Copper Alien Betta Breeding Journal

[Daedalus]

Unexpected surprise! I fill up an year old 3 gallon water bottle that used to have daphnia in it to raise Scuds outdoors. The crashed culture of daphnia laid eggs and they hatched! This bottle was just tucked away in a corner and not looked after at all. Life is amazing. I added moina that I received today to this so it's a tri culture now, scud daphnia and moina. It will serve as my back up if things go bad

II made a fish stick toy to play with my bettas. It's a clay fish on a chop stick.

 

My paramecium culture is still going strong. Zero inputs, no lights no heat no feed, just duckweed.

Some lizards are living in my tiny patio

Edited April 2, 2021 by Daedalus

[Daedalus]

My babies are finally coloring up!

 

[Daedalus]

More babies. Royal blue female x Copper male. I want to suss out the genetics of the royal blue, I should be able to tell if she's heterozygous or not from the babies. There seems to be at least 50 eggs there. Im starting to like these small alien spawns because I'm not a mass producer and don't like culling unless it's necessary

 

 

And my little lizard buddy is back. He got bigger and changed colors

Edited April 21, 2021 by Daedalus

[timQ]

For the Daphnia culture. Did you just fill a water bottle and add some plants. Put it in the sun and let them do their thing?

[Daedalus]

To hatch the dormant eggs yeah that's pretty much what I did. Bit to keep the culture going you need to feed with greenwater or yeast. You also need to harvest often or the culture will overgrow and then crash

[Daedalus]

The spawn hatched in 24 hours, this is insane! It usually takes 2-3 days. I have the temps cranked up to 83 degrees.

Here you can see the advantage of the cave, all he has to do is swim an inch up or down to collect and deposit the eggs back into the nest. It'll save his energy since he won't be eating for a few days and will be up all night taking care of his babies. 

 

[Daedalus]

Baby female and baby male

[Daedalus]

Copper alien x Silver marble? I will try.

Edited April 30, 2021 by Daedalus

[Daedalus]

Update on the fry. I'm separating and grading them right now.

[Daedalus]

I think I might be in trouble with my latest spawn. There's about a hundred babies that hatched😅 silver marble male x galaxy koi female

[Daedalus]

Another spawn

I've got my goal of 4 spawns for this year. I'm gonna keep it going and see how much I can handle. I've been lucky with small spawns, if each were 100+ I would not be close to 4. This one looks to be a small spawn too, I've only had one that was +100 babies so far.

[Daedalus]

Got a mutation in my copper spawn that is white base on top of copper scales making a very light copper alien. This is going to make my goal of creating the first Gold Alien easier(hopefully). I'm protecting this guy with my life lol

[Daedalus]

Babies fat with liquid gold bbs. The water is cloudy with paramecium and scud babies. I'm trying to work out a system where live food is present at all times to mimic nature but I've had some problems with water parameters. Massive micro bioload will crash your whole system as fast as over stocking a fish tank. I'm trying to find the balance. Duckweed has been a huge help in my experiments. Scuds are excellent as a clean up crew if some fry die. Coop test strips have been a blessing in these experiments, quick fast results whenever I make any changes.

Sometimes just taking out some duckweed will cause things to spike. It's pretty crazy how small changes can have such an effect on the tank

Edited July 22, 2021 by Daedalus

[Daedalus]

My brass boy + Murphy in the background

Edited July 28, 2021 by Daedalus

[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.