Reply To: Bad luck with pairing bettas?

[Brittany T]

#34936

Thanks for the reply!
Yes, I do give them frozen foods as part of their conditioning. Bloodworms and brine shrimp seem to be the only ones I can find in my area. Haven’t seen frozen daphnia but I’ll keep an eye out or see about ordering through my LFS.

I sometimes keep pairs I’m wanting to try together in a divided tank for a while beforehand. Figured they would be getting each other’s hormones in the water? I do see a response in the females for sure. I haven’t tried putting them together for short runs though, that is something I can do next time.
I do put Indian almond leaf in the tank so it usually gets to a light-medium tea color, and keeping spawning tanks covered is standard procedure for me because I have curious cats who will otherwise sit on top of the tanks and try to bop the fish through the glass.

I did have success recently, with a pair of petstore royal blue VTs I bought in a fit of rage, to experiment with to see if I could pinpoint what’s going on.
They pretty much took one look at each other and boom! Babies. ARGH! In an ironic twist of fate, we had tornadoes blow through my town last week, which knocked out power for a day right as a cold front moved in, so the temp in my house dropped well below what week-old fry can tolerate and I ended up losing all but 2-3 of them. DOUBLE ARGH