Tips for keeping Bettas healthy and alive

[CrazyCory42]

I love better fish and I’ve had 2 so far since the beginning of my fish keeping journey back in Jan 2019. However, both never lasted more than 6months. The first got fin rot and subsequently passed away (I was very new to fish keeping and didn’t really know what I was doing) and the second was doing brilliantly and then just one day, in a matter of a couple of hours, looked sick, bloated, curled up under a plant and died. It was very much a shock because she’d looked perfectly healthy up to this point.

I really want to get another, but I’m terrified of killing it! At first I thought it was because my nitrates are very high, they sit at 40ppm out of the tap and stay at 40ppm from one end of the week to another, despite lots of plants and filter media that supports anaerobic bacteria. I have several other species of fish and cherry shrimp and I’ve never had a problem with them. And many members on this forum have suggested that nitrates will only really start to cause problems when you exceed 80ppm.

Does anyone have any tips? This is my tank and tank specs:

Tank Specs:
100L tank (36”L x 12”D x 15”H)
Heated 24 - 25C
EF-250 All Pond Solutions external filter
50% weekly water change (seachem prime)

Stocking:
6 harlequin Rasboras
8 false julii corys
1 pepper cory
3 bronze corys
1 unknown cory
50 something RCS
3 amano shrimp

Water quality (tested with API master test kit):
Ammonia 0
NO3 40 (Tap water sits at 40ppm)
NO2 0
GH 8
KH 6
pH 7.2
CI2 0

(p.s. I have a fine filter bag over the intake pipe to prevent shrimp being sucked up)

 

[MirandaB]

Best kept in a smaller,low flow planted tank on their own as they're not a community fish.
That way you can regulate the diet better and feed more live/frozen foods with the occasional soft pellet type food as they are quite prone to bloating 🙂

 

[Aqua360]

I prefer smaller tanks with low (and I mean virtually non-existent) flow.

If you plant heavily and keep on top of water changes, it's easily doable to do with or without a filter, similar to Killifish.

Also a cover to maintain humidity helps with their air breathing organ (in my opinion). Get some small pellets and feed sparingly, it's super easy to overfeed Bettas and cause bloat.

 

[mort]

Mass production and inbreeding to produce colours and finnage has weakened the average betta to a point where they can be tricky to keep alive. They like slow moving/still water and that's for the shorter finned natural types. They tend to do best in low flow tanks with few, if any, tankmates.

There are some uk breeders if you check out facebook (or so I've heard as I don't use it) and these might be a source of hardier stock but I would recommend one of the more wild type strains with a natural colour simply because they are less manipulated and if you match the parameters, can be far hardier.

 

[Aqua360]

I think another point to make, that I think also contributes to not keeping Bettas in conventionally larger tanks, is that in the wild they inhabit bodies of water that are typically very shallow.