Tank ShotsCleaned the glass and did maintenance on some of my tanks, so thought I would get a couple of photos while they were still looking decent. Substrate is peat moss, and the leaf litter is made up of oak leaves and indian almond leaves. Both tanks are filtered by sponge filters and have hollow logs for the fish to hide in, as well as smaller pieces of manzanita to make it look more natural. The plant is hydrilla verticillata. I use it to help with the water quality between water changes and to provide cover for fish, particularly the young ones. Top tank houses my group of B. rutilans 'green' while the bottom tank houses my family of B. uberis.
I change out 10L of water once every three days, and keep the temperature at around 26-27 degrees. I usually only add new leaves as the older leaf litter starts to break down. Sex RatiosI have a lot of issues with getting balanced sex ratios in my spawns. They tend to be very male heavy, which means I often have only a limited pool of females to draw on. Sometimes it seems that I am fortunate if I get any females at all. Wild bettas are only just starting to become more popular in Australia. However, as most hobbyists want a male/female pair to use for future breeding, I think it's going to be difficult to offload a large number of males to anywhere but my local fish store. My B. persephone spawn yielded only 6-7 females from at least 25 individuals. My B. uberis pair seem to have two female juveniles out of a total of five that I have seen, but they also have another 20 odd fry that cannot yet be correctly sexed. Currently my wild-caught B. burdigala pair have given me the worst results. I seem to have perhaps one female that I can find out of at least 20 individuals, and as this is still only a juvenile, I cannot be one-hundred percent certain. Fortunately, I have a confirmed female sub-adult and a possible three more females from my captive bred burdigala pair to make up for it. I just hope I am correct in my assumptions and they do not turn out to be late sprouters! I am starting to think that the temperature of my tanks is what is giving me so many more males. The coccina group of species, do not require excessively high temperatures, and yet I noticed that a lot of my tanks sit in the 27 °C range, which is equivalent to around 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
I am starting to think that this is much too hot. The tank housing my captive bred B. burdigala pair has the coolest water temperature out of all my tanks. They have also given me what appears to be the largest number of females. Therefore, when I do an overhaul of my tanks over the next week or so, I am going to be turning the temperature down to around 23-24 °C to see if this doesn't have an impact on ratios in future spawns. Betta palangkaraya officially describedIt seems that B. palangkaraya/sengalang has now officially been named and described as B. hendra, a member of the coccina complex group.
Betta hendra is named for its discoverer Hendra Tommy and has also been traded as B. sp. ‘Sebangua’ in the past. Its colour pattern looks similar to that possessed by members of the B. foerschi group of species but its breeding strategy, adult size and behaviour mean its actually included in the B. coccina group. (SeriouslyFish.com) |
AuthorLocated in Melbourne, Australia, I currently keep and breed a number of species from the coccina complex. Archives
November 2017
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