badatnamingbettas

[badatnamingbettas]

Hey there I just got a little crowntail betta (Magnus) earlier today and was wondering if I could ask for some advice? I have a 2.5 gallon tank with a filter and heater but the filter kind of knocks him around if he gets too close and the heater is keeping the tank at 80 which seems a little too warm. Both say they're good for smaller tanks but I was wondering what you use. Any help is appreciated! Thanks!

Hey there! So I don’t technically use anything anymore--college life proved to be too much moving to maintain tanks, but I can give you my product recommendations based on the time that I did maintain tanks, and what I will eventually go back to once I start keeping again!

From what I’ve seen, it can be hard to find a good filter for such a small tank because oftentimes they are too strong. You can just google “betta filter baffle” and find different home DIY methods (such as using a plastic bottle or sponge) to reduce the filter flow.

Personally for betta fish, I like sponge filters the most. They are almost always more gentle, and I just think over-all they make more sense for bettas. You can also easily add a flow-adjuster to the tubing, which you can’t do with a traditional hang-on-back filter (and HOBs can be purchased with adjustable features but are more expensive that way). 

If you don’t have a water testing kit, I recommend that you pick one up. Any tank with a filter is going to have the capacity to go through “cycling,” which is basically when the tank grows bacteria that will convert ammonia (produced by your fish) into nitrites and then into less harmful nitrates. A water testing kit is a great investment will help you monitor the levels in your tanks to make sure your fish is safe (and help you know when it’s time to do a water change). Here’s a resource on cycling!

80 is, the very top of the range for betta fish so 80 should be ok, but doesn’t leave much wiggle room since any warmer than that is less beneficial--if your heater isn’t adjustable (sounds like it isn’t) then I would consider buying an adjustable heater.

The hydor theo heater is by far the best heater that I have used--it’s inexpensive, adjustable, and actually will turn itself on & off based on what temp it’s sensing the water at. The only problem that I’ve seen with it, is that the actual numbers on the temperature dial tend not to be super accurate, but that’s not a big deal, just watch the thermometer.

Congrats on your new friend! :)

[badatnamingbettas]

Without a filter your cycle will crash, if you had a cycle, so I’d just keep a close eye on water parameters to make sure ammonia/nitrites/nitrates don’t spike weird. It’s always best to go off of measured water parameters!

If you didn’t have a cycle going then I don’t see it making much difference.

hey bettablr! is it alright for my 5 gallon to be without a filter for few days? i’ve had one up until now, but i had to remove it for several reasons and won’t be able to get a new one until saturday (at the absolute latest, i may be able to get one tomorrow or thursday if i can convince my mom to drive me to the store).

should i do daily water changes until the filter is replaced? and are there any negative consequences to doing this?

my 5 gallon houses one betta, and no live plants (yet) aside from a single marimo.

[badatnamingbettas]

Do you have an email? My fish is sick and I need your help please.

No email for tumblr questions! You can message me here on or off Anon, or you can message me via the messenger thing (though I prefer that you not.)

[badatnamingbettas]

omg when did you become active again!! welcome back!!!!!!

Thanks for the warm welcome!!! I just popped on last night to answer some questions because I got several asks in one night and wanted to reply, and got sucked into replying to different things.

I think I’ll stick around for a while now--I’m on summer vacation so I have time, and I miss fishblr so much! 

[badatnamingbettas]

tl;dr I think milesbeardsworth wrote a great guide to different things to try to get your betta to stop tail biting, but over-thought it and labeled it as a separation anxiety from humans behavioral theory

[badatnamingbettas]

I would like to start this off by reassuring--I don’t mean to start drama with this but I very strongly disagree with your position and I want to open up a discussion and address it, and articulate why I disagree (since I see other people have also disagreed).

Regarding the tail damage your betta has: The curling appearance of your betta’s tail along with the presence of red streaking (neither of which are present in prior pictures of this betta, I scrolled through your blog to look) makes me question your assessment that this is a case of fin biting alone.

Regarding your separation anxiety idea: I honestly think that your evidence is too weak to actually support it. (Not to say that fish don’t experience separation anxiety, I just don’t think your observations support it.)

I agree with some of your methods for treating fin biting behaviors as per this post (namely the techniques that involve distraction, increased stimulation, and de-stressing). Those are tried and true methods to decrease fin biting, generally accepted by betta keeping communities because they prove to work. Given that tail-biting is a behavior that is seen in fish that need more stimulation (or have heavy fins causing physical stress), it makes sense that increased enrichment & decreased stress will help stop that behavior. 

