Hummingguppy
Aquarium Advice Regular
Breeding betta's is something that greatly interests me. I have owned betta's before, and currently own one blue male veil tail. He isn't breeding quality, though, since I bought him from a bet shop. So, if I did end up breeding them, I would buy a pair of betta's online, from either eBay or aquabid. I understand the whole breeding process, conditioning and the breeding tank set-up. The one thing I have found increasing variants on is what to do as the dry grow. When to separate them, when you can tell if they are male or female, and what type of container to house them in when it is time to separate them. The container is what I found most disagreement on. Some kept them in canning jars, some in one gallon bowls, etc. I usually keep my betta's in filtered, 10 gallon tanks, sometimes in three and five gallons, but it just isn't feasible for me to have 60+ ten gallon tanks, for both room and price reasons. What have you done and had successes with?
)The common denominator was that once the fry were eating on their own, they needed to be transferred to a much larger tank as a typical spawn was about 200-300 fry. I used 20 gal longs and 30 gal longs to grow out my fish. Once they started to show sexes, then I would start separating the males. Now, the caviat to this is the fact that when you raise spawns up together, often, the male siblings don't usually fight until they are of breeding age ( approx 3-4 months old) and condition and if the tank is large enough, there may never be fights. This however usually does not work when you mix spawns together, even at a young age, for some reason. If you do separate the males, one of the "tricks" to getting long finnage is to put the fish in a smaller container so that the body stops growing but the fins don;t. Now before you start thinking "How cruel!", this can be done in a number of fashions. What I did in my last breeding effort, was to make a plexiglass grid that divided the bottom of a 30 gal long tank into 12 parts. With one fish in each section, I also had room for a filter to blow water through the sections so there was little stagnant water. While this worked, 12 fish per tank was not going to cut it as I was having a few hundred fish at a time that needed to be dealt with so I made a flow through rack with running water and cubicles so that I was now able to house 80-84 males within the whole system. Much better!!! HOWEVER, That was good sometimes for only one spawn and I was doing more than one pair so I needed to make another section which was when I said enough already!!!!! See, if you breed Bettas successfully, you will have to have a lot of room or else it's futile. 
