pet fish in the dorm room

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wow cool...thanks!

so betas are the type that like to be left alone?

i know the whole speel about how they will kill the other fish if is a beta
but will it be that if that way if it is a another type at all?

We had a few for years

Average lifespan is apparently five years

Say, "Betta" as in "Good, betta, best," rather than "alpha, beta, gamma" and you'll be right and the guy at the fish store wrong.

Male bettas will fight until one is killed. A male betta will kill a female betta if she's not ready to breed, and will kill her after breeding when he is engaged in ferociously defending his bubble-nest if you don't remove her. Females can be kept together, in a spacious tank. They don't like each other and will fight some, so they need space for the loser to run away. There's also the chance that one of your 'female' bettas is a male who's reverted from the fancy long-finned domestic variety into the wild-type. A wild-type male looks like a fancy female, and is more ferocious than a fancy male, because stronger.

You can keep bettas with other fish that don't look like bettas. Small catfishes like otocinculus and corydoras species will be fine. If you put guppies in there, the betta will kill them -- their bright colours and long fins will make the betta think they are rival bettas. Avoid any species that's aggressive, regardless of size. Danios, barbs, and many types of tetras (etc) will bite your betta's long fins. Because of those fins, he can't swim fast enough to escape them and they'll eventually nip him to death.

Others will disagree, but I think if you want to keep more than one fish, you'll want at least a ten-gallon tank. The more water there is to dilute your fish's waste, the less often you'll have to do water-changes. Moving a few gallons around every week isn't a big deal, but it's nice to have leeway about it so you don't have to worry about it during the week you've got finals. There's also the fact that almost every small fish (that stays small) you can find in the average pet-store is either solitary and aggressive like a betta or is highly sociable and needs, for best health, to live in a group of at least six of its own species.

Don't keep bettas in those tanks with one mirrored wall, or those ones with a divider where you're supposed to keep two. They will flare at each other (or their own reflection) and do their pretty "I am gonna kill you," dance, and the stress of constantly preparing to fight will shorten their lifespans. You can show them a mirror every so often to see the dance if you want to. Given enough space to be interactive, your betta will probably seem to recognize you after a while, and may develop the charming habit of flaring and dancing at other people who come near the tank, trying to scare the loathesome stranger away. Give him a plant, too, bettas are lazy and will sometimes rest on a leaf, perching like a bird. Pretty. A real plant 'eats' nitrate and will reduce the need for water-changes, too.

Get a 'master test kit,' the $15 hobbiest version (you don't need all the cool tests in the big expensive professional's master kit) and 'cycle' your filter before you add any fish. There are any number of articles on the web about how to do a 'fishless cycle.' If they confuse you, I can probably explain, they all make it sound more complicated than it is. After you've got your bacterial colonies, all you've got to do is make sure you don't kill them by letting the filter dry out or splashing cholorinated tap-water on them, and change out water so you always keep the nitrate level at or below 20ppm. Or 40ppm for most fish, bettas can handle more, sensitive things like discus and dwarf cichlids need it less than 20. Ammonia and nitrite will always read 0 if the filter is properly cycled, and if they don't you'll be doing water-changes every day for ages while waiting for the tank to cycle again without harming the fish in there.

how would i know if the water is chlorinated?
it it is would use distilled water or store-bought water?

yah i've read about letting the tank run for a week without a fish...is that what you mean?

It'll be chlorinated if you're on a city or town's public water-system and not a private well. Just treat it with a dechlorinator you get at the fish-store. 'SeaChem Prime.'

Distilled water isn't good, they need some minerals in the water.



Naw.

The filter has two kinds of bacteria on it. One kind eats ammonia and excretes nitrite, the second kind eats nitrite and excretes nitrate. These little critters are all over the place, but they are only going to grow in large numbers on your tank filter if there's food for them. Normally they feed on the pee of your fish, but if you add fish and there aren't sufficient bacteria on the filter then the fish will end up swimming around in ammonia-y water while the bacteria become established and will likely die (unless you change out water, which will slow the growth of the bacteria but help the fish). The 'Fishless Cycle' thing is just introducing some substitute fish-pee (your own urine or ammonia from a bottle or a dead prawn, whatever) to get the bacterial colonies established before you add fish. It takes more than a week, but you can make it happen faster by adding live plants or a handful of gravel from an established aquarium.

i'm still a tad confused...

what do you do first?
what do you get?

could you make steps for me? it just isn't making much sense.

thakns

Buy:

Tank. Filter. (Filter is built-in if you get an 'Eclipse System' mini tank.) Master Test Kit. Dechlorinator ('Seachem Prime' excellent and less expensive for volume of water treated).

Optional: a live aquarium plant. (For this you will need a substrate -- gravel or sand.)

Set up the tank where you want it. Fill it with water, treating it with the dechlorinator. Add the substrate and plant if you've got them. Turn the filter on.

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Fishless cycle: Add ammonia to the water. You can do it by the drop, from a bottle of household ammonia (be sure the kind you get doesn't have perfumes or detergents added to it) or you can use your own pee, by the tablespoonful. Use the ammonia test from the test kit and try to get it to read at about 0.5 ppm. Count your drops or spoonfuls, you can do the math about how much you have to add to get a certain reading.

Test daily. (before adding ammonia) Soon you will find that the ammonia-level drops overnight. Add more to bring it back to 0.5ppm. Test for nitrate, you will start to get some reading of this. This shows that bacteria are growing on your filter -- they eat the ammonia and poop out the nitrite.

Keep adding ammonia to get that 0.5ppm reading. Test for nitrite every day. It will spike to an enormous level and then start to go down. Then you'll start to get a reading for nitrate. This shows that a second species of bacteria is growing on your filter -- it eats the nitrite and poops out the nitrate.

Keep adding ammonia. One day you'll find that the tank goes from 0.5ppm ammonia to 0 ammonia, 0 nitrite in 24 hours or less. Test for nitrate. It'll be off the chart.

Now you're ready for fishes. Keep adding ammonia until the day you get your fish. Before you add them, change out all of the water to get rid of the nitrate. Remember to dechlorinate the new water before you put it in. Never let chlorinated water touch your filter. Never let your filter dry out. You have millions of pet bacteria now.

This will happen faster if you get some gravel or filter-material from an established aquarium -- it'll have a bunch of the bacteria you want on it, and give you a jump start. The live plant will do the same, but it may make the readings proceed unpredictably, because plants 'eat' nitrogens. Don't worry about that, if it goes from 0.5ppm ammonia to 0 ammonia 0 nitrite overnight, it's good.
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You can, and most people do, ignore this if the tank is relatively large for the fish and the fish a hardy species (one betta in six gallons should be okay) and instead just add your fish. In that case, test daily for ammonia and nitrite, and change out some water if you get a reading other than 0. (If you keep large fish, or delicate ones, or put a lot of fish in the tank for its size, you'll kill them doing this, or need to do water-changes several times a day for weeks.)

verycool thankyou!

Go to petsmart. They have a good package there. I had a 30 gallon with 5 cichlids.