thinking of setting up a betta project

hi lads and lassy s thinking of setting up a breeding project for betta s .not buy any means skillled in the keeping in betta s been talking to kev aka stetnik about them he is giving me a book on them so going to do my research brfore decideing what type to get.any one any ideas of tips for me on keeping these lovely little critters.



regards craig

well Ive not kept them but have been tempted over the years,however I feel they should have a tank to themselves or compatitable fish etc.
Anyhow only tip is to ensure little or no surface movement to allow them to build their bubble nest. Any other questions and you will have to ask the guys who have kept them, Kev wont steer you far wrong at all.
Gavin

yeah kev is the man alright.the other tanks ill be running are shrimp so womt be mixing fish with them

I did a talk on breeding bettas with line-breeding and genetics thrown in 2 months ago. It's easier for me to give a talk than to type away here.

I've worked for nearly 40 years on the genetics and line breeding of bettas to drive towards producing pretty pure strains (but they never will be as there is hybrid blood within many).

Start off with siamese fighting fish....many are not really Betta splendens by the way but a hybrid (often the colours give it away).
Wild caught bettas can be tricky if they don't get the right water.....and it has to be good quality water.

The key is to select the parents carefully.
If your project is to breed a pure line then start by not selecting colours and forms that are genetically dominant. If you start with genetically dominant parents then you have more chance of ending up with a mish-mash of off-sring.

Don't cross profoundly red with profoundly blue as that will lead to a bigger mish mash of offspring.

Avoid parents with a double tails; avoid parents with a narrow base to dorsal and caudal fin at the body.

If the book does not contain a decent section on genetics, then it is possibly of little use in a betta project: why? well, bettas have a long history of genetic studies by fish-keepers (who are also geneticists) and therefore there is no excuse for any book to not have a good genetics section. If it doesn't have a good section on genetics (and because siamese fighting fish have a lot of selective and non-selective breeding from them) then it could even be called not being responsible in encouraging breeders to think hard before breeding.

By my calculations, I work out that there are about 25,000 possible colour combinations in siamese fighters.

One advantage of betta breeding projects is that you see the results fairly quickly after spawning of what you have to select for the next stage of any line-breeding.

Yep....I'm assuming that you would wish to do selective line-breeding as I assume that that is what anyone is doing when breeding bettas.

ian

indeed yeah i wanted to pick a male and a female of the same species.well youve narrowed a lot down for me man.could you suggest where to get some pure betta s or what type to breed thanks a mill for all that info big eye opener.

I know that Fins Furs and Feathers are having a big delivery of some nice siamese fighters next week (you'll have to look down the sponsors section) and they are getting 2 other species of wild Bettas (but I would be hard pushed to recommend them unless you've had some experience with siamese fighters first....but there are recipes to follow).

Seahorse often have some nice specialist strains in....so worth a check there.
The type of named strains from places like FFF and Seahorse do not cost much more than box-standard 'bettas' in a pet shop and are well worth the extra 50 cent or a euro (they are not expensive at all).

At times I do a clear out of young babies that I will not be using any further in my work......I've decided to concentrate on the Plakat style siamese fighter at present and have some nice offspring. It becomes too much of a chore to work on too many types at once as once a line-breeding project starts it takes room and time.

I will be doing some white platinum plakats in a few weeks time..... I have a picture on another thread of a young male....but look at these.....bettafishstore.com/Halfmoon-Plakat/WHITE...MPK/flypage.tpl.html

ian

ian they are amazing holy crap stunning fish i must say super red dragon nice to yeah been seeing that bettas are a rather good price to buy thanks so much for your help mate

Yep Ian, contains most of the relevant for a beginner and a wannabe amateur, no point in giving him a copy of the Dandy now is there? :o)

I meant to add, Craig admits quite candidly that he is a newbie so really there is no point bamboozling him with Phenomes, Genomes, alleles, gametes et al so soon, it'll put the poor guy off his Chips.

Let him manage to keep his first charges beyond his first months of keeping the usual suspects and who knows? he could become a genius like the rest of us, ubiquitous lol .




Kev

yep when it comes to bettas im prob the biggst newbie there is and no point stateing other wise.

I remember one of my very first books on fish-keeping.....it was Bettas by Myron Gordon (the geneticist)....I thought it looked interesting, but very hard going. Came in very handy for uni though. and inspired me to get to know about fish-keeping properly.

There are some good books and some pretty poor books on bettas out there. Some of the good books for starting out also have a healthy section on genetics for when the reader decides to venture to them pages.

ian