Take for instance, a totally different animal--an Ecuadorian hermit crab (which by definition, cannot be domesticated--land hermit crabs very, very rarely reproduce in captivity and only in very specific careful recreations of their normal habitats). Eccies are known to climb around their enclosures and be very very active--an Eccie that has ropes, ladders, and climbing materials will be more engaged with its environment, whereas an Eccie with no other climbing outlets will climb the sealant of the tank and try to make a break through the lid. If a human picks an Eccie up, it might climb all over and up and down on the human. This doesn’t mean it likes the human, or that when it’s alone it’s trying to get closer to its human--it just means that the Ecuadorian hermit crab requires environmental stimulation to redirect behaviors, and deriving any other meaning from that is anthropomorphizing.

So in your case--maybe you are just providing the right kind of stimulation that your fish need to be happy and not participate in tail-biting behaviors. 

In addition, when it comes to your evidence for each treatment--You have used multiple treatments on the same fish, so who is to say that a treatment like “keeping goodbyes short” (like with Duo) is what’s having the positive influence on your fish, when you are also providing additional environmental stimulation with videos? Or maybe part of the goodbye, which is providing food, is also providing stimulation in terms of a prey-catching need?

Additional evidence you provide, such as “they change color”, doesn’t really support your theory either--what does the color change mean? Do they lose color every single time you leave the house? Have you observed your fish when you aren’t home to see them, such as via a webcam, to see if the color change is something that is consistent all day while you are not there? 

You also cite enthusiastic greetings, attentiveness to your presence, and reluctance to interact with other people that are not you--all of these could easily be explained by the fact that they associate you with both food & additional environmental stimulation, causing them to be more interested in you. 

And perhaps the only reason you have never seen your betta fish bite its tail is because when you are in the room observing, you are providing a distraction and environmental enrichment just by being there. You’d be hard pressed to find an owner who has actually witnessed a betta bite its own tail (I think the only time I’ve heard of that, the betta was totally blind).

I’m also going to quote one of your reblogs: 

“No, there is no scientific evidence to support my claim and yes, it probably sounds anthropomorphic to some people. But fish welfare and behavior research is years behind that of other animals right now. I understand the value of scientific evidence but at this moment, we don’t really have any either way, especially not in regards to domesticated fishes. All I have is my knowledge, my education, and my experiences with my own bettas. This provides more evidence to me to support the idea than it does to disprove it.”

I mean, you are anthropomorphizing your fish, there’s no way around that--interpreting your fish’s feelings and emotions as indicated by your own person views. Direct quote from you--“Maes has always really liked watching lightsaber fights,” How do you know? How does Maes indicates that he/she likes watching lightsaber fights--a more plausible answer is that the muted backgrounds with bright colors & flashing catch your betta’s attention, but to say that Maes likes the lightsabers is to assume something you cannot know, not with what we know now about fish behavior & conscience.

Just because we don’t have the answers backed up with science, does not mean that we can substitute personal anecdotes as scientific evidence. And just because there is no behavioral theory readily applicable to fish, does not mean that we can take other animal behaviors and extrapolate them to fish (especially when those behaviors are coming from mammals with very different brain structures and domestication histories). 

I definitely think your personal anecdotes and observations on what treatments have been effective in reducing fin biting are quite useful, but I think that’s where it ends and your idea of separation anxiety just doesn’t hold up.

What I would really love to see, is people delving into the field of fish behavioral studies to answer questions like this--can fish experience separation anxiety?

@quasarlasar

I wanted to address this here instead of in a reply, because this was something I almost included in my original post but didn’t because it was already so long.

Yes, I am as certain as I can possibly be that this is unrelated to either fin rot or an accidental injury. It’s not just the fin biting, there are multiple other symptoms I have observed that are unrelated to either of those scenarios.

I included a picture of one of my bettas, Duo, for reference. I took this photo earlier this week, the day after I got back after being out of town for several days. Duo’s caudal fin is obviously damaged, but there are two main things to pay attention to in this photo: one being that he doesn’t have fin rot, and two being the distinctive u-shape of his injuries.

Fin rot can develop after a betta has a bought of fin biting, but typically shouldn’t unless something else is wrong in the environment or the fish’s immune system has been compromised in some way. U-shaped marks are characteristic of fin biting; they match up with the shape of a betta’s mouth and are too consistent and regular to be accidental. I have also seen these sorts of injuries on multiple bettas, in many different environments. It’s been more than ten individual bettas I’ve observed this with by now, and there are just too many similarities for it to be either accidental or coincidental.

