Is it fin rot if there's no black margin?

I have a thread in the Betta forum where I've gotten help getting this guy set up, but I'm hoping for advice more specific to diagnosing what is wrong with my daughter's fish. Purchased 08/13 and initially started in a 1 gallon tank with no filter. She was doing 25% water changes daily using BettaSafe to condition the water first, but almost a week, his fins started to show damage. Did a full water change and the next day when it was looking worse, we went out and got a 5.5 gallon tank, filter, heater, Prime and a bottle of Tetra SafeStart Plus. (Had tested ammonia by this point, and it was at 0.50, and even with water changes, was staying at 0.25.).

Set up the new tank 08/19 with water treated with Prime, and the next day, with fish looking even worse still and just sitting on the bottom of the tank all the time, we moved him to the 5.5 gallon with filter. That night (08/20), once it had been 24 hours since Prime, we dosed with 3/4 bottle of TSS+ (the small bottle for a 20 gallon tank).

Next day (yesterday), he wasn't doing any better, fins possibly looked worse, but still eating. Today, we woke to find him swimming around instead of sitting on the bottom. He has been swimming around all day, until tonight, though he's not always on the bottom tonight like he used to be. His fins are continuing to disintegrate, though. Tonight I can see a little piece hanging that I'm sure will be gone by tomorrow. But behavior-wise, he really does seem much better.

I thought this was fin rot, but there still is no black margin. I will attach pictures starting from when we got him to tonight, to show progression. Sorry for the blur. I can try tomorrow when there's better light.
















The last two are from tonight. I'm posting from my iPad and don't have a picture on here from the first days we had him, before he started losing his fins.

 

In the one gallon tank you needed to be doing closer to 100% water change every day. Congrats on larger tank. To help with the fin rot I would do a salt bath... At the rate of one teaspoon per gallon of water. However I wouldn't do it in the five gallon tank... I personally would use the one gallon bowl for this... If your house is warm you could leave the betta in the 1 tank gallon over night... But every day do 100% water change and redose the salt for seven days. Then move the betta back into the five gallon tank.... Or just do a salt dip, leave betta in the one gallon tank for an hour or so and move him back into main tank if you rather do that... But all that moving around could be stressful to the fish. I would use a cup instead of a net to scoop him out of the tank. The salt will help treat the fin rot. It will take a while for the fins to grow back... As in a couple of weeks. You could get some vitamins to help the growth process along, such as Boyds VitaChem. Good luck, nice looking betta!

 

It looks like he's been biting his fins because of the big chunks taken out. Rot tends to leave comparatively smooth edges. I don't think this is rot.

I would definitely not try salt in this case since there is no apparent sign of disease. Salt is an irritant and will only cause him more stress.

 

I just tested the pH of my tank and tap water for the first time, and it's 8.0. The tap water is water treated with Prime yesterday, and has been sitting out for 24 hours (in case I ended up needing to abort my TSS+ cycle and do an emergency water change). Would this factor in? Also, the filter isn't putting much oxygen into the water, because the water level is even with the output. Somewhere in the back of my brain is some chemistry knowledge about the effect of oxygen on pH, but I will need to look into that to remember in which direction the effect is. I do have a sponge filter arriving in the next day or two. Not sure what I will do with it, because I don't want to stop the cycling already happening in my existing filter.

 

Mine had fin rot without any colored edges.

Sorry couldn't get a better shot at the time (He refused to stay still) but you can see some of the raggedness on his tail in the pic. I treated it with Maracyn 2 when clean water wasn't working.
Your fish may have fin rot since it seems to be affecting the other fins.

 

He keeps getting more and more active, and really seems by behavior to be healthy now, but I can't tell if his fins are getting better or worse. I think he's losing the tips, but it's possible it's actually filling in, giving the appearance of the tips getting smaller. I do think there's a bit of black edge today. He definitely keeps them spread out nicely now, whereas he was clamping them together most of the time when he was at his worst. There's so much conflicting advice that it's hard to know exactly what to do. I'm leaning in the direction of concentrating on healthy water, and so far that's what we've been doing. The results of medications seem so mixed. Of course, if he doesn't recover, I'll wish I'd tried that (but if I try and he doesn't recover, I'll wonder if the medications caused it. Gah!).

Forgot pic:

 

I have an update. It's been about a month since we moved him to the 5 gallon tank (one week after we got him), and he slowly seemed to maybe be improving, but I couldn't tell if I was seeing actual regrowth or not, but at this point we were sure he was looking a lot better, and I got a new picture of him. Comparing him to the last picture here, he looks miles better. It just happened so gradually that it was initially hard to tell it was improving. We never did use any medications, but we started using Prime and Stability daily, plus giving him blood worms a couple times a week, and added a sponge filter (he had and still has a filter with sponge medium in it, but not the same kind of sponge as a sponge filter). At some point, we want to switch to just the sponge filter, as the other filter is a clip on that doesn't fit and causes the tank lid to not close.

Here he is today:

 

He looks so much better

 

Beautiful!