How do you know when your male or female betta fish wants to mate?

Question

How do you know when it's ok to put you r male and female betta together?

Answer 1

You need to do a lot of reading and preparing before you even consider putting your male and female betta together for breeding. You should have the tank set up in just the right way and be prepared to feed the fry at the right time. Further more, you need to know what you will do with all of those babies if they live. Here's a methods that works for me, but I would suggest you google breeding bettas and read up from several sites, consider carefully your plan and prepare well before you even start.

Breeding tank: A 10 gallon makes a good breeding tank for bettas. Place in on a dark surface and set it up with no gravel or decorations. Use a small sponge filter and a heater. maintain the heat at 78-82, the temperature is not really that critical. Using a hood is a good idea to hold in heat and moisture.

Conditioning: Condition the male in the breeding tank. Condition the female in a separate tank and be sure they cannot see each other. Feed well on frozen or live foods alternating with flakes or pellets for at least a week. The female should be plump with eggs and the male should be flaring and showing his best color, maybe even building a bubble nest.

Spawning: Drop the water level in the breeding tank to about 5" deep. Place the female in a bowl or other container next to the breeding tank so that the male can see her. As soon as there is a good bubble nest in the breeding tank add the female. Check for eggs in the bubble nest every few hours. You know they are finished when the female is hiding from the male and he no longer leaves the nest to chase her down. He will also not be trying to attract her to the nest. At this time remove the female from the breeding tank. If they fail to breed within a few hours go back and repeat the conditioning steps for a week.

Eggs and fry: The eggs will hatch in 2 days. At first the male will collect the babies and return them to the bubble nest, this is normal. Once you see that the babes are able to swim in a normal fashion, remove the male. Now is the time to start feeding the babies. Feed them newly hatched brine shrimp, micro worms or vinegar eels. Feed several times a day for the first week to 10 days. At that time you can start adding some powdered flake food to their diet and begin increasing the water level in the tank.

Care: The babies need very clean water. Do a 50% or more water change every day and be sure to remove any uneaten food or dead babies that you see. Keeping the water clean and changed very often is one of the major keys to success. Be sure you cull the brood. Culling is to remove unwanted fish. Remove any deformed fish right away and destroy them.

Rearing and selection: Eventually you will need to split the batch as they will over crowd the 10 gallon. Removing the females to another tank is the best way. The males can stay together without a problem. Continue to feed quality foods of increasing size working your way up to frozen or adult brine shrimp and continue to do large daily water changes. Once they begin to develop color, you should cull based on color. Keep the color you like and remove the rest. Even if you started with two reds you will get a few that are not red or are not evenly colored. If they are near adult size a shop should buy them from you or at least give you some store credit. Be ruthless, keep only the very best to breed with next time around.

The males can stay together basically for their entire lives as long as you never separate them. Once separated even for a day they will begin to fight so keep that in mind.

Best of luck and stick with it, you'll have baby betta before you know it!

Hope that helps

MM

Answer 2

Basically your male will be building a bubble nest is when he is ready. To stimulate this, you can raise the temp in the tank and keep him on a high protien diet such as bloodworms, tubifex, brine shrimp ect. The female as well needs to be on a high protien diet. She will become rounder and develop a gravid spot near her anal fin. I believe it will develope a white coloration on it, I am not postive on the color though. When the male is building a bubble nest and the female is gravid put them togeather. The male will be aggressive towards her and will appear to be fighting, but let things be for awhile. Keep an eye on them and if it looks like the female is not going to make it, she may not be ready yet and take her out. I am not experienced in breeding Bettas though, Kylie, LuvinLife and Magicman are. You can reach thier emails on my avatar.

JV

Answer 3

The male will make a bubble nest at the top of the container. However, every time I've put a female in with him, he tried to kill her. Betta's are originally from the rice paddy fields, so there were plenty of places for the female to hide before and after mating. Good luck with this.

Answer 4

After the male has attracted the female to mate and she's released to do so, they'll be at it for about 1 to 2 days to spawn. Once they've spawned, and everything goes "according to plan" within about a week from the time they have begun to spawn you should start seeing fry hatching and swimming.