attempt and recondition the pair or try another pair. SPAWNING So, the male's building a nice bubblenest, and the female is ready (in your opinion). Well, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and let the female loose. You know you'll have a good spawn if you see the female races to join the male under the nest. Sometimes (well, more than sometimes, it actually happens quite a bit) that doesn't happen and the female goes on to minding her own business, getting beat up, or beating up the male. Well...let's not go there, and just focus on the positive... Soon, you'll see the two fish swimming in circles round each other with a gentle nudge (Figure 13). The male will try to flip the female upside down (he'd no doubt sweep her off her feet, if she had them), wrap around her in an embrace and squeeze. First few times nothing would happen as they're just getting warmed up. But eventually at the end of each embrace, eggs will be released from the female and you can see them sliding off the fin of the male. They both will get stunned and look stupid for a moment. Usually the male recovers first, and if he's a good dad (or if he's done it before) he'll go down to pick up the fallen eggs, and spit them into the nest. Sometimes, the female has to do that instead, as the male only got one thing in his mind and forgot all else (poor girl). This is why we give them shallow water, this way there's less travel between the tank bottom and the nest. Spawning will take from 15 minutes to hours, depending on how pumped they are (this is why you condition them). You can tell it's the end of the spawn if you spot these three things: 1) the female's hiding, 2) the male has his full attention on the nest, and will chase away the female if she gets near, and 3) the female looks thinner and worn out. Now it's the time to remove the female. This is generally an easy thing to do, as the female would be FAR away from the bubblenest, and with a quick scoop with a net, she'll be out of there in no time. For the next couple of days, the male will take care of the eggs until they hatch and the wrigglers turn free swimming. During this time, you want to leave you tank light/night light on 24 hours to keep him awake at all times. I didn't believe it at first, but it does help reduce the chance of dad turning into an egg-eater. To quote Hung, "the male falls asleep and when he wakes up, he gets stupid and confused, and thinks the eggs are breakfast before realizing they're his babies". I experimented with the same pair by spawning them twice, once with regular light (14 hours light, 10 hours dark) and once with 24 hour light, and found this true. The first time I had only 2-5 hatched, and the second time the entire batch (100+) made it. REMOVING THE PAIR Well, the female should be removed as soon as spawning is over, as I mentioned in the previous section. As for the male, you leave him in until you see the fry swimming horizontally, about 2 days from hatching, and not sticking to anything. Removing the male is a bit more challenging, as the male would frantically try to evade you, disturbing all the babies, and you also would risk scooping out the babies because they're now all over the place. Here's a way that worked for me: First, get ready by having a container of clean water. I use a white butter tub (why white you say? You'll soon find out). Lure the male with food (a live whiteworm) at the far end from where the bubblenest was, since most fry should still hang out near there. Then take the glass chimney that was used to confine the female to trap the male. Slide you hand under the chimney and slowly raise it, draining out most of the water through your fingers while trapping the male. And take him out of the tank and dump him into the container. Leave him there fore maybe 5-10 minutes and check on him. Sometimes you'll see fry in the container. But wait, I swear I didn't scoop any fry...well I didn't, the male did. He was holding them in his mouth when I trapped him, and now that he's loose, he thinks he's safe and spits them back out. Hence the white container so you can see the fry better! VERTICAL WRIGGLERS - DAY 1-2 At this point, the fry consumes their yolksacs. Therefore no feeding is necessary. Plus, dad's taking care of them, so no worries! If you look carefully, you'll see tails dangling off the nest. Once in a while the nest will "rain babies" if something is disturbed or when a bubble bursts. The fry falls to the bottom of the tank and some of them will try to wriggle back up by themselves. Most of the time, dad will go pick them up with his mouth, then spits them back into the nest with a few new bubbles. FREE SWIMMING FRY - DAY 3-4 Now that dad's gone, and your fry will need to take care of themselves. At this point they're so small they won't eat very much, so be very careful with your feeding. For livefood feeding, it can be done as easily as dumping a good clump of java moss in the tank. The little critters and infusoria on the plant surface would give your fry some food to munch on. I also put in a tiny bit of microworms/vinegar eels. I prefer vinegar eels because they float, which at this stage is where most the fry are. But I find they'll just look at it and move on, as the worms are still too large for them to gulp down in one shot. There's a dry food method too. And that's by giving them First Bite, Atison's Starter, golden pearls or other fine powdered food. A cheaper DIY way is to use the yolk of a hard boiled egg. Hard boil an egg and then squish a chunk of the yolk into a cup of water until you get a murky solution with no large clumps. Put that into a spray bottle and give the tank ONE squirt. ONE. THAT'S ALL. It's VERY easy to overfeed at this point, and dry food tends to foul the water a lot quicker. So be very careful! Before each meal, you should siphon the bottom of the tank to remove any gunk. Oh it's almost always that you'll end up sucking