Betta fish fry food

March 7, 2021
RECIPES
Betta fry are VERY VERY VERY VERY tiny. Imagine them to be so tiny you can hardly even see them. Can you picture it? Yes? Ok. Now reduce that picture by 50% and that is how minuscule they are. Obviously they cannot eat the food you feed your large adults. It’s like trying to fit square pegs into round holes: It just does not work. Get it? OK.

Fry do not eat flakes or dry foods. They will not even look at it. They will more than likely starve to death, or choke on it, or die from bacterial disease. Why bacterial disease? Because all this inadequate food you are dumping in the tank is not being eaten and it is rotting, causing bacterial blooms, raising your ammonia and nitrites levels and stressing the fragile fry.

Fry need live foods. Live food is the only food that will provide the fry with the nutrition they so badly need at this stage of their lives.

And not ANY live food: It has to be a live food that is as minuscule as the fry themselves. So forget your brown worms, they are useless to you right now.

Minuscule live food cannot be purchased ready to use. It cannot be found at pet stores or even at the best fish stores. Live brine shrimp sold at fish stores are for adult fish only and are 10 times bigger than the fry!!! Unsuitable. You will have to generate your own minuscule live food.

Fry need to eat constantly. If you run out of live food, you are TOAST! So planning could save your @##^*. (or your fry‘s, which ever way you want to look at it) :)

The proper foods are: There are a few options, but I’ll stick to the easier and best ones: Microworms (my all time favorite), newly hatched baby brine shrimp (great too but with moderation) and vinegar eels (great as a back up). If you want to get cultures and would like to support this site, you can get your cultures or brine shrimp eggs from me. See the betta supply section.
Infusoria. Some breeders feed infusoria to their fries, but I have stayed away from it. It is easy to mess things up with infusoria since infusoria is a bloom of microorganisms that occurs when an organic matter rots in water. So to start an infusoria culture, you need to let a rabbit food pellet or a lettuce leaf rot in some still water. When water is cloudy, then the infusoria has bloomed. Or is it the bacteria? See, that is the problem, you never know, and might feed your fry putrid water filled with bacteria, thinking it is infusoria… I decided to pass. I have never used infusoria, and as you can tell by seeing the photos of some of the beautiful bettas that my fishroom has produced, I have done quite well without it. I have raise all my many spawns on microworms mainly, with some baby brine shrimp. And they do GREAT.

Plan ahead!!! If you are going to spawn your bettas, the goal (I guess?) is to get some offsprings out of the ordeal. So why not do a little homework ahead of time and be prepared? Setting up a brine shrimp hatchery or starting your own microworm culture will take some time. Brine shrimp may take up to 48 hrs to hatch once set-up. A microworm culture will take about 7 days to bloom after you have initially set it up. That is 7 days without food. Thereafter it will produce enough to harvest daily or twice a day :)). So as you can see, you will need to be prepared, to have your brine shrimp hatchery and your microworm culture set-up ahead of time, even before actually putting your breeding betta pair together to spawn.

Source: www.bettatalk.com
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