spontaneous generation
My betta fish (named Fish and Fish) are getting old. They're getting sick more often, dirtying their water faster and not responding as much to treatment. They both seem to have difficulty with buoyancy (one always has); one has to struggle to the surface and the other has to struggle to the bottom. At least they're happy being warmer now... their bowls were next to a shady window and they only got up to 60 degrees or so. Now that they're in the sun they can have 74-80 degree water.

The heat doesn't help much with algea generation. One of the fish always has dirty water, a slight silty green-yellow color, no matter what I do. The other, however, does not. I wondered why for a while. Was he just cleaner? Pooped less? Ate more? I wondered until I looked REALLY closely at the bowl the other day. There are little snails living on his plastic plant. Little, fragile, clear-shelled SNAILS!! Not hundreds of them, but a handful.

Where the HELL did they COME FROM? Spontaneous generation went out with the middle ages and thinking about magic snails in my fish tank just makes my head hurt. Were there snail eggs in the food? Were there snail eggs hiding on the live plant I had in his tank a while back? I didn't SEE any snails until recently... and there have been at LEAST a few months' cleanings between the replacement of the live plant (which eventually died) with the plastic one. What gives? WHere did these snails come from?

Now I wonder if I can export some of them from the one fish's bowl to the other and see if it takes care of his water cleanliness. The fish whose bowl the snails are in seems to do OK. He had a near-death experience around Christmas (got really sick, became blind in one eye, couldn't swim, wouldn't eat) and I thought he would die for sure. But after some rest and treatment he got better. They've both been around for almost three years now-- past their usual pet-store lifespan despite my negligence. Does anyone know if mini-tank snails are bad for betta fish?