ImaginaryNumber

Hi Daedalus, congrats on the copper spawn! I wonder if you have crossed to the blue female yet? If so what were the results? It wasn't clear from your post whether your blue female is a regular betta splendens or a royal-blue alien female. If she is an alien, I think the charts from BettaTerritory are not fully applicable. The aliens don't come with the 'nm +' combination, they all have '++', and the color mixes come out a bit different than for betta splendens at least within the original three alien colours green, royal-blue, and steel-blue. I've found nowhere how the copper color behaves with the three blues. I'm quite interested because I have a new copper alien male but the female was DOA, so I can breed him only with the alien females I already have, and I only have the original colours. If your blue female is not an alien, fecundity when crossing to an alien is very low. Alien spawns already end up small due to many eggs not hatching (not a fertilisation issue, it's genetic compatibility issue usually related to the female - female aliens range from infertile to somewhat-fertile) and many fry dying before 2 week old (again, genetic compatibility issue). Crossing to a splendens only results in offspring if you are quite lucky. I got offspring from a blue alien male crossed to a metallic blue/red fin splendens female (female solid-coloured non-marble offspring from koi or nemo spawn, fry turned out beautiful), but my friend has had no success at all crossing alien to splendens. Most of my F1's are infertile. After trying many different pairings (F1xF1, F1xalien) with at most 2 fry surviving (usually none though) I had luck crossing an F1 male back to a fertile alien female (~20 fry), and found an F1 female fertile with her brothers (60 fry) though barely fertile with an alien male, ~0-5 fry. Anyway I'd be interested to learn your experience especially if you crossed copper and royal-blue aliens, though my current plan is to cross a steel-blue female to my lone copper male.