It is important to establish procedures or protocols when you are going to be breeding your Bettas. If you have procedures you follow you can take some of the guess-work out of the process, placing more emphasis on solving any potential challenges rather than floundering in the hocus pocus of myths.

"I breed Bettas" is actually not a good technical term. One does not actually breed the fish (they do that on their own). As a "breeder" you are really facilitating their activity. Your primary role is in creating an environment that makes the fish comfortable enough to spawn and then to successfully rear the fry to the point of parental separation. It sounds a little clinical when you discuss the events in these sorts of terms, but when you approach the event in a matter-of-fact manner, you will probably improve the chances of success.

Before we decide to set up a pair in a spawning tank, we ask ourselves a couple of questions.

1. What are we trying to accomplish
2. Why are we trying to accomplish "it"

Once we have satisfied that our answers to the first two questions are answered, we ask ourselves a few more.

1. Do we have room to support the resulting fry
2. Do we have the energy to take care of the fry
3. Do we have a channel to "get rid of" the fry

Deciding that we have the room, the energy (time) and the channels to move the fry into new homes, we set up a pair that has the reasonable chance of taking us in the direction of the first two questions.

We look for a couple of things when selecting pairs for spawning. We like vigorous fish. We like fish that are excited about eating, a neighboring fish and of course flare at fish from the opposite sex. All of the obvious signs of a healthy fish should be present in the potential spawners such as brightness, alertness, deportment and no lesions, fungus or infections. We also consider the genes that the fish should be carrying and how the two parental fish might effect the resulting fry. With respect to the genes we look at qualities in a particular order.

• We look for finnage first
• We look for lack of flaws in color and pattern
• We look at color

Once the goals have been established and the fish have been selected we set up a tank for spawning. When the tank has been set up, we make sure that some critical criteria are satisfied and then we introduce the pair to the tank.

We are careful to use the same procedure with each spawning attempt. The method we use rarely fails. When the attempt is less successful than we anticipated, we can look back at the attempt and either change the procedure to address new discoveries or we can sometimes find that we have deviated from our protocols and procedures and that those deviations have had negative impacts on the result.

Good notes help.