Do bettas have to be able to reach the service?

I think the word you're looking for is surface and yes Bettas need to be able to get to the surface to breathe. "Even though Bettas do well in waters low in dissolved oxygen, that does not mean they require less oxygen than other fish. Bettas have a special respiratory organ that allows them to breath air directly from the surface. In fact they inherently must do so. In experiments where the labyrinth organ was removed, the fish died from suffocation even though the water was saturated with oxygen. For this reason, Bettas must have access to the water surface to breath air directly from the atmosphere." a href="http://freshaquarium.about.com/cs/anabantids2/p/betta.htm" rel="nofollow"http://freshaquarium.about.com/cs/anaban…/a