#105 – Guppies, Questions, and B!t₵hing

10 months ago
Transcript
Speaker A:

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Speaker B:

Welcome to the aquarium, guys podcast. I'm so sorry, the Nick rib is gone.

Speaker A:

Shut up. Mr. Marbles.

Speaker B:

Mr. Marbles.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

I'm your host, Rob Zolson.

Speaker A:

I'm Jim Colby. And I'm Adam El Nashar.

Speaker B:

So we were going to do a know you schedule these things. You get everything set. You think you dotted the I's, you crossed the t's, and I'll be damned if a microphone jack on the other party's end just suddenly explodes in his hand. So Oliver's aquatic garden shout out to you, brother. We're going to have you on next episode. But got to fix that microphone port. So till next time, we'll get you. But for now, we're going to go with a pre done episode.

Speaker A:

Pre done.

Speaker B:

That Jimmy doesn't know he's going to cover.

Speaker A:

I did not know that. If I had known that, I would have showed up sober.

Speaker B:

So, before I tell you information about more of the topic, we're going to do some questions to catch up on our email.

Speaker A:

What are you, the police?

Speaker B:

No, you've been gone. And there's a couple of questions asked that I feel like we need to re review as a Whole. But, gentlemen, anything on your brains? How was your holiday?

Speaker A:

How about you, Adam? My holiday was good. Kids were happy. The kids were happy. So you gave them gifts this year for once, or, you know, I didn't hand carve them stuff and make them out of twigs. They got actual toys. Wow. I know. They were pretty happy. I do have a good Christmas story. That is a friend of my son's. And I'll just tell you really quick, hit us. So my son's friends, they're in their thirty s, a young couple with two children. And they mess with each other every Christmas. And so anyway, she asked her husband last year, sweetheart, what do you want for Christmas? And he goes, I want a red rider BB gun. And she goes, you'll shoot your eye out, kid. And he goes, no, seriously, I wanted one for my whole life. Never got one. My parents told me the same damn thing, that I shoot my eye out from that stupid Christmas story movie. And I want a red rider BB gun. And so she went out and bought him. This is last year. Now, she bought him a red Rider BB gun. Took the gun out of the box, gave the gun to her nephew, took the box and put it on a handle of a snow shovel, put it at the end of the driveway. And so when you looked out their front window, all you could see was this red rider BB gun sticking out of the snow. And so they get up and stuff, and she goes, hey, sweetheart. He goes, what? She goes, I think Santa missed the house a little bit last night. But look what's out there for you out in the yard.

Speaker B:

This is cruel and unusual.

Speaker A:

And anyway, he's like. And he runs out there. He had a pair of tennis shoes on and some gym shorts. Recorded it. And he goes out there and he pulls up this BB gun out of the snow. And there is a handle of a snow shovel sticking out with a note on it saying, as long as you're out there, why don't you shovel your way back in? That was last year. So now this year, he asked her, he goes, baby, what do you want for Christmas? She goes, nothing. Because you're just going to mess with me. And so, long story short, she finally says, I just want diamonds and pearls. And this is a friend of my son's. He's in construction. So he built this beautiful box, and it says, diamonds and pearls do it yourself kit. And gave it to her for Christmas. Opened it up, and it was a lump of coal and an oyster.

Speaker B:

This is your friend or family?

Speaker A:

This is my son's friend.

Speaker B:

This is your son's friend?

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

Your son has pretty awesome friends.

Speaker A:

I thought that was pretty cool. It's a good Christmas story.

Speaker B:

Yes.

Speaker A:

Nobody is harmed in the making of this.

Speaker B:

I mean, the last time I stuck things in people's yards, I got in a lot of trouble. Exactly how are those wooden crosses in your yard, Jimmy?

Speaker A:

Don't start wood.

Speaker B:

Anyways, so let's go over a couple of questions, one that you boys missed. I believe that you were gone during the holidays. This is Claire that messages and says, hey guys, hope you're doing well. I have a big favor to ask. In the middle of setting up more fish tanks in our spare bedroom and over the last few months we've been slowly entering the house. I am now up to 15 and very patient and understanding wife. Only three tanks are running now, but I'm getting there slowly. Anyways, I have a blank wall where I would love to have autograph pictures of my favorite fish tube and podcasts. I know it sounds weird request, but I would like this cool items in my room. I don't know how easy it is to send stuff in the US to Scotland.

