So Much For The Off-Season

Last weekend, I think, I setup two spawns after nearly ten days of conditioning my pairs.

• Gold HMPK pair

 

Female

 

The egg-eater Male

• F1 of the CTPK line Green II

 

He's marbled a little since this photo with a lot more black now showing in his fins

 

She's not changes at all

I think I might have to come up with some names for my lines....

Anyway, as reported on my last post, the gold male ate his eggs. The green pair just didn't seem interested. Truth be told, I'm a little more blasé about the actual spawning process now-a-days. I condition, I introduce, and then I let them be once I think they've shown enough interest in each other.

So, every time I looked in on the green pair, she was on one side of the tank, he was on the other. Occasionally he'd go over and try to encourage her back to his pitiful nest. At no time did I see her acting submissive or hiding, and at no time did I see him trying to warn her away from the nest.

I checked the nest for three days, and saw nothing to indicate success, and the behaviour of the pair hadn't changed, so I called it a failure, fished the girl out, and went about my business a little disheartened. It was here I decided a I needed a break and implemented an off-season.

Today I thought it was past time I did a little tank maintenance, so I started doing some cleaning and water changes. Last on my list was the failed spawn tank, which the male was still in.

I began siphoning, and something moved, so I moved the siphon over to get it, and it moved again. I thought it was the biggest infusoria I'd ever seen, or maybe I's begun cultivating larger single cell organisms - I had been pretty slack in cleaning this tank up. There was hubris all over the bottom, I'd been feeding the male pellets each night, and I'd not done a clean since I'd removed the female.

I got up closer to the tank with my magnifying specs on...and there was fry in there....quite a few...

The tank has now been very carefully siphoned, new water, and BBS added.

These guys are very active, but a little on the small side, but then I have no idea when they were actually hatched. If they are a week old, then they're not so small, if closing in on two weeks, then maybe a touch behind where they should be. Plenty of BBS in there now though so they should catch up fairly quick.

I now have a spawn of Black Orchid F2's in the grow out, and now this Green F2 in the spawn tank...the early morning feeds continue then for the foreseeable future :(

Isn't Mother Nature grand...

It's The Off Season

Weather in Adelaide is getting a bit on the cold side of late, and hampering not only BBS hatching times, and the ability to keep a female in a separate tank during the introduction period, but also my ability to bend as well as I need to...and the fact that my gold HMPK pair spawned and then the male ate all the eggs...has led me to require an off season.

So, no more spawns for the time being. I'm thinking nothing till late September, when the weather should be well and truly warming up, maybe not even till October if need be.

Yes, it will slow down all the breeding programs I've got on the go, and all the lines waiting to be done, but so be it. I need some down time as well. I've been at this, flat chat, for a little over a year, so before I just burn out, I think a rest will do me good.

I'm not going away. I'm not packing it in. Just pressing pause on the spawns for a month or two.

I'm thinking June through to the end of August will work nicely for me as a break from now on...actually, I'm quite looking forward to sleeping in occasionally instead of getting up everyday to feed fry...and, as I wont be running so many tanks, there should be a drop in the electricity bill :)

This is not the end of posting on this blog during this time either. I'm expecting a new arrival soon, and then I'll post some pics of what is currently in the fish room, plans for the next 9 months once the on-season returns :)

It's All About The Numbers

Since I gave away my first two spawns of F1 CTPK, I've had a rethink on a number of fronts.

I'll not be giving away anymore fish, unless it's in special circumstances. I'll be happy to trade or to have them purchased from me, but I don't think I'll be actively offering them up for sale in the short term. If you're after something specific, I'm happy to take requests and if I can help, I'd be happy to sell/trade to you the specimen(s) in question.

When I start creating good quality CTPK, then I will start actively offering them for sale...and that's still a long way away.

Next number I figured out the other day...while I was doing a water change on an F2 spawn...a 1 in 8 chance...that is the possibility in getting a male F2 CTPK out of a spawn.

The long fin trait is dominant over the short fin trait, so we can work a simple punnet square to work out the approximate chances of getting plakats (sf) back from a F1 sibling pair.

Long Fin (Lf)
Short Fin (sf)

Fish from a cross of a long fin CT and a short fin HM = F1 spawn carrying both LF and SF genes. Crossing a sibling pair from this F1 spawn gives us Lfsf x Lfsf:

  x       Lf        sf
Lf     LfLf    Lfsf
sf      Lfsf     sfsf

25% (or 1 in 4) LfLf = Long fin
50% (or 1 in 2) Lfsf = long or mid-fin
25% (or 1 in 4) sfsf = short fin - these are the plakats we're after for the CTPK line.

Of course, we need a male and a female, so we have a 25% chance of getting a short fin, but then there's a 50/50 chance that it is either male or female (at least until someone figures out what is behind male or female heavy spawns).

So things fit nicely into all these number games, we then say that the 50/50 chance will play out evenly in the long run, resulting in every second short fin being of the opposite sex. Naturally, this is where Mother Nature steps in and laughs at our carefully prepared punnet squares and throws up female heavy spawns, or only female short fins, or the opposite with male heavy spawns or only male plakats.

Maths isn't a particularly strong point of mine, and genetic punnet squares are not as simple as the one I've depicted above. There is the background of the fish, the environment, the preparation, then there's the caring for the fry - cant say I know many people who have never lost a fry during the 3-8 months it takes to get them to maturity! What if the only fry lost are the short fins...or maybe only the male short fins? What if you only get a small spawn of 10-15 fry? You need 16 to better your chances of getting two short fin fish, let alone the astronomical odds of those two being a perfect breeding pair.

This is where time and patience come into play. Creating a CTPK line from scratch (HMPK x long fin CT) is difficult. You may have to spawn the same pair a couple of times, or cross an offspring back to a parent, or cross over to another line, or introduce another HMPK to increase the odds of getting short fin at the cost of webbing reduction. Lots of options, but what's right for the situation your line is in?

And what do you do with all these less than ideal fish you're producing looking for the elusive plakats with some form of webbing reduction? If you sell all of them off into the Betta community then you'll recover some of your costs...but what happens when you finally get to the quality CTPK specimens you've always been after....everyone else already has their/your previous spawns building up to the arrival of your quality fish....who will want, or have the room, for your newly discovered fish-par-excellence? Pet shops will only give you so much for them, and usually it's only in store credit.

So, I've come to the conclusion I'm not doing it anymore - selling (or giving away) less than quality fish, I mean. Like I said before, if you want something, then feel free to ask - if I can help I will, but I'll not advertise another fish for sale until I have some quality fish to sell...which should be right about the time I'm ready to show!

Now I need to experiment and find the best way to make home-made Oil of Cloves...