can i breed any bettas

[guppy_man]

hi i have a female plakat but i want to breed bettas like my uncle but hes on holiday so im gonna ask you guys can i breed and 2 types of bettas or have they got to be the same kind??

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Yes you can crossbreed the majority of bettas with each other as they are not separate groups but just different color variations and tail types.

On the other hand betta breeding is no walk in the park- bettas can produce hundreds of fry in a single mating and not introducing the male and female together properly can result in bad accidents. Also betta breeding is expensive because when the male bettas start to mature you are going to need individual tanks for everyone of them to prevent them from fighting.
Other than the cost, time and energy involved in betta breeding, no lfs is going to take 60bettas off your hands at a moments notice so you have to thoroughly plan out where you are going to rehome all your betta fry once they have matured BEFORE you breed them.

 

[guppy_man]

i kno this isnt the best idea but if i do have over 60 eggs i might feed some to my other fish is that wrong?
but yes i have 3 tanks 1 of them has 1 female betta in but the other 2 tanks are 1 for my male betta and the other 1 is for them to breed in and to raise the fry.

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

i kno this isnt the best idea but if i do have over 60 eggs i might feed some to my other fish is that wrong?

It is kinda wrong.
If you can't raise the fry, don't breed the fish in the first place- i know its very tempting to breed bettas but they don't need to be bred and the whole process takes alot out of them, it isn't nesarsary to put them through the process. Simply feeding excess eggs or fry is irresponsable behavior IMO- also i think it may make the male abandon his nest, at the least it will stress him out lots somone is taking away his babys.
I think with livebearers it is acceptable to euthanise fry as livebearers will breed constantly for as long as they live wether you like it or not and even if you go for all female groups the females can still get pregnant from storing sperm from encounters they may have had with males at the lfs or breeders.
Bettas on the other hand will only breed if you deliberatly make them do so, so i think you have to take full responsability over their fry and that means not just euthanising excess fry because you knew you would get too many in the first place, i also don't think many people would be very impressed or they would get suspicious if you posted you bred bettas and only raised 5fry successfully.
Better to just leave the whole breeding thing alone IMO .

 

[bkk_group]

hmm, why don't you wait till your uncles back and ask him to guide you through the breeding process. if he is on holidays right now why not impress him when he comes back but reading up on bettas and doing some research, might make for a fun project in the meantime. like tokis says, if you are going to breed them then you better be able to take care of them.

 

[guppy_man]

ok ill leave the betta breeding to my uncle.

 

[Synirr]

Tokis-Phoenix, I think saying it is ok to cull livebearer fry but not betta fry is a bit of a double standard. In the same way that you know breeding bettas will get you huge numbers of fry, you know that keeping both male and female livebearers together is going to get you fry... and even just purchasing a female that has been mixed with males at some point might get you fry as well. If you're going to say it is irresponsible to cull betta fry, then I think you should at least be consistent and say it's irresponsible to cull fry, period.

For the record, a lot of breeders (probably even most of them) do cull, but it's up to the individual to decide for themselves whether or not they're comfortable with that.

 

[red-devil0602]

i could never cull, i feel aweful if i have to kill a sick fish never mind cute little babies, why do they cull is it just because they have too many or are they not good enough

 

[JoLtNbolt]

I was just reading some info on the website www.bettacave.com and the breeder mentioned that he had a spawn and kept the best 4 and culled the rest, specifically because he was trying to develop a strain with very specific traits.

 

[Synirr]

why do they cull is it just because they have too many or are they not good enough

Both reasons, depending on the breeder. If they're trying to develop a specific strain, sometimes they see it as too much effort to raise the entire spawn when most of the fry aren't going to be worth their time to breed anyway... then there's the fact that you usually get +100 fry per spawn

 

[LifeBear]

There is nothing inherently WRONG with culling. The reason bettas and many other animals have so many babies each time in the first place is because nature has it's own culling system.

