Maybe She Was Just Depressed

[Tiggle]

I originally bought my VT female betty to live in my community tank for platty birth control. All went well for several months until my platty girls got cleaver and all gave birth within a week of each other. Hence to say, betty got sick of chasing platty fry and i ended up with a lot of platties in my tank.

At first this was fine, but as the fry grew the tank became more crowded and betty become obvously unhappy. i took her out the community tank when her tail started to shred and put her into her own heated and filtered 14L tank. I treated her with salt and fin rot med, which cleaned up the infection but she was still not happy. for about 3 months she continued like this, bearly eatting or swimming and her fins showed no sign of regrowing.

Last week i decided to move one of my boys from the barracks into isolation so i could treat some kind of weird fungal growth hes acquired into the 14L and betty into the barracks. within two days of having company she was back to her old self, being a guts and eatting everything offered to her, swimming around and best of all her tail is growing back. if only i knew she was lonely i would have moved her sooner!

Ive heard of males getting depressed when seperated from their fry, but i never even considered it the cause as to why this was dragging on so long. is it normal for females to get depressed when removed from a community tank, even when she is the only of her species in the tank?

 

[blue_ram]

It could be. I once had a female betta in a community tank which included 4-5 other female bettas. Normally, I don't have too much problem, but for some reason, this particular female got constantly beat up by the others. So I moved her to 1 gallon bowl, but she seemed to be unhappy there. She sat on the Anubias all day, and only came up for feeding. She definitely wasn't sick. Thinking that she might be bored, I moved her to my 10 gallon community. She immediately started to act like her old self again. Fortunately, she got along reasonably well with the other female that was in that 10 gallon.

IMO (i.e. not a scientific fact), most bettas seem to require some form of mental stimulation to be happy.

 

[Elise]

When one of my fishes died, his counterpart in the split tank was depressed until I moved another friend nearby. They are really "people" bettas. They need friends, whether that's you, a nearby betta, or a tankmate (of the right kind), and sometimes something random in your room (Ula was attached to a calendar page at one point...... )