|
|
||||||||||||||||
| . | Do you find this site helpful? Fruit Flies More about: Why Live Foods
© 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009, J.Atchison |
BETTAS Live Food Recommendations Live Foods Some breeders start their new fry out on newly hatched brine shrimp as soon as the fry are free swimming. Some of the fry will not be able to eat the baby brine shrimp and the fry will starve to death. Only the larger fry will survive. This is one way to cull the fry in a quantity vs quality decision. When we first started to notice the rather dramatic
difference in the size of even the new fry and decided that we wanted to address that
issue to insure a higher rate of survival. We have found that the addition the java moss
and suplimental feeding (or primary feeding) with vinegar eels has made a substantial
difference in the survival rates. This allows us to "play God" and cull fish to
suit the goal we have set for the spawn rather than let nature take a course with less
control on our part. Prepared Foods We feed our Bettas a diet which relies primarily on a live food regimen in preparing them for spawning. During this time they will see Grindal worms, whiteworms, frozen bloodworms and mosquito larvae when in season. Fruitflies are a great food that is often over looked. During the conditioning period, flies can give results very similar to mosquitoe larvae. They will continue to see some prepared foods, but the amount of protien and lipids in most of the commercial food is insuffient for superlative spawns...both from a qualitative and a quantitative prespective. We like to use two sizes of heaters when working with our Bettas. We use a Visitherm 100 watt heater in our 10 gallon tanks and a Visatherm 200 watt heater in our 20 gallon tanks. Because all of our heaters are used for the same purpose, they are usually removed from the tank and hung up for storage. When we set up a new tank, depending on it's size we use either the 100 or the 200 size. For spawning tanks and in that same tank until the fry are moved into 20 gallon tanks we use "Dirt Magnet Junior" sponge filters. They are a high quality filter and last what seems like "forever." When the fish are moved into 20H tanks at about 1 month of age, we filter those tanks with "Dirt Magnet IV" sponge filters for the same reasons as the Junior version...high quality and long lasting. In drum bowls, when an adult breeder is being conditioned for spawning, we like to use the Junior version also. It's round design fits neatly into the round base of the drum bowl. The water that comes into the tap of the hatchery is 110-120 ppm of total dissolved solids (TDS), and has a pH of 7.5...but has chloramine. We treat the chloramine with Amquel by Kordon. Amquel neutralizes the chloramine (and will take care of chlorine also)...but it also takes care of the resulting ammonia from the breakdown of chloramine...a naturally occurring chemical combination by-the-way. Some chlorine treatment products do not address the issue of the resulting ammonia. We don't use any other chemicals to treat our water. Bettas will tolerate a fairly wide range of pH reading from 7.0 to about 8...preferring 7.0 to 7.5. They will also tolerate a pretty wide range of TDS readings from 85 to 250. They will NOT however do too well with changing water qualities. Consistency is important with Bettas...temperature included. We resist the temptation of the playing with our chemistry set and work at minimal treatment in a consistant protocol. This is one area where experience is helpful...a background in triage is also helpful. Some diseases just can't seem to be eliminated. The best remedy occurs long before the fish might "catch" something...good water qualities...good diet...clean environment...all these things are better than chemical solutions. You will probably hear or read a lot about stressing the fish. Keep in mind that when "stress" is spoken about in the fish world it is correctly used when referring to biological stress and not as proper when speaking about mental stress. The biological stress problems are well documented...the phycological ones are not. Stuff happens and chemicals are sometimes the only hope. We use MarOxy to help combat the fuzzy fungus of fin damage on post spawning battles. We like Clout to take care of hydra outbreaks...which seem to come into tanks from the mosquito collecting. Clout is not a good product to use in fry tanks. It's powerful, the fry are fragile. When our Bettas look "sad" and are listless, we use BettaMax as a preventative or first strike for fungal treatment. We're not sure but it might be that when the fish see us holding a medicine bottle and eyedropper in hand they perk up so that we don't have the opportunity to "play doctor" with them...they don't like it. Honestly, if one watches the water quality, uses a variety of foods and monitors the water temperature, nearly all illnesses will be eliminated. Shipping Depending on the temperatures and the time of year. We add a high quality heat pak to the inside of the lid of the shipping box. We like to use heat paks rated at 40 hours even though we ship fish using overnight services. We like the added insurance the few extra hours of heat paks life gives us. All of our fish are packed using double bagging techniques. We use 1.5 mil poly bags as the 1.5 is dense enough to keep the water in and porous enough to let some gas exchange occur. We like to use 3 inch wide bags with Bettas and use bags long enough to be able to tie a knot in the bag rather than having to use a rubber band. Knots don't break. We like to use bags 15 inches long or longer...shorter ones are slightly cheaper but much harder to knot. Our preferred bag for shipping Bettas is 3 x 15 x 1.5 mil. Bag Buddies are a pretty cool product. They more or less duplicate the ammonia breakdown properties of the Stress Coat, but when we ship fish, we don't like to take too many chances...so Bag Buddies are added to each bag. "We grow food not bait"
|
|
|||||||||||||
