LIHUE — Liz Hahn is passionate about breeding better bettas.
“Fish are another way to help people to become more human,” the Waimea woman said. “To see all living creatures as part of the same world we live in. Not as an object or a color, something to decorate their house with, but something that can be a part of their family.”
Hahn was the number three show breeder for bettas in the nation in 2017. She said she might have placed second, but her competitor had someone drive his fish to a show in Canada that she couldn’t enter because she couldn’t mail her fish there.
But for Hahn, placing third nationally is still something to celebrate. Because many people can’t have furry animals, Hahn said having a betta is like having a dog. Only better.
“They can really enjoy it,” she said.
Picking out a fish, Hahn said, is like picking out a puppy. She advises people to spend time with her fish and pick out one that’s most attracted to them. If the fish is fluttery, excited and happy to see the person, then that’s the fish for them. It’s not about the fish’s color.
Hahn’s love for fish began when she was a child in Wisconsin. Her mother allowed her to keep guppies in their kitchen because it was the warmest room in the house.
“Guppies are live breeders and they’re life bearers and they breed like rabbits so pretty soon I had five tanks of guppies in the kitchen,” Hahn said.
From there, Hahn got into the varieties and characteristics of guppies, but it wasn’t until the 1990s that she became interested in breeding bettas. Her move to breeding bettas, she said, was a natural progression.
“A lot of the characteristics we take for granted now, like the half moon where the tail fully flared goes out 180 degrees, that didn’t exist. Black bettas didn’t exist,” Hahn said. “Marbled bettas was just becoming genetically consistent and so that was back in the ‘90s and that’s when I started.”
And in Waimea, she had a lot of luck with bettas because of the warm weather.
“That’s what bettas like, they like warm water,” Hahn said. “Other fish like koi and guppies and other tropical fish, they’re tropical, but they like cold water, so bettas thrived. They did really well and pretty soon they started taking over the house.”
Taking a break from betta breeding to raise her children, Hahn got back into the betta lifestyle when an old customer contacted her and asked if she wanted a fish. She expected he would be sending her one fish to be a pet, but instead, he sent five breeding pairs.
Bettas are personal and can live a long time, Hahn said. They are sensitive to emotions and positive energy and in the right environment with the right care, they can live up to six or seven years.
While the majority of betta breeders are focused on fin size, Hahn said she keeps her fish in the tank for as long as possible before breeding them because she is focused on body size.
“I want their bodies to be healthy. In the fish mills of Southeast Asia where they have millions of fish, they jar them early because they want their fins to grow because people are fin obsessed. So people obsessed with finage don’t care about bodies because people are looking at fins. I care about bodies,” Hahn said.
Hahn said she might not breed them until they’re a year old, which is unusual. Most breeders start breeding their fish after a few months.
Though Hahn does work under the standards of the International Betta Conference in her breeding, the overall health and happiness of her fish is what’s most important in the end, so she focuses on breeding compact fin fish.
“I want it to be full like a half moon, but I want it to stay proportionate like that until it’s old,” Hahn said.
The current trend, she said, is that breeders are breeding their fish to have half moon and pectoral fins so large that they become too heavy for senior fish and they end up lopsided. That can be dangerous for the fish because it can’t get up to breath air or get its food.
“They’re expecting the fish to live like that,” she said.
Normally a betta will go up top to breath air, gulp air and then they blow bubbles,” Hahn said.
“Like the males will blow bubbles, that’s part of their mating ritual,” she said. “They build a bubble nest so if a fish is sitting in still water they’ll build a nice bubble nest and they’ll do that when it’s raining and the barometric pressure goes down, (or) waiting for a girl to come by. That’s instinct.”
She said it would be like humans walking around wearing large diving fins.
Keeping a fish in a tank with a filter is not something Hahn agrees with because it takes away part of their behavior.
“That’s not me. I’m about raising healthy fish,” she said. “So I want to see a fish that comes to the market, gets packed up the next day, goes to a show, wins a show and gets sold to a breeder, but these are the same fish I would send to a show.”
Betta breeding, she said, is addictive.
“It’s like that first drink, that first cigarette,” Hahn said. “It’s hard work. You have to have devotion to do it and to be able to do it for any length of time.”
Hahn sells her fish each Saturday at the Kauai Community Market in the parking lot at Kauai Community College.
