How to Train Your Betta Fish
Bettas are one of the most popular pet fish, and they also love to interact with people and learn tricks.
These fish are popular choices for fish owners because they are small, hardy, and have beautiful colors and markings.
They are also pretty smart little guys and thrive on mental enrichment and interaction with people.
While bettas can learn a variety of tricks, they find the tricks near the surface of the water easiest. This means they will probably learn quickly to follow a target stick, eat from your hand, or push a ball along the surface of the water, but may take longer to learn to play soccer at the bottom of their tank or swim through a hoop in the middle/lower half of the tank.
When you first start training your betta fish, you will probably find it best to start with surface-oriented tricks before moving to more challenging tricks for your fish.
There are plenty of surface-oriented tricks to start off with, including following a target stick, eating from your hand, going through a finger hoop, or swimming through a hoop or tunnel placed near the top of the tank.
You can also encourage them to push a floating ball around on the water or put some food on your finger to teach them to jump.
The video below is intended as a starting point when you first start training your betta fish. From selecting foods to use for training to building up engagement that will help when teaching future tricks, this short video should get you started on the right foot.
The steps in the video are pretty simple and quick, but they will teach your fish to interact with you and follow your finger around, which helps significantly when you try to teach more advanced tricks.
The following video is great to get you started with a few easy tricks. These 5 tricks are typically pretty easy to teach, and they help set a foundation for teaching more tricks in the future.
DIY Training Equipment
I have some tutorials below on how to make various different trick obstacles and equipment in the video. For the ball, I’m using a small plastic ball that came from a random board game.
However, you can use any type of small ball that floats. Small styrofoam balls can be found in the craft section of a dollar store. You may also be able to find mini game sets that have small plastic balls in the kid’s toys or party sections of a dollar store.
List of DIY Tutorials: