Fry Food... Is This A Good Plan??

Wow, that's amazing that it survived! I'm so excited about that. Talk about lucky, lol. I am so happy to hear all of your progress, but totally bummed about your female loss. That is a total shame. I hate when accidents like that happen. You never see it coming until it's too late. Hopefully it was a swift death as you say. But it sounds like everything else is going well. I'm having to step back on the Bettas for a week or so to get things in order here. After my female so outwardly chose the other male who is a veiltail, I have some serious thinking to do on how I should proceed. I keep hearing how Veiltails are so undesirable because they are the most commong, and being that I do really feel like I need to breed this particular female first because she is so full of eggs, I'm at a loss as to how to proceed. Her breeding stripes went away after she was back around Sapphyre(the original male I want her to breed with)My mother gets into town on Saturday, and we have a school thing tomorrow, so I'm just stepping back for a bit until I decide what to do. I'm hopefully going to order some worm cultures this weekend too, as I want to be prepared if I get fry when I do try again. What do you use for your little ones? I'm going to try and use a variety of things, but I really don't want to have to go the baby brine shrimp route after they are bigger if I can avoid it. It seems like too much of a hassle that I don't understand the first thing about, lol. Do you know of an acceptable alternative? I was reading that Microworms are good, but will they be enough until they are ready for non-live food? And when can you introduce the babies to regular food? I'm so bummed that I had to stop mid-breeding because she decided to fight the power, but I know I can breed Sapphyre to my other 2 females. The downfall is that my other 2 males are veil tales, so I don't have a proper backup as far as males go. And this is what I need to ponder, lol. Hoping your fry are doing great and you are still progressing with everything. : )

 

Wow, that's amazing that it survived! I'm so excited about that. Talk about lucky, lol. I am so happy to hear all of your progress, but totally bummed about your female loss. That is a total shame. I hate when accidents like that happen. You never see it coming until it's too late. Hopefully it was a swift death as you say. But it sounds like everything else is going well. I'm having to step back on the Bettas for a week or so to get things in order here. After my female so outwardly chose the other male who is a veiltail, I have some serious thinking to do on how I should proceed. I keep hearing how Veiltails are so undesirable because they are the most commong, and being that I do really feel like I need to breed this particular female first because she is so full of eggs, I'm at a loss as to how to proceed. Her breeding stripes went away after she was back around Sapphyre(the original male I want her to breed with)My mother gets into town on Saturday, and we have a school thing tomorrow, so I'm just stepping back for a bit until I decide what to do. I'm hopefully going to order some worm cultures this weekend too, as I want to be prepared if I get fry when I do try again. What do you use for your little ones? I'm going to try and use a variety of things, but I really don't want to have to go the baby brine shrimp route after they are bigger if I can avoid it. It seems like too much of a hassle that I don't understand the first thing about, lol. Do you know of an acceptable alternative? I was reading that Microworms are good, but will they be enough until they are ready for non-live food? And when can you introduce the babies to regular food? I'm so bummed that I had to stop mid-breeding because she decided to fight the power, but I know I can breed Sapphyre to my other 2 females. The downfall is that my other 2 males are veil tales, so I don't have a proper backup as far as males go. And this is what I need to ponder, lol. Hoping your fry are doing great and you are still progressing with everything. : )

Great to hear from you again! Too bad you'll have to tear yourself away from your bettas, but life is life.
I wasn't happy about the female but there are others I could have lost that would have been worse... maybe that sounds cruel but it is true. At least I've learnt my lesson not naming them until I really need to refer to them, haha. It saves some attachment
Yup, two fry left from Hue x Hunan I. If it helps your feeding conundrum - I didn't feed them for two weeks because I was convinced there was nothing in the tank. They still grew. The tank is very heavily planted so it seems they can live on just aufwuchs, micro organisms and plants and dried leaves, etc. just fine as long as their numbers are very low or the tank very big. Cramming a 100 fry in 5 or 10 gallons worth of sparse planting won't do though.

I actually don't feed BBS at all. I know everyone does it but I dislike them and also find them prohibitively expense. I met a breeder a while ago that didn't use them ever and that convinced me to also go against the grain. The only reason everyone uses BBS is because they boost growth the best (as in, fry fed exclusively BBS will grow faster than those fed exclusively anything else, as far as that was scientifically tested). Other foodstuffs will make fry grow just as healthy, it just takes a fraction longer.
Personally I feed mainly microworms, you can feed those from day 1. They are also the live food that will last the longest in your tank, they stay alive for several days and so are unlikely to foul your water. Another upside to them is that they differ in size from nearly invisible to mini-sized, so fry of different sizes can pick different size prey (unlike BBS that are all the same size depending on how long after hatching you feed them). They have basically the same nutrient profile as BBS, except that they apparently make fry grow somewhat slower.
Other complementary foods I use are vinegar eels and as mentioned, the presence of a lot of live plants, dried leaves, driftwood, rocks, etc. from established tanks.
I don't do egg yolk because of water quality issues (would maybe consider it in a completely empty fry tank, but not in a planted one, too hard to clean properly without risk to the fry).
I've read of some people feeding chopped grindal worms to larger fry, but I wouldn't know where to get a starter culture unfortunately. At the point where microworms are no longer filling enough though, you can already start on pulvarised high quality commercial feeds and on frozen tubifex, and finely chopped live feeds like bloodworms, white mosquito larvae, etc.

Another option I've been trying on fry of several weeks old is live daphnia. I have a culture established in a tank with gourami fry at the moment, it is hard to see if it is working but the idea is that the adult daphnia stay at large while the miniature offspring is a live food source for fry.

As for your male veilteil conundrum... yes, that is not great. It is up to you whether you want to breed them or not. I can't speak for how hard it would be to sell veilteils where you live. I think I have an easier time selling fish to private buyers where I live, because there is a thriving online marketplace where hundreds of fish are sold and traded every day across the country. That is where I got my own bettas as well. It doesn't seem like there is an American equivalent of this, as all I've seen people recommend is aquabid, which has quite a hefty pricetag and seems to be dominated by people shipping fish intercontinentally and professionally.

 

Whelp, another day with mixed news. There appears to have been a die-off in the Kyoto x ChennaI batch overnight eerily similar to the one in the Hue x Hunan I one. It was exactly the same day after hatching (day 6), the same mortality pattern (everything dead within a few hours, a handful of survivors) and I already did indeed think the fry looked a little odd yesterday - the same sort of blotchy appearance as Hue's did. Best guess, the same protozoan infection that was in Hue's breeding tank is widespread in my tanks and simply too low key present to make any of my comfortable adults sick. That would be, at least, my best guess. The other option is cross-contamination between the two specific tanks that are next to each other on different pieces of furniture, but that must have happened a while ago... Eh. This time I did not suspect because neither ChennaI nor Kyoto showed any signs, I just checked and still nothing, neither are showing any symptoms (not even lethargy, etc.) despite the intensity of the spawning process. I'm a bit stumped.
I immediately dosed the tank with exit as I wished I had done sooner in Hue's tank. It'll be too late to save the majority but I still see a fry swimming around here or there and the tank is even more heavily planted than Hue's, which also turned out to have two survivors that I didn't spot for weeks. So I'll probably be able to save a handful of fry. Also slowly upping the temperature to 85F as it seemed to work so well for HxH I.

Just before noticing this, I released Hunan in Hue's new breeding tank and the two got busy. So now there is HxH II. It is a *huge* clump of eggs, despite the two breedings with the minimum recommended 3 weeks in between (and I didn't even condition all that intensively), there are way more eggs than HxH I and KxC. This time I'm going to leave Hue in the tank with his fry, period. He clearly has no tendency to eat his fry even under extreme circumstances and I'm hoping he'll eat any possibly dead fry and helps keep the tank cleaner, move food near his fry, etc.
After I spotted the problems in the KxC breeding tank... I just dosed the HxH II tank with exit straight away. Hue should be parasite free but the new tank wasn't disinfected and was previously home to a breeding attempt which included MuI who lives in my sorority like Chennai. Not taking any chances anymore. I should be able to do two doses before the eggs hatch, from what I've seen it is probably best to take chances with the eggs than with the newly hatched fry, assuming the egg shells should protect them from organ damage or w/e. I don't want to raise the temp on this tank because it is very shallow and opening the top already affects the temp more than my other breeding tanks, I don't want too much of a gap between the room and tank temp.

Whelp. I'm glad I saw this coming and wanted to do so many batches straight away instead of just one at a time...
Meanwhile all of my non-betta fry is just cruising along. Sigh. I even bred other anabantoids that live in the *same* community tank as the betta sorority and their fry are fine, zero problems. Maybe the two tanks were the only ones affected and I'm just unlucky with my choice of breeding tanks... I hope so. If it isn't parasites then I'm stumped on what is going on.

On the upside I've finally gotten a good luck at the two HxH I fry because they swimming closer to the front for once. They both look good and satiated, already have quite a bit of colour, round tummies and fully formed caudal and pectoral fins. Dorsal isn't really visible yet.