# Breeding info



## ChannaLover (Nov 22, 2013)

Hey Guys! Just thought ill make a thread on how to breed wolffish and bettas, with all my steps allllll from personal experience  Im open to advice!

Wolffish(Hoplias Malabaricus)
1. Quite frankly these guys arent too active so a large tank isnt too essential so for me, a 200 Gallon tank worked just good 

2. To set up your tank, give it dim lighting, about 2 inches of substrate( the finer it is the better- best is fine sand) Some driftwood to hide about or some little cave stuff 

3. I recommend getting the fish to be raised in the tank from young but putting them in together would work fine if you know they are of opposite sexes.

4. How to tell their sexes apart? well frankly, i dont have a solid point for that. All ive heard is that males are sleeker and females a tad more wider and shorter... For me what i did was based on pure luck and as some may say, a bit cruel... I placed 5 wolffish together to let them grow and real soon the largest one killed all but one and i left them... As they approached 40cm then they started spawning

5. When they spawn its usually a little pit in the substrate with maybe a 1000+ eggs or so?

6. The adults wont really bother the fry for awhile but still i feel that transferring the adults away is a good idea.

7. Do you want to keep as many as possible or end up with just 1 fry? Up to you. Either way, well fed or not they seem to cannibalise each other so if you just leave them be, there will be just 1 fat little wolffish after a month or two. if you want to keep more, hell youre gonna have to seperate them up and this would be quite painstaking and time consuming.

8. For my fry, they seemed to like taking live daphnia for their first two weeks then for the next three weeks i just left them to eat tubife worms. Eventually i got them to eat peeled small shrimp  Good thing that they arent fussy with their food so that shouldnt pose much of a problem.

9. I frankly recommend that if you are keeping many, sell them off. Even in a large pond they still do get real aggressive and kill each other when they reach a good 10' or more but below that they can stay fine together as long as there isnt too much of a size diff...

hope that helped! 

Fighting Fish( Betta Splendens)

1. IMO, you should start off with a 2x1x1 ft tank. NO SUBSTRATES( the eggs might get trapped) and well half a styrofoam cup to float about on the top should work well.Also, fill up the water level to about 3-4 inches as fighting fish fry cant swim up really well when they hatch

2. First Place the male in and in a diff tank, show him the female and you can progress further if he starts building a bubble nest even after you shut off their visual contact.

3. At first, place the female in a jar and everyday expose her in the jar into the tank for 3h a day until she starts swimming eagerly up and down or left and right  Then you can pretty much release her.

4. The male will almost definetely always chase her about so a bit of torn fins on either party is ok. But if it gets serious, of course! Remove them from contact 

5. The male will soon instead of chasing the female may be followed by the female and when the female is ready to lay eggs, she will show about two vertical stripes of the fishes colour. sometimes you may have to see it from afar or close up but if you see these bars you know everything would or should go well.

6. Finally, the female would bend her head down and the embrace will begin. The male wil wrap around the female to fertilise her eggs and seconds after about 7 eggs would drop down and the male will go down, pick em up and place them in the bubble nest. After the eggs drop out, the female would kind of freeze for awhile but thats alright. This would keep happening until the male chases the female away.

7 Remove the female, she is not needed 

8. Leave the male with the eggs and during a period of about days, dont make alot of ruckus about the tank as parent fishies like eating their fish eggs if they thin that the eggs are in danger. After the fries hatch, remove the male.

9. IMO I like feeding them with live daphnia for their first two weeks before moving them to tubifex till they are about 3 months old.

note that all the spawn can be kept together for about maybe 4+ months, just remove any males that seem hostile and go jar em up 

Hope these tips help! Open to advice  and uh excuse any spelling or grammatical errors please


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