Mac Cool wrote:
Sorry, this is not a pond question but rec.aquaria seems to be abandoned
for this group.

I have a white betta with two rasbora hets as tank mates. They are all
slowly turning reddish pink. I don't know if it's the food or something
bad. The water tests fine. I feed them 3 types of food:
Omega One Betta Buffet
Ginger Betta Pellets (with natural color enhancers)
Live Daphnia

I mix it up, feeding them flakes 4-5x/wk and pellets 2x/wk and a few
daphnia every day. The betta, Rocky, will eat anything but he is fond
of the pellets while the hets seem to prefer the flakes. I suspect the
pellets are too big and crunchy for the hets. They all love the daphnia
of course. My wife found a daphnia in the outdoor tank that was so
large the het couldn't eat it and swam around with it in his lips for
several minutes.

I was concerned because my indoor daphnia tend to be reddish and I'm
told it's because of poor water quality although they are thriving.

The betta has red fins so he looks fine turning pinkish red but the
hets were shiny silver and I don't really care for them looking pink.

Nothing in the tank is pink or red so they aren't matching their
surroundings.
-
Mac Cool

LOL! Everything is fine. First, daphnia can take on a reddish cast in
good water. Pure white bettas are quite rare, and the most common color
flaw is red in the fins, called red wash. Yours is not pure white and
the color food is bringing the color out.

R. heteromorpha are supposed to be pinkish. The juveniles are silvery
in the stores where they are stressed, but once they settle into a tank
and mature, they develop the pink/red color. Breeding males are even
deeper red. I'm sorry you don't care for the color, but there's not
much to do for it.

As for rec.aquaria.freshwater.misc, we had problems with the same trolls
and crossposting that plagued rec.ponds. Many of us have moved to the
Google group in my .sig.

--Altum

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