Raising Betta Fry

Fry 'Em Up

So you've put your male and female betta fish together. They've done their wild and crazy courtship, producing a boatload of eggs, which the happy couple carefully placed in the male's bubble nest. You've managed to remove the female without damaging anything, and the male has brooded over the eggs for two days. All of a sudden, you've got teeny tiny wigglers in there, dropping out of the nest like little bombs. Your male is working his long-finned tail off, scooping the fry up and blowing them back into the bubble nest. Now what do you do?

The good news, at least for the next thirty-six hours, is that you don't need to do anything, except possibly feed the male betta if he'll eat—he's got quite the job-rescuing the little fry as they constantly fall out of the nest, and he might not want to take time out for a meal—or perhaps you can do a little tank cleaning. The fry are still absorbing what's left of the yolk material, so they don't need to be fed while they're hanging tail down from the nest. When they've depleted the yolk sac and start swimming horizontal, then it's time to feed. It's also time to remove the male—he continues to do his job, corralling the young fry to the bubble nest, but soon he may view the tiny swimmers as food.

Feeding the Fry

The first two to three weeks of their lives are the most critical for the baby bettas. They are developing their labyrinth organ, so they're very sensitive to cool drafts across the water. If this organ is damaged, they'll die. So it's important to keep a tight cover on the tank and try to keep the atmosphere inside the tank as warm and moist as possible. When they're a couple of weeks old, you can start gradually withdrawing the cover so that they get exposed to cooler temps slowly.

The other critical factor in the first couple of weeks is what they eat. The fry are amazingly small and need an abundance of micro-particles, either very fine particles of a foodstuff you've ground up or microorganisms like Paramecium. Many of these organisms should already be living in the aquarium if it was cycled properly, but an infusoria culture of microorganisms can be developed by putting hay or lettuce in water from an established aquarium. A few eyedroppers of this water given to the fry as often as six or eight times a day would be sufficient. After a few days, they can start eating larger particled food, like finely ground dry food.

A different method is to strain cooked egg yolk to make a fine particle infusion, but this is messy and can dirty the water and kill fry if you don't clean obsessively to remove the excess. And how do you clean without sending drafts over the water or accidentally sucking up the fry? You can also grind up regular betta food and strain it like you would the egg yolk, which is still messy, but possibly less labor intensive. Another possibility is to feed newly hatched brine shrimp to your betta fry. The shrimp are larger, but strong betta fry can still tear them apart. The weak will perish, but you'll have a smaller population of competitive, hardy fish instead of a large population of poor doers.

They Will Grow

During the critical first couple of weeks, the betta fry shouldn't be moved, since that might damage their sensitive labyrinth organ. So it's best to have a breeding/brooding tank that's big enough to hold a couple hundred wigglers until they're about a month old. They don't start to show much color or fin shape until they are about three months old. But you can remove the unhealthy, small bettas at one month. Once they begin to show fin size at three months old, it's easy to tell the females from the males. The males begin to fight at about that time, so they need to be housed separately, but the females get along fairly well, so they can be placed in the same tank.

Beautiful Bettas

One question you might be asking yourself is. 'Why?’ Why are you putting yourself through all this trouble and work? Some people actually breed bettas for commercial gain, but many hobbyists breed their bettas for the educational experience, or just because they love their beautiful bettas and want more. Some fanciers breed their bettas for show, fine-tuning their betta strains for the most beautiful or most unique specimens. For whatever reason you began this experience, breeding bettas and raising the fry is bound to be interesting, educational, and fun.