Home Of Artemis

i wanna try running a sorority. i wanna document every single aspect of it, every behavior and stress sign the girls go through to like visually show whats wrong and why its wrong. 

like, daily updates on each individual girl, water parameters, coloration changes, specific behavior and interations i witness.

it would only be a temporary thing, like maybe 6 months in a sorority tank, then split up into their individual 20s for the remainder of their lives, and that would be documented for the next 6 months at least too, for any stress related illness, or changes again.

BFFs written by iantojonesthebetta.

I almost didn’t finish it because I started crying. :(

Links to fish-related care:

Betta Splendid

Calleo’s Big Fat Betta Caresheet

Betta Adventures

Aquariadise

June 27th is drawing closer. There’s still time to enter the competition.

Competition details and post

For now, here are some suggestions, tips and notes:

No pet owner ever wants to have a sick pet…

In the fall of 2012, my roommate and I had a sick betta fish on our hands. We had went away for a vacation and returned to find our boy, Ianto, in a rough state. Although it was scary, we managed to bring our boy back to his usual self with patience and care. Unfortunately, it can often be difficult to find good information about how to treat sick bettas, so I’m making it my mission to do what I can to help make it easier for other betta owners to diagnose and treat their fish.  Because we were able to successfully treat our sick betta, here is handy information about fin rot and what you can do to hopefully make your pet healthy again as well:

Ten gallon tank progression, and the new betta. I do believe his scales have grown and are growing over his eyes, he can barely see. I don’t know if I can keep him going but I’m going to do my best for him.

Aside from that, I just made sure not to move his stuff around too much and he did great! Syaoran lived to be a very happy old man. I have another older betta now with decreased vision and he seems to be helped most by vibrations near the food that he can follow and use to pinpoint its location. He will not grab the food if it is just floating but will if I tap my finger right next to it in the water. He will also grab frozen foods (bloodworms and shrimps) from my fingers if I set them right on his mouth for him, so that might be something to try for your boy too!

I have recently been talking with @oliviner about our experiences with domestic bettas and separation anxiety, and put together a post summarizing some of the things I have done over the years to treat my bettas that I believe have bitten their fins and suffered other symptoms characteristic of separation anxiety.

I am sometimes met with skepticism when I bring up this topic, but I think people often forget that bettas are a domesticated animal species and that being domesticated is inherently a process that changes the way a species relates to and behaves around humans. In my eyes, a betta fish having separation anxiety is just as plausible a scenario as it is for a dog or a cat.

Interestingly, with this sort of fin biting, tail type seems to have little to do with the behavior. I have had veiltails, crowntails, halfmoons, even plakats and one female betta fish bite their fins for this reason.

It’s true that most of what is out there on the topic of separation anxiety is dog-centric. I spent the majority of my Canine Training and Animal Behavior/Welfare classes a few years back adapting what we went over to my bettas and other aquarium fishes, despite rarely ever actually talking about fishes in class. Just like in training, all the same concepts do work here, they just sometimes have to be applied slightly differently. Taking those classes was when I first started to really see the parallels in behavior and symptoms between canine separation anxiety and what I have observed in my own fishes, and started trying to figure out how I could adapt existing treatments to be used with my bettas. I am in no way a veterinarian, but without access to a professional to consult on the matter, these are the methods I have come up with myself and found to be most effective.

I apologize in advance for the length of this post, but it is a subject that is difficult to explain (at least for me) without going in to some amount of detail.

Girlfriend bought me some really neat dice for D&D…bailey does not like them. turns out, he hates blue. Even tested it with my pill container (also dark blue) and he got pissed.