Fish Breeding: Bettas

Since I was a teenager, perhaps a little younger, I have been interested in fish. I have been keen at observing their behaviour, the differences among the males and the females and the different ways of breeding. It has held my interest all the years and today with even more time to enjoy myself, I have gone more deeply into the hobby.

Although I have bred fish as a teenager, caught my first wild betta splendens in a paddy field at my uncle's house in Bukit Besar near the little town of Kota Serang Semut approximately ten kilometres from Alor Setar in Kedah, and saw and bought  my first pair of crown tail betta in the 1990s , I found it difficult to breed the fish then.

Looking back I must have thrown away minute fry so many times. Each time I saw the two fish, male and female, embrace, pick up their eggs to have them placed into the bubbles that comprise their nest, remove the female when it was driven away from the nest by the male to protect the eggs from being eaten by it.Then there was the waiting period which ended a few days later with the bubbles more or less gone but my eyes saw not the fry in the water. No fry means failure and so the water was removed, the tank cleaned and another attempt was made.

Failure did not deter me from going on. I was not a total failure at breeding, as I was already a very successful discus breeder, selling my young discus from home. (Today, I am still breeding discus although there is hardly any demand. I now have more than a hundred 3cm line-bred blue discus.) However, the guppy seems to have such great demand that I soon had red flamingos, metallic dragonhead, red glass and blue glass guppies. Since they are live-breeders, they were, of course, so easy to breed.

In fact, the number of guppies increased at such a tremendous rate, I had to buy three large fibre-glass tanks to breed just the flamingos. The joy of successfully achieving better colours through line-breeding was so great that I went on to the metallic dragonheads, hoping to create bigger and better coloured fish. Eventually, another three even bigger, seven feet length, fibre-glass tanks had to be bought.

Of course, my breeding of the bettas continued, breeding plakats, halfmoons, crown-tails and the latest, the dumbos (big-ears). Well, that's all for now. I will gradually introduce them to you.