Fish breeding!

[Teach97]

wow for like the 100th time!

those are neat...wouldlove to have that in my classroom. I have bred swordtails (not on purpose!) it just happens kinda like guppies!

I have heard bettas can be challenging I am impressed

 

[Stacykins]

Quote:
1-3 guppies would NOT do well in a non aerated environment. They do not have a labyrinth organ in order to extract air from the surface like those in the genus Betta do. In addition, plants barely increase water quality, they never replace consistent water changes in a filtered and unfiltered tank, unless you make a walstad style aquarium. There is a vast difference between survival and thriving. And since they are a schooling species, keeping them in such small numbers is deterimental to their well being. Schooling fish stress when they lack the numbers required to school.

It is very hard, not impossible, to cycle a 2.5 gallon. Personally, it is easier to do a weekly 100% water change on a 2.5 gallon rather than fiddle with nitrogen cycle. Ammonia and nitrites are hard to control in such a small volume of water and can quickly swing out of control. 5 gallons and above are easiest to cycle, and once a tank is cycled, only weekly 10-25% water changes (depends on your nitrate levels) are needed.

 

[HHandbasket]

I really should not have opened this thread. LOL. There was a time there were 6 tanks in my house, the smallest being a 20-gallon "hospital tank". I bred bettas once, but it was SO brutal on the female, I decided it was too much for me to stomach (cuz I was a squeamish 20-something-year-old at the time). I bred orandas and lionheads one year, and that would have been really cool if the lionhead daddy didn't keep eating all the fry! I'd have to take him out and put him in the hospital tank until the fry matured.

 

[HHandbasket]

Quote:
I had a community tank that had a number of mickey mouse and red wag platys, 2 green swordtails (1 male, 1 female), mollies (1 male 2 females), two dwarf blue gouramis, maybe a few guppies (you start with 2, and the rest just kinda "occurs"), a small school of clown loaches, some neons, and a betta. It was a very peaceful community tank (65 gallons), and the bettas fins were intact. I ran that tank for about a year and would have continued it for God only knows how long, but we moved and sold the tanks when we moved.

 

[SourRoses]

Congrats on the Platys! You know you could always get a female Betta.. with her shorter fins she is less likely to get picked on and she could swim away faster

Hehe!

HHandbasket - I know what you mean! While my mom and I were first working on getting the bigger "showcase" tank setup in the living room.. with homemade acrylic deviders... My moms "brilliant design"

fell completely to peices and that big honkin copper female got in with my favorite little male... Just in the time it took us to find the net, she got a couple chunks out of his beautiful tail.. She pulled off a whole strip as long as his tail, and was swimming around with it in her mouth!

The peice was getting shorter and shorter and I was thinking "What?".. Then it completely disappeared as she finished slurping it up like a spaghetti noodle!

I didn't know wether to cry or laugh, but it grew back!
Thankfully, I have the much larger Pinky on hand! After much waiting, and waiting, she has finally been acting submissive to him through the devider.. So heres *hoping* he doesen't get eaten

Sorry about your tanks

At least you're not like me... and insist on emptying them out and setting them back up in the new locale... only to have the tank spill gallons of water all over the floor in the middle of the night.. more than once!


Teach - What grade? Have you tried the Brine shrimp experiment?


Ps- Some people (not me! LOL) just keep fish for fun!

 

[gumbii]

those are some nice halfmoons... i used to collect, halfmoons, crown tails, delta halfmoons, double tail, plankats, and wild bettas... over here they are all over the place... well except the wild bettas... i used to get them directly from an importer...


i used to breed cichlids... lake tanganyika cichlids... and also some extinct in the wild cichlids too... with the guys from COAST cichlid club... this was years ago... like in 97 i think...




those are cool bettas though... they're getting nicer and nicer...

 

[AinaWGSD]

I've had a male betta in a community tank with swordtails (and danios, neon tetras, and angelfish) before. But it was a MUCH larger tank. 60+ gallons, it may have been a 90, I don't remember for sure, but I do remember it was a pain if I had to get down to the bottom of the tank for some reason because my arm just barely reached from the top to the gravel and only if I was standing on a step stool. We got rid of it when we moved from a ground floor apartment to an old rental house with a basement because we weren't sure that the floor in the new house would support the weight of the full tank. Of course now I'm really regretting not just storing it in the basement. But we don't have a whole lot of money to play around with fish right now, so for now our little tank will do. Of course, every time we go to the fish store DH keeps looking wistfully at the tanks and trying to figure out how we could swing it. The tank itself isn't the hard part, it's the hood, light, and filtration systems that really hurt. Maybe my dad will let me have his tank. It's woefully neglected anyway, the light is never on when we're down there and the algae is so thick on the side that I can't even tell if there are any fish in there anymore. It's not much bigger than mine, but with two tanks I could have a second community tank.

My real favorites are barbs and corydoras. I'm also very partial to dwarf neon rainbowfish and rummy nose tetras. But my husband wanted more color in the tank and has an affinity for long-tailed varieties, and with limited space it was either go with all feisty fish like barbs or slower more colorful fish. So we went with the swordtails and platys. And I don't recall ever having a community tank that didn't have zebra danios (or at least some morph of danio). At any rate, my current tank is perfectly stocked right now. Just enough fish that it's very lively but not so many that it's too crowded and they can't get away from each other if they need to.

 

[Afleetalex]

Fellow betta breeder here too! I breed halfmoons. Some gorgeous fish you have there. Have you ever been to the UltimateBettas forum?

 

[Pinky]

Those are some great looking bettas. I had some sailfin mollys that would breed like crazy. It was cool to watch the male spread his fin and display for the females. I also bred killifish before.
I had some corydoras breed and I didn't know what they were doing until I seen the babies later on.

 

[xchairity_casex]

im breeding guppies nothing speciel i have no guppy breed goals i get pretty females andp retty males and put them together and see what becomes of it currently i have 3 twenty gallon tanks for adult guppies, i have 2 10 gallons for fry and juviniles and an assortment of 5 gallons-2 gallons for momma and breeding tanks. i also have an 80 gallon tank for my 2 goldfish and 2 catfish and im in hte middle of setting up a cherry shrimp tank-10 gallons. heres some pictures

one of my breeding males

this male i raised from fryhood lol along with the female

and heres my goldfish and my catfish the oranda is 4 yearsold i bought him from wal-mart as one of those 1.98 fish and here he is today a big boy about 6 inches

the catfish and pearlscale are each only a year old