Speaker A:

Scotland.

Speaker B:

But if it's not possible, I totally understand. If it's something you can do, please let us know the cost. Claire, I've attached photos of my progress, so see if I can copy this one and put it in the chat so Adam can see as well. And if you guys are not already on our discord, go to aquariumguyspodcast.com or in the show notes. You'll see our link to please, please get in there and get in there and join the debauchery and listen to these podcasts live. There's the photo, Adam. It is currently uploading as we speak. Jimmy, what do you think of this setup here?

Speaker A:

I think it's a good start. I tell you what, it's a nice looking room. It's got a nice floor that will slowly be flooded and being warped in about a year.

Speaker B:

Well, my question is just to explain the beginning of the fish room. There's a couple of nice metal racks and whatnot. And then you can see default pictures in the background. And the picture they're focusing in on is like a picture of. Is that hindi picture? Must be like a Buddha. Buddha. I'm not a theologian by any measure, but I got a feeling that that's what they're trying to do is replace that picture with us in there.

Speaker A:

I don't know. I mean, you look at the two tanks below there, and those are nice rimless tanks, and they're probably just going for some sort of serenity.

Speaker B:

Serenity.

Speaker A:

Serenity.

Speaker B:

Excellent.

Speaker A:

And so you'll see where our picture is going to be is over by the tank full of clown puke. Excellent. That'll be where we're at.

Speaker B:

Well, in that case, since they're in Scotland, I'm not sending them a picture. Okay, but I'm going to send them the digital picture so they can go get it printed on with our.

Speaker A:

There you go.

Speaker B:

So what do you think, Adam? We supposed to sign it? I don't think there's enough of us together pictures. So I think the best thing we can do is send the infamous picture of Adam in a towel, Adam in a blanket over his head, and then you and I, Jimmy flipping off the camera, signing sponge filters.

Speaker A:

Sure. That sounds really. I mean, who wouldn't want to display that in their home?

Speaker B:

That's more authentic to the podcast than anything they could ask.

Speaker A:

Know, we probably should send them a couple pairs of dirty underwear and they could just put that up like a trophy.

Speaker B:

So if we want to change our minds, we could also take a photo, but we could. Adam's a long ways away.

Speaker A:

Well, we have that picture of us from Joe's show last year. Oh, we do?

Speaker B:

Yeah, but that's not really a, like, photo esque photo for a wall in their fish room.

Speaker A:

Well, maybe, but it's good.

Speaker B:

That's what we got to do. Next time we meet up, we got to take some real nice quality photos.

Speaker A:

We should spend some money and get us an appointment, and the three of us can go hold hands and take pictures and shit. Glamour shots. Glamour, glamour shots. I like that. You know what? I'm going to put a little bit of Adam Lambert sprinkle dust on my face, I tell you.

Speaker B:

Little Adam Lambert sprinkle dust.

Speaker A:

I just saw Adam Lambert in concert here about a month ago. Phenomenal. He's now singing for queen, and we had fantastic seats. And I tell you what, Adam Lambert, what a hell of a guy.

Speaker B:

I feel like you can't really go wrong, but he had a lot of that concert.

Speaker A:

He had a lot of glitter. A lot of glitter in his hair. I'm just saying he pulls it off.

Speaker B:

Well, all right, so the next one, before I read a couple more questions here, I'm going to show you what I got for Christmas. As tangent my friend likes to get me. We do best friends forever. Little gifts, like retarded gifts for birthdays and whatnot. But more importantly for Christmas, we like to get each other gag gifts sometimes. So she apparently hired an artist, and we have the rights to this picture, so we can do anything we want with it. But I will send it into the podcast chat right now for those that are in here. Adam, do you see the podcast chat? Yeah, that is a temporary tattoo, and it is about, oh, I'm going to say four to six inches. We'll go four inches just to be safe.

Speaker A:

That's nice. And to think that I was going to go and spend like $300 on a tattoo here in the next few weeks. Maybe I could do that.

