Ammonia Burn Treatment

[Syphoniera]

LOL, probably! She's not a match for him at all but if I can find a nice pink or cambo VT female I will breed him, IF he recovers. If he's still weakened I won't put him through spawning, it's pretty stressful. I think he's got digestive troubles because he'll only take one or two pellets at a time, but I'm getting four or five down him a day - not enough to put condition on him, but enough to stop him getting worse. He's probably been fed some utter rubbish cheap junk that's gummed him up. At least I can fix that - good food and clean water, yet again. It's pretty incredible what good food and clean water will do for a fish. When I bought him I was pretty much guessing what he looked like because his colours were washed out, his fins clamped and he was floating almost on his side in the cup gasping for air, almost a constant stream of bubbles flowing out of his mouth. He looked the worst of any of them and he was tucked away in a corner - dunno whether some idiot missed him for teh water changes that I would have been doing about 6-8 times a day if I was forced to keep them like that (but he'd have been lucky to get one daily) or whether they put him there on purpose hoping nobody would complain about them leaving a fish to drop dead in some god-forsaken corner.

The betta is a resilient creature, it must be said. A few days removed from that hell and he's already got mating on his mind. Typical. His colours darken a little every day. He's got a light bf pattern, a very small ring of pink around the edge of all his fins where they join his body. The rays of his fins and the membranes closest to his body are opaque white and a very pure colour, and the rest of his fins are cellophane clear. His body's a pale peachy colour with black specks. And he's got these gorgeous gold eyes! I love their eyes, they come in as many colours as the rest of them. I did have to swap males on my in-progress spawn - the one i'm using is a self-BF, maroon and steel, and he has BLUE EYES!!! aaaw.

Wonder if his little tummy shrank through food being forgotten, too.
I doubt he'd have lasted any longer without you, but then again, that extreme suffering saved him, because he couldn't have lucked out more in the end...
'.. A few days removed from that hell and he's already got mating on his mind. ...' Definitely a boy, isn't he, lol?
Isn't the difference even in a healthy betta amazing, once they're home?
He just sounds incredible - even now, with all his troubles!
(Please note I spared you the bad pun and did not say he did indeed sound 'peachy', as painful as this was.)
If bettas were all similar, it would be easier to stop at one, but they're all such individuals, in all respects, including 'the windows of the soul' - but gold eyes?!!!
Sounds like you're lucky, too.
Just need to rescue the right babe for him now.
Glad you found a suitable male, for the spawning, though.
They sounded like such a lovely pair, if only they'd gotten along, although she's got her 'blue-eyed boy' out of the deal, and I hear you can't do better than that.
It's not like he'd ever run off and leave her holding the baby.

 

[LauraFrog]

Oh, you'd be amazed. Most of my pets seem remarkably keen to run off and leave ME holding the baby... my frogs do it every year, so I have to convert my entire veranda into a vast tadpole raising setup, running three or four air pumps driving filters made from old drink bottles (I perfected that technique because filtering the tadpole setups was gonna send me broke, especially with the little buggers going through - in a week - eight lettuces, one kilo of fish pellets, a loaf of bread and six eggs.) My livebearers do it as well... lol

I can't believe though how much of a difference clean water and good food actually make. If you'd shown me that fish just when I got into fishkeeping, I'd have said no way, he's a goner, he's dying. But the things I will rescue now... there's a remarkable story on one of the Australian fish forums, somebody's zebra danio got stuck behind a filter for several hours. The blood supply to the tail was cut off, and so the entire tail fell off along with a few mm's of flesh. If it had been my fish I'd have plied the clove oil, but she wanted to give it a chance. That was two months ago. The fish now has a new tail. Unmarked, small and misshapen - but she can swim perfectly. It's absolutely incredible what they can take.

It's annoying though, it's hard to find decent females around here. The female I'm spawning at the moment is one of the first run of CT females I have seen for months. I'd buy more but the others are all blue or red with iridescent washes on them - if I did build up a line of those I'd spend the next six generations trying to breed out the iridescent contrasting wash, so there's no point. The other females that they get in are always a mixture of plakats, some male and some female. The ones that are female are so tiny you have to grow them on for about two months before you can spawn them with any of the males you get, because the males are already large.