Betta splendens

Common name
Siamese fighting fish

Description
Beautiful fish with a interesting behavior.

My experiences
In my opinion this fish isn't suitable for every aquarium with a mixed population. A male B. splendens held with two or more females is almost constantly trying to impress the females, which is very interesting and a beautiful thing to see. My experience with male B. splendens is that they are pretty sensitive and easily damage themselves. The first male B. splendens I held jumped out of a small hole (used for the filter hoses) of the aquarium. When I found him, he was almost dried out. Luckily I could save him, but he never became 100% the same and therefore died a few months later. The second male I held was very sexual active, because he didn't granted himself any rest, he became very sensitive to diseases. Therefore I had to isolate this male regularly in an other aquarium to cure him from diseases. But every time I putted him back in the main aquarium it got sick again after some weeks. This fish also didn't get old. The females were much stronger and became about a year and a half. A disadvantage of the female fish was that they regularly where aggressive to small fished and persecuted them. The male fishes didn't do this, probably because the females got all there attention. The only fish that the male B. splendens disliked were the Microgeophagus ramirezi.

Foot-note
The picture of this page is taken from the book 'Het optimale aquarium' van Kasper Horst en Horst E. Kipper.

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