Here's the "rest of the story" Tom. You can probably go look for yourself I don't know if they left the article in question up and can not check.

Tom somebody posted a photo of a really cool 3' tall triad of driftwood with a foot tall elliptical bowl that looked like it had melted into the wood and somebody asked if it was ok for fish and the usual people said it's too small, had bad gas exchange blah blah blah.

Of course they don't know enough to know whey they're wrong so I politely explained then they got all agitated.

They're not just wrong they're fatally wrong and given there's cruelty laws in the UL people could kill fisj based on their bad advice and be in financial and legal trouble because t is.

They don't seem to understand that bettas breathe air and do not take any oxygen from the water. Now, those of us who have drowned bettas inadvertently know this but they do not.

You can easily prove this by putting a better in a container that water can flow through that sits on the bottom like a plastic cup with a lit and lots of holes in it. The fish will die if it can't get atmospheric oxygen.

That bettas breath only atmospheric oxygen is not something that needs to be proved. It's what's in the textbooks. If somebody believes a betta can survive in water from dissolved oxygen without breathing atmospheric air they should try and write it up. We're all waiting to see that one.

Now, the person that did't think this was true could have checked. It's in every fish book ever written. As are the words "bettas don't d well in deep tanks or tanks with fast flowing water or with other fish and this is more true of man made long finned varieties". Literally any decent reference book on thede fish says that.

So you have to wonder about the research ability of people who take the opposing view, where do they get this stuff?

As for the small fish comment, if miss itchy trigger finger there had manages to take some death breaths and go for a walk I would have finished explaining how killifish live in a tenth that much water in nature and even thrive in half an inch of water (see "Rivulus species Jim's basement floor" there's lots written about this) and even had a nice photo of a half inch dipteron, half a dozen of those $100 fish would be lost in a tank as huge as the one in question. Again they live in ponds bigger and smaller than this, literally cow footprints in the ground which is exactly what this reminded me of. Frans Vermeulen's IT Rains Fishes book explain this best and how fish there walk from hole to hole and often as not you find them on land and even in trees, there were a lot of newspaper articles about Riv. marmoratus doing this.

Certainly the idea of keeping fish in small containers is not new, nano tanks and nanofish are perhaps not common and not for everyone bur neither are they nonexistant. Killifish do better in small tanks, the psychotic little buggers freak out in big tanks because that's not what it's like where they're from, like bettas.

One of you doubts I actually write. Here's a secret, I don't get paid to write on the net and if you find a typo, great! If you can still understand what it meant why are you complaining about he appearing of something you got for free. If you find a typo in one of my published articles, tell the editor, that's his job. Ok?

If you need convincing, type my name into the gewgle with the word "aquaria". Always do that before you yell at somebody on the net, not after.

If you have TFH you can look in the fiftieth anniversary issue, where Axelrod names off people he thinks continued most significantly to the hobby, my name is right above Heikos. Please check this for yourself.

Here's an example of one of my articles from the magazine on the TFH site.

http://www.tfhmagazine.com/details/articles/hobbyist-profile-charlie-drew-and-the-elusive-red-crypt.htm

How is it possible to get so much wrong in one go. By not checking!

Do better.

In response to RS: I just got booted off of "Tropical Fish Keeping UK" for potting out bettas breathe air and dissolved oxygen isn't important.

Apparently I'm a troll, and was removed because of this just now.

Will somebody please save those people from themselves?