How long can bettas starve?

If you no choice on starving your bettas, say because holiday or other reasons, then there are a couple of info you need to know before your bettas gone completely AWOL by the time you return back.

First, any form of starvation is not good. They can take it if done in moderation, but if it is prolonged, then you better send the suckers to someone who can take care of them better than you do !

Any living animals, bettas and us included, when starved, will have the tendency of consuming the fat storage, and possibly internal organs, before they really show up as skinny skeletal-like form. So, avoid the starvation whenever you can.

Bettas can be starved for weeks. We ran experiments on some and had managed to starve them for 3 weeks. Note that they need to be fully fed before you start the starvation. We didn't have the heart to continue on, cause they look more like bettas in the petshops now, very skinny.

When you bring back bettas from starvation, try not to overfeed them as yet. Feed them a little, let their stomach get used to foods and able to process it. After a couple of days, they should be back to normal.

When do you know that your bettas no longer able to cope with foods, due to prolonged starvation? Well, when you start feeding them, you'll notice your bettas not even eager to eat the food, or perhaps they went belly up bloated. This means, their internal organs can't process the foods and you were slightly too late in rescuing them. And yes, it's YOUR fault for leaving them too long without food !

Note that the experimentation were done to bettas in individual tanks, without any single food in sight, no plants, nothing else in there. Do not experiment this with your community tank though, cause you'll end up with reduced number of bettas by the end of your travel. Some of the tank residence will have hallucinations that there are floating foods nearby whenever they see another fish...So you'll end up with barbaric act in your tank.

We haven't been able to confirm whether prolong starvation in females will cause them to be not-viable in producing eggs. While starved females will have skinny body and sometimes missing their eggs repository, it may take sometime for them to build up egg supplies. So until someone can confirm this then we presumed females can rebuild their egg supplies given sufficient recovery time.

Lots of people worried about starving their bettas. What you may not aware, in the wild, they are used to starving. However, usually they are only starved for couple of hours to couple of days, not a full on 3 weeks! Your typical imported bettas, for instance, could very well starved for days before they even reach quarantine/aquariums. Once they've got to quarantine, had anyone ever told you that they really feed your bettas? Take their words for it, but chances are your bettas will only be fed a couple of days after their arrivals. No harm done to them with this, of course. This is when your boutique bettas had "issues" such as finrot, chew tails, or even death. They are stressed by all the travels, further stressed by not getting foods, and finally happen to stumble on that chewy-taste-not-so-bad tail of theirs. If your fish is weak during this "transitional" period, then tough luck, they may not survive a simple journey to your front door.