General Discussion

[img]https://i.imgur.com/BicKYB4.png[/img] [i]This photo is not mine, just a good example I found of a marble betta[/i] I have discovered I adore them so much. I've heard most breeders don't want them due to the unpredictable-ness of their colours, but I think I'd love to breed a line of marble bettas. I love not knowing what I'm going to get! I don't have any before photos of this guy, Bruce, but this was my first marble betta. He used to be almost entirely white with bits of purple and red. But as he aged, his colours spread and changed. It still hurts me that he died - he was so gorgeous, he was my first betta (I bought him at the same time as another betta, but he was the one I saw first). Rest in peace, Bruce. [img]https://i.imgur.com/Mefv70g.jpg[/img] This guy, Duke, was a surprise marble. By this, I mean he stayed his original colour for well over a year. Then he started to change. The process can be seen [url=https://imgur.com/a/RCjsX]here[/url] (starting partway through the change), but here's the before and after. Sadly, this boy died a few days ago. I was never able to fix his tail either - I think it was left mangled for too long, and stayed looking messy. [img]https://pre00.deviantart.net/c1a3/th/pre/f/2016/135/e/8/duke__the_survivor__by_thesolitaryfeline-da2dwd7.jpg[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/RTuesWg.jpg[/img] This little guy, my cute Thunder, is a marble betta as well, just his transition wasn't so dramatic. He's still young though, so he might change again one day. He was a lot more like Bruce in his colour change - rather than drastically changing, like Duke, he slowly developed more of the colour he already had. [img]https://i.imgur.com/1GTpyqf.jpg[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/xx7Py3p.jpg[/img] This girl, Bastet, is the next betta I knew was a marble. I don't have any photos of her from the day I bought her, but just picture her with more white. And I apologize that her "after" photo is her with an injury - she got an injury on her tail, and by the time I noticed it there was a bacterial infection, and now she has dropsy. As soon as I have the stuff I need, she will be humanely euthanized. As you can see, she developed a lot of black! [img]https://i.imgur.com/XTAl1rN.jpg[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/n9U8QYL.jpg[/img] And, last but not least, Hathor! I had no clue she would be a marble betta, and a dragonscale at that! You can see how her blue slowly took over her white, and how the rest of her has darkened. Good lord do I love marble bettas. [img]https://i.imgur.com/XQvu8mQ.jpg[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/LzAkCsZ.jpg[/img] [img]https://i.imgur.com/FRu5z9k.jpg[/img] I just needed to gush about marble bettas. Anyone ever have marble bettas? Never knew about marble bettas? I would love to see and chat about bettas in general, marbles or not! Here's a little thing about marbling in bettas, taken from Reddit: [i]"Marbling bettas can change color over time. This is not the typical coloring up (with age, or after getting in better environment), but a drastic change in color. A white betta with a tiny blue spot can slowly turn blue, and vice versa. Meaning that the gorgeous koi betta boy you bought on impulse can slowly turn into a regular bicolor betta. The change in color is caused by genetic transposable elements, genes that can move from location to another on a chromosome (massive strings of DNA, you all had biology right?). Because of the random nature of this jumping gene, it can occasionally interfere with the expression of the genes it decided to visit (like when you randomly add letters to a word, it can change meaning, or become meaningless). When this happens to the genes responsible for color pigments, random bits on the betta can change color."[/i] Some examples I've found of marble bettas: https://imgur.com/a/szNsg https://i.redd.it/is1ptse2r4kz.jpg http://www.bettysplendens.com/the-ever-changing-marble.html https://nippyfish.net/2009/06/11/marble-betta-fish-color-changing-genes/ http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tuxFCYdGIk8/TrDzoYdozSI/AAAAAAAAAEM/GMUG0xcDVYE/s1600/combo4.jpg

A lot of bettas, if not most, do this. Is there more information from the betta breeding community?

*goes off to look up some things*

Huh. I used to keep female bettas in my community fish tank before a rampaging disease killed the entire tank in about two weeks (a few fish lasted longer than the others...) I've never heard of marble bettas but I had a few that changed color, not much in the way of dramatic changes though. I'll pop by later to talk about them (I have too much homework right now,) no pictures though, sadly...

Hah, I was just planning on starting a betta thread! I knew about marbles, although I don't have any (...yet). I do have a beatiful doubletail plakat named Ares, though! He lives in a five gallon tank next to my bed, and he's a bit of a meanie- flares up at my fingers all the time, lol. He's pretty smart at what to flare at; whenever I put a new knick knack by his tank, it only takes him a minute or two to realize it's an inanimate object.

