DAT's Sex - Is it MALE or FEMALE?

Lok Tiger Fish

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Jul 14, 2007
69
1
0
Thailand
i have heard and seen and have been asked alot by many people about theirs sexes and the way to distinguish them, even in Thailand i get asked by some keepers.

before even needing to see the fish, there is two questions to screen the basics of a male to a female; which gives around an 80% correct answer:

- is it banana gold color (male), copper red / brown color (female)

- is the body long (male) in shape or squarish (female) looking shape?


* these are the two most easy ways to distinguish them, however there are obstacles that create confusion and quarrel; such as mine is banana yellow and square looking, or its long and its copper! etc etc.

so in order to be able to distinguish them using this simple method, you have to understand how you are keeping your fish.

1- these fish's original food is live fishes, such as bettas, baby snakeheads, small frogs, crickets, small breams, etc in the wild. so feeding them or changing their food diet to dead things, prawns, or dog food looking pellets will distort their body shape. ( i never feed my fishes these things as i believe it shortens their life span and they don't need to exercise to get their food but of course your feed is more expsensive than me having to net around some ponds and find plenty of small fishes)
i have a friend who used prawns before on a CT i gave him, which was a 16 inch male, i never fed it other than live ghost shrimp and fish but after two months feeding it prawn (took a week of starving to change its habits) i got so fat it looked like a female. and this also happened to other of my friends CT's as well.
so the feed can disorientate is body shape so only its natural diet will determine its true sex.

2- so with food out of the way, its true sex can be determined with the environment it lives in.

assume you have five CT's of exactly 12inch together, with one or two females and the other males, their femaleness will stand by tending to be more agressive towards the males but more neutral towards the same sex, unless there is a size difference.

the color of the females tend to fluctuate more than the males, you can see this when they are frightened or trying to show their agressiveness to protect themselves or their young, they will erect their top back fin and their scales erect out a bit creating a semi grey metallic color and tjheir gills stretch out a bit (similar to the siamese fighting betta but nowhere near as much). only females would do this, which is assumed is used to protect their young. whilst i haven't seen males with this behavior before.


so i hope this has been some use to you all and as stated before, males tend to have the banana color, but in my past experiences, i have kept over quite a large amount of large sizes in a concrete pond, and there were quite a few fat boys around even when the diet where whole shoals of small freshwater mullet.

good luck and hope it was some use.
 

Lok Tiger Fish

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Jul 14, 2007
69
1
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Thailand
obtw,

i don't have any pictures to prove or shoe you as i am not a photography fan and never took pictures of these fishes when they were alive.
 

JD7.62

Dovii
MFK Member
Sep 13, 2005
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Wow thanks man!

Kind of echoes the post I made to T1, that diet can change the way a fish looks, but of course he has been doing water changes on his tank for the last several years so he knows EVERYTHING there is and we are wrong! lol

Have you heard of any attempts to induce maturation through the use of hormones and artificially harvesting the eggs and milt and the fertilizing and rearing the young in a lab?

I have the facility and equipment to attempt this but I am not going to sink thousands of $$ that I dont have if this has been tried and failed.
 

Lok Tiger Fish

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Jul 14, 2007
69
1
0
Thailand
JD7.62;1865528; said:
Wow thanks man!

Kind of echoes the post I made to T1, that diet can change the way a fish looks, but of course he has been doing water changes on his tank for the last several years so he knows EVERYTHING there is and we are wrong! lol

Have you heard of any attempts to induce maturation through the use of hormones and artificially harvesting the eggs and milt and the fertilizing and rearing the young in a lab?

I have the facility and equipment to attempt this but I am not going to sink thousands of $$ that I dont have if this has been tried and failed.


to let you know the sad truth about breeding in Thailand from fishery people i know, heard and seen, full NTT's were tested ( around 5kg specimens and around 6 years of age) milking of the eggs when female showed signs of full maturity and loose eggs look of full size and readiness; mixed with male milked sperm, it was a success. but sadly due to NTT's low price here, the cost was not viable and project stopped.

so from this experiment, we think we can mimick this on CT's, so sad fact here is that since it is illegal over here to buy trade sell and keep CT's, nobody is trying to breed them. however a person has tried so using this milking process on CT's but the female died right after the milking process and the eggs never fertilized after mixing with the males sperm. so we weren't sure if it was the male's sperm which was impotent or the females eggs not matured enough yet.

another test was tried with a friend of my friend who has over 20 full size CT's in his collection, he used concrete ponds, and put the males and females together in the most natural environment as possible and obvserved, but sadly no breeding occured.

we thought of giving them to the fisheries dept, but even with the fisheries dept friends help on this already there is no success, so by giving straight to the fisheries dept, the chances that in Thailand, with alot of corruption, our fish won't get bred, may die like our methods, gets confiscated and fined for letting them know, and worst of all get sold off by them to the fish market again.


so right now me and some friends are grouping together again and thinking of another project to breed them, but due to our work, finances, other burdens, it has been going slowly.
however we also have news the japanese are trying as well and are gaingin some success but not a big enough scale yet and alot of abnornal looking ones arised and very high death rates within the 1st week.

so now lets hope that these fishes dont' run out before breeding succeeds as alot of my previous past lots of fishes have died of old age and the new lots are not matre enough yet.
 

M|L

the asian
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Mar 29, 2005
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I've never read anything like this before, so this is quite refreshing and a breakthrough for me.

First and foremost, I think your theory of the different food offered to the fish is rather irrational. A well fed fish will of course be more "fat", regardless of whether it's fed live or prepared foods.

I cannot disprove your claims on sexing datnoids, but unless there are concrete evidence on this, I wouldn't go ahead and approve it. People say that the coloration is more of a locale difference rather than anything that indicates gender characteristics. Can you prove otherwise?

I once had a batch of around 6 baby datnoids that were all rather "unstable", all of them came from the same seller so I would say they were all collected in the same location. Does that mean I just happen to have 6 females, or what?

I did have a few very stable datnoids that I've kept for a while (at different times), but I always assumed it was because they were the most dominant fish in their tanks (which they were). Would you say that they were in fact males? and that their gender is the reason why they were very stable?

One thing that I think you're definitely right is, of course a gravid female will appear "fatter" than a male that's not carrying eggs. But that's pretty much common sense.

and one thing that I think you may be heading in the right direction is the body shape, but then again, there are other "theories" out there for that. But I can see how that may be true, as I've seen this in other fishes.
 

Lok Tiger Fish

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Jul 14, 2007
69
1
0
Thailand
M|L;1865654; said:
I've never read anything like this before, so this is quite refreshing and a breakthrough for me.

First and foremost, I think your theory of the different food offered to the fish is rather irrational. A well fed fish will of course be more "fat", regardless of whether it's fed live or prepared foods.

I cannot disprove your claims on sexing datnoids, but unless there are concrete evidence on this, I wouldn't go ahead and approve it. People say that the coloration is more of a locale difference rather than anything that indicates gender characteristics. Can you prove otherwise?

I once had a batch of around 6 baby datnoids that were all rather "unstable", all of them came from the same seller so I would say they were all collected in the same location. Does that mean I just happen to have 6 females, or what?

I did have a few very stable datnoids that I've kept for a while (at different times), but I always assumed it was because they were the most dominant fish in their tanks (which they were). Would you say that they were in fact males? and that their gender is the reason why they were very stable?

One thing that I think you're definitely right is, of course a gravid female will appear "fatter" than a male that's not carrying eggs. But that's pretty much common sense.

and one thing that I think you may be heading in the right direction is the body shape, but then again, there are other "theories" out there for that. But I can see how that may be true, as I've seen this in other fishes.


M L,


it is hard to explain anything without pics as we all know a pic can say a 1,000 words. there are still old photographs available amongst us here but i am not going through the hassle of scanning them sicne they are not of good qulaity and starting to yellow.


to explain some more to prove my point and other friends of mine here about sexes, we like to conclude the following for ST or so called CT, they are always stable since their colors develop which is around one inch or so, and they never drop. this is their uniqee trait. this is proven on our lands here where all my friends and i have fed them only two types of food, ghost shrimp and live fish, in normal tropical water temp without heaters, in concrete ponds, fish ponds, and tanks, the water we use is just normal tap water, no chemicals added such as black water, clear solutions etc except for just normal sea salt.

we have used this style for over 20 years, and used for over 5 batches or generations of of CTs since they are from 1" to around 22++ " when they start dying from us of old age.

i have had the luck and chance to personally kept 3 generations of them. i used to keep 35-50++ mekong basin and cambodia tigers in a 10wide by 5 wide and 1.5 meter deep concrete pond, and various tanks as well. in one go for that generation.

here comes the answer to your question, unless it is IT, NTT or others, ST or CT colors are always stable. they drop only a little when they fight or are courting each other but not much compared to NTT or IT.

as you didnt mention which dat you were keeping that was'nt stable. but i assume it is IT. because a friend and also vendor here has to go through around 100 of them and only see about 10 that are stable at aorun d1-2' inch size, this is something with IT's that has never changed. i have even tried keeping them from small to large, but have found that around 1 in 5 will turn stable with good color at an older age if they are not already stable since young. the list will be very exhaustive if i have to list all the methods i have tried to make them stable and pretty. some work and some don't.

the unstableness had nothing to do locale area it is found as i can tell you that catching them will be started from one place as there is only a handfl of people who knows how to catch them, which are in turn hired or to be bought by another smaller handful of buyers. catching will take place in one concentrated area until all is gone and then they will move to another area or wait another season and catch something else dring then. so geographic location does not have anything to do with unstableness.


out of all females and males, i have not seen many females around, let alone Thailand, females are much less in Q'ty in comparison to Males; for CT that is. but for IT, the balance is good.
my point will be very clear when the are maturely grown between a male and female, and very easy to identify. if water para is good and with food mimicked to its natural environment. two years or around 16" will show its true sex.

hope this help soemthing.
 
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Lok Tiger Fish

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Jul 14, 2007
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Thailand
JD7.62;1865669; said:
Are you saying that NTT weighed 5kg?!?!

How big are STs when mature?

Its late here but PM me your email. Thanks brother!

JD,

the biggest CT/ ST i seen from a pond is around 25" in captivity or around also close to 5KG.

but in the wild i have seen an old pic of a TRUE BUNG BORAPETCH ST of 8 KGs and 30" which also went on the news as the last Thai living ST.

bt our fathers told us that 3-5 kgs specimens were readily available from there at that time in a restaurant. that was at least 35++ years ago.
 

Ade

Piranha
MFK Member
Jun 7, 2008
3,534
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London
Thanks dude. Very little info anywhere about male/female tigers. I asked some friends in Hong Kong who work in gold fish street and they have suggested the body shape theory i.e male long and femael squarer, those males seem to be chunkier.

I have 2 cambeli 4" and 4 IT, 10", 7", 5" and 4" in 100G tank. What you say about females seems right also. I got 2 cambel 1 and the 2 smaller IT's last week, and both previous owners only been feeding on meal worms and river shrimp. All bodies seem more natural and less distorted. The existing 2 large IT's I have had since 3" for 3 years and both after initial starving now accept frozen muscles, prawns and white bait...its their bodies that definately look not strange, but a little distorted.

JD- Wow, a 25" CT!! only in Thailand... I once saw a large Pulcher in Hong Kong about 6 years ago 17 to 18".Truly an experience!!
 

T1KARMANN

Giant Snakehead
MFK Member
Sep 19, 2005
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JD7.62;1865528; said:
Wow thanks man!

Kind of echoes the post I made to T1, that diet can change the way a fish looks, but of course he has been doing water changes on his tank for the last several years so he knows EVERYTHING there is and we are wrong! lol

Have you heard of any attempts to induce maturation through the use of hormones and artificially harvesting the eggs and milt and the fertilizing and rearing the young in a lab?

I have the facility and equipment to attempt this but I am not going to sink thousands of $$ that I dont have if this has been tried and failed.
you make me :ROFL::ROFL::ROFL:

by saying the post sounds like yours

what i said was the food can change the shape of the body making it look more like a female so the body shape is no way to sex ST :D in captivaty
 
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