Siamese fighting fish

Where does the Siamese fighting fish live?

Home: Rice paddies, ditches and slow streams in Thailand.

In the wild it lives in these countries: Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia.

Conservation status from the IUCN: vulnerable.

The short profile

Fully grown: 6-8 cm long, males with long flowing fins. It weighs about 0 002 kilograms. On the menu: meat.

The story behind it

In the wild a betta lives in shallow, warm water: rice paddies, ditches and puddles where there is very little oxygen. To cope with that it has a labyrinth organ, a folded chamber above the gills that lets it gulp air from the surface like a lung. Wild bettas are brownish green with short fins; the glowing red, blue and white fish in pet shops were bred by people over hundreds of years. When two males meet, they flare their gill covers and fins to look as large as possible, and most fights end when one of them backs away. The male builds a raft of bubbles on the surface, guards the eggs and puts any that sink back into the nest. Although millions live in aquariums, the wild fish is listed as vulnerable, because the swamps around Bangkok are being drained and built on.

Find it on the globe

Siamese fighting fish is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.