Don't
ever breed bettas unless it is a deliberate attempt. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but raising betta fry is a LOT more labor-intensive than with most other species, and it's definitely not something you want to dive into unless you know exactly what you're doing... for example:
-- There's always the potential for one of the fish to kill the other during the spawning process.
-- You can easily get over 100 fry from a single spawn. My past two have both yielded just under 200 (198 and 195,) and you can get as many as 500!
-- The fry have to be provided with live food when they are young, which you will have to culture and/or hatch yourself.
-- To keep the fry healthy, you should be doing 80% water changes on the growout tank
every single day. This sucks a lot, believe me
-- The males will begin fighting when they are around 2 months old (possibly sooner, depending on the spawn,) and will need to be housed individually. This means covering your house in small containers. If you have to buy them, you're going to have trouble finding them for much less than $2.00 each, which doesn't sound like much, but once you buy 50 or more of them it adds up. In addition, each of these needs to have 100% of the water changed every two days at the least.
-- Assume you've successfully raised 100 baby bettas to adulthood... what do you do with them now?? You may find it nearly impossible to get rid of them, especially if your fish are pet store quality VTs. I'm still hanging on to a few of mine from the 1st spawn about 6 months after the fact, and they actually come from relatively good lines.
So yeah... my point is it's expensive and time-consuming, and only crazy people would ever want to do it
Not to say it isn't very rewarding, because it most definitely is... just make sure that if you really want to do this, you do a TON of research so you don't find yourself in a situation you can't get yourself out of
/www.flippersandfins.net/BettaBreedingArticle.htm
