It’s a funny thing, falling in love. It just happens. You meet someone, a
connection is made and suddenly you wake up one day and can’t
imagine life without them. They’re a part of you. And even if it doesn’t
last, the memory of that love will always remain.
I fell in love with bettas when I was eleven years old. My parents had
bought me a large glass aquarium for my birthday and amongst the first
fish to inhabit it was a male veiltail betta. He was a rich royal blue,
with long flowing fins and a pugnacious attitude and I was very proud
indeed to be his owner. Sadly, he didn’t last long under my novice care.
The scant information contained in my many tropical fish books hadn’t
equipped me to properly care for him.
I was completely devastated, as only a child can be, to lose such a
beautiful fish and vowed that I would read everything about bettas that
I could get my hands on, so that the next time I brought one home I
would have more success.
Shortly afterwards I purchased a copy of Walt Maurus’s A Complete
Guide to Bettas and it change my life. Here was a book that not only
answered all of my questions about bettas, but was also written in such
a way that you couldn’t help but affected by the author’s enthusiasm
for his subject.
Twenty-two years later, after a dalliance with Central American
cichlids, I find myself keeping bettas once again. I returned to betta
keeping in 2007, just at the point when one or two people in the UK
had started to import show quality bettas from Asia. Having seen
photos of modern show bettas online I was captivated by their colour
and finnage. I had to get my hands on some! Through the importers I
started to build a collection of high quality bettas, turning most of my
fishroom over to their care. I then embarked on what has turned out to
be one of the most enjoyable journeys of my life: The quest to
understand and put into practice the art and science of keeping and
breeding bettas. I turned to the world wide web for help.
It is no easy task to learn everything you need to know about the
modern betta hobby by using the internet alone. Most of the
information is spread far and wide across a plethora of websites that
vary in both the quality and accuracy of the information they provide.
Of course, if you know where to look, there are some brilliant websites
out there that provide excellent information, but for most people
starting out in the hobby finding the information they need can be a
daunting prospect. In the end many either give up or find themselves in
an endless cycle of posting questions on social media pages in order to
get answers (some better than others).
It is for this reason that when I first sat down at my computer three
years ago, to begin the process of writing The Betta Bible, I had just
one aim: To put as much information as possible about keeping and
breeding bettas in one place, so that others could save themselves from
the countless hours of scouring the internet that I had to go through in
order to teach myself how to do so.
Not for me a basic beginner’s guide to bettas, or a coffee table book
full of photos and no useful content. I wanted to write a proper
reference book that anyone could pick up, knowing absolutely nothing
about bettas, and use to educate themselves about every aspect of this
wonderful hobby.
This is the book you now hold in your hands. In it I have tried to cover
every aspect of betta keeping, from taxonomy, anatomy, geography and
history right through to how to keep and breed bettas, descriptions of
the various types of betta, their colour patterns, and no less than a
whole chapter on genetics. I have also included a section on common
diseases found in bettas and how to treat them. Put simply, if there’s an
aspect of betta keeping that isn’t covered in this book, then it’s
probably not worth knowing; and if it is worth knowing, then please tell
me and it will appear in the next edition. After all, this is only the
beginning.
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