Betta Fish Care – Your Betta Fish First Aid Kit

Not many people realize what the proper Betta Fish care is and that leads to their fish getting sick and living a VERY short life or even dying because something went wrong with their environment.

Over the years I’ve had a lot of experience working with Betta Fish and really discovering the secrets you need to know in order to keep them living healthy, feeling happy and best of all, how to make them REALLY show off their colors.

In fact, not many people know this but your Betta Fish can actually live for up to 5 years if you care for them properly. But most of the time they die MUCH earlier due to the lack of knowledge about tank conditions. They end up getting sick, and once one of the gets sick, it pollutes the whole tank and could potentially kill the rest of your fish.

If you don’t use the proper Betta Fish care and your fish DO get sick. I’ll show you exactly how to identify those symptoms and then how to treat particular illness with the right medication so your Betta Fish perk right back up in no time and remain happy and healthy.

Another cool thing we will talk about right now are the many different Betta Fish colors. They come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes and if you know what you’re doing. You’ll be able to make their colors really pop and come alive. I’ll show you a few tricks to doing that as well.

Let’s DIVE in…

How To Diagnose Your Sick Betta Fish

Below are some of the most common ways your Bettas should act and look. Be sure to take note of how your little critters are acting on a daily basis and pretty soon your eye will be trained enough to notice any of the slightest differences in their behavior.

Healthy Betta Fish Symptoms

• Eats everything you give it

• Swims around in a playful way

• Acts totally normal

• It’s colors are bright and vibrant

• The tail and fins are fully spread out

• Body is clean and sleek

• Eyes look perfectly normal

• Gills are normal

• Scales feel smooth to the touch

• Belly is totally normal

These are the characteristics below that you need to look out for. If you’re Betta has any of these symptoms then you may have a sick little Betta Fish on your hands that needs some serious attention, and needs it fast.

Sick Betta Fish Symptoms

• Does not eat AT ALL or may eat some food only to throw it up

• It’s not active, it may hide in the corner or stay laying on the bottom only to come up for air

• Might purposely run into different things in the tank trying to scratch itself

• Has a dull color, looks pale, or may even turn grey

• Tail and fins are somewhat clumped together and looked ridged

• Body may have open sores, white cotton like patches, lumps, red spots or white spots

• One or even both eyes seem to be popping out of its head

• One of both of the gills may be inflamed and not close all the way. Might look red

• Scales are raised, similar to how a cat will raise its fur when upset

• Belly either looks WAY to skinny or is completely swollen and fat

The 3 Most Common Betta Fish Diseases

Below I’ve listed the 3 most common Betta Fish diseases that I have come across in the past, how you can easily recognize them using the pictures I’ve provided and finally what medications you need to use to cure your Bettas before the disease gets the best of em… 

DISEASE: FUNGAL INFECTION

Symptoms: Your Betta may flat out stop eating, become less active and will typically develop white cotton like patches on its head or body. It may also loose much of its color and become very pale.Treatment: Do a FULL water change. Make sure you flush everything then once you fill it back up make sure you add the "Fungus Eliminator" by Jungle. These are little crystals and the dosage should average about 30 to 40 grains per 1/2 gallon. Your water should have a nice gold tint to it and please make sure to NOT over medicate. That will ensure your Betta Fish die.Next, you'll want to change the water every 3rd day and add a new dosage of the same medication. Continue doing this until all the fungus has disappeared from the tank and their bodies and they have returned to normal coloration and activity.DISEASE: ICK

Symptoms: Your Betta Fish will develop these weird little white dots all over its body as if it was sprinkled with salt or snow. Your Betta may become less vibrant and less active and may even start rubbing itself or purposely running into things in order to try and scratch itself.

Treatment: Ick is a common parasite. But because it’s a parasite its VERY contagious and its usually best practice to treat the whole tank even if only one fish is showing the symptoms. Luckily, Ick is temperature sensitive, all you have to do to get rid of it is raise the core temp of the tank to 85ºF and add one drop of Aquarisol per gallon everyday until it’s cured. It will only take a few days to cure the little guys. 

However, if you DO NOT have a tank that is bigger than 5 gallons and your Betta Fish resides in some kind of desktop tank, DO NOT try to heat the tank. These smalls tanks make it incredibly difficult to regulate temperature and if you don’t do it right, you could end up boiling your poor Betta…

Instead, just use the Aquarisol adding one drop per gallon of your tank each day until the little parasites are gone.

DISEASE: POPEYE

Symptoms: Pretty obvious here, usually one but sometimes both of the Bettas eye will seem to pop out of your fishes head, thus giving the disease its name, Popeye. After the first week, your Betta Fishes eye will start looking so gross that you may not even want to look at that nasty thing anymore. But please, we have a STRONG “No Flush” policy here on this website and I don’t want you to give up on your Betta because we can fix him. However, I will say that in some rare cases Popeye is triggered by Tuberculous, which is a virus that ALWAYS kills its host. In which case you won’t be able to help much, but we’ll assume that is not the case with your fish.

