Breeding Halfsun

I want to do something INTERESTING betta-related, instead of breeding yet more pet store bettas for people to abuse in drinking cups.

I live in Australia. The halfmoon strain has a presence, but it is prohibitively expensive. The Halfmoon breeding stock in Australia is only two or three generations out of Thai imports. To import a decent quality pair from Thailand costs at least $250, plus the costs of breeding them... the going rate for halfmoons is at least $30 a fish, and if you want to know the parentage/genetics/origin of the fish, expect to pay closer to $50. This is for three-month-olds with no guarantee on the eventual quality of the colour or finnage. Then you SHOULD buy several in case the pair does not get on, one fish dies, one fish's colour isn't quite up there, etc etc.

So you can see what the situation's like! I can't afford to breed pure HM, for obvious reasons that anybody willing to pay that much for the fish will go to an experienced breeder, not a greenhorn with only two or three spawns to their name. I can't ask significantly less because it would be stupid to throw money away like that.

So I thought of halfsun. There is a huge choice of crowntails for around $12 a fish. That would cut down the number of halfmoons I needed to fork out for and since the strain is virtually unknown in Australia, I believe it would be received well by hobbyists.

So I wanted to ask a few questions about selecting breeding stock... I only know of one halfmoon breeder who will let you see the fish and choose them (he just chucks em all in a tank at his LFS). The others show you blurry photos or describe the colours, AND you have to pay shipping. So stuff that, I'm going local. There's a large choice of colours - butterfly tri banded blue red and black, platinum, platinum with pink or blue rays in the caudal and iridescence on the body (possible strain impurity), solid blue, solid red (with blue wash, not a pure colour), red and cellophane butterfly, occasionally a silver or turq. I want to use halfmoon females, because a) it's impossible to buy crowntail females ANYWHERE, b) they're cheaper by far than males, only about double the price of a standard female as opposed to the males which are quadruple minimum. And c) I already have some nice males. So which colours would you go for?

Second, what sort of finnage should I look for in the CT males? Is it okay to use crossray and quad ray males?

Third, is there any problem mixing and matching colours (like that stunning BF CT I dug up)? I don't want to breed for colour as much as finnage. The more different colours I get from a single spawning the better, it's a lot easier to offload them if they dont' all look the same.


Thanks heaps guys!

well given the prices and such, I would get a few of the nicest hm females you can find, and then use the best ct males you can find, quad rays or better at least. it may take you a few generations to get it right, possible sooner if you dont have to worry about pure color breedings.

You should have a good market, all the LFS near me sell only your, dark blue, red, and dark blue/purple male bettas with tattered fins.

creating halfsun is the hardest tail at the moment to produce and even harder to maintain, there is so much genetics going on in the halfsun that you get a lot of throw backs, the main prob with this strain is when your starting from scratch you wont see half suns until atleast the 4-5th generations, the ct gene is very strong and needs to be controlled well to produce the sun trim and it takes a while to get them short enough to class and sell them as halfsuns.

Yeah, I heard as much elsewhere.... the good thing is, I'm in a great position to try, because my situation is similar to Pieman's... around here people will buy anything that's NOT your bog standard blue, red, purple or opaque veiltail. There are quite a lot of crowntails available but they get snapped up fast. Few people attempt to breed, and even fewer succeed, and the people who do breed are mostly using plakat females so they don't get what they want anyway. So I'm in a better position to attempt halfsun than most other breeders in Australia, because I can sell on the throwbacks for enough that I won't be losing money. Apparently the standard betta price in the US is, like, two or three dollars... well over here it's ten for the grubbiest veiltail. Even selling to LFS at $4 each I think I could cover costs.

So what do you do? I haven't done much planning yet since I don't have the females... I was just thinking cross crowntail male to halfmoon female, grow on the fry, choose the ones to breed that have a 180 spread and breed them. So I figured once I had a crowntail strain going that was reliably throwing 180 degree tails - hopefully with shorter extensions - I'd just pick the shortest and neatest to breed together and eventually end up with halfsun.

And the thing is, if I pull it off, I could probably get quite a bit for them because nobody is breeding them in Australia at all as far as I can tell.

hey laurafrog
i live in new zealand and im with you bout the expensive vts for sale in petshops and how quickly cts get sold!
here in NZ even a poor looking ct can sell for $30!

if you did manage to breed some halfsuns i would be quite interested in shipping some over if you would

Well of course I would try... but I have NO experience in shipping fish! It might be some time before I get them though, because as Daz said it does take quite a few generations.

At this point I don't know if I'll get to true halfsun before I go to uni (which is pretty much exactly two years time). Even then, I want to continue breeding bettas, because they take a lot less space than most other fish and can be adapted to most water conditions. I have a lot of tropicals but I figured that since I've chosen (mostly) common and easy to care for species, I will rehome those, leave the tanks (empty) with my parents for safekeeping, and keep a few nano tanks as decorations, and cut back to bettas.

I can't imagine not having fish, or even not breeding... funny when I think about it, I've only been in the hobby for just over two years but it's already a pretty big part of my life. I plan my shopping trips (namely when I finish off the milk and bread so we HAVE to go shopping) to coincide with the LFS getting fish delivered!

At any rate, there's nothing stopping me trying now, because I just might get there!

The standard of crowntail in Australia is not too bad. Mostly they are bred by the same mobs that produce the veiltails, and they just roughly match male and female by colour. You get a lot of double rays and partial quad rays (three or four rays split twice), but occasionally one turns up with really good finnage, full quad. It's just a matter of being there to look, every time. Of course the pet store crowntails are not show fish. You get red wash on virtually all blues, blue wash on the vast majority of reds, the most common colour is the 'wild' red and blue mixture, and the ones that are different colours usually have some random smatterings of genes like marble and mask.

Just how bad are the NZ crowntails in terms of general quality? The Australian ones sucked until a few years ago, because they were trying to create enough to fill demand from just a few pairs with the result that they were inbred and weak and anything that could swim was sold.

well i had my first and so far only crowntail for 10 days till it just died
i will try get some photos up of the best cts ive seen and just the average ones availiable in nz


edited to add pictures

btw i dont own these pictures and these fish are 3 months old so still have growing to do

a couple of females

The crowntail females look like that but they are hardly ever available... but when you can get them, that's what they look like.

The males we get over here are much nicer looking, I should get some photos of the average standard of colour and fins so people know what I'm starting with. They're usually about five months old though.

a few of those females are pretty obease.

Hi, LauraFrog,
just wanted to wish you the best - I feel as though I'm sitting in watching Australian betta history-being-made.
I think you've found your niche.
Lord knows you're prospectively filling a vast market demand armed with the best intentions, intelligent research, planning and expectations, a great deal of knowledge, and love for the breed - the situation could only be more ideal if you had money to get whatever pairs you wanted.
And with the rarity and prices described, you might even make money on betta breeding!
You go, girl!