Fry Foods
I think people freak out a little bit about what to feed their fry. I decided to go the simplest way possible - put some live plants or spawn mops into the spawning tank for early introduction of infusoria. Th the bubblenest itself harbors lots of microorganisms for the fry. Lastly, I add some cultured Paramecium aurelia (the smallest one) to the tanks.
When the fry are free-swimming, I start feeding SMALL amounts of freshly hatched baby brine shrimp (BBS). I used to use Brine Shrimp Direct's super simple dish hobby hatchery (http://www.brineshrimpdirect.com/c213/Hatchery-Dish-p183.html). No annoying airstones, just put in the salt water and the eggs in the outer chamber and you have BBS in the easy-to-collect strainer within 24 hours. Love them! Now I use a medium (1 liter) BBS hatchery from Jehmco (http://www.jehmco.com/html/brine_shrimp_hatcheries.html). It's very easy to use and yields quite a bit more BBS (as you can see in the video).
NOTE: I almost never feed microworms. I once had a spawn with no ventrals (probably largely due to my reliance on microworms) and it sucked. Never again!
NOTE: I almost never feed microworms. I once had a spawn with no ventrals (probably largely due to my reliance on microworms) and it sucked. Never again!
Once the fry are large enough to start tackling slightly larger food (around 3-5 weeks), I offer them grindal worms. There are lots of ways to maintain grindal worms, and about a million pages on the internet on how to do it, so I suggest googling it and see what is best for you. I use coir fibre (a subtrate from coconut husks), making sure that it does not have any added fertilizer. I add some worms from an established culture and feed them only a few bits of cat food until they get going.
As you can see in the video below, I use a pipette to wash the grindal worms into the cup of water. Then I swirl the worms so that the heaviest ones collect in the middle while the smallest ones are left out in the periphery. I can then harvest based on size for whatever sized fish I need to feed.
After the about the 6 week mark, and your baby bettas are starting to look like ACTUAL bettas, I start to introduce dry foods. I love feeding them big blocks of tubifex worms suctioned to the side of the tank wall - what a riot! My other favorites are the Golden Pearls in various sizes (available in the IBC store), New Life Spectrum "Grow" pellets (http://nlsfishfood.com/), and a couple of foods that my European friends swear by (Dr. Bassleer's Biofish Food, and a "secret" 60% protein mix, etc). I am the queen of variety and try to do a bit of everything. Usually at this age, the bettas are snarfing everything down like crazy. Once they reach this stage, I move them out of the 10 gallon spawning tanks and into the larger, planted grow out tanks.
