My Betta fry are 3 weeks old (August 1st) how large should they ideally be? Here’s some questions.
1. How big should they ideally be?
2. Should they already be breathing air?
3. Is it true that the males develop quicker?
17 hours ago
– 3 days left to answer.
Additional Details
The biggest of mine are reaching over .5 inches long already. They’re breathing from the surface and beginning to get color. At 3 weeks. Not much color just some pearly scales on their heads in places. It seems they’re ahead of the game. I’d chalk it up to the things I did differently this time. 1. Bred in a larger 20 gallon long tank. 2. Adopted a more “hands off” approach. Meaning no messing with water quality, no messing with the tank, no moving them around. Feeding them only when necessary. 3. Feeding them BBS, infusoria, introducing a strong live culture of copepods ranging in size from barely able to see them to the size of a pin head (which they readily hunt and eat often), and adding a large culture of black worms to the tank itself. They ate the leftovers and te Betta’s are now beginning to see them as food. Plan on my first water change tomorrow. Oh and I have a bunch of live hornwort in the tank where the pods hang out and breed and it helps with water quality.
My infusoria culture is mostly green water I have to say. BUT the babies lived off that for 3-4 days until they were big enough to feed on the BBS. I use decapsulated eggs to begin with. I have five double tail in this bunch too which is WELL above the 2 per 15 I estimated using the punnet square. the parents were heterogeneous for double tail on their father’s side. The way I worked it up in the Punnet square parent’s were S, Dt so the alleles in the square were 25% S, S 50% S, Dt and 25% Dt,Dt the 50% homozygous and 50% heterozygous Phenotype (what they actually look like) is 75% Single tail and 25% Double tail. BUT mine are closer to 50/50. I’m noticing some red in one of the medium sized ones and a couple of the largest ones. I’m about to make a video of them for the first time since they were hatched. They’re going to get frozen brine shrimp today. I’m weening them off of live foods for the frozen easier to get stuff. They’re also getting high quality flakes once a day now. They still get pods and they’ve eaten all the black worms now. And the blackworms eat leftovers and then the fish eat them so it works out rather well. The reason I do pods is because if I have to be out or most of the day they don’t go hungry. With pods in the tank they reproduce quickly and give the fry something to hunt and eat. I was at my mom’s for 11 days helping her clean out her house and only got the chance to come feed my fish 3 times during that (she lives and hour and a half away) and even the majority of the baby babies survived it due to the pods. My next breeding adventure will be giants. I want to get a couple of giant Betta’s to breed. Oh and pods are easy to culture. If you have live plants you’re almost guaranteed to have pods. I get hornwort out of my planted tank add it to one of my little one gallon pickle jars and add some of the infusoria culture/ green water to the jar and within a few days you have a good healthy culture of 3-4 different type of pods. I dump that in and viola they have a lasting food source. And the bigger they get the less they eat them so the pods start to grow back over time so that it’s ready for the next group of fry. This group was an experiment really in Betta genetics AND new rearing tactics. It’s been a smashing success. Do you actively breed? If so do you have pics or video of them? I’m currently caught up in Plakats especially half moon or half moon double tail plakats.
@ Obsidian: Thank you for your answer. I can’t seem to contact you but I think you can contact me. my e-mail is anime_lover_kikyo@yahoo.com The other question won’t allow me to put additional details.