Speaker B:

Now for those that aren't listening to the podcast, because this is not a video podcast. And again, this is for the live people. But I will describe it to you. Apparently what she did is she said that she wanted a, quote, fish with tits. And when she sends it to the artist, and the artist did not know I was an aquarium guy, so instead made a large mouth bass with lipstick, eyeliner, tits in a bikini, and of course, they're outrageous tits. I am going to take this temporary tattoo and apply it to my ass and then show my mother I got a new tattoo, which is adherently opposed to tattoos. So I'll be sure to inform you guys how that all went.

Speaker A:

Knowing your mother, I'm hoping that she just freaking lets you have, like, I.

Speaker B:

Buy that for a dollar. I love the chat this evening. You guys are the best.

Speaker A:

All right, now, Jimmy, what.

Speaker B:

What's your thoughts?

Speaker A:

It scares the hell out of me a little bit. It looks like some fish just ate her head or something. And then she's got these bazangas here.

Speaker B:

Wouldn't you buy that at a bass pro shop on a. What do you. What do you appreciate?

Speaker A:

I'm not even going to go into a rant about mean a lot of work went through this and stuff, but, yeah.

Speaker B:

I appreciate you guys'review.

Speaker A:

And by the way, your video and audio went all shit.

Speaker B:

Mine. Can you hear me now?

Speaker A:

Yeah, we can. Your audio is better, but your video is still off. I've been trying to tell you, but you ignore me. For you.

Speaker B:

Oh, I'm sorry.

Speaker A:

It's all right. He does that to everybody. You should get used to it by now. I know you're not special.

Speaker B:

I'm quite the canoe. All right, well, continuing on.

Speaker A:

Hey, what's with a haircut? Mine. Yeah.

Speaker B:

Okay, so you missed it because I was completely bald. But it's been a while since you've seen me, so I went to California on purpose. It was a Christmas trip. Oh, that's right.

Speaker A:

For work.

Speaker B:

Because I work at a California office in the SoCal area.

Speaker A:

So I get there and I go.

Speaker B:

To a barber, and I got like, a free coupon.

Speaker A:

Okay, well, you got your money's worth. Absolutely.

Speaker B:

Anyways, I got a free coupon. So I'm like, okay, free haircut.

Speaker A:

I'm in.

Speaker B:

So I go to this place. I'm the only white dude there, and the place is loaded. They get me down on. They get me down on the chair, and I feel so embarrassed because I'm so white. I hear this really good song in the radio. I'm like, is that tupac? And the whole room, I shit you not. The whole room freezes. And they go look at me like, yeah, that's Tupac. I'm like, this is really good. And they're like, oh, do you have any Bill Cosby? They immediately, the whole place burst into laughter, and they all heckled me, saying, well, I'm finally glad you're expanding your reach outside of bluegrass. So that set the tone.

Speaker A:

You've got all your teeth. So bluegrass is probably. Let's go back to something. I just thought maybe something had happened, and you got, like, a make a wish thing going on.

Speaker B:

Oh, no, it's worse. So I sat down on the chair, and the guy said, so what do you want, man? I'm like, you're the artist. I literally said, you're the artist. You get to pick. This is your canvas. Have fun. You know what happened? He gave me the Kim Jon un. I shit you not. Like, even the little side part, the whole thing. Next time, I'm going to say, a little easy on the communist look, please.

Speaker A:

I like it.

Speaker B:

So I had to go to my Christmas parties in Kim Jong un. So immediately when I got home, I shaved my head bald. So now I got it like, what? This is how long? Eight inches on my beard. Six inches. I'd say four, but four inches. All right. It's curled up right now. Whatever. That's what he tells his wife.

Speaker A:

Jim. I know.

Speaker B:

Six to eight inches measurements. So I got a beard, I'm bald, and I'm a big dude. I look like I'm a biker dude that wears neon glasses and shoes. I'm like a clown. Thank you, Jimmy, for pointing that out.

Speaker A:

I just hadn't seen you for a while. I was on vacation.

Speaker B:

Been a hot minute. It's a lot to take.

Speaker A:

I just. All of a sudden, you turn your head to the side, and I can see what you're thinking, because his hair is so thin. Holy crap.

Speaker B:

Holy crap.

Speaker A:

But I just thought, well, maybe. Are you okay? Are you feeling okay?

Speaker B:

I'm feeling good.

Speaker A:

Okay. We don't need to do make a wish program.

Speaker B:

No, not today. Not today. Next question. Flog. I'm not going to. I was about to read his last name. I don't do that. So flog's first name. Also love the name of flog. I don't know if that's a nickname or this guy's like from Florida or something. Okay, here's his real name. Hey, my name is Lucas and I'm 19. Okay, never mind then. And I live in Tampa, Florida.

Speaker A:

Okay, all right.

Speaker B:

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make that joke. I did not read ahead. Clearly I should have. I work at an Amazon fulfillment center and want to spend my paychecks on some aquarium stuff and really want to start a coral tank. Hopefully one day sell corals in the future. Can you guys talk about some growing corals 101 P-S-I prefer episodes without guests, but you guys should definitely do one with a coral expert if you can.

Speaker A:

Because you don't know shit.

Speaker B:

You're right. Love this podcast so much. Really helps me through the day and my twelve hour day. A mind numbing job. I love listening to the three of you bullshit. I laugh so hard in my Airpods I look like idiots. It's awesome. Flog or Lucas, however you want to. And he emailed back saying, feel free to read my message on air.

Speaker A:

Flog you.

Speaker B:

Well, I wasn't going to not read it on air.

Speaker A:

We don't need your permission.

Speaker B:

You send it to us. This is our prerogative. No flog. Yes, for sure. I would love more salt episodes, but there are some bigger. Like, if you look at the podcast space, there's not a whole lot of Aquarium podcasts out there. There's getting more, but we're definitely one of the bigger names in the game for Aquarium podcasts. Except for Saltwater. There's a few good saltwaters. There's the reef beef. There's other ones. I'm not saying don't listen to us and check them out, but definitely check them out as well. We'll definitely have more for coral fragging, but we did do one a while back. I'm trying to remember the episode number. It was like episode in the 30s. Yeah, but that really didn't cover how to frag. What to frag? Cheap frags, stuff like that. So it's on the list. A long, long list of recommendations. Now for the topic at hand. I had it saved.

Speaker A:

Can I go on my rant first?

Speaker B:

Yes, Adam, please kick in your rant.

Speaker A:

Hold on, I gotta sit back for.

Speaker B:

Wait, wait. I'll freshen up your drink. All right, pause the podcast, come back with a drink. All right, I'm ready.

Speaker A:

All right, aqueon, get your shit together.

Speaker B:

Hold on.

Speaker A:

What the hell?

Speaker B:

Hold on. It's already hard enough for us to get sponsors because we're a brand risk. Now you just got to just shit on one of the biggest boys in the neighborhood. Did they take a dump on your lawn?

Speaker A:

Who drone your dog over Christmas? My God. Slow it up, buddy. Slow down. Here's what happened. I go looking, okay?

Speaker B:

Acryon fish food is fine.

Speaker A:

Yeah. If you want garbage to feed your.

Speaker B:

Fish, go ahead and feed them garbage. Oh, God. I'm going to stop you there, Adam.

Speaker A:

Just one.

Speaker B:

Guys, guys. If you don't understand how hard it is for us to get sponsors on this shit, please go to Patreon, help us out, throw us a buck because no one else is going to give us.

Speaker A:

We don't need any money in Patreon. We need some money for Adam to get some help.

Speaker B:

Yes.

Speaker A:

He's got some freaking issues with.

Speaker B:

Go. Let's go. This is an interview, Adam.

Speaker A:

Corridors are fine.

Speaker B:

Hold on, hold on. Don't argue with our fans, all right? Give them time to cook.

Speaker A:

God, I just want to. Adam, you're on the edge.

Speaker B:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

Jump.

Speaker B:

Adam, what happened? Tell us the story, Adam. What happened? Why?

Speaker A:

Calm down. Because I am calm.

Speaker B:

I went to go buy some beta.

