Ted’s Fishroom

A Visit to

Bob Major’s

Fish Room

March, 2006

     Bob Major likes wild-type bettas. He likes them so much that he goes to great lengths to get the species he wants to work with, which usually means that he has to import them by the box-full. This means that Bob has a LOT of bettas. I met Bob through AquaBid, and then had the chance to spend the afternoon with him during a visit to the Atlanta Area Aquarium Association. Bob was nice enough to pick me up at the airport get me to the meeting. We had plenty of time for a tour of his fishroom.

     Bob’s fishroom is in the basement of his home. The space is packed with tanks of various sizes, mostly on wood stands. The layout has tanks running along all the walls, and there is a center aisle of tanks. All of the larger tanks are filtered with power filters, and a few of the smaller tanks are filtered with sponge filters driven by small diaphragm air pumps. Bob does not use any central air supply or filtration systems.

 

     Bob’s collection of Betta sp. is impressive. He has several species that I hope to work with someday, including this species, B. foerschi. This fish is a lot larger than I thought, and it falls into Bob’s ’small-mouthed-large-betta’ category.

 

     Other bettas in that same category include B. pugnax and this beautiful fish, Betta fusca.

 

     Another category of betta that Bob has several of is the ’small-mouth-small-betta’. Two of the several fish in this category that Bob is working with are B. edithae (top) and B. falx (bottom).

 

     Bob also has many bubble-nesting Betta species, such as B. coccina, but I was not able to get any decent pictures of any of them. He also has several other types of anabantids including small gouramies like this licorice gouramie, Paraosphronemus deissneri.

     Bob also keeps several non-labyrinth fish. He has several rasboras, barbs and danios that he imports along with his bettas. He also has some cichlids and killifish. Here is a picture of a pair of his killies, A. bivitattum, and an angelfish (P. scalare).

     Thank you Bob for the hospitality, lunch, transportation and fish. I hope that I get the chance to stop in again and see what is new in this fishroom. There is a lot more there than what I managed to document in this tour.