out some fry as well. This is why you don't dump the waste water directly. Instead you siphon into a white tub. Then with a strong light, magnifying glass, turkey baster and squinty eyes, inspect the tub of waste water thoroughly and pick out the escapees, and put them back into the tank. Yes, it's VERY time consuming and your eyes will hurt. Replace the same amount of water that you siphoned out with clean aged/treated water. FREE SWIMMING FRY - DAY 5-7 You'll see the little guys grow (or disappear if you have a dense clump of java moss) every day. By day 5, if you've been feeding the fry other worms, you can switch to entirely microworms which I find is easier to harvest than vinegar eels (that's the only reason). I'll also add just a drop of baby brine shrimp (BBS) as of day 7, and then observe and see if they're big enough to take them. Usually, the fry loves BBS once they find out about them. Watch out about BBS hatching. I mentioned earlier in the LIVE FOOD CULTURE section, that BBS only carries a nutritional factor for the first 24-36 hours. After that, they molt into the INSTAR phase, where they develop their mouths. By this time, if you don't start feeding your brine shrimp, they are nothing more than swimming skeletons of blank, and feeding that to betta fry won't be at all helpful. You can "gutload" or "enrich" you brine shrimp by feeding them. Usually, it's done by adding the enriching food 8-12 hours prior to feeding them to the fish. You first move the shrimps from their hatcher to an enrichment tank, filled with saltwater and shrimp food like marine greenwater (phytoplankton), fatty acid/vitamin enrichments, and other shrimp food like "Gut Load (TM)". During the 8-12 hours, the brine shrimp filter feeds and takes in the food, carrying the nutritions provided by those food. Then you collect those shrimp and feed them to your bettas. When the bettas eat the shrimp, they digest and absorb the nutrients from the shrimp food, not the shrimp itself. Keep the water clean by siphoning out the gunk at the bottom with an airline, just like I mentioned earlier. This is always "fun" to do, but it'll get better as the fry grow bigger and stronger. They'll be easier to see and avoid. WEEK 1-4 For the following weeks, I increase the amount of BBS and wean the fry off microworms. Feeding microworms as the fry's sole diet is known to cause troubles with the fry's development of their ventral fins, especially in females. Some say it's a bacterial growth at the tank bottom that eats up the fin, as microworms stay on the tank bottom, the same place where the bacteria is, with the fry drawn to the worms as food source and spending way too much time getting acquainted with the bacteria. I personally think it's a nutritional deficiency of microworms to prohibit the fin's development, period. So I switch my fry to BBS as soon as I can. BUT, once again, DON'T overfeed. Too much BBS is also known to cause swim bladder disorder in bettas, as they see no limits and will devour each and every BBS in sight until they literally blow out their stomachs! By the end of week 4, the fry will be having only BBS. Starting at week 1, you should add an extra inch of water to the tank every day or two. This way over the next week or so, you'll start filling up the breeding tank. By the end of week 4, your tank should be filled to the top. You should also turn up the sponge filter to help maintain water quality. WEEK 5-8 Now reaching week 5, you've past the month-old mark. Congratulations, good job so far! Now you can start introducing a variety of foods to your growing fry to satisfy their appetite and nutritional needs. You can grind up dry food and frozen food into very small bits so that the fry would eat them. The goal for these few weeks would be to get the fish to understand that their food don't have to be live and wriggling at all times. Some of the foods that I use are 200 microns golden pearls, crushed Attison pellets. I also add shaved frozen bloodworms and daphnia as the weeks progress. To shave frozen food, take a cheeze grater and run the frozen food down the finest side, or take a knife and scrape away. It's simple, but COLD...it'll get your fingers numb in no time... It's now time to check if your tank is getting crowded. If you're using a 10gal you're probably fine, but with a 5gal it might be getting tight. You should move the fry to a bigger tank, such as a 20 or 30 gal, to continue growing them out. One tip, longer tanks are better than tall tanks, so if you have a choice, get the 20-long (30"Lx12"Wx12"H) rather than the 20-tall (24"Lx12"Wx16"H). WEEK 9-12 Another month! YAH! Their little mouths are now larger, and they will be able to start eating whole pellets, frozen foods and live foods (grindals) by now. I still feed them live BBS at times as treats, but mainly they'll be eating dry food, golden pearls 300-500 microns and Attison pellets. Are you starting to notice bickering and nipping in your growout tank? I bet you are? It's time to start picking out the trouble makers and separate them into their own jars, especially males. You also have to keep up with your water change (25% weekly) to keep the water quality good. Some literature has suggested that as the fry grow, the largest ones release a hormone into the water to stunt the growth of their smaller siblings. Doing frequent water change can help alleviate the problem. You may also notice that once you jarred a fry, he's experience a growth spurt. Well, afterall, he's got his own room now and doesn't have to compete for food. He's got to be happy. I bet you felt the same way when you finally got your own bedroom instead of having to share one with your brothers and sisters. AFTER WEEK 12 (3 MONTHS) Males should all be jarred by now, and all the fish should be eating all sorts of food. They're sub-adults now, and anytime soon, they'll be ready for new homes. Congratulations, betta breeder! You made it!!! |
