Admiral in the community

No, not a war and peace story, this is about my fish betta whom I call the "Admiral" because of its gorgeous blue color (see below). Admiral lives with an assortment of other tropical community fish in my fishtank. He is a "crowntail" male betta, so called because of the exaggerated fringes on his fins and tail that make him look aristocratic and pretty. They are known to be very aggressive, which makes keeping them in a community type tank together with other fish a challenge for aquarium hobbyists.

I have developed aquarium maintenance as a hobby only during the last three years. In the world of professional aquarists, who have been doing this sort of thing for many decades, I am but a wee novice. Moreover, my experience is limited to freshwater aquarium, which is much simpler to build and maintain than a marine aquarium with all those fancy coral and dazzling array of fish (most famous of them all is "Nemo", named after the Disney blockbluster that popularized this little beauty the world over). I have a 10 gallon tank at home (see above), in which I have been keeping a variety of tropical freshwater fish over these years. In the early stages they used to die off faster due to my inexperience, but now the average turnover has settled into a relatively sedate 8 months to 1 year.

Back to Admiral, with a bit of history. This fish originally hails from Thailand and Malaysia, and more than a century ago in the Siam province (in Thailand) Admiral's forefathers used to be the gladiators in the then locally popular sport of fish fight (that is how they got their more common name Siamese fighting fish). Bettas are fiercely territorial - if you put two males together, they will fight each other to death. The original betta were pale, less attractive and more muscular; later they were brought to the notice of the outside world, and people began cross-breeding different types of betta in order to create increasingly beautiful and exotic varieties. Crowntail species is the latest (and most expensive) of this breed, and my Admiral is a direct descendant of this august lineage. I picked him up from a local pet store about five months ago, and since then he is a happy resident along with fellow tankmates that include a school of three neon tetras and one glo-lite tetra (see them here), and a very shy oto.

Because bettas are so aggressive towards their own kind and others that resemble them, such as the fancy guppies with large and colorful fins, the trick is not to keep them in the same tank (unless you plan to breed betta, in which case one male should be put together with one or more females in a larger tank). Also they are territorial, and need bigger space than any other fish of similar size. Bettas face danger from other fish too. They are slow because of their large fins, and also quite picky about the type of meal they eat. As a result, betta is often outcompeted by the swifter fish in the tank, and can eventually starve to death. Moreover, there are some smaller and aggressive fin-nipping fish (such as danios) that enjoy taking nibbles out of the betta's glowing mane, and over time can stress it out. These are some of the reasons why it is so difficult to make betta share the tank with other fish. What I have done is to keep my betta with a safe mix of non-aggressive fish that prefer water at different depths, so that their territories do not overlap. This is no rocket science, but still fun to see it working at the first try. Betta, with its upturned mouth well adapted to pick off food from below the water surface, is the so called "top feeder". Neons have mouth at the front of their head that enables them to grab crumbs suspended in the water, and they are the "middle feeder". Oto (short for otoclinclus) is the least visible but funniest of them all. It has a mouth right underneath its head, perfectly suited to suck soft algae from the rocks and other debris at the bottom of the tank - they are the "bottom grazers". Otos are also nocturnal, and prefer hiding in some dark corner during the day. Such niche partitioning (which is a technical jargon, but not hard to follow) makes it possible to house them all in my relatively small tank. I am not done yet, and have plan to add other variety of fish later; for now, Admiral looks only too happy and majestic in his little world - don't you agree?