I'm sorry if there's already a post about this somewhere, but I didn't see one and I thought this might be a very informative topic to cover. Different tail types have different amounts of rays. VT's, usually have two, as do CT's (though sometimes they can have more - up to 4 or 8 sometimes). HM's can have up to 8 (and have even been know to have as many as 12 ), but usually have 4 or 6 (though a HM with only 4 - 6 rays would most likely be classified as a delta or super delta). PK's generally have two (traditional PK's) and HMPK can again have 4-8. When you look for rays, they always start off at the base of the fin as one big ray, then branch off about 1/4 to halfway down the main ray. It's the branching you want to count. It can be tricky to see sometimes.

Here's a pictures taken off of aquabid to show you what I'm talking about, lol.





I drew in the rays to make it clearer. In example #1 you can see the clearly defined 4 rays. But in example #2 you can see where the rays spliting off and there's actually a 5th ray, bettas rays comes in two's so when this fish is finished maturing there's a good chance that he'll have 6 rays. You measure your bettas fins by the highest ray-count. So it could have a few rays with 4, and a few with two, but would still be classified as a 4-ray.

I hope that this was informative, and like I said I'm sorry if theres already something like this on here, I couldn't find anything

This post has been edited by Jaded12: Feb 10 2007, 02:43 AM

hrmmm, neat. can this tell you if the betta is pure though? does this work on females too?

Yupp its the same for females What do you mean by pure?

like 100% plakat, or 100% veil. kinda hard to tell for females

The only time to know for sure what your fish's back round is is to buy from a reputable breeder. Store bought fish can have any number of other tail types in their history, which when bred will show up in places you don't want them. Kinda annoying, considering I have 2 PK's from wal-mart but can't verify they are full PK.