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Betta Fish Need To Be Kept Warm
Is your betta fish sluggish? Maybe not interested in food? Spending most of its time on the bottom of its aquarium? It may not be sick - yet - it may just be cold.
Betta fish are extremely easy to care for. They don't need water filters, aeration, or even much space. But they do need to be warm? What does a betta consider
"warm"? About 78 degrees will do, thanks, though they are very happy up to 84 degrees, which is the temperature that most betta breeders spawn them at.
Unless you live in a semi-tropical area, the temperature is probably not at 78 degrees except during the summer. Even then, at night, it will drop to mid to low
60s. If you keep your betta in a full-blown community tank, you'll probably already have a heater. This article is focused more on the single betta bowl or
aquarium. These aquariums tend to be small - 5 gallons or less (sometimes even less than a gallon, though that's not a good idea), and very low-tech. That's why we
like them - they're so simple and look so good. But while they do look good, that betta fish has to stay healthy for them to keep looking good. The best way to
do that is to keep them warm.
The next - at last - item you'll need to keep your betta warm is a Hydor mini aquarium heater for tanks from 2 to 5 gallons. They also have a model for tanks up
The Hydor mini is flat - so you can put it under the tank. Its flexible, too - wrapped in rubber, so if you need it to bend a bit, it can. It is also pretty much unbreakable, so if this is for a child's pet, you're much better off with this heater than a glass model (though there are good standard shape unbreakable heaters). Just don't bend it in half to test this out.
The Hydor mini also doesn't have a control setting like other heaters - its either on or off. This makes it even simpler to run. The drawback is that if you want your betta bowl to be exactly 79 degrees, this is probably not the right heater. For our purposes, though, the idea is just to keep the betta fish a bit warmer - even if its just 5-10 degrees warmer - than it otherwise would have been. If we can get that bowl to be 75 degrees in the middle of the night in January, instead of 65 degrees, that's enough. This feature makes it good for kids again - you can touch the heater when its on and not burn yourself. It is pretty hot, but not quite hot enough to burn (unless you clenched on to it for a minute). Also, anyone who's ever owned fish knows that a common disaster is when the heater fritzes out and cooks the tank. This little heater has less to break, and even if it does break, its not powerful enough to do too much damage.
Putting the heater under a tank is a bit tricky, because its not exactly flat. There's a diamon shaped section of it that's thicker than the main part of the heater. The diamond shaped area, fortunately, doesn't give off much heat, so you only need to get the three inch paddle under the tank.
Now a word about protecting the tank. While learning to cook, I did break two glass cooking dishes by 1) not letting the first one cool slowly enough and 2) accidentally letting one dish touch the side of the over while it was cooking. I do not want to have anyone's betta bowl explode because the heat differential between the heater and the glass bowl was too much. So, we're going to put something between the bowl and the heater. And put something under the heater so we don't damage whatever the bowl is sitting on.
Make a heater sandwich, with a trivet above and below the heater. Pull the heater out enough so that the raised diamond section isn't causing the fish bowl to tip. Conceal the cord as best you can. You now have a heated fish bowl. The heater should either be on or off, but it should stay that way. I usually turn mine on the same day I turn on the heat in early fall, and I turn it off in early summer. Again, its not the perfect temperature for the betta fish, but its a lot better than nothing.
These come as small as 9 x 19, but I like the standard 10 x 20 model. It costs $30, but it some ways its better than the Hydor mini. First reason: the heat is not nearly as intense. You wont need to put anything between the glass bowl and the heating mat. Its also truly flat, you do need to worry about the bowl toppling over. You can make it prettier by just putting a cloth on top of it. And if you want to be extra-nice to one of your houseplants, use the extra space as a growing area. The plants will benefit from the extra moisture from the betta bowl.
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