Dad is taking great care of the fry. Crossing my fingers for lots of quality CTDTs and CTdts from this spawn!
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Seascapes in Mountain View, CA is a REALLY cool store. You know it's going to be good when you walk in and are immediately greeted by a ravenous, enormous, and gregarious giant gourami!
Diana is a wonderful supporter of us crazy bettaholics. (Or should I say, enabler?) She owns and operates a great exotics pet store in downtown San Jose, and we congratulate her for renewing her lease for her second year in business! Big steps forward! Her store stocks not only healthy and beautiful reptiles, fish, and a lot of other exotic pets (quails, cockatiels, you name it!) she also stocks some kinda rare stuff for fish keepers, like kanaplex and methylene blue, which are great for when you bettas run into bacterial trouble or to keep fungus at bay while artificially hatching eggs. She also carries repashy, which is a great gel-based food that I love to use so that my fry are snacking on it all day. I had a great time this last weekend hanging out with Larissa in San Jose! Lots of breeding projects and fishy plans! :) I was able to bust out my camera and get some good shots (although I need to get a LOT better...) Betta channoides!! Larissa has a bunch of Betta channoides of somewhat dubious sex sometimes. They can be very difficult to sex when you have females mixed in with dominant and subordinate males! Finally, after 5 days of patiently waiting... This slide show can now be found in the Planned CTDT Spawn section. I usually don't give a spawn a date until the fry are free-swimming to ensure their survival.
Who knows what determines sex in bettas? A pair of researchers try to figure it out. Edit: I will be getting smaragdina males in soon, so I will have trios and pairs available!! I was finally able to take some pictures of my Elassoma! These guys are so shy that I had to use a telephoto lens with macro to be able to photograph them from across the room! They are fine when I sit still and watch them eat or display...but they were NOT ok with the camera lol, even if I set it right by their tank for several hours. These photos can now be found in the Elassoma section.
Finding insulated boxes for shipping bettas Sometimes finding insulated shipping containers for shipping fish can be really hard. I tend to ship out a lot more fish than I receive, so I'm always running low. You need a box that is insulated with preferably an inch of styrofoam to protect from rapid temperature changes, and then there has to be a sturdy cardboard box on the outside to protect the inner box from damage. Luckily, I work in a research lab that gets a lot of reagents shipped in these boxes!
Occasionally my lab's supply dries up, so I go journeying to surrounding labs to find them. People are surprisingly helpful when you describe what you are looking for. I managed to run into a tissue & organ laboratory that receives a lot of their samples in these perfectly sized containers! They have a strong, molded styrofoam that fits perfectly within a sturdy cardboard box. I think I'm ready for the show season! Cuckatoo cichlid bandit! I have a pair of cuckatoo cichlids that live with my older bettas in a planted 30 gallon tank. They seem to respect each other really well. I don't know if this is common to other cuckatoo cichlids, but I really love them! The bettas actually are so pushy that I worry about the cichlids eating enough.
The male cichlid is especially gentle, so for a while I was trying to feed him individually. However, the baby bettas caught on quickly and would steal his food right out from under his nose! However, he has become a little wiser, and usually steals the ENTIRE BLOCK of tubifex. It's hilarious because he likes to chew his food thoroughly before swallowing it...so it usually takes him a while LOL. |
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