counting hm rays

[justin]

Hi i was just wandering how you count how many rays your halfmoon has?

do you need a still close up photo to do it?

[splendidbetta]

A good photo would be helpful but you can do it well enough if your fish stays still long enough while flaring.

[michael]

I can tell you what i do to count female rays and check out there tails. I place my females in a bare bottom tank (10litres) I dont feed them for 4 days after that i over feed them with live worms. They will eat that much they will just sit on the bottom of the tank with there bodies at a angle with there tails spread wide apart.

[Fishchick]

that may work, but you risk the health of the fish. overfeeding can cause intestinal problems.

[Callatya]

eeek! just to count rays!? Very risky business! get a stick-on betta barracks, much much safer.

Fin rays work somewhat like tree branches, at a certain point they fork into two. In some fish (plakats, VTs etc) that is as far as it goes, but when you are talking rays, the more rays that a fish has, the more times they have forked in two. That forking is why the ray numbers are always in 2, 4, 8, 16 etc, there are always double the amount of the previous split because each one forms two new rays.

Check out this picture from Joep's site, what you are counting are the batches of rays that are coloured in orange. Here is the rest of the article on HMs if you want to have a read

A photo is easiest, but as mentioned above, betta barracks can work well as you can get the fish flaring parallel to the front glass at a distance that makes it easy to check.

[michael]

The method i use has no ill affect on my fish as i do it to find the best females for breeding. I have been doing it for years now. Try taking pics of 1 to 2 hundred sibling females .The fish are over fed once in there life im sure many people have over fed fish.