hi everybody,
When I found the eggs, they were probably about 6-8 hours old. This was the time when I took the first microscope-pictures. Now, I guess they are over 12 hours old and there should, as deepin peat mentions, be visible blastomers to be found. I was lookign for the eggs but only found that there were about 4 or 5 of them left. I think I can definitely tell now that they have not been fertilised since I could not any of the mentioned charateristics a fertilized egg should have. I comared with older pictures of fertilized Betta coccina eggs I had taken about half a year ago. There, after 10 hours, the blastomer are clearly visible. (The first picture is a B. coccina egg, the blastomers – the first cells of the growing embryo – is the greyish structure around the yolk on the left bottom part) The other pictures I added aer the ones I just took of two of the eggs. Maybe, somebody sees more than I do but I am quite sure there is nothing. Besides this, the fluid around the yolk looks like an emmulsion, not at all clear…
So there is probably no male…
Enough of the embryology (a highly interesting subject by the way)…
The behaviour of the two fishes is still rather strange. One (the bigger, a bit larger fish) did some kind of a cave-tour when I came in this evening. She swum in and out of the caves, quickly followed by the second girl. I am really sure that these two must be girls since they both have almost no filament, no blue dots on the side and their caudal fin is of almost no color. I would be really surprised if one of them prooved to be male. Somehow, this larger fish was also really interested in the place where the eggs lay. As mentioned above, most of the eggs have already disappeared. I could, however, not find a nest in one of the three caves (that are all placed in a way that I can easily check them…) I tend to think that one of the females must have lain the eggs. Maybe because of the big waterchange or for another unidentified reason. The two do not show aggressions, They seem to be “playing”. On the two last pictures, you can see the cave-hopper…