Help me gender two powder blue gouramis

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KevinaCow

Aquarium Advice Newbie
Joined
Oct 5, 2024
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2
Location
texas
We thought we had a male and female but noticed the one we thought was a female was making a bubble nest, the first picture on the left is the one we think is female and making a nest, the second picture on the right we think is definitely male. Can someone please let me know if they are both male or not?
 

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Unfortunately, this fish specie has been bred and interbred so much that physical characteristics have been altered too much to give a 100% identification just from physical appearances. The wild dwarf gourami ( the specie which is the original form of the powder variants) is a piece of cake to identify because they are different colors from each other. I have bred many original form dwarfs so this is what I see, The fish in the first picture, ( you say is building the nest) has a dorsal fin that is too long to be a female but not pointed enough to be a male so because it is building a nest, not a typical female behavior, I'd say that one is a male. The fish in pic #2 appears to be a lighter color which could point to being a female but the dorsal fin is very pointed which is a male's trait but that could also be that the fin is not fully extended. 🥴 So this is the behavior to look out for that can be more helpful. If fish #2 is a male, fish #1 should try to defend his nest from fish #2 so he will approach fish #2 and either attack or flare his gills at fish #2. If fish #2 is a female, fish #1 should approach fish #2 and chase her away then rush back to the nest to build it more to try and attract her to his nest.. Here's a potential fly in the ointment: Not many farms were releasing females of any of the color variants so it's more likely you have 2 males than a male and female. Here's a video on breeding Flame Dwarfs so that you can see the whole process as well as the difference between males and females color and shape wise
If you are really interested in breeding these fish, I'd look for females similar to the one in this video to be sure.
Hope this helps (y)
 
Thank you so much this was very informative 🙏🏼 we’ll look out for their behaviors to see if we can figure it out!
 
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