Treatment: Popeye usually only happens when you don’t clean your tank. Keep a clean tank and your Betta will always be fine. However, if you do catch the Popeye soon enough you will be able to save your Betta. In some rare cases, it may loose an eye, but if you’re on it early enough, you should be fine. The very first thing that you should do is a FULL water change. Keep it VERY clean, giving it a fresh change no more than 3 days after the last. After you’ve got that done, you’ll need some Ampicillin, a common antibiotic. You will typically find this medication in capsule form that is meant to treat much larger tanks, usually 10 gallons and above, so what you’ll need to do is open up the capsule and sprinkle just the right amount of powder into the tank. Be sure not to over medicate your fish and you’ll be fine. Continue the the treatment for about one week after all the symptoms have gone away, JUST to be sure.

Your Next Steps To Betta Fish Care

First off, I hope this post really helped you out. It was my intention to create a resource where you can come to get all the info you need about keeping your Betta Fish as healthy as possible. I really do wish you the best and I welcome any comments that you’d like to leave on his page with your thoughts or opinions. And you need to get a hold of me, leaving a comment is a create way to do that too, I read every single one.

If you’d like to take your Betta Fish care to the next level then obviously you need to start learning everything you can about them. One of the best ways to do that is to either watch YouTube videos or read about them on forums or sites like WikiPedia.

However, at least with me, that stuff got kind of boring after awhile because I kept coming across the same rehashed information. I wanted something new, something fresh, something that would REALLY teach me the stuff I knew the pet stores were not telling me…

So after many hours of searching and sifting through all kinds of other boring stuff out there online, I found this one website online that seemed to tell me exactly what I needed to know.

Not only did this website show me how to keep my Betta Fish in the best condition possible but it also taught me how to breed them successfully. And that is something I’ve ALWAYS wanted to learn how to do because if you get really good at it, you can start creating your OWN breeds of Betta fish by crossing different colors with different tail and fin types to create a truly unique breed.

Heck, you could even name it after you!

Anyways, if you want to check out the site I’m talking about, then just click the button below and you’ll be taken there immediately.

Click Here For The Betta Fish Secrets

Fighter Fish Diet – The Secrets To Betta Fish Health

To fully understand what the perfect Fighter Fish Diet is you first have to understand where the Fighter Fish is originally from. These awesome fish have received the nick name “The Jewel Of The Orient”, their native home is originates from Thailand but they can also be found in their natural habitat in and around Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and parts of China.

They like to hang out around small, shallow ponds and even some slow moving streams. While there is some debate about which is actually the best possible habitat for your Fighter Fish, one thing that is often over looked is the actual water temperature. In their home countries the average water temperature is about 80ºF, so that is their ideally perfect water temp.

As the water starts to cool the Fighter Fish will get increasingly more agitated, which can really lead them to live up to their name. Fighter Fish have been known to fight to the death just because the other Betta Fish looked at them the wrong way. So be sure to keep their water temperature right at 80ºF and you’ll be fine. That’s why you shouldn’t keep them in a small bowl, because you cannot regulate the heat control very well. I highly recommend getting a top of the line Fighter Fish Aquarium.

The Secret Fighter Fish Diet

Back in Thailand, you would find the Betta Fish feeding on all kinds of cool fish food like insects and insect larva. In a perfect world that’s all they would eat. But if need be they will adapt to eating the dry flake foods found at your local pet store or even freeze dried food if that’s all ya got.

However, the BEST food you can ever feed your Betta Fish is live insects. They will love that stuff and will eat it all day. Their digestive system are geared towards primarily consuming meat so when you can, give them the good stuff.

The healthier, more live food you give your Fighter Fish the more their colors will pop and the happier they will be.

They actually have a upward turned mouth made specifically for eating any unlucky bugs that happen to fall in the water. What you wanna try to do as a Fighter Fish owner is replicate their natural habitat as much as possible. By feeding them live bugs, you can do this and they’ll love you for it.

Some of the best things you can feed these little guys are Brine shrimp, Daphnia, plankton, tubifex, glassworms, and beef heart. Those are all great things to feed your Fighter Fish, you can find them either frozen or freeze dried. Either one will do nicely. But if you have flake food, you’ll need to suppletment with either freeze dried, frozen or preferably live food.

Some of my favorites are the freeze dried blood worms. Betta Fish go bonkers for these nasty little worms and will be sure to really brighten up their colors too.

Go ahead and leave a comment below to tell me what your favorite Fighter Fish Diet is…