Betta's successfully breeding at last!!! I started when I was first starting to keep fish and I tried to do it in bowls. Go figure.both of the Betta's I tried to breed died within days of each other! It never worked. Then I learnt some secrets
This is my male dragon, one of the ones I have just successfully bred
(by the way the babies I will sell when they are a inch long)
My female, Eclipse.
When the male is ready to breed He will tell you by building a bubble nest then you are supposed to put him (and the Female floating in a jar) in a five gallon tank at the least and he will see the female and start to build the bubble nest. This nest is critical to the babies survival, because over hundreds of years Betta's have formed a way to stay alive when the rice paddies in Thailand have dried up and when the babies are hatched they only have this extra organ and their gills have not fully developed. that is why some times you see your Betta go to the top of the water and kind of swallow air
Eclipse floating in the jar
when you let your female loose in the tank with the male and his now really big bubble nest (my Betta's was about five inches long and two inches tall) he will try to chase the female under his bubble nest. it can take from 2 to 24 hours and my pair did not start the embrace until the male was chasing the female around for 22 hours! another thing that is pretty critical to breeding Betta's is having a cave for the female to hide from the male so she can rest.
after the embrace the female Will appear as if she were dead and the eggs will come out as little white almost flake-looking things the most I've seen come at a time is 10 and they did the embrace roughly 10 times. when the eggs first came he looked like he was eating them! he was actually picking them up with his mouth and popping them in the bubble nest. the female ate some but in all, I think I have about 100 eggs at the least. I will write another post about how to care for the minuscule fry.