Speaker A:

Pellets because I wanted some good quality beta pellets. So I go to Petco because that's the closest. That's the only thing that I got in my area. Oh, Amazon doesn't come to your house. I don't want to order from Amazon. But that's. Jesus Christ. Sorry. So, yeah, hikari is the best for beta pellets. I go everywhere looking for Hikari. Beta pellets. Can't find them anywhere. So then I go and I talk to this petsmart guy and he goes, here, these are your two choices. And he gives me an aqueon and then some other off brand that I've never even heard of before and I go, well, I'll go with Aqueon. And the packaging looks like the beta pellets are small, right? The beta pellets are bigger than the goddamn beta's eyeballs.

Speaker B:

Adam, Adam, have you not heard of giant betas? Come on.

Speaker A:

No. This is asinine stupidity. Have some quality control for your shit and make a good quality food. I had to run the shit through a grinder just to get it to work. And why do you have a grinder in the house, Adam? And I think you should use a grinder more often. I think he needs to use a grinder more often because you're tired. But all I'm saying is that they go and they're like, oh, here, try this shit. Everything that I've bought from Aquion has been garbage. They have literally taken fish keeping and flushed it down the toilet.

Speaker B:

It's worse than the shit that they gave you.

Speaker A:

At know, I think who you should be mad at is hakari. Because why isn't hakari out there pushing their stuff in these big box stores? You should be mad at Hakari, not Aqua.

Speaker B:

Like zoomed pellets are hikari pellets.

Speaker A:

I could name off, like, four other pellet companies.

Speaker B:

Can I go? Can I go and take your hate and then go with little love? I love zoomed shit. Zoomed shit.

Speaker A:

No problem with zoomed. That's not what I'm complaining.

Speaker B:

They got these little scoops with their beta containers. It's really cute. And you give your kid a little scooper and anyways, continue.

Speaker A:

But equion is just taking stuff and then making it in the shitter. And then they're like, here, this is.

Speaker B:

All you can get.

Speaker A:

And then when your beta dies of starvation because the pellets are too big.

Speaker B:

They'Re going to be like, oh, you.

Speaker A:

Should buy another beta. Why would I pay $20 for a beta?

Speaker B:

That's what they are, by the way.

Speaker A:

At Petco now is $20. I did see that. For a three beta. For a normal beta, yeah, for a normal beta. How much is a normal beta, Jim? Eighty cents. A dollar? The last time they're on sale, I picked them up for $0.09 apiece. For 100 lots.

Speaker B:

Exactly.

Speaker A:

And so your beta is going to starve to death because all they have is shitty ass aqueon food. It's too big for them. Why don't you feed them flake? Another $20. Why don't you feed them flake? I have never seen a beta eat flake, and I will not yell about that one. Have you gotten your beta c flake?

Speaker B:

I have, actually. I've gotten my beta hungry enough.

Speaker A:

I mean, I'd eat flake, but it's like, just give me good products. That's all I want. I just want shit that doesn't kill my fish or isn't garbage. And I don't want idiots at Petco or Petsmart telling me that they know better than me. Don't you have like, a regular pet store around there somewhere? No, they closed. The guy retired.

Speaker B:

All right, so now we drive to the cities.

Speaker A:

You're going to have to go on the Internet by yourself.

Speaker B:

Now we're going to have to go through the questions because you've now arose the haters and lovers in chat. So someone said, aqua on food's fine.

Speaker A:

Shut the up.

Speaker B:

My cars are fine. Hakari. Betas are good. Adam and the shit. Oh, hold on. They have this picture here of Adam. It's a picture of Peter Griffin fighting the chicken and family guy. And it says, look at this is a video of the petco clerk and Adam fighting over betas. So that was decent.

Speaker A:

Can't fix stupid.

Speaker B:

I agree. Aquion's pretty bad. Adam should write angry letter to Aquion and get more free beta pellets.

Speaker A:

There we go.

