I believe that you’re confusing “stress” and “suffering”. Fish do not have the mental capacity to have an affective experiance. Fish are not self aware. Suffering is absoluely a higher mental function. All living things however can experiance negagive stimulus and that’s usually then quantified as stress.
I’m confused. What if I pulled the fins off the fish, then tossed him back in the tank. Would it not be feeling pain? One might quibble about the word “suffering” in that case, but it’s still gotta hurt, right?
They use match.com to find a partner and then hail a cab.
I don’t really see mine come to the top of the tank, although he hangs out in the top half of the tank (when I can see him–there’s a lot of foliage in there).
He does come up to grab his food. Or to nibble on my finger.
He does take air from the surface, even if you don’t notice it. It’s just a very quick little dart up and back down. Nothing prolonged. It looks a lot like when they’re nipping at some food. You might have seen him taking air without realizing that’s what he was doing.
Actually there’s quite a debate as to the degree that fish feel pain. I have a book at home with several cites against the idea, I’ll post them later as well and the gist of the scientific idea that fish do not feel “pain” as we understand it.
Someone needs to tell these people:
Nitpick: “Sentient” means “having the ability to sense the environment.” A fish is more or less just as sentient as you are; they can see, smell, feel, etc.
They’re not very INTELLIGENT, but they can definitely feel discomfort. They have a central nervous system. I’d rather err on the side of caution and minimize the likelihood they’ll experience pain.
Some type of nonaquatic plants do okay. We’ve had a betta in a gallon cider jug for about 3 years now, with a piece of philodendron stuck in the top. It’s beautifully green, grows really fast, and we regularly have to trim the roots, so that they don’t take up too much room. (Although the fish does like to nap in them, like a hammock.)
When we got a second betta (different jug), we just lopped off a section of the first plant and stuck it in the water. It started putting out roots in just a week or so.
. . . But it’s the walk back home to their own puddle in the morning that’s the killer.
I don’t think fish have the brain structures to feel pain as we understand it. In “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace discusses what happens to a lobster when it is boiled alive. As part of this, he discusses the subjective experiences of people with brain damage who do not experience pain anymore. The structures of the brain that allow us to experience pain (and that were damaged in the individuals he discusses) are not present in lobsters so they cannot feel pain as we understand it. I don’t think fish have these structures, either. They might experience something, but it is not pain.
FWIW, many spp. of Spathiphyllum can in fact be adapted to aquatic conditions, although they do better if their foliage is allowed to bread the surface.
The male builds a bubble nest about half the size of a tennis ball. I would like to see a cite. Perhaps buffalo footprints are larger and deeper than I imagine. 
I’m deeply dubious of these claims. For one thing, they sure do make us feel better.
I’m suspicious of science claims that let us off the hook, like “black people need to be kept as slaves, they can’t make their own decisions.”
Scientists have also made sweeping claims before like “No animal uses tools/words/names/shows self awareness/can count/asks questions/can form concepts,” all of which have been disproven. Scientists asserted that they knew almost everything about the laboratory mice they’d been studying for decades, only to realize recently that mice sing. Scientists have asserted that human babies don’t feel pain – at a time that such an assertion was comforting.
I’m also dubious about assertions of what structures are necessary. Hydrocephalics who are missing 90% of their brain volume have been shown to be able to converse normally and do well in school despite missing entire structures scientists assert are necessary for these functions. Scientists never actually told us bumblebees couldn’t fly – but they did tell us bumblebees lacked the physical structure we understood to be necessary to fly. Then they learned about mitochondria.
I’m not anti-science. But I am keenly aware of our need to lie to ourselves to feel better, and of our endless egotistical quest to define ourselves as the unique center of the universe, despite repeatedly seeing this specialness vanish in a puff of Copernicus, Darwin, or Pepperberg.
Sailboat
For anyone interested, below is a link to Wallace’s article which I appear to have somewhat distorted and simplified:
http://www.lobsterlib.com/feat/davidwallace/page/lobsterarticle.pdf
heh … there oughtta be a law. 
The other end of the OP: Is there such thing as too much room for a bet(t)a? Like would it be lonely in a 55 gallon aquarium all by its lonesome? And what is the maximum depth you could expect one to frequent? More than a few feet?
My experience has been that he would hang out near the surface where he made his nest and wait for a potential lady friend to swim by.
Actually, I have a beta betta. Once the pectoral fin glitch is fixed, they will be available for general release. 
Cost of the animal is irrelevant. I had a client spend hundreds of dollars for me to do a mastectomy on his pet rat. I have also done cesarean sections on guinea pigs, where the surgical fee was the same as it would have been if the patient were an expensive show dog.
Perhaps. Perhaps also they build as big a nest as they can in whatever circumstances they find themselves. I’ve bred Bettas and I think of the nest size as somewhat variable.
Probably; I’d still enjoy reading about it, and wonder what happened to the Happy Couple and their many fry.