With the major water change I performed on Wednesday, and my nitrates measuring under 20 ppm, my tank was finally ready for a fish. On Wednesday evening, I set out in search of my Magnus or Grendel and instead I found Auberon.
I had imagined myself with a handsome blue betta, much like my regret fish Alfred, but tucked in the back of PetSmart's betta section, this grumpy, pale, little guy was purposefully swimming about in his tiny cup.
Enchanted by his vivacity, despite the gross water he was swimming in, and by the slight iridescence that illuminated his little white body, I kept coming back to him over and over again.
After a lot of deliberation, I finally brought the little guy to the register.
A whopping $6 later and he was mine.
It would be a bit before I was able to get him home and start acclimating him to his new environment and I felt terrible that I had not thought to bring a little Prime to bind the ammonia and make him temporarily a bit more comfortable in his cup.
Had I thought about it, and felt like being a pest, I would have insisted that the PetSmart employees fix the situation for his journey-- after all, its the least they could do after making him live with rotting fish food in odoriferous water.
Acclimation was not perfect. It was only after I had started to add tank water to his little floating cup that it dawned on me that I should have tested the parameters (at least the pH and ammonia content) of the water he had been living in. I would have been curious to know what the ammonia concentration was with that rotting food in there-- I really wonder how long it had been since a water change had been done at PetSmart.
I let his cup float for a few hours, slowing adding more and more tank water until the cup was nearly full (but with enough room for him to breathe) until, finally, I poured betta into a net (over a bucket, as not to get cup water in the tank) and set the net into the tank. It took him a few second to find his way out of the net, but as soon as he was out into open water, he was busy swishing around the tank.
I acclimated and released with the lights off and didn't see Auberon in the light until the timer popped the bulb on in the morning. Under the light of the tank, he was even more beautiful than in the florescent light of the store.
That iridescent teal shimmer I had seen in the daylight when I brought him outside after purchasing him was much more intense under my daylight bulb and featured hues of purple, pink, mauve and even yellow.
His ethereal, diaphanous, appearance and fluttering double tail had me think of wings-- moth wings, butterfly wings, faerie wings, which lead me to name the little guy after the king of the faeries-- Auberon.
He spent his first full day at home hunting the colony of copepods that had (almost miraculously) shown up in my tank. He was busy exploring, swimming to and fro, and almost giving me a heart attack showing me the dangerous places he could fit in the tank.
Next water change, I'll do some rearranging to make sure there are no spots he can potentially wiggle into and get stuck. I'll also give the leaves of my anubias a trim since some are yellowing.
I'm quite curious to see if any color intensifies or develops on the little guy especially because of that blue splotch on his dorsal fin.
A few of his fin ray bones are exposed or damaged, mostly on his anal fin, so he has some healing to do but, overall, I think he's in pretty good shape.
I figured he might not want to eat on his first day home, but I dropped a New Life Spectrum pellet in the tank anyway, and a minute or so later, when he discovered it floating over by the thermometer, he ate it. And then spit it up. And then ate it again. He's so tiny, I'm surprised the food would even fit in his mouth.
I'm going to look into getting some frozen food for him and maybe another pellet food to add some variety.
The video really shows how changeable Auberon's color is. Sometimes it seems like the different hues are just pulsing through him or like he's lit from within.
So glad I took a chance on a pale betta rather than going with a traditional blue fish like I had intended!
Welcome home, Auberon!