Speaker B:

Got them for free. Extreme is superior now. Okay, I'm pause you. Everybody has their own pros and cons. Every company has had a bad batch of food. I don't care who it is. You check your food before you do it. If they're mass manufacturing something you're not in, 100% of the containers are not going to be good. Right? It's just how food is. But if you talk to different people, everybody has their favorite food. I do like some akari stuff, but I still like to have flake. Akari doesn't do much for flake extreme. I haven't had anything bad. I have my favorites, like Norfin. I love, love that shit. New life spectrum. Awesome stuff. But you talk to anybody, and I don't think Chris Biggs will admit it. But if you talk to Chris Biggs about his least favorite food company, he is one of the most humorous people to have an Adam style rant about fish food. A particular popular company that I'm not going to name, but have some know. Let us know in your notes if you want to just do your own Adam rant and submit it. Aquariumguyspodcast@gmail.com. Now, the last one is, I got a message here. Someone says, can you give me Adam's address so I can send him some better food? So, Adam, this is your opportunity to tell people your address on the podcast.

Speaker A:

That's not happening. How about your phone number?

Speaker B:

Don't you have a Po box?

Speaker A:

How about your last nine of your Social Security number? The last nine of your Social Security number?

Speaker B:

Can you set up a PO box so we can all send you shit?

Speaker A:

That'd be fun for me. I wonder if I could poop in a bucket, man.

Speaker B:

Hey, most time they don't ask for permission, so consider that a nice.

Speaker A:

Just Google Adam and you'll find his address. Adam, was it state penitentiary?

Speaker B:

Adam, did you go back to Petco and complain about your food?

Speaker A:

You should.

Speaker B:

No, I didn't. Bother.

Speaker A:

Although, just so you know, now, apparently I must have triggered something with Petco because you're banned. You're banned. No. Okay.

Speaker B:

Whenever I go in there for whatever.

Speaker A:

Reason, like to buy crickets or something, they sent me like 14 emails asking me how was my visit and everything.

Speaker B:

Well, yeah, because you hazed the guy doing his job.

Speaker A:

Yeah. What was he, eleven? Shitty. He was eleven years old. He was older than that.

Speaker B:

Sorry, he didn't know that. You're a pissy aquarist. All right, that's on him.

Speaker A:

I can't wait till Adam's seven years old and he's going to be get the hell off my lawn. Even though he doesn't have a lawn.

Speaker B:

I am buying so much aquion food.

Speaker A:

You know, we should do for his birthday, we should give him our address and have people send us aqua and food and then we'll forward it to Adam. That's what we should do.

Speaker B:

Real talk, though. Real talk. We do have an address. If you guys do want to send something to Adam, we're not going to give his actual address out because he's.

Speaker A:

Still under the witness protection program also, right? Yeah. Surveillance by the federal government. Yeah.

Speaker B:

So for those that want to know, we do accept packages at two two three front street, West Detroit Lakes, Minnesota 56501. That is the designated spot for fan mail and retarded packages.

Speaker A:

Yeah. And if your package is ticking, we're going to soak it in water first before we open it.

Speaker B:

And if you send us clown puke, know that we love you to your core.

Speaker A:

Yeah. Please spend money sending gravel in the mail. I'd love that. All right, who thinks that beta needs ten gallons?

Speaker B:

Oh, okay. Quick rant.

Speaker A:

Oh, here we go.

Speaker B:

Hold on, Adam. You had to ask that question. So at D's Fishco, they're putting up a giant cylindrical tank. Do you remember that tank at Ty's place?

Speaker A:

I've seen it.

Speaker B:

How many gallons is that? Like 100 and something.

Speaker A:

It's got to be somewhere north of 80. Yeah.

Speaker B:

Well, then it's a giant stump underneath. So I think all in all, it's like 125 gallons, but it's a giant cylinder tube going straight up. And the guys finally got all the hardware to put it together. They got it setting in the store and they're getting it cycled. They already decided that they're putting one beta, one beta. One in that tank.

Speaker A:

Just put one in it.

Speaker B:

And they're going to put a sign on it saying, still not enough for one beta.

Speaker A:

One beta. Yeah. And I hope they put the pump on high so it's swirling around like a blender.

Speaker B:

Just a turbine.

Speaker A:

Just a turbine. To chewing up this beta.

Speaker B:

Can you imagine? Because that thing stands up. It's got to be four and a half, 5ft tall.

Speaker A:

Well, it touches the ceiling almost.

