Pics of my 1st spawn! Updated today.

Hi all,
My two crown tail bettas finally spawned Thursday (Feb. 24th) night and the eggs hatched Sat (Feb. 26th) night! This was their 4th attempt at spawning, but their first successfull one.

I'm pretty excited about it! Just thought I'd share some pics. I apologize for the poor quality of pics.

Male CT:

Another pic of the Dad.

Last pic of the Dad.

Here is the female:

That is a GORGEOUS daddy. I love the metallic sheen on the second picture.



Congrats on the succesful spawn!!

Last pic of the Mom.

Beautiful fish Congrats, you should get some gorgeous babies

Pic that I took on Mon, Feb 28th. See those two babies hanging on the outside of the styrofoam cup?

Pic taken the same day looking from underneath the styrofoam cup. You can barely make them out (sorry for the poor quality), but there's four babies in the pic (the other babies were wandering a bit!).

Here's the same pic but sharpened (maybe you can see them better in this pic).

Pic I took today of them as they were busily eating microworms from the bottom of the tank!

Again, sorry for the bad pic.

I love to watch them eat, as they lunge at the microworms. They are so much easier to spot now, as they are growing, plus after they eat the microworms their bellies get nice a plump & white in colour.

Last one for tonight.

The setup I have them in consists of (this tank was already cycled and everything prior):

10 gallon Hagen Waterhome half filled
50W Hagen Tronic Heater
Sponge filter (running slowly)
1 bunch of floating ricca
1 silk plant

During the spawn the male kept the eggs under the half cut styrofoam cup, but after they hatched, he tried keeping them under there for the most part, but then decided to shift them over to the small cutout piece of clear plastic bag that I also floated near the styrofoam cup. I cut about 2.5"-3" semi-circle shape from the plastic bag that one of the parents came in (after giving it a good rinse), and placed abit of it against the glass, as it "held" it there with the moisture, and the rest of the plastic floated on top of the water.

I kind of did this as a test, just to see if the betta would use it or not. I noticed the bubbles would not pop as often as the ones under the styrofoam cup (maybe that's why the male decided to move them over, as he noticed this too).

What I did notice was that there were these little reddish/brownish bugs that were on the floating ricca plant. I'm not sure what kind of bugs they were, but they are very small, and if I looked closely I could see them usually hang out just under the surface of the water against the glass.

I also noticed these bugs starting to hang out/collect in the airpockets where the piece of plastic bag stuck to the glass. A good thing about those bugs is that the fry would eat them while they were hanging under the nest. I could tell because their bellies would be reddish/brown in colour (same colour as those bugs). However, I don't see those bugs anymore. They must have ate them all!

I was kind of glad those insects were in there, as eventhough I put in microworms, the fry hardly went down to the bottom to check them out (fry hung mostly around the surface). I think another reason might be that the table I have my tank on is white in colour. Maybe they had a hard time seeing the white microworms, as they matched the colour of the table, so I carefully slipped a big blue paper bag cut in half underneath the tank, to hopefully help them out in seeing the worms. I noticed as they got a little bit bigger, they do roam the bottom looking for food!

Ok, enough rambling on for me. Just wanted to share my experience!

Thanks.

Gorgeous parents and excellent photos!

I love seeing cute litte fry

Thanks for the congrats and compliments fellow betta owners!

Btw, my sponge filter is running pretty low (2-3 bubbles/second). Should I turn it up a bit? Or leave it as is for now?