Fry First Foods

[newfishy]

Ive been doing a lot of research on trying to spawn bettas, one topic by a particular person stated that he only feed decapsulated brine shrimp to his new born fry as a first food...moving on to crushed pellets when theyre bigger. The reasoning behind him doing that would be to only have the larger healther fry survive, then in subsquent generations the same person stated that in each spawn he often had fewer eggs and then live fry, but those live fry were larger and healther then spawns of previous generations and grew into much nicer adult fish.

so I thought Id ask, what do you feed your babies, microworms, vinager elles, brine shrimp, betta starter, for example and what do you feel your results are?

 

[blue_betta]

my first ever spawn i tried to feed, rather nievely, frozen microplankton and it was useless. what it did do however was feed the infrusia(sp?) in the tank and a few fry survived to a couple of weeks, and then i only had one survive to adulthood.

my second spawn i tried a little experiment, i kept the tank well planted and on removing the male, i introduced a live daphnia culture id been feeding on my windowsill for several weeks. then every few days id feed the tank the frozen microplankton again. the idea was that the adult daphnia were too big to eat, but tey would be well fed and churn out lots of baby daphnia for the fry to eat. it seemed to work, plus i had swarms of tiny tiny tiny creatures living and multiplying in the tank before i even started the spawn, and they seemed to provide food for the fry too. then at 4 weeks i tried them on frozen cyclops and they took to it easily. the spawn was reasonabley successful, out of 30 or so fry that hatched, 12 survived to adult hood.

my third spawn i fed microworms and this was all well and good untill i tried to wean onto powdered food and frozen cyclops and they wouldnt touch either, then i moved house and the cange in water chemistry killed off the fry.

my two most recent spawns have been fed entirely on betta starter and all seems well. ive had a couple of tething problems with it, mainly that the feeding instructions dont tell you to crush the food for the first couple of weeks, but my next spawns will go well im sure
i have vinigar eel cultures on the go, but ive never used them yet, but they are there in case i need them.

 

[5teady_2012]

My first spawn i fed mnicroworms for the first week and then went on to baby brine shrimp and then at 5 weeks started to feed them frozen daphnia and bloodworm.

2nd spawn i did microworms for 2 days then baby brine shrimp straight away, they are growing rapidly.

 

[Kaz1814]

I too fed microworms for the first week, then bbs then a bit of everything! at just under 7 weeks they eat bbs, frozen cyclops (defrosted of course) daphinia bloodworm and crushed betta pro..
They are pigs and eat anything you put in!!!