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KC BETTAS HOMEPAGE

Old Piebald

ABOUT US

KC Bettas is shorthand for Kilgore/Chisum Bettas. We are a household of three people--Gary Kilgore, Michael Chisum, and Laura Chisum--who are involved in keeping, breeding, and showing bettas, which are also known as Siamese fighting fish. We are all members of the International Betta Congress (IBC) and officers of the Texas Area Betta Society (TABS). While we have many bettas, perhaps our favorite is not kept in our fishroom, but over the mantle in our living room. He is named "Old Piebald" and is pictured to the left. It is true that he not a living fish, but an illustration of betta drawn by Dr. Gene Lucas during the 1995 IBC Convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. While it is also true that he is not a piebald betta, but is a single-tailed marble male, his name commemorates the controversy over a revision of the IBC Judging Standards, which many argued would have disqualified piebald bettas from being shown in the marble classes at IBC shows. The thing we like best about Old Piebald is that he never requires feeding or having his water changed (in fact he actually lives in picture frame rather than a jar of water). Also, no matter what we do to him or fail to do for him, we can never kill him. This may make him the perfect betta to keep. However, he does have his limitations. While Dr. Lucas did place him in the illustrations class at the 1995 Convention, this was Old Piebald's first and last foray as a show fish. Nor is he particularly responsive to his owners. And I guess breeding him is definitely out of the question.

ABOUT OUR FISHROOM

Pictured below and to the right is our fishroom, or a couple of corners of it. By the way, we want to thank Mike Wall for taking all the photos on this page. The size and shape of our fishroom makes it quite impossible to take a panoramic shot of it. However, it is able to house a lot of things. We have around 150 fish in quart jars in our fishroom. We use the double jar method, so we have a total of 300 quart jars in the fishroom. Using this method, the fish is kept in one jar and behind this jar there is an empty, clean jar. When we change a fish's water, we pour properly aged and treated water into the jar in back, net the fish from the jar in front, and place the fish into jar in back. We then rinse out the jar from which we removed the moved the fish and move that jar behind the jar in which the fish has just been moved. Anyone requiring a clearer explanation of this method can come to our fishroom and help us clean jars. After changing the first hundred or so, you will not only understand, but will never forget, the double jar method. In our fishroom we also have two five-gallon breeding tanks, three brine shrimp hatcheries, numerous one-gallon milk jugs (in which to age and store water), a space heater with a thermostat, records of our spawns and fish (using the John Benn record keeping system), a work table, a small television-radio, and various other fish-keeping equipment. Unfortunately not all of our fish can be kept in our fishroom, so we keep fry, juveniles, and some of our females in heated nursery tanks in a corner in another part of our house picutured in the last photo on the right.

Our fishroom

Our fishroom--opposite corner

Our nursery tanks

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