"m" wrote in message
oups.com...
*disclaimer: I have very little experience with bettas short of keeping
a male one in a fish bowl. I also have no intentions on trying this, so
don't get all worked up. I'm just wondering.*

My previous post was asking about female bettas, and I've been sitting
here at work with nothing to do except think about how great bettas are
and how I wish I could fill a tank full of them.

Then I started to wonder....

Why CANT we do that? It's not like bettas are the only territorial fish
we have in the hobby... why can't the same techniques used for keeping
agressive cichlids together be used with bettas? Wouldn't it be
possible to keep male and female bettas together in an overstocked,
highly planted/caved tank? Wouldn't the agression be spread out and
maybe, just maybe things would be ok?

The only reasons I can think of for this approach not working (and
these are just me basically saying random things that may or may not be
way off) a
-Maybe bettas are more delicate than cichlids? I suppose that generally
they're not as big and tough looking, but then it's still a level
playing field. It seems to me pretty unlikely that they could do a lot
of damage to another fish if they couldn't take quite a bit of damage
too.
-Maybe it's the fins. Maybe the long fins get nipped up too easily and
infections would abound. This seems a lot more likely to me than the
first point. Still, if the water quality is good then there shouldn't
be too much trouble for the fins to heal.
-Maybe they're too messy to overstock a tank with? This seems pretty
unlikely to me... if that were true then I don't think people would
very much like them being in small tanks.
-Maybe they're not very smart and would refuse to run off and heal up
after a fight? Again, this seems like one of the more likely reasons to
me.

So does anyone have any thoughts on this? I know bettas are a lot of
peoples favorite fish (I'm starting to feel that way myself) so I'm
sure that somewhere, some time, SOMEONE tried something like this, but
I don't know. It would be really cool if it worked, but I think it
would be too much of a risk for a normal person to try.

-m


The question is whether multiple males can be kept in a single tank. I
don't have any experience with this, but I imagine that if it could be made
to work (which I doubt), then you would have a lot of males with torn fins.
This would probably not cause any health issues (with healthy fish in clean
water) but it would be very unattractive to look at.

Territorial cichlids which are able to do serious damage tend to have sorter
fins and I think more hard rays. The nature of their contest is often
through pushing and pulling with the jaws, and various amounts of posturing,
with the occasional feints. It's only when the loser does not disappear
from the winner's sight that he is in danger of being killed (or he would
have been able to swim away to fight another day). There are some cichlids
such as the Leleopis which can genuinely kill a rival with a single plunge,
but most depend mostly on guile and jaw-wrestling.

I think Bettas also do a lot of posturing, flaring and circling, but then
they try to take chunks of each others fins out, so winner or loser, both
look like hell.
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