It took two decades for French aquarists to learn that when male bettas blew bubbles, they were not suffocating but constructing a nest. When the figured that out, they became the first westerners to breed fighting fish.
Conditioning
Today's beginning aquarists typically find bettas easy to breed. It's a matter of knowing what to do and then doing it. The most reliable way to get them to breed is to first condition the adult male and female separately for two weeks. During this time you should feed them rich foods, especially live black worms, frozen bloodworms, or live brine shrimp from your pet store. If these foods are not available, you can use frozen meaty substitutes from the pet store, especially the rich frozen foods preferred by breeders of discus and marine fishes. Your dealer will know what's particularly nutritious and appropriate for bettas. You can also purchase supermarket seafoods and meats. Nutritious supermarket foods suitable for bettas are chicken and beef live, beef heart, any edible fish, shrimp, and oysters, but not clams (they are too tough). Frozen foods should be grated or blended into small particles that won't choke your fish, and then washed in a net with tap water to wash away juices that might pollute the water in which the adults are held. Conditioning takes about two weeks, and is complete when the male spends all his time working on a higher than normal bubblenest, and the female becomes wide with ripened roe and displays a white spot that resembles a ripe egg at her vent, or gonopore. The male never displays a white vent spot. (The white vent spot is a useful way to distinguish females from the short-finned males.)
The Breeding Tank
Yes, it's true. Size matters. The usual breeding aquarium is 5-10 gallon (20-40 L) tank, although tanks up to 50 gallon (200 L) are preferred because they are easier to keep clean. The additional water volume dillutes the growth-inhibiting effects of nitrogenous wastes emitted by the fast-growing young. Diluting these wastes (using large tanks or frequent water changes) results in young fish growing evenly than if crowded (in which case there are usually one or two large fish and all the rest are dwarfs). On a practical level, it's faster and less work to clean one 50 gallon (200 L) than to clean ten 5 gallon (20 L) tanks.
The tank is filled to a depth of 6 inches (15 cm) with new tap water, chemically dechlorinated. A floating thermometer is placed in the water, with a small heater (50 watts or less) added to maintain the temperature at 78° F (25° C), The water should be allowed to equilibrate with the room environment for two days. This allows enough time for any required thermostat adjustments, and for the supersaturated air in fresh tap water to come out of solution and dissipate in to the atmosphere. If fish are placed in dechlorinated tap water too soon, air escaping from solution may attach to the fish's gills and oxidize (burn) the gill tissue.
The tank should also contain abundant plants. Plants profice a hiding place, or refuge, for a potentially attacked female and slower growing fry that need to escape their larger cannibalistic brethren. They also supply surface area for the growth of microscopic food upon which newborns depend and support for the nest. A dese clump of submerse plants, such as Java moss (Vesicularia), provides an ideal refuge. Floating plants, such as water sprite (Ceratopteris), provide surface structure to support the bubblenest. Other surface structures should be 4-6 inches (10-15 cm) diameter platic food container lids, Styrofoam drink cups sliced in half lengthways, or pieces of Syrofoam. Many kinds of household or food containers, especialy those made of translucent plastic, naturally float and are also suitable nesting sites for supporting a hidden bubblenest.
Do not aerate the tank. The release of air bubbles dirupts the surface film, interferes with the strucural integrity of the bubblenest, and stimulates vibrations that cause the eggs to break free from the bubbles and sink. The upwelling currents will push the fry away from the oxygen-rich surface film. The tank should be largely covered to prtect the water surface from evaporative chilling and to keep oils in airborne dust particles from producing an oily sheen that inteferes with the diffusion of oxygen and carbon dixide through the surface.
The First Date
Place the male in the tank first, and allow him time to take over that territory. Two days is a good period during which he can investigate the tank and then decide it belongs to him. His territoriality contributes to his decision to nest there, and a day later he will probably start building a bubblenest.
Two or three days after the male has been placed in the breeding tank, you can net the female from her conditioning aquarium and place her in a half-filled quart (1 L) jar. The reason the jar is half-filled is to make it float, no matter how much water is in the breeding tank, and to provide a wall over which neither fish can jump. With the jar floating in the breeding tank, the fish can see each other, but neither can jump into the other's space at this time.
By now the male has built a bubblenest, whether the female is in view or not. Once you have added the jar with the female, he gets very excited (well, who wouldn't?) and vigorously adds bubbles to increase the height (more than the diameter) of his bubblenest. He seems torn between attending to his hest and attending to the female, constantly interrupting his bubble-blowing to charge toward her, biting and pushing the jar, undulating back and forth before her, fins spread grandly and gill covers flared.
The female may be unimpressed and, in that case, will ignore his antics. If this happens, leaving her there for a week won't make any difference. Set up a different match.
