Bun Berka

Biography

I’m Bun Berka. I keep bettas in Riverview, Florida, and I write everything on Bunstay.

I grew up in Rabat. The pet stalls there sold goldfish in glass jars, and I had one as a kid, and it died the way those fish always die. I got my first real tank at fifteen. Goldfish again, badly filtered, and I learned water chemistry by getting it wrong for about a year. I moved to the United States in 2014 and didn’t keep fish at all for three years.

In 2017 I bought a red veiltail betta at a big-box store, along with the one-gallon kit the staff recommended. He lasted six weeks and died of ammonia burns and fin rot. I had followed the instructions on the box exactly.

What changed was finding out where he came from. I live about twenty minutes from Gibsonton, in Hillsborough County, which is the center of the American ornamental fish industry. Florida farms roughly 95% of the freshwater ornamental fish produced in this country. So I went to see the operations, and they were nothing like what I expected: controlled temperature, real filtration, water testing, staff who know exactly what they are doing.

Those fish leave the farm healthy. They die in the last mile, in the shipping cup, on the shelf, and in the bowl the customer takes home believing it is enough.

That is the gap Bunstay is built to close. I’m not a vet and I have no qualification in fish medicine. I’m someone with four tanks who reads the welfare literature, tests his water, photographs what actually happens, and says so when he doesn’t know something.

If you’re here because your betta is in a bowl and something feels wrong, you’re not the problem. You were told wrong, the same way I was.

Areas of expertise

• Betta splendens care and welfare
• Freshwater aquarium setup
• Aquarium nitrogen cycle and water chemistry
• Fish disease identification
• Low-tech planted aquariums

Credentials

Bun Berka holds no formal qualification in fish medicine or aquaculture, and this site never implies otherwise. His experience is practical: 9 years of keeping bettas, 4 tanks currently running, and a habit of reading the veterinary literature before writing about it. Where a question needs clinical expertise, our articles say so and point to an aquatic vet.

Current tanks

Care guidance on this site is tested here first. These are the setups our parameters, timings and photographs come from.

Contact

Email [email protected], or use the contact page. Corrections go to [email protected] and are always welcome.