I also help take care of my little brother's betta, a blue veiltail named Neptune. My dad saw him half dead at the dollar store, felt bad, and bought him because he knew I like bettas. He's a fin biter and since he's not been in proper care for long, he's still looking a bit ragged. Since he jumps for food without having been taught, I've been working to teach him to go through hoops.

@DalphiaRose Marbling and changing colours when they mature are different things. For example, though this may look like marbling, this is just a betta getting his adult colour [img]https://i.imgur.com/WtwtpdN.png[/img] They need to be full-sized/decent sized bettas in order to actually be marbling. And some bettas get their proper colour when they're put in proper water conditions and can gain their full health. This wouldn't be a dramatic colour change though, more like going from a pale colour to something deeper (for example, I had a blue female a while ago who would turn very pale when she was stressed, but was darker and had golden accents when she was content). Out of the 28 bettas I've owned, only 4 have been true marbles. I've had ones change colour slightly as they matured or gained their full health, but nothing like marbles. I've just gotten the impression from the internet and my own experiences that marble bettas aren't common (though not uncommon either). @GingerC Oooh what colour is Ares? He sounds awesome :D One thing I love to do is purchase sad or sick bettas to bring back to health. My three females [url=https://imgur.com/LfHotB7]Nephythys[/url] (not shown here; she's a black halfmoon), Hathor, and Bastet all came from the same tank with lots of other females, they all had torn fins, and at the time Nephythys was very skiddish. But now, she's swimming everywhere and is quite the pig at feeding time! The male I got at the same time as Bruce, [url=https://imgur.com/hZAoy6X]Red[/url], was in very dirty water, was pale, and hardly moved. My mother thought he was a waste of money. But within a day he perked right up and gained his full colour back. He only lived for about 2 years with me (I know bettas can live for much longer than that, but I've heard that with store-bought bettas you can never truly know how old they are or whether they're heavily inbred or not), but while he was alive he was very healthy. I've tried saving a few other sad looking fish, though sometimes they die no matter what you do. I recently had what I can only call a betta-apocalypse. I lost 7 bettas in around a month's time. It all started with a 10 gallon leaking until it emptied, killing all the fish inside (including a new betta). I was away from home at the time, and by then I had already purchased a few fish to put into new homes. But that was no longer possible. I was forced to take down all the tanks I had in the upstairs (since the upstairs is where the 10 gal was when it leaked, completely wreaking our living room ceiling), which meant I had my purchased male bettas plus 4 others homeless (since I couldn't set up any more upstairs tanks, but without stands I have no places downstairs for them). I turned a blue plastic bin I had in my room into a roughly 15 gal makeshift tank, which one fish went into, but later died (I'm assuming it was stress-related, since nothing else in the bin died). That meant two fish were now dead. Then another one of my older males, Finnegan, died while he was homeless in a cup. I put one of my new fish into a 3 gal bucket, but he died (again, nothing else died, just him). Four now. Then two more homeless fish died, one probably to ammonia and stress despite my efforts, the other from ich caused by my inability to keep bettas that aren't in tanks warm. Losing my cool, I put my last two homeless males into my community tank, in breeding compartments. I know it would be stressful on them to be able to sense and see other bettas so close (my sorority is in there), but I didn't want them dying just because I couldn't keep them in warm, filtered water. But then Duke died while I was away from home this weekend, probably from the stress of the whole ordeal taking a toll on his older body. Thunder is still alive in his space, and I gave him some uprooted live plants and a hollow log so that he doesn't feel so exposed. I have two male crowntails in my room now, one in the blue bin with some tetras, the other in a spare 2.5 gal I had sitting around. I'm thinking of putting Thunder in the 3 gal bucket, but I'm worried it was the fact that the bucket is high rather than long that killed the previous betta in it, along with maybe something else I'm not seeing. And on top of that, Bastet needs to be euthanized due to her condition... I'm just paranoid at this point. I want to keep buying bettas to give them good homes, but I know I can't do that without actual tanks. This is getting ridiculous and sad. I'm hoping my dad will let me turn our spare junk room in our basement into a fish room. And if I can get the job at my local grocery store (I got the feeling during the interview that the owner really liked me, and they do need a few new employees, so I have high hopes), I can start buying my own stands instead of waiting for my dad to [s]never[/s] build stands. [sub]Oh my gosh, I did not mean to ramble like this... sorry![/sub] It still amazes me that you can teach bettas tricks :D I've never tried, but most of my bettas know to follow my finger to find their pellets, and that open lids mean food will be dropping from there. Some of the newer guys still need to learn, but they'll get there haha