Question: Sex change?

Okay, this is just a random question. Can Betta's change sex? You see, I bought this lovely red female over a year ago. I even tried to breed her, but 'she' never produced eggs. About 2 months ago, my male betta died, so I thought I'd introduce 'her' to my other female and took the divider out of the 5gal tank. They started fighting so I put the divider back in. Over the past 2 months, the red 'female' has now become rather male looking with long fins. Could 'she' have been a late blooming male all along?

yes it is possible for them to change sex, how common it is i've no idea as I've never had one do it yet lol

good luck with him/her :D

Do you have a photo Taelin? we could establish if it was a young male, a pk all along or perhaps something more unusual

All our "Females" are turning Male!!! What's up with that? Girls don't want to be girls anymore, is there a betta psycotherepist around here somewhere?

Okay, just took this.

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Deffo looks male, not pk at all! Is this a pic from before or from recently?

Bettas actually changing sex That would be impossible as females have an egg casing along with all the other female bits.

Your's was probably just a docile male right from the start. He is a Veil tail

I bought this fish at the local FS and have had it for at least a year now, and until 2 months ago it had short rounded fins. It was the same size as my other female, too. I was pretty sure it was a female, think it even had the 'white spot' underneath. But as you can see from the pic (taken about 30 minutes ago) it's definatly a male now!

it might have just had its fins shredded and they where starting to grow back when you got him. looking at the pic his fins do look like they have just grown back because there not the same colour the alot lighter.

Males can show a false Ovi spot too

hehe good for me! Saved me $3 on buying him, then. I've never had a male take a year to grow back fins, but guess he's an anomaly!

yh but taking a year to grow his fins back seems less on anomaly to me that it changing from female to male.

I have a male that is possibly a year old and only just decided to show he is male. Has lived in a female sorority for a long time.

Kelly - can they REALLY change sex?? that seems rather odd to me

yeah def a male VT could have been a young male mistaken for a female or a male with nipped short fins, a lot of pet stores have trouble sexing bettas, so you got a male for the price of a female!

Our male Thumbelina appeared to be female until well over 6 months old. Some can be very slow to mature hence why a mistake could be made when trying to sex them.

i'll see if i can find the article about bettas changing sex.. think it was dr. lucas who wrote it

I've heard of certain wild fish changing sex due to chemicals being dumped in waterways etc. but it was something that happened over a long period of time.

Scientists tried to replicate this under controlled environments but in most cases the change didn't occur until about 2 years of age.

Will be interesting to see something about this with Bettas and what the causes were and whether it's relevant to domestic strains of Betta or just those in the wild.

From what I can find, the tests on bettas were conducted by ovariectomizing 245 females. This means to remove the ovaries, so isn't comparable to non-modified bettas.

Bear in mind that most of the research was done back in the 60's and my hunch is, that possibly, reports of females changing into males is purely down to incorrect identification in the first place.

A lot of animals start their lives as female and its environmental factors that determine the outcome.

The only possible way to determine whether a full female can change into a male would be to scientifically identify the sex of all the females being researched. The difficulty is, if all are hatched as female anyway, at what age would the sexual identification be able to be carried out to provide a guaranteed result?

I cant find anything to say it has been done yet, but unless it is determined whether bettas come out the egg as all females or mixed sex, any experiments would be flawed.