Phishies Inn

I was curious in what people who breed bettas do with the fry/offspring. I guess this goes for any species but since I was thinking of breeding bettas and selling them I wanted to be species specific.

What do you do with your spawn? Do you sell them all? If so, where? Just online/auction, or do you give them to any LFS in your area? How successful are you in selling? I see bettas everywhere obviously but I don't know what the "demand" is for them. Also how many fry do you *usually* end up living and maturing enough to jar?

Also: In the tank where the fry are raised what kind of filtration would you use? Obviously the fry are tiny tiny so "normal" filters wouldn't work.

MagpieTear

I have a question as well. If you're breeding for a specific trait, say a strain of your own, what percentage of each generation would you keep until you were able to isolate the desired feature and get it to breed true? You obviously can't keep them all (unless you have a setup like Tim and Karen, or Dino) I'd be paranoid about selling off the one that has the genes I'm shooting for and keeping the duds.

COBettaCouple

Betta breeders tend to cull the unwanted offspring. How they do that depends on the breeder. We have 2 'culls' from the Betta show auction.. Teddy Bear has a swim bladder defect and Kairi has a curl in one of her ventral fins, otherwise they'd be show bettas. Auctions, fish shops or destroying them are the most common ways from what we've heard.

Chief_waterchanger

We have a chaca chaca that we feed our livebearer culls to, but as far as betta breeding I have some points to make.

1) You mentioned 'jarring' the fish... Bettas should be kept in ABSOLUTELY no less than a 2.5 gallon (10 liter) tank, more than that if at all possible.
2) You can use a normal size filter on 2.5+ gallon tanks, just get a very dense filter sponge, turn it so that you see one of the ends, cut a hole in the center lengthwise, but not all the way through. Slide that sponge over the filter's intake and wrap a rubber band around the sponge & intake.
3) If the bettas you are breeding are show quality you won't have a problem getting rid of them: www.aquabid.com , local fish clubs/associations, advertising in the paper, etc.
4) If your bettas are just run of the mill like you would commonly find at Wal-mart, Petco, Petsmart, etc you'd not get much and have trouble selling them usually, since your competition would be selling them for 2-4 dollars a piece, atleast where I live they do. Whereas show quality betta could go as high as 20-50 dollars a piece, depending on your market.

Phishies Inn

Don't take me for so cruel I have 2.5 gallon containers for the males and a 50 gallon tank for the females. I just use the term "jarring" to mean seperating them from the spawning tank.

And yes they are "high quality" bettas, not the ones found around in Petsmart or Petco, but I was actually thinking of starting an online store and sell them for cheaper than the "average". Rather than sell them @ $20-30 per betta I'd do $10 at the most...if there's really that much of a demand for them then lowering the price would be a good thing I would think, since people would be more inclined to buying them? Not to mention since I'm not doing this for a living I wouldn't mind if I didn't quite make that much profit.

And even if I did have run of the mill betta I wouldn't sell them to any of my local stores Even the LFS that is generally better than the chain stores is horrid with their betta. The only difference between the LFS and Petco is rather than keep them in a little plastic cup they keep them in "fancy" looking glass...things...I guess you could call them mini mini vases.

^^That and I'm pretty sure they keep puppy mill puppies. No thanks. I'm way too much of a dog lover to support that.

My dream would be to open a store and sell my betta at the same price Petsmart does so people can come over and say "Hey look, these bettas look way healthier than Petsmart's does! - for the same price!" To show how awful they are. At least, the ones in my town are pretty awful.

Chief_waterchanger

Cool. Sounds like you've got it working for you. I would try aquabid.com most people on there selling bettas are from thailand, so if you are not from thailand you still stick out, especially if you have lower prices.

Best of luck.

COBettaCouple

We'd love to open a Betta shop of our own one day. Best of luck in getting that.

We've not bred any Betta splendens yet, since we don't have the room for all the tanks and everything. With up to 500 fry from a spawning, it'd just be too much for now. We've bred Betta mahachai, but unfortunately lost the male in the move from florida to colorado. What type of Betta splendens are you planning to breed?

leafgirl115

One reason the price is so high is because of the cost to breed them. Be prepared to spend a lot of money.

Phishies Inn

Yeah that was another question I had, how much do you spend on average per spawning? I mean thankfully things like tanks, filters, and containers are a one time buy (hopefully), but then once that's out of the way how much do you have to spend on each spawn?

Oh and you mentioned that quality bettas would sell easily - but do you always manage to sell all of your spawn? I can understand being left over with a few but let's say you end up with 50 alive by the time it's time to sell...could you actually sell all 50 on aquabid? I see plenty of betta auctions that end with no bidders Is the online market reliable? I want to make sure I have multiple places to sell from so I don't get stuck with 50 more betta than I started with lol! Although they'd be a pretty feature to my house I don't know if I need 5 in every room

COBettaCouple

The cost of spawning a pair, then raising the fry would be huge on the first spawning and not as huge on subsequent spawnings. We've not done the exact math, but would expect to need $1,000-2,000 at least for setting up the first spawning on a betta splendens pair, plus need a good sized room that we could control the temperature in to set aside for the endeavor. Then massive amounts of time to care for the fry and do all the water changing.. or setup a system to make things more automatic, but increase the cost of setting things up.

Chief_waterchanger

We've yet to actually start selling bettas online, but the online market is seasonal. VERY few smart sellers ship from around october to march due to cold weather. The online market would only be one aspect to explore, you have to be willing to put yourself out there in person as well. Take out newspaper adds, find a LFS that wants high quality bettas, take out whatever advertising adds you could. The more people you get your message out to the more likely your product is to sell. In this case, the betta is your product and you live in an age of mass communication, which makes advertisement easier and less expensive than it used to be. Utilize any tool you possibly can, and remember, word-of-mouth is one of your best tools.

It is not hard to build a client base, but it definately takes a lot of work. The money you make is almost always a direct corilation to how many hours are spent at whatever the task may be. Your main goal would be to build a steady client base. One of the things you can do is cut deals to people at first, or decide on a group of people that will get lower rates.

In a nut-shell, marketing your product is time consuming, but your goal is to get as many people talking about your product (in a positive way) as you can, human curiosity will take over from there.

Good luck if you do decide to take on the endeavour, it is a lot of work.

LuvaBetta

I hope you do - I think most of us would prefer not to have to go to the big box stores which treat these beautiful fish so badly. But we don't always have a choice. Our lfs is a great one, the owner doesn't know that much but he's hired several people who do. Unfortunately, they don't have many bettas (no females at all) because the big stores can sell cheaper.

Every time I go in to Petsmart, I want to rescue each and every one, but I know they'll just have those **** cups filled with bettas tomorrow. I'd MUCH prefer to buy from someone who treats them well, where know I won't get a sick fish unless I WANT to help one!