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Hanging Betta Bowls: A Good Idea?
Amazon, PETCO and Target are all selling hanging betta bowls. The bowls are made of clear acrylic, are about a foot
in diameter and have a single hole for hanging. Because they're so cool-looking, I had to try one out.
These bowls have a couple of immediate drawbacks:
1) There's no easy way to heat them. They look cool because they're so simple, but that would make trying to hide a heater
even harder. Don't put them in sunlight to warm the water up - bettas do not handle direct sunlight well, and putting the
hanging bowl in sunlight would heat the water up too much during the day and then chill your betta at night.
2) There's not a lot of water for your fish to live in. These 12 inch diameter hanging bowls hold about a gallon of water.
If they were just a bit bigger and held 2 gallons, they'd be a MUCH better betta bowl. Water weighs about 7 pounds per gallon, so
a two gallon bowl could definitely be hung safely, even from a drywall wall - just use a good anchor.
After those two drawbacks (and they're major drawbacks), there's no denying these bowls are cool. Everyone who's been over to my house
since I put the bowl up has commented on how much they like it. Plus, if you're short on counter
space for a traditional fish bowl, they're even more attractive. But due to the inability to warm the water in the bowl,
and how little space the betta will have, you are going to reduce the lifespan of your fish by keeping
them in one of these hanging aquariums.
How much will you reduce your betta's lifespan by? It
depends how good you
are about changing the water, but your betta will most likely live only a year or two in one of these. A bowl this small will need to have its water changed out at least every 5 days,
and every 3-4 days would be a better idea. Again, because the fish is going to be cold in this bowl, its already under stress and more susceptible to illness.
Here's what the bowl looks like right out of the shipping box. They give you instructions, which do include the very wise
directive to not put the bowl where it will get direct sunlight.
They also recommend using an anchor when you put the screw in the wall that the bowl will hang from. To be sure nothing could go wrong, I used an anchor/screw set I got from
Home Depot that holds up to 75 pounds.
This particular anchor/screw set doesn't require that the hold be pre-drilled - the anchor does the drilling for you - so it saves a step.
I didn't put any gravel in the bowl for this test-run (no, I'm not keeping my fish in this bowl for more than the time it takes to take pictures for you). To maximize the
space your fish has to swim around, try to keep the gravel at a minimum. Your fish needs the room in these small digs.
Even though I like this hanging bowl a lot, I'm not going to keep my betta in it long-term.
It does make for a betta version of a summer retreat, though - the temperatures
have been in the low 90s during the day here, and only goin down to mid-sixties at night.
So long as the room the betta's in gets protected from the chilly (for it) nights,
its seems pretty happy. I have noticed its blowing a LOT less bubbles in this new bowl than it did in its old, larger, heated bowl. That's usually considered a sign of how happy
a betta fish is, so it does seem like the fish would vote to go back to its old bowl.
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