Marine Betta with eggs

[ThRoewer]

Sunday afternoon I noticed that the larger Marine Betta of my second pair was attending to a nest of eggs:



This may have been their first spawn. The nest is relatively small since the female is still small. I got them both quite small almost 4 years ago. The female is a Sea & Reef captive-bred, the male is wild-caught. Both were females when I got them.

[Reef Bass]

Very cool. Well done.

Should the eggs hatch, how difficult is the rearing of the fry?

[ThRoewer]

Originally Posted by Reef Bass

Very cool. Well done.

Should the eggs hatch, how difficult is the rearing of the fry?

I raised two batches back in 1991 and 1992 with just Brachionus and brine shrimp nauplii. So by today's standards, if you have the right and enough copepod cultures and suitable larva tanks, it shouldn't be too difficult.
But right now I don't have the food cultures to get a couple thousand larva through the first weeks and also no suitable tanks - standard rectangular tanks just don't work well enough.

[OrionN]

What about just pick 20-40 of the largest ones and try to raise them?

[ThRoewer]

Originally Posted by OrionN

What about just pick 20-40 of the largest ones and try to raise them?

How would you go about picking so few out of 2000 to 3000?
Usually, you need to start with the whole batch and let natural selection do its thing...

[OrionN]

If I don’t have enough food, I just raise about the numbers of fries I have food for. I just pick what ever the number I think I have food for and separate them and do my best raising them. The rest I just let the fish in the tank take it course. I can’t say nature take it course because my tank is not Nature.

[ThRoewer]

My experience with picking a handful isn't the best. And at the time you need to pick there isn't really a good way to determine who is a winner and will fall by the wayside. In my experience that comes down to how good a larva accepts the offered food. The picky eaters usually don't make it regardless if there is a lot or a little competition.
But right now my real problem is not really the food but rather having a suitable tank to raise larva in.

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[lionfish300]

So back on 91-92 did you actually raise to how big and how long did it took? Also what you end up did with all of them? Very cool

[ThRoewer]

It took about 8 months to get them to around an inch. At that point, I sold most of them.

This was one of those at about 6 weeks:



Of the first hatch, only 8 survived. One I kept knowingly, 6 I sold, and one that had slipped through the overflow drain and was believed to be dead resurfaced a little over two years later in the sump tank as the second female to another Marine Betta pair I kept there together with a fully grown pair of Clarkii.

The one I kept knowingly went all the way to spawning himself:



The second batch I raised yielded 13 and I sold all of those.
Back then it was a pretty big deal and Fossa and Nielsen came by to take pictures for their books:



The issue is that you need better larval foods than rotifers and brine shrimp. On top of that, you also need special larva rearing tanks - square tanks won't work. I used an octagonal tank with a rotational flow that was plumbed into the parent's system. Even better would be a plankton kreisel like it is used for jellyfish.

[Dmorty217]

Very cool and very impressive. What a honor to have Fossa and Nielsen come take pictures for their books!

[OrionN]

Very good. I would love to buy a fish from you if you decide to raise this patch.

[ThRoewer]

I caught them with another nest in the same location. Over the holidays I plan to modify either a 20L or a 20T to a Kreisel larva tank. And in parallel, I got to get food organism cultures going, especially Brachionus S type and Tisbe. Once I got all that ready I plan on raising a batch of Marine Bettas.
I also plan on setting up another pair. Two weeks ago I found a large one that might be a young male or a female in transition to become a male, and today I got a nice sized female to pair it with. I plan to put those with the Amphiprion milii where I will have better access to the eggs than in the large display tank.

I plan also to make a few smaller, 10-gallon larva tanks for pipefish and my Assessors.
Hopefully, by summer of next year, I got the first baby fish.

[lionfish300]

Thanks you for answers to my questions. Very cool babies picture