This is a space for me to collect and share fun facts that I've learned. While I'm always a fan of citations, and they most certainly have their place in more formal, academic contexts: this isn't a scientific paper. I'm just shooting the shit with you, as I would while yapping away with friends if asked for a cool fun fact off of the top of my head, no practice allowed beforehand.
Purple bettas don't exist.
This is baffling, because there are bettas that look quite purple! But from a genetics standpoint, it's impossible for a purple betta to exist. Why? Well, blue bettas don't exist.
This seems even more absurd, because blue is quite a common variant to see in stores- (red-blue bicolor is especially popularly sold as like, fourth of July fishies, but bettas come in a beautiful, wide range of colours and patterning- such as the much adored koi and beautiful marbled babies) so what gives?
It's because betta fish colours are kind of weird, not unlike how cat colours are a bit strange. For betta fish, you can think of it sort of like washes of watercolor. There's four layers that can be present or absent (as in, turned off): black, red, yellow, and iridescent- and various combinations therein will yield different perceived colors. Iridescence is also in of itself, weird, because 'iridescent' isn't really a colour the way that we might think of black, red, and yellow as being colours. The regular colours are caused by chromatophores, and the special sparkly ones are called iridocytes.
But you might notice- there's no such thing as a blue layer! So how the heck do you get bettas that look blue? They're black fish, that have the iridescent layer active. The iridescence in their scales are shaped and coloured in such a way that the iridescence sheens back as blue. If you have a black base to your fish, the iridescence will sheen blue. But on the other bases, you wind up with a coppery, metallic finish. A super thick layer of iridescence can even make your fish look wholly silver! A fish with all four layers switched 'off' is pure white. Pattern and coloration can be particularly unstable with some color morphs- marbleds and koi are notorious for it, and I have an especial soft spot for blue/white marbleds. The instability is also a big driving force behind heavily masked and very metallic morphs like dragonscales (who have that super thick layer of iridescence) going blind, as their eyes can be prone to scaling over.
There are some, in my opinion, very unethical morphs that I don't purchase or support- like the mentioned dragonscales and rosetails, who have extremely overbred finnage and often results in the miserable little guys gnawing off their own fins to cut them down to size: bettas truly are metal as fuck, and they are stubbornly tenacious fish with huge, spirited personalities. They're survivors, and so feisty. They're among my favourite fish to keep, and certainly punch massively above their weight class for intellect and personality: watching them patrol around their environment and curiously sniff around at new additions like marimo moss balls for a soft place to cuddle up and nap on is freaking adorable. Every single one I've kept has had a radically different attitude, and learning their quirks: their favourite snacks, sleeping spots, toys to play with, interest in following their humans about from within their tanks, curiosity in changes to your attire (especially if you wear bright clothing, haha) and so on has been so rewarding.
Circling back to the fishie colors- basically, there is no true blue pigment in bettas- only black base scales with iridescent sheen overtop, that results in reflected light that is blue to our eyes: but because it isn't genetically blue, you can't crossbreed a red betta and a blue betta to spawn a purple betta. This is also why there is no such thing as a true green betta- because you don't have the blue to mix. Some 'alien' morphs can look super greenish, but that's just a result of the iridescence flashing light back. Alien bettas are hybrids that draw from similar related sub-species that are much closer to their wild/natural appearance, which causes some absolutely fantastical looking iridescence and black color markings, almost like stained glass and solder. They're not like, actually green, though.
The very purple-y looking betta fish you might see swimming around are actually red-blue bi-colors, which means they express both red and blue coloration: but with extremely fine tuned breeding and some luck of the draw, it's just very densely packed together red and blue, which blends in our eyesight as purple. But if you were to zoom in, it's still distinctly red and blue, not a mixed purple tone. So you can have a purple looking fish, but it's not really purple.
Have you heard of the unseen voyeur?
It's a phenomena that comes up in writing circles- though particularly in journalling and diarist spaces. Some people make the hard distinction between journalling and diary keeping on the basis of the time commitment and content.
Some people use journalling infrequently, but as a chance to delve more deeply into guided questions, or deep plumbing into their own lives, and some people use diaries more so for a daily record of events to look back on, or to hand down to future people who might be curious- there are some really interesting preservation projects that look into the details of everyday life that history books may skim over: things like weather patterns and slang come to mind.
I don't really personally, as I use the terms interchangeably, but the unseen voyeur is most often encountered in diarist spaces. People can often struggle with the sensation of needing to account for an unseen audience: and fear not just having their private entries read, but also feel an obligation to make their mundane, everyday entries profound, to craft them into elegant, blisteringly brilliant stories, like the sort of diary excerpts we see snipped from famous poets and authors- the trick is, most of the really snazzy bits from their letters and diaries are from reams and reams of extracted works: so of course it feels elevated, and better-than.
I think that the feeling of curbing and curtailing your speech and thoughts has elements of both a structural issue, (with the hard word count limits on many sites), and more of a theoretical issue, with the spectre of the unseen voyeur, or some close approximation of that shade.
In diarist circles: the only way out is through, and overtime, people who keep diaries often find that the voyeur recedes, the presence lightens: and they don't feel that need to perform or be switched on when they write: that an authenticity of thought, no matter how silly or ridiculous, but deeply genuine, tends to float up to the surface. It is an act that takes practice and repetition to really sink into comfortably, but it's often something that brings about a radical change for diary keepers.