Betta-keeping, where 'conventional wisdom' is highly mistaken

One may think that fish care has been well-studied, much like other popular pets. After all, there is a lot of good information about caring for animals like cats and dogs, from their diet and required activity levels to diseases to watch out for.

Fish-keeping, however, is a whole other ball game. If you have ever kept fish, you probably would have learned very quickly that for many species, it is not as simple as chucking them in some water, and that's that. Sometimes, they need aeration. Other times, they need specific types of decoration or substrate. Some co-exist with plants, others dine on them. Some fish eat each other. Some only eat algae. Some like high pH, others low. Same with temperature. Minerals. Etc.

That is why aquarium-keepers are almost biologists in their own right. Unfortunately, there has been a lot of mixing of facts and anecdotes, resulting in a lot of misinformation in the hobby.

Even for something as standard as a betta, a.k.a. fighting fish?

Well, my evaluation says yes!

I remember reading scientific papers where I briefly saw that in the wild, bettas lived in low-pH environments. I did not pay much attention until I started keeping bettas while reading guides by so-called 'experts' stating that bettas prefer higher pH than in the scientific paper I read. Well, that was a red flag. So I decided to do a more extensive analysis to compare not only the pH but also the temperature of natural environments where bettas can be found, compared to what popular guides say.

The full article can be found here.

Unsurprisingly, every guide by so-called 'experts' in the hobby was wrong. What was surprising was how extensively they were wrong.

Here is a simple visualization highlighting the minimum and maximum pH stated by the guides, compared to what they could be naturally found in. Only one guide, by Seriously Fish, had a relatively similar minimum pH. Everything else was significantly higher. However, Seriously Fish listed a maximum pH much higher than in the natural environments.

Temperature was not that much better. Again, Seriously Fish was closest to representing what was found in scientific literature. The other guides by so-called 'experts' are wildly off in at least one aspect, if not both. For example, both the r/bettafish subreddit, and bettafish.org had the temperature maximum being much lower, and minimum temperature much higher. For sites literally with 'betta' in their name, the accuracy of information here is reflective of the state of misinformation in the hobby.

It should be noted that there is evidence that fish can thrive in parameters quite significantly outside their natural range. However, the aquarium-keeping hobby regularly specifies the parameters as necessary to mimic nature... which they don't.

The analysis here is nothing complicated. Just a matter of jotting down some numbers and plotting them. It goes to show how relatively basic level data analysis can provide quite interesting insights into something like a hobby one may have.