Here are some other things I’ve observed that have led me to conclude “separation anxiety” as opposed to something else:

-Loss of color, but only when I am gone; they gain it back within a minute or two of me returning and sitting with them

-Decreased activity levels and reluctance to interact with people other than myself, again only when I am gone

-Hyper attentiveness to my presence; these bettas will sit and stare at me excessively, and react to my every little movement, much more so than your typical betta

-Overenthusiastic greetings when I return; both in comparison to other bettas, and to themselves (when I come to sit with them when I have been around vs. when I have been gone)

-Shared personality traits, such as initially being very withdrawn and reserved; may or not be related, but has occurred often enough to have caught my attention, and happens across various tail types and sexes (including plakat bettas and females).

-Treatments designed for separation anxiety have been effective and had a positive influence, whereas no other treatments were even tried (if it were fin rot, you would expect it to worsen without appropriate treatment, but these bettas have fins that are always regrowing before being bitten off again).

-These behaviors and symptoms occur when I am gone, and ONLY when I am gone. I have been observing this for years now and I am certain that the fin biting is directly caused by separation of the fish from myself. I have had bettas that will not bite their fins while traveling cross-country, so long as they know I am there, but will chew off their fins when I leave the house for thirty minutes. It doesn’t matter if they have food, or if someone else is there with them; if I am gone, they will exhibit these symptoms.

Like I said in the original post, Betta splendens is a domesticated fish species. Saying that a domestic betta can’t develop separation anxiety because they’re a fish is like saying that a dog can’t develop separation anxiety because they’re a mammal. It doesn’t make sense. This is something that has to be examined on a species by species, individual by individual, basis. I know it’s not what was said exactly, but statements like “fishes don't develop separation anxiety” are huge generalizations, given the fact that there are tens of thousands of fish species on this planet.

Domestic bettas are not a schooling species of fish, and most people know this about them. What less people seem to realize is this: these fishes spend their entire lives around humans, and while they may not be social with their own species, they ARE social with us. If a betta fish is a sentient being capable of experiencing emotions and forming personal relationships with humans- and no one will convince me that they are not- then I see no reason why they could not develop separation anxiety, also. The fact that so many people still don’t see them that way, however, probably has something to do with why a lot of people find this idea unbelievable or surprising.

[badatnamingbettas]

(HEY KAI-NI!!! Long time no talk!! :) ) 

Reblogging because definitely a good addition--this ask is actually a couple of weeks old, and honestly I don’t know much about stocking different fish so I generally try not to advise on it.

Hi! I have a 10 G tank with a betta, a Molly, 2 platys, 2 corydoras, and 3 merits snails. Just switched out the gravel in my tank, and did about a 40% water change. This was on Monday. Yesterday I noticed all of the fish acting really weird, except for my betta. The platys were keeping to them selves. One hiding at the top. One hiding at the bottom under a plant. I couldn't really see them. Tpray I notice one of the corys with eye cloud, and both platys with fin rot. What is safe to treat this?

Hey–I hope you figured this out! I am not super active on this blog and I also don’t know much about fish outside of bettas & generic fish care.

My recommendation in this situation would have immediately been to pull all the fish and acclimate them into clean water and scrap the gravel, since that seems to correlate. Given the potential for contamination, I would have put ‘em in clean water and let them deal with that rather than try treating when it might be a problem with something in the tank.

How did this situation turn out?

[badatnamingbettas]

Hi! I have a 10 G tank with a betta, a Molly, 2 platys, 2 corydoras, and 3 merits snails. Just switched out the gravel in my tank, and did about a 40% water change. This was on Monday. Yesterday I noticed all of the fish acting really weird, except for my betta. The platys were keeping to them selves. One hiding at the top. One hiding at the bottom under a plant. I couldn't really see them. Tpray I notice one of the corys with eye cloud, and both platys with fin rot. What is safe to treat this?

Hey--I hope you figured this out! I am not super active on this blog and I also don’t know much about fish outside of bettas & generic fish care.

My recommendation in this situation would have immediately been to pull all the fish and acclimate them into clean water and scrap the gravel, since that seems to correlate. Given the potential for contamination, I would have put ‘em in clean water and let them deal with that rather than try treating when it might be a problem with something in the tank.

How did this situation turn out?

[badatnamingbettas]

Hello,My betta fish has fin rot and I dont know how to heal him. Before he was ok after triple sulfa treatment. Now i tried it again and i also tried bettafix but he didnt get better. He eats ok but his fins are getting worse. I have him in a 5 gallons aquarium with a filter and heater (77f) and i clean his tank weekly and remove 25% of the water. He is alone in the tank. I also bought almonds leaves for him but it didnt make a difference. Thanks for your help,Corina

Hi there! So the number one cause of fin rot is infection by opportunistic bacteria that are ubiquitous to fish tanks. Opportunistic infection only occurs when the immune system is already under stress, which can happen due to a number of different factors–maybe the temperature in your tank fluctuates, or the current of the filter is too strong, or the light is too bright, or the food quality you are serving is too low. 