Culling is done for many reasons. For high level breeders, it can be because the fry are not what they are trying to acheive. It can be because there are deformities. Culling is what keeps "line breeding" from becoming "in breeding" (yes, I know that is a semantics argument, but you can see the difference in connotation.) It keeps recessive deformites from progressing into future generations. The majority of breeders that I know choose their culling method based on their opinion of what is least traumatic for the fish. Many who have larger specie do choose to feed them the unwanted fry. That would seem to be the closest thing to what would happen in nature.

2 things to keep in mind-
In the UK it is illegal to feed one live vertibrate to another.

The word "CULLING" does not mean the same as "KILLING." It means "SEPARATING" i.e. getting tehm out of a particular gene pool. When the culling is because of DEFORMITIES, euthanasia or feeding up the food chain can be the best option (opinion, of course). Contrarywise, many breeders choose the fry they want to keep and then SELL the ones that aren't actually "deformed" but are not the highest quality (such as not having the widest fin spread, right color, etc). This is also considered "CULLING."

 

[GSD]

I think culling is worong

u dont want the fry
dont breed the fish

 

[bkk_group]

how did this nice peacfully resolved post end up being about culling? you guys wanna talk about culling? lets make a new post alright? geez

 

[Tokis-Phoenix]

Tokis-Phoenix, I think saying it is ok to cull livebearer fry but not betta fry is a bit of a double standard. In the same way that you know breeding bettas will get you huge numbers of fry, you know that keeping both male and female livebearers together is going to get you fry... and even just purchasing a female that has been mixed with males at some point might get you fry as well. If you're going to say it is irresponsible to cull betta fry, then I think you should at least be consistent and say it's irresponsible to cull fry, period.

For the record, a lot of breeders (probably even most of them) do cull, but it's up to the individual to decide for themselves whether or not they're comfortable with that.

Because female livebearers can store sperm in them as long as they have been in contact with one male once in their life and can have up to 7 pregancys in the absense of a male after that, so stocking an all-female tank of livebearers will not prevent you from having fry as long as the females have been in contact with a male at the breeders or lfs, which the majority have.
When you consider mollys for example can have over a 100fry each pregnancy and your average pregnancy lasts a month, they are going to be churning out tons fry for a long time.

All male tanks are much harder to stock than female ones and you will often get alot of harrassment and deaths if not stocked very carefully- it all comes down to the individual males personality.
Livebearers do not like to be on their own due to being very sociable fish so keeping a single male on its own is not fair on it, its like keeping a neon tetra all on its own.

My point is, is that unless you have an all-male group of livebearers which are hard to stock and not exactly perfect as the males will always pick on each other to a certain extent, you will always have fry and lots of them wether you like it or not.

On the other hand you cannot keep male bettas together so that is out of the question and a female betta cannot have fry without a male present in the tank, unlike female livebearers, so if you do not want betta fry you can easily avoid them.
Bettas only have fry if you want them to, livebearers will have them regardless of wether you want them to.
This is why i think it is acceptable to cull livebearer fry since it is near impossible to raise every single one of them and find homes for them all without them inbreeding with each other as lfs's only take in livebearer offspring if they are sexually mature or in the case of mollys and swordtails- half grown; but when you consider molly and swordtail fry take up to 6months on average to reach the half grown size and have more fry on average then platys or guppys, its just as difficult...

When a newb asks what would be a good fish to start off with, so many people recommend them livebearers but so few warn them of their notorious ability to breed on a large and fast scale.
So to top it all off, i do not think i was hypocritical in saying its acceptable to cull livebearer fry than betta fry as in the majority of cases of livebearer fry it is for the best for the fry and the owner as it is pretty unavoidable but with bettas because they will only have fry if you make them, because you took the choice to make them breed i think you should also take the step of also raising them 100%.

 

[Bettaman]

leave the father in the Betta tank he will cull the fry for you as any that wont make it will not with him in there.....and if you keep him on his normal diet you will still get 50-60 good fry lets face it OK we could get 600 fry but you wont rear them all anyway most will die due to being attacked by siblings unless you split them 50/50 and then keep taking out the bigger ones as they grow and let the smaller ones catch up and in most home set ups this is impossible to do will say on the matter its a time and money consuming part of keeping bettas and unless you have a goal to breed,a particular strain or colour, then best not do it just because you can.......