First, thanks everyone for the birthday wishes on facebook and Twitter.
And now, some sad news. After battling a two week battle with dropsy, my son’s betta passed away. Dropsy is a particularly nasty condition where the internal organs can’t process body functions properly, and fluid accumulates inside. This causes the body to swell and the scales of the fish to stand out like a pine cone.
It isn’t a disease in and of itself. It is a condition, a symptom of something else that went wrong. Once a fish gets to the dropsy stage, it’s usually fatal. I have actually managed to nurse a fish, a Siamese algae eater, back to health from dropsy. It did finally die from other causes, but not from the dropsy.
Unfortunately, the betta did not, and so we’re trying to decide how to repopulate his tank. We are considering least killifish, which are neither the least (in size), nor a killifish. They are the world’s second-smallest vertebrate and are livebearers, something I know a little about. Question is whether we can find any locally.
ETA 2 Aug 2016: This page has some information on how to treat dropsy in fishes.
