So Saturday night, I had an inkling of a design idea that revolves around betta fish. The Betta fish (a subset being the commonly known Siamese Fighting Fish) is absolutely beautiful:

(credit)

So the idea was to get one of these from Ikea:

... and get some individual tanks for each Betta fish and arrange them like so:

I think it would look very attractive.

Unfortunately, the problems began when I realized that no Ikea shelf would support the weight I needed; assuming each of those jars is a 2 gallon tank for each Betta, that means the shelf has to support roughly 40 pounds of weight (~8.3 pounds per gallon for water, plus the tank itself). So the plans were put temporarily on hold.

Instead, I *did* want to pursue setting up tanks of Bettas next to each other (watching them flare up at each other is rather amusing, although I will state that none of the fish are stressed out - they simply swim away if they get tired of flaring!). So I added a 20 gallon tank and partitioned it with dividers (so each Betta fish gets 5 gallons of space):

You can see a bit closer the arrangement in the tank:

Unfortunately, the middle partition was makeshift and wasn't enough to keep the two center Bettas separated, so I moved one of them to the community tank (I haven't seen him attack a fish yet, so I may just keep him there!). When I get back from NC, I'll finish this tank by adding another partition and adding a few rocks (give them hiding space).

This morning, I woke up and found the betta which was in the left partition in the center! The only conceivable way this happened was that he jumped! Anyways, before I split for work, I put him back in the left partition... but when I got back from work, he had somehow found his way back to the center again!.

I decided to leave that guy in the center, and moved the guy who was previously in the center to the left.

(I have a tank cover, but it doesn't completely close due to the filter I have installed).

My community tank is doing very well - all the fish are incredibly active and seem to get along with each other very well. I had two fatalities yesterday, but those were of sick fish from the store, so I'm ok with it. I bought some larger rocks today, and I'm going to order a Java fern soon so I can help set-up a more fry-friendly (baby fish) part of the aquarium - I have a lot of live-bearing fish, so hopefully with some luck one of them will have a few babies which will make it into adulthood.