Red HM x Red DT CT

This was an on again, off again spawn which I kinda gave up on. I never intended to work with reds but I saw this beautiful red halfmoon male and I just had to have him. My first attempt at spawning him was with a gorgeous red HM female. I set the spawning tank up, placed the female in a chimney and returned the next morning to find her dead. I then had a couple of attempts with the red doubletail crowntail female who eventually became the mother of this spawn. She became so badly battered during their unsuccessful courtship that I had to allow her to rest. While she rested I tried a red veiltail female which also failed. But the rest seemed to do the red DTCT some good and on the sixth spawning attempt the male finally spawned with the red DTCT. It wasn’t my intended pairing. I would have liked to have used a HM female. I had previously done a plakat to crowntail pairing and really didn’t want to bring crowntail into another non-CT line. But she was the only red female I had so that’s what I used. There were only a small number of eggs and there seemed to be hardly enough fry to worry about. I dutifully added food to the tank for a while but I could only ever find one or two fry among the plants. After a month I gave up on the fry and was in the process of cleaning out the tank when lo and behold, 6 little bettas revealed themselves. Click here to go to the AusAqua log.

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This was my first successful spawn after I returned to the hobby from an absence of about 9 years. Unfortunately I was new to fish photography at the time and didn’t get good pictures of either parent. The metallic royal blue plakat male was from St Kilda Aquarium and the turquoise crowntail female was from a chain pet store at Chadstone Shopping Centre.

I didn't have a defined goal in mind. I just spawned the best fish I could find at the time. The resulting fry were mostly royal blue and green plus a few marbles and black lace. Apart from a few exceptions there was a great deal of red wash. There were varying degrees of webbing reduction in the offspring. Mostly in the caudal fin although some individuals did have fringing in the other fins.

Had I been more dilligent I would have used the offspring to work on a crowntail plakat. But when I worked on the punnet square and determined that only a very small percentage of the following generation would carry both traits, I lost enthusiasm for the project. It would have been quite difficult to differentiate them from their siblings that didn't carry both traits. So I would have had to do several sibling spawns in the hope of getting to the CTPK goal. It's a project for some time in the future, perhaps.

Click here to read the full spawn log thread at the AusAqua forum.