Speaker B:

Well, yeah, but it's on a base.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

So can you imagine, like bait is go all the way to the bottom, they sit and lay down and then that thing has got to go 5ft in the air to get a gulp of air before it drops back down half dead and exhausted.

Speaker A:

You're an awful person, apparently.

Speaker B:

Thank you, Adam.

Speaker A:

That hit the spot.

Speaker B:

Normally I have to cringe that you got enjoyed. If we're never going to get sponsored by Aquion, at least you made it interesting.

Speaker A:

I have no problem with them. If they want to make some actual good, I would be. I would be okay with. You know what? I think that I'm going to just buy random shit every time I go to Petco. Petsmart. I'm going to try it and then I'm going to be like, this is Adam's opinion on this.

Speaker B:

That's what we'll do every episode. Yeah, every episode. We're going to have you be a professional review.

Speaker A:

We should do that. We should like a little three minute segment.

Speaker B:

Yes. And you're going to tell us the product, how you felt about it, and you're going to give it an atom. Score one out of five. So right now, we did Aqua on beta pellets. That's a zero out of five.

Speaker A:

That's a zero out of five. Yeah. My personal favorite is the lighting systems that cost, like, $250. I'm not buying that. Who buys those?

Speaker B:

It's up to you. This is free form jazz, Adam. We don't get to pick the product. You get to pick the product.

Speaker A:

Okay. But I'm asking a serious question. Is that an actual thing? People use $250 light? God, yes. Oh, yeah.

Speaker B:

I know people that spend $500 on their not saltwater lights.

Speaker A:

It's unbelievable what people will spend. I look at some stuff, I go, that's the stupidest thing I've ever seen. And you go, yeah, they sold 600,000 of them last. There you go. There you go.

Speaker B:

Pop in tropical. Man says, my lights for my plants are $400.

Speaker A:

What kind of plants? Plant. What kind of plants do you got?

Speaker B:

They're freshwater plants.

Speaker A:

They're under the water plants. Yeah. I thought it was. I thought maybe he was starting to farm or something.

Speaker B:

Cheech and Chong, baby.

Speaker A:

There we go.

Speaker B:

All right, so now let's get to our thing.

Speaker A:

Adam.

Speaker B:

One more.

Speaker A:

I'll stop.

Speaker B:

Are you sure? Because that soapbox is pretty warm.

Speaker A:

You know what? Be. No, no, I'm fine. You know what? Be fun for us when Adam does these things. It would be fine if we had a blood pressure cuff on him and we could just have a meter and just watch his blood pressure, and then I'll take bets on when he dies has a heart attack.

Speaker B:

Love of God, editor, please make that sound softer. Replace it with the sound.

Speaker A:

No, I'm cranking it. As a reminder from the legal department, though, the personal views of Adam el Nashar do not represent the views or opinions of the aquarium guys podcast. Just throwing that out there.

Speaker B:

Could you put that on the ad?

Speaker A:

Can you put that on a t shirt? Put that on a t shirt. Number two. Number two, his segment where he reviews things should be called the pissy aquarist. You said it.

Speaker B:

Done.

Speaker A:

I'm claiming it.

Speaker B:

Done.

Speaker A:

Calling it the pissy aquarist.

Speaker B:

Done.

Speaker A:

And number three, his pissy. And number three, his scale should really only be zero to two. Either he loves it or he hates it. There's no wonder. Five.

Speaker B:

Okay, yeah, it's green or red. There you go. I love it. There you go, Adam. Make it even easier on you, budy.

Speaker A:

All you need to do is make it work. That's like. Okay, having shitty aquarium food and $500 lights is like putting fake testicles in your dog when you neuter them. Whoa. The guy that makes those, do you know how much he makes a year? He makes between five and $10 million a year selling fake dog testicles. Wait, and who's a dumb ass? And those dogs have never felt better.

Speaker B:

You know what? I'm going to stop it there. I'm going to stop it there. We've had too much. Thank you, Adam. Save that for next round. Oh, lord in heaven. Let's go back to the real reason we're doing this podcast today. It's worth money in the discord. We have a place called ask for help, and we can review some of these if we have extra time. But the main part of the podcast I need to do is Sam the man. One of our added fans here says, hi, everyone. I want to salt my guppy tