How to breed Bettas splendens ?

Question

how can i apply selective breeding to bettas ?

Answer 1

Well, this has been done extensively with bettas over the past several decades. In the wild, bettas are small-finned and brownish. The large fins and bright colours you see on petstore shelves today are the result of generations upon generations of selective breeding.

Anyhoo, the "selective breeding" part of your tank should be relatively simple. Decide what you're striving for. Are you looking to develop a certain colour? Do you want a bigger tail fin? Longer tail fin? What shape tail fin? Look around for some betta breeder websites and look through their pictures, and decide just what it is you want to improve.

Once you've chosen what you want to breed, you'll have to buy your fish. You can just go to the petstore and see what you can find, or you can buy them directly from a breeder.

Bettas are easy to breed, but it is very time consuming. If you're not ready to feed the fry 4-5 times per day, you're not ready to breed bettas.
You'll have to keep the male and female separately, of course. You can either divide a 10 gallon tank, or put them each in their own 5 gallon tank. Happy fish spawn readily, so make sure you keep their water warm (78-80F), clean (do 20% weekly water changes), and feed them a variety of quality, frozen and pellet foods to keep them in breeding condition. By that I mean cyclops, brine shrimp, bloodworms, mosquito larvae, daphnia, etc.
The male will eventually start producing a bubble nest, which looks like some foam on top of the water. This means he is ready to spawn. The female will be carrying eggs when you can see plumpness around her midsection. You can put the female in the with male, and be sure to keep a close eye on them without disturbing them, because if the male doesn't like her, he'll attack her, and you'll need to take her out. If he does like her, he'll squeeze her with his body, forcing out her eggs, which he will fertilize and place in the bubble nest. You can then remove the female.
The eggs will take 2-4 days to hatch, so at this point, start working on your brine shrimp and infusoria cultures. Once the eggs hatch, you'll need to remove the male and turn off the filter (or have the filter on a very low setting with a nylon sock wrapped around the intake). As I say, you'll need to feed them frequently, very 2-4 hours, and keep them warm. Water changes must be done very carefully (I suck the water right out the filter instead of the tank, lest I suck up any babies, but you can also use an airline as a syphon tube - takes forever, but it's safe).

Anyway, those are the major outlines. Much has been written on the subject, and there are many great articles available online and in books.

Answer 2

In Thailand those 2 species are go bred for particular features for struggling with besides as Imbellis and Splendens in different areas. until eventually you have a particular reason to crossbreed them that's going to easily smash the features of the Splendens finnage. those 3 Betta species besides as Mahachai will all inter breed the comparable way.

Answer 3

If the only place you know to go to find information on breeding bettas is Yahoo Answers, then you don't know enough about your fish to consider breeding them.

There's a whole big web out there with tons of info.
Do some research.