My New Rosetail Almost Died Today

[dogfood]

I just got a new 3.5 month old male rosetail that's only 1.5 inches. After dropping some TetraMin granules into his temporary container I went to feed my other bettas. A few minutes later I see him laying on the bottom with both of his gill plates wide open and all of his fins extended motionless as if he got electricuted.

At first I didn't know what to do because I didn't know what was wrong, but it was obvious that he wouldn't be able to surface for air and suffocate if I didn't do anything. So I took him out of the water with a net to expose him to air to see if it helped which it did but not in the way I had expected.

When I took him out of the water he was able to kind of jerk his mouth a little which I took as a sign that he was able to get some air so I put him back into the water. A few seconds later he somehow was able to spit out the food that was stuck in his throat. After that his gills were back to normal but breathing heavily and he just laid at the bottom gasping. I let him stay there for awhile and checked up on him to make sure he had enough strength to surface for air. About an hour later he was slowly swimming again but obviously still weak.

I'm happy to report that he is at about 80% health right now. I think I'll be feeding him and my two other new young bettas flakes for the next couple months. One of them is my first female betta which I got free. She is the sibling of a new but older male I got. She's really small about 1 inch.

 

[Naughtygirlrlw]

How scary! I'm so glad he's okay

 

[ileopard]

How big are those? If they're the normal size of goldfish flakes, I can see why he choked. I recommend Hikari Betta Bio-Gold pellets every day and freeze-dried/frozen bloodworms (the Hikari frozen bloodworms are better if you can get them) as a treat once a week.

The Bio-Gold pellets are small enough so that a betta shouldn't choke on them. Bettas also usually don't like flakes very much.

If you get the Bio-Gold package, it is very small, and it's also hard to dispense pellets, so I would recommend taking the pellets out and putting them in a snack-sized plastic bag so you can easily take them out.

 

[dogfood]

I have 4 types of foods that I feed to my existing bettas, flakes, granules, round Hikari Biogold pellets, and FD bloodworms. Before I got these new 3.5 month old bettas, I had a small CT that couldn't handle the granules or pellets as they were too big for him so he only got flakes which he ate without any problems. As he got bigger I slowly switched him to granules and pellets.

The granules are pretty small but their dimensions/shapes vary. They're shaped like tiny pieces of gravel that are slightly smaller than Hikari round Biogold pellets. Some are elongated and it was one of these elongated granules that got stuck in the little betta's mouth. I'm gonna feed these little guys the flakes until theyre big enough to hand the granules/pellets.