one quick story though about bettas. my family was given one in a bowl about 8 or 9 years ago. Apparently (i didnt know this), their life span is about 2-3 years. For some reason ours exceeded this by an incredible amount. It lived for over 5 years. and the best part about the whole situation is that we pretty much forgot we had it. We rarely ever fed it...sometimes my mom would be like "dave has anyone fed the fish recently?" and we\'d realize that we hadnt fed it in over 2 weeks. We would go on vacations and just totally forget to tell anyone to feed it while we were gone. We also rarely ever cleaned its bowl, it was so discusting at times. But the fish somehow lived about double its life expectancy. It just swam in a circle every day for 5 and a half years. what a trooper.
Yeah I think that the life expectancy they give you for bettas is shorter than it should be. One of my bettas just died, he was about 5 or so, and the other one I still have is 5 and looks great. I think the other one\'s death wasn\'t due to old age actually, but due to the fact that I came home one day and found his bowl knocked over and all of the water spilled out. I cleaned up the rocks and marbles, and then went to pick up what I thought was the dead fish, only to find him alive! Who knows how long he had been like that, the carpet was almost dry. He managed to live another couple of months after that, but his fins were all dried out and eventually he died.
You know, your negligent ( :lol: ) fish keeping may have done the fish some good. Most people really overfeed their bettas, and change their enclosures too recently, which is obviously bad since it is stressful every time you do it.
Sounds like your guy was a tough little sucker.
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