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Typical blue gouramis in retail tank. Breedable at around two- inch size.
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Typical color and size. Separate your sexes to condition them.
Female (short top fin).
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Longer top fin on males. Put them together after separating one week and
feeding well.
We conditioned this pair on betta pellets (no live foods) as an experiment.
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When re-introduced a strange transformation takes place in their color.
Dynomite.
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Female gourami very plump and showy. Conditioned on betta pellets.
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Same female gourami chock full of eggs (and betta pellets) and ready to rock and roll.
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Male gourami gets his share of the betta pellets also. (Styrofoam cup to build nest
in.)
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Male chases female and vice versa even before building his nest in ˝-Styrofoam
cup.
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Female gourami chases him more than vice versa. Still no nest.
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She chases him. She's the one missing scales and chunks of fins. Go
figure.
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Male and female gourami "hugging" each other now.
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We'll take a five-hour intermission at this point to put away two fish shipments.
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Male darker now. About an hour ago, we poured in two betta bubble nests to kick start his
libido -- an experiment, since we're fresh out of carp pituitary gland
extract. It seems to have worked. Male gourami's stoked now. He's guarding his
future nest site instead of hiding. We put the nest protection up front,
so they would breed up front.
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Our male gourami's decided to get serious and blow some bubbles.
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We're seeing a few bubbles -- not too impressive yet. But he's trying.
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He's blowing out lots of bubbles, but few manage to stick.
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A few bubbles. We'll leave our male gourami in libido limbo and check in again tomorrow.
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Next day, both gouramis still sparring. No concrete results. We'll check
next day.
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No action for four days so we fed them some worms and he started
"bubbling."
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Now he's just bubbling his little heart out. Guess he needed some live
food.
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Friday. We totally missed their nuptial embrace. No
bubbles. Maybe 100 floating eggs. No bubbles make it really
easy to see their eggs. We expected another 600 eggs. They ate
all these eggs so we have no fry to mess with.
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Stunt doubles to the rescue many moons later. Same species.
Different color.
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Male. Longer top fin. Red eye. Brighter colors.
More aggressive.
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Female. Same size. Nice plump belly.
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He's just starting to build his bubblenest and pesters her a lot.
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And just in case, we'll pair up an odd couple (same species). This
male opaline and ...
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... this chubby platinum female. She's actually a bit smaller than
he is.
©
2004 LA Productions

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