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I like bettas, otherwise known as Siamese fighting fish. They come in a vast array of colors (through use of selective breeding), and have the equivalent of plumage in birds - flowing tail and fins that look quite beautiful. [Okay, technically, there are some 60 kind of betta. The one I'm talking - and the one you'll see at your local Walmart or pet store, is the Betta splendens.]

The male betta is the one with the long flowing fins, the female is usually only purchased by people interested in breeding, and I won't discuss that type of thing here. It's complex - thanks to the aggressive nature of the betta, and is not for the beginner!

When you go into a pet store, you will see various betta bows - teeny tiny bowls in which your beautiful fish will be suspended, a sort of living sculpture. Do NOT get this kind of bowl! I mean, come on! Would you like to live in such an environment? Well...maybe people would, they can think and process what they see in the outside world and get some entertainment out of it, but a poor little fish just suspended, with nowhere to swim. That is no fun for the betta - and a betta in that environment does not live as long as those in bigger tanks.

There can be only one male betta to a tank - no matter how large it is. Betta are very territorial, and in captivity at least, will fight to the death to defend their space.

I currently have four male betta, each in a different kind of tank, and what I know I've learned over the course of a few months of trial-and-error, in which, unfortunately, I have unneccesarily stressed out a couple of my fish and killed one.

So learn from my mistakes.

I bought two betta to begin with, and two 1-gallon globular fish-bowls in which to house them. I knew enough to buy the fish-bowls beforehand, fill them full of water, and let them sit for a day to achieve room temperature and to leach out the chlorine that comes in tap water.

My steel-blue betta, whom I called Stavros and who was my favorite, took to his bowl like a fish to water. The other betta, blue with red fins, whom I called Sunshine, was much more aggressive. He could see reflections in his bowl and was constantly going up and down, up and down, guarding his territory and getting stressed out.

So after a couple of weeks of this, I bought a different kind of 1-gallon bowl, one with flat panels, and curved sides, hoping this would elimate the reflections. Of course it didn't. Except now they were coming from the curved sides, and he was up and down, up

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