Usually, a well-conditioned female will be attentive to the male's efforts. She will respond by becoming darker and ramming the glass as though anxious to be with the male. Don't overrate this response. It may only mean she wants to play with him, but isn't ready for a serious relationship. She is probably not ready for spawning until dark vertical bands appear on her flanks. These bands are pronounced in wild bettas; but, in Cambodians and other strains, thses bands may be masked by a lack of melanin, a surface sheen of iridocytes, or dense red (pterin) pigmentation. So the absence of bands is not necessarily bad news. But neither is their presence a guarantee of imminenet spawning. Hence, the importance of dense vegetation as a refuge. She'll spawn when she's ready, and that might be a day or two later. This is also another reason why larger tanks are better; they give the female a better opportunity to escape.
The consequences of putting a male ready to spawn with a female not ready to spawn can be deadly for the female. Males of many fish species harass females with chasing, butts, and nips; but male bettas bite and bite hard, often ripping the fins of females or opening wounds on their flanks. The result may be an infection that kill the female. Fighting fish are well named, and you should take the name seriously, always considering the welfare of a female who might not be physicologically prepared to spawn. Keep in mind that conditioning may help develop her eggs withing the ovaries, but ripening of the eggs so they are receptive to fertilization may take some days, and behavior is not always reliable in determining then she is fertile and ready. Keep that back-up hiding place avilavle. Even if you don't need it for this spawning, it will provide hiding places and a feeding station for the resulting babies.
After two or three days for the fish to become accustomed to one another, the female should be released into the tank with the male by tipping the jar. Watch both fish for at least a half hour to be certain she is not being damaged, although minor aggression is normal. If torn fins or wounds appear, the female should be immediately removed and retired for recovery, and another conditioned female selected for spawning.
Spawning
The male's first reaction to the released female is to circle her, displaying frantically, undulating so hard you might think he'd break his back, and then trying to lead her (by example) to the bubblenest. If the female is not ready, she will refuse and head for cover or try to get out of the tank. If she is receptive, she'll eventually follow him to the nest. This foreplay could take an hour, or a day before the first false spawnings. False, because the first few efforts to reach consummation are never successful. The fish need to adjust to each other.
The ritualized spawning act is as follows: The female meets the male beneath the nest, and he tries to wrap around her by bending hsi body into a U-shape around her body. This takes a while, as they try to fit confortably together, she tilted perpendicular to him, and both their bodies angled so their vents are in close apposition. Once he succeeds in getting a firm grip on her, he squeezes his body hard around her, and it looks like he's hugging her as hard as he can. Again, this will happen several times unsuccessfully, with them breaking apart with nothing coming of all the effort. Then, suddenly, they'll succeed. The squeeze will end with a vilent trembling motion as both fish reach climax and he ejaculates milt, the female simultaneously releasing about a dozen small white eggs that tumble from their embrace.
Sometimes the female recovers first and goes after the sinking eggs (which she may eat or put in the nest), but more than often the male recovers first. He makes a beeline for the eggs, picks them up in his mouth, and then goes to the nest, where he spits or shoots the eggs, together with a mouthful of bubbles, to the bottom of the nest. He may add another blast or two of air bubbles before he goes back to the female for another hug.
Spawning consists of many rounds of wrappings, climaxes, and releases of eggs, each lasting 15 minutes to an hour, and it can commmence at any time of day. There may be a hundred or a thousand eggs in the total spawn. When the female is finished, having spent all her ripe eggs, she will try to leave, but the male will be insistent that he's not finished. That's another benefit of refuge. If she didn't need it before, she certainly needs it now.
If you didn't see them spawning, you can still tell it has occurred. The female will have a different patter, she will be hiding, and she may look thin and bedraggled, or even damaged. A close look beneath the bubblenest with a flashlight and a hand lens, or a pair of strong reading glasses (2.5x), will reveal the opaque white eggs tucked among the clear bubbles.
At this time, without disturbing the male and the bubblenest, remove the female to another tank and give her tender loving care (no tankmates, light feeding with nutritious and preferably live foods, heat about 80°F (29°C), and moderate aeration siphoning the debris on the bottom daily), so that she may recover.
Hatching
The bubblenest support the eggs and early stage babbies (prolarvae) not yet able to swim. Because the eggs and prolarvae are heavier than water, they would sink (in nature, into the muck at the bottom) if they could not attach to floating bubbles. The bubbles are coated with a sticky mucus to which the eggs will adhere. The eggs are stuck to the bubbles rather than enclosed within them.
Later the prolarvae themselves produce sticky mucus from head glands. This prolarval mucus assists in holding them at the oxygen-rich surface upon which they depend early in life before the labyrinth has been formed. This benfit is especially important to fishes that breed in stagnant, often polluted, water of low oxygen content. If there were nothing to hold them near the oxygen-rich surface film, they would perish in the lower reaches of the stangnant water.
At this early stage, the prolarvae are the vulnerable to surface disturbances, and can be seen frequently dropping from the nest and darting up again in spirals, where they stick at least emporarily. Do not add any food, for it will only decay and foul the water. Prolarvae cannot feed, as they have no jaws, guts, useful eyes, or fins. They do not yet have functional gills and they labyrinth is well into the future. The prolarvae get all their nutrition from their yolk sacs and by absorption from the water, and they respire (absorb oxygen and release carbon dioxide) direcly through their tissues. This stage lasts two or three days.
Feeding the Fry
At about the thrid day after hatching, the prolarvae become larvae (fry) with developed (black) eyes, jaws, functioning intestinal tracts, and fin buds now developing into fins. At this time, they can swim horizontally with control, search for food in nature consists of protozoa and other minute animals such as rotifers, gastrotichs, tiny worms, and the larvae of copepods and other crustaceans. In aquaria, we feed them cultured protozoa (you can purchase cutures and directions from many sources or wild protozoa that you have grow from dried leaves, lettuce or banna skins place in a jar with warm water from a pond, outdoor container, or an established aquarium. The pond or tank water provides a seed stock of protozoans, and the plant material provides a culture medium upon which bacteria and fungi muliply. These bacteria and fungi are food for the seed stock of the protozoans, which then multiply rapidly (bloom).
Sniff the jar. It should have a pleasant smell, like hay on a farm feild. Now hold the jar up toward the sky, and you will see the protozoa as a smoothly layered cloud of fine white particles. If you see only a gray cloud with wisps, no discrete white spots, and the jar smells bad, hen you have grown only bacteria rather than protozoa, the culture has failed, and you need to throw it out and start over.
Alternative first foods are the dust at the bottom of packages of dried food, commercial liquefied fry preparations based on yeast and egg yolk, and even crumbled dried leaves from hardwood trees, such as sycamores, oaks, hickories and maples. Just like the lettuce or banana skin mehod, these dried leaves,left in tank water for about a week will develop a microscopic fanual community that provides an excellent and diverse food source. In this case, the protozoa are attached to, or glid along, the surfaces of the leaf bits.
Protozoa as whole culture water should be fed to the fry as soon as they swim horizontally. Feed the fry a cupful per 5 gallons (20 L) twice a day for three days. Feeding fry will develop plump opaque white bellies.
Two days into this regimen, begin feeding small quanties of live Artemia naupalli (baby brine shrimp). By day four or five of free-swimming, you can stop adding protozoa and feed brine shrimp naupalli (with or without microworms) exclusively. When the fry are feeding on baby brine shrimp, their bellies become calmon pink. (All these food growing and feeding procedures are explained further in Chapter 5.)
Grow-out
You will never raise an entire spawn of up to a thousand fry. You will raise a fraction more in larger tanks, and relatively few (only 10-20 fish) in a small (5 gallon [20 L]) tank. In a small tank, you need only siphon out old water before replacing it with new (dechlorinated) water to make up for evaporation. If you are using larger (20-50 [80-200L]) tank, then slowly increase the volume and water level by 1 inch (2.5 cm) each week. And at least weekly, preferably more often, siphon debris from the bottom while removing 10-25 percent of the old tank water, replacing this volume with dechlorinated, emperature-equilibratred, and degassed, tap water.
The best growth doesn't result from heavy or frequent feeding, or even the most nutritious foods, although they all help. Optimal growth (fast and even) is attained by frequent, massive water changes that remove the growth-inhibiting nigrogenous wastes of the fishes themselves. The expert angelfish breeder Dr. Joanne Nortan changes 90 percent of the water daily. That's an extreme example, but her fish grow at extraordinarily rapid rates.
Culling
Culling is the hardest part of breeding bettas. Nobody likes it, but it's necessary to produce good quality fish from generation to generation. In culling, we remove and eliminate the slowest growing and deformed young. Many breeders feed these culled fish to larger predators. The objective is to save the fastest growing, best formed and most colorful and best-finned fishes for two reasons. They have commercial or show value, and they are the future breeding stock of the next generation.
Unless you are a show or commercail breeder, culling is not necesary. There is no rule that you must remove or destroy baby fishes that don't measure up to some standard. If you want to keep all the fry, then keep them. Like people, the joy they experience from life and the joy they bring to you will have nothing to do with somebody's invented standards.
Please note that I did not write this. I got this very helpful guide out of: The Betta Handbook by: Robert J. Goldstein, Ph.D.
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