First time posting here so sorry if this isn't a great post. I've been lurking for a while before biting the bullet and introducing our recently adopted Betta; Larry.So backstory to Larry is that my girlfriend wanted to get a Betta fish for our home and we had a look around, reading up on bettas ect. That simmered down for a while as we focused on other things. But recently, my girlfriend messaged me with "Err, this fella might be coming home with me tonight" and sent me the below picture:\"This fella is coming home with me tonight\"My response "guess we have a fish now lmao". I was excited but I told my girlfriend that she better be ready to care for it properly as I already took care of a lot of stuff in our house and couldn't think about keeping a fish alive.The reason we adopted Larry was because my girlfriend's work colleague's boyfriend was moving in with his grandad to him help cope with the death of his nan and they didn't have enough space for all of his fish. My girlfriend's work colleague knew that my girlfriend was eventually looking to get one so asked her if she was interested. Told her Larry came with a tank, heater, filter and food.So then I started looking up general care stuff about bettas such as tank size, temperature, diet ect. I started getting more excited and into it. I've never had fish of my own before other then being a kid and my dad having a aquarium in our family house so I wanted to try and do it right.So the night came where my girlfriend was bringing home Larry, she asked me to prep around 5L of water. I knew we didn't have any conditioner so I did the best I could at the time and boiled it to try and get rid of anything nasty to fish and cool it to the ideal temperature. We didn't have time to get a tank to cycle due to timing of things.My girlfriend came home and brought the little guy in. He had a 5L tank and was in a plastic bag looking kinda sad (understandably) and had lost some colour. We got to work with prepping the tank with the gravel, water, filter and heater. We let the tank run with the heater and filter on for a while before introducing Larry. Again, I understand it wasn't ideal but it was the best we could do with the time we had. We left Larry for the night and he was still alive and swimming around the next morning which was a relief.Over Larry's first week I was reading more and more about bettas via this subreddit's care sheet, wiki and other websites and I kept seeing that Larry was really lacking in tank space and decorations which can lead to boredom. Kind of made me sad thinking of him in such a small tank.When the weekend came we made plans to go to our local Garden Centre and buy some cleaning items and maybe some more decorations. In short:Larry's upgrade (left) vs Larry's shack (right)I bought Larry a new 25L tank. Opted for 25L as we haven't got the space for bigger tanks right now so I went with the best size we could have. I picked it up and said "I'm buying this for Larry". When my girlfriend asked why, I replied with "I just want him to be happy" which surprised her as I gave her the impression I didn't really care after my "You better take care of him" talk. The tank is a Superfish Start 30 Tropical Kit tank. It came with a filter with adjustable flow rate, adjustable 50w heater, light, thermometer, Colombo Aqua & Bacto Start, food and a net. We also bought some live plants, more gravel and a little skull decoration. Opted for live plants (bought fertiliser as well) as the available fake ones they had were very hard plastic and only had one (expensive) silk plant.We set up the tank and let it do it's thing before adding in Larry.Larry's new homeLarry seems to have a tendency to hide/chill under the filter. Unsure if that was because he felt safe there or was just chilling. He seems better in his new tank! He's been swimming around and resting on the live plants. Even nipped at the leaves a couple of times.\"Welcome to my crib\"He seems pretty chill in general, we can give him a little stroke when he's at the top of the tank and seems to actively swim to the glass if he sees you approaching most of the time.We added in the fake plant just to fluff up the tank a bit more until we can buy more stuff for it.Larry exploring the AnacharisSo fingers crossed he's happy in his new home. Trying our best with the space, time and knowledge we're reading about.https://ift.tt/3mmI0yv turns out I like this fish more then I thought I would. Honestly really excited to learn about maintaining and making a better environment for our little betta. I can see that his tail/fins seem a bit ragged, I read that could be fin rot. Unsure if it's related to the stress of him moving in, his previous care or we mis-handled something so some advice would be great. I know the tank is a bit bare still but I want to get some drift wood and other smaller decorations, maybe another plant!Sorry for the wall of text, I just wanted to share our little story of bringing Larry into our home. Again, any advise is welcome as we are both kind of new at this. Thanks!\"boo\" via /r/bettafish https://ift.tt/3kyipCe
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