I had been trying to spawn the Betta off and on for some time with no luck. I tried a couple of different ways and could never get any thing to happen. At our October club meeting JoAnne Toven gave a presentation on how she breeds her bettas. I got excited and went out and got a new male and female betta. I picked a blue male and a blue female because I thought they looked different.

I set up a 10 gallon tank about 3/4 of the way full put a submersible heater in the tank and got the temperature up to 80 degrees. I put a yarn mop in the tank as cover for the female. I used a 2 liter pop bottle with holes I melted in it for water to flow through cut top off to be just above the water line. I taped a styrofoam 20 oz. coffee cup cut in half long ways to the middle of the front of the tank. I placed the female in the pop bottle (had to add a rock in the bottom to keep it from floating). I put the male in the tank. In 2 days the male had a bubble nest and everything looked like it was going good. I released the female and waited for the spawn to start. By morning the male and chased the female behind the mop and had ruined his bubble nest.

I then did a water change on the tank and put the female back in the pop bottle. The next few days nothing happened. Then one morning when I got up to go to school the male had a bigger bubble nest and the female had jumped out of the pop bottle. I thought this would be another failure but as I watched I saw the female swim under the cup where the bubble nest was and the male would squeeze her. She would then float limp for a few minutes. She then would swim back to the mop while the male would collect the eggs in his mouth and spit them in the nest. I saw them do this about 3 times and I had to go to school. I hoped they would be OK for the day.

When I got home from school I took the female out and put her in another tank she looked beat up. I could see the eggs in the bubble nest and the male was swimming under it in circles. The eggs hatched in 2 days and on the 3rd day I removed the male. He looked like he was getting tired of collecting all the babies and putting them back in the nest. I started to feed the fry baby brineshrimp the fourth day. You could see their bellies orange so I new they were eating good. I also on the fourth day duct taped a piece of plastic bag over the top of the tank. I left a flap to open to feed them.

I did not do any water changes till after one month to avoid giving them a chill. After that I did a 10% change every week. I now have about 100 betta fry at 60 days. Some of them are really pretty. They are all blue and some have red tips to their fins. I started giving the fry some fine ground flake food at about 1 month.

Thank you JoAnne for giving a good demo on your way of doing bettas it worked for me. Also at the meeting some one brought up the new moon as a good time to spawn bettas. Well it was November 20, 1998 that mine spawned. A NEW MOON !!!

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