Not everyone can have a dog, a cat, or even a pocket pet to spend time training and conditioning. Although a fish is confined to their tank by necessity, that doesn’t mean they can’t be trained. Many different species of fish, including goldfish, bettas and oscars can be successfully trained to do tricks.

Training your fish does take a lot more patience than training other animals, but if you love teaching animals new tricks, they can teach you a lot about how animals respond to training.

Clicker training your fish

Unlike other animals, it’s impossible to use negative reinforcement, or even vocal reinforcers. Although it might not seem like it, your fish tank is a very loud place. While your fish does have hearing, it’s unlikely he’ll be able to hear you.

In order to get started, you’ll need a flashlight, and some small treats. The flashlight will act as your clicker, and the treats will be the reward.

Conditioning your pet to respond to the flashlight is called “loading” the clicker, but in this case you’re loading the flashlight. Simply flash the light over the tank (don’t worry, he can see it) and drop the food in.

Do this every day for several days. Eventually, your fish will learn the light means food, and come eagerly swimming up to the top for the treat when he sees it. When he does that, you know the flashlight is loaded.

Reward behaviors you like

Now it’s a bit of a patience game. Look for the behavior you want, and reward your fish when you see him doing it. This works well if you want to teach him to spin or turn, but if you want something such as jumping out of the water, or swimming through a hoop, you’ll need to reward a little more loosely.

Since it will likely take forever for the fish to perform the action randomly, instead wait till you see him doing something related to it (looking at the  hoop, turning his head towards it, etc.) and reward that instead.

Eventually he’ll get the idea and perform the trick! It does take patience, but eventually you’ll have a trained fish to impress your friends with.

Resource:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ij8H6zPuAyw this is my old betta Twitch. :) Hoping to get a new betta some day and do it again.