Brief for Small, Shy, and Easy to Over-Help
A scarlet badis is barely an inch of fish living deep in planted cover, so brief your sitter to expect very little visible activity and to trust that this is normal. Show them where your male holds his territory among the stems, red bars bright when he is settled, and where a plainer female is likely to drift. Your briefing should give them a calm baseline and a short list of changes that genuinely matter, so their restraint is informed rather than nervous.
Feeding a Badis Is the Delicate Part
A scarlet badis hunts tiny live or frozen food and picks at it deliberately, so the feeding instruction needs to be the most precise paragraph in this handover. Prepare the exact portions yourself, in the container the sitter will use, and show them where to place the food so it sinks slowly through the stems where the fish waits. Explain that a badis may inspect a morsel and reject it, may eat nothing in the two minutes a sitter watches, and still be feeding perfectly well across the evening. The forbidden move is compensation: no second portion, no flake from another tank's supplies sprinkled in hope, no chopping something from the kitchen.
Faded Bars and a Fish That Vanishes
A male scarlet badis wears his stress as faded colour, so give your sitter that gauge and its limits. Red barring washed to a dull tan for a whole day, especially alongside a fish that has stopped coming to its usual stem at feeding time, is worth a photo and a message to you. A fish not seen for one day is not yet news in a dense tank; a fish not seen for two days, with its prepared food untouched in the same spot, becomes a report — delivered to you, not investigated by the sitter pulling plants apart. If a badis is found lying on a leaf or the substrate breathing fast and out in the open, that is the one true hurry in this briefing: check the filter is running, do not move the fish, and call you immediately.
Gentle Flow and an Undisturbed Layout
A scarlet badis lives in slow water among fine leaves, so tell your sitter what the tank's movement should look like and forbid the tidy-ups that change it. The filter outflow should stir the surface plants slightly, never pin the fish or bend every stem one way; if it suddenly does, something has shifted and you want to know. No pruning, no replanting a stem that has floated loose, no glass-scraping marathon that fills the water with drifting algae for a micropredator to cope with.
Other Mouths, Other Rules
If the badis shares its tank, brief the sitter on the neighbours separately, because feeding confident tankmates is how a badis quietly goes hungry. New chasing, a badis driven from its plants entirely, or fin damage on any fish should be photographed and sent to you the same day. The sitter separates nobody and adds no divider or trap; in a small planted aquarium, improvised barriers trap the wrong fish and tear up the layout in the attempt.
A Short Briefing, Deliberately Understated
Keep this handover brief and calm, because a long alarming list invites a sitter to hover, and hovering over a badis tank — lights switched on at odd hours, hands in the water, plants lifted — is itself a stressor. Leaving those few instructions in KinsLe as a Care Pass suits this fish particularly well: the sitter can quietly re-read what normal looks like for a scarlet badis, feed exactly what you prepared, and let a very small fish get on with being almost invisible.