My personal recommendation is to evaluate all potential stressors that your fish might be under, before you try more medication–For starters, I would get your water tested to find out ammonia levels (either buy a kit for yourself which is great to have, or contact your local pet store and see if they can do it for you). If you don’t ever do more than 25% changes, you might have a build up of ammonia in your water–that could be stressing your fish’s immune system and making it hard to recover. 

How long did you go between triple sulfa treatments? Did you see a full re-growth of fin in the time between treatments? Not enough time between dosing could have increased stress as well. 

As far as medications go–I say it’s time to start working with medications once you have exhausted all options, and the fin rot is steadily progressing OR if the fin rot is rapidly progressing. I’m talking like, half the tail is lost, rather than some nagging black spots.

Triple sulfa might have been a good choice–according to the MSDS data sheets provided by API, though, Triple sulfa is like >60% NaCl, which isn’t effective against bacterial infections (which is what fin rot usually is). The other ingredients are all good antimicrobial agents (I don’t know the minimum dosage a fish would need to so actually get the infection treated so I can’t really comment on whether or not the ration is effective). So it could have some benefits, but if using it isn’t working I would say don’t mess with it again.

As for Bettafix, the API website literally says “Contains the healing power of Melaleuca, a variety of Tea Tree,” which I think sounds like a load of crock, and the MSDS sheets for Bettafix won’t even tell you what’s in it–just says “proprietary blend” so who knows!

If you would be willing to send me some pictures of your fish & fish’s tail, I can assess where his fin rot is at and maybe provide you some more guidance.

(I might have a really different approach from other fish keepers on here–I haven’t been on in a while but my views are informed by my studies in microbiology and by personal experience–I’ve treated mild fin rot cases better with decreasing fish stress than any sort of medications.)

[badatnamingbettas]

I just emailed you about my fish fifi. My address is cbc237 at yahoo com. Thanks!!

If this is legit, I’d like to help, just message me here instead.

If it’s not legit--is anyone else getting messages like this? Is it a scam?

[badatnamingbettas]

Firebird fish looks cool

[badatnamingbettas]

My naym is fish an wen it’s day I wurk hard on nest tu plees my bae

I wurk all day I wurk all nite I see a fingur I want tu fite

me mom return with fud in hands my tyme haz com it tyme tu dance

My naym is fish I may be smol butt in me mind I’m varre tol

I cannot lik I cannot chewe so in my tyme I dance for fud

[badatnamingbettas]

Squad goals.

[badatnamingbettas]

Oh shit I just remembered the time I bought a nerite snail but it wasn’t a nerite snail and that’s how I wound up with THOUSANDS OF SNAIL BABIES

[badatnamingbettas]

Yo would it be too much of a bioload for a 10 gallon if I had shrimp + a betta + snails (small snails btw, not big snails) ?

Also, what is fishblr’s general opinion at this point on shrimp + bettas as tank mates?

[badatnamingbettas]

Signal boost--help help help if you can!!!

Please Help: Rehoming

I hate to be this person, but unfortunately things have turned a bit sour at home and I need to re-home Lila and Sparrow. I may need to re-home other fish at a later time, but this is all I’m aware of for now. They need a twenty gallon tank minimum if being housed together, which is preferred (10 gallons each if separated). They are carnivorous, meaning they can only be housed with each other. I don’t know their exact ages, but they can live 15-20 years. I can give details to whoever is interested in taking them. Unfortunately shipping is limited to within the US (for now). I don’t know when they need to go by, I don’t have a set date, I just know that they are no longer welcome in my household. Please, if anyone is willing to take my babies, message me. I know they’re a lot of care, but… you’d be doing me the biggest favor. You can’t even imagine. I’d owe you big time. Thank you for reading and, if you can’t take them, please hit the reblog button. Thank you.

[badatnamingbettas]

Did you check inside the filter? I would pull the whole thing apart, gently, and see if she swam up inside. 

Also, check inside the driftwood anyways if there’s a hole in it!!

(Disruptive to your tank, I know, but you might be able to find her!!)

Disappearing Fish?

I’m trying to figure out where Cass disappeared to. Just as she was getting comfortable and confident and not constantly stress-stripey, she just…vanished. No dried betta on the floor (there’s a gap of less than a centimeter at the back of the tank where there’s space for cords to come out). No body floating at the top of the tank. No curious and angry fishy flaring at the siphon when I did a water change last night. I don’t think there’s anywhere she could’ve gotten stuck on the driftwood that’s in the tank; the only hole is clogged with plant roots.