Colors
B. splendens have been affectionately nicknamed "The Jewel of the Orient" due to their beauty and wide range of colors which are produced through selective breeding.
Wild fish exhibit strong colors only when agitated. Breeders have been able to make this coloration permanent, and a wide variety of hues breed true. Colors available to the aquarist include red, blue, dark blue, black, turquoise, orange, yellow, green, bright blue with pink highlights, cream and even true white (the "Opaque" white, not to be confused with albino). The shades of blue, turquoise and green are slightly iridescent, and can appear to change color with different lighting conditions or viewing angles; this is because these colors (unlike black or red) are not due to pigments, but created through refraction within a layer of translucent guanine crystals. Breeders have also developed different color patterns such as marble and butterfly, as well as metallic shades like copper, gold, or platinum (these were obtained by crossing B. splendens to other Betta species).
Breeders around the world continue to develop new varieties. Often, the male of the species are sold preferentially in stores because of their beauty, compared to the females. Recently, breeders have developed in females the same range of colors previously only bred in males. Females never develop fins as showy as males of the same type and are often more subdued in coloration.
A true albino betta has been feverishly sought after since one recorded appearance in 1927, and another in 1953. Neither of these were able to establish a line of true albinos. In 1994, a hobbyist named Tanaka claimed to have successfully bred albino bettas.
Read more about this topic: Plakat
Famous quotes containing the word colors:
“Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We may say that feelings have two kinds of intensity. One is the intensity of the feeling itself, by which loud sounds are distinguished from faint ones, luminous colors from dark ones, highly chromatic colors from almost neutral tints, etc. The other is the intensity of consciousness that lays hold of the feeling, which makes the ticking of a watch actually heard infinitely more vivid than a cannon shot remembered to have been heard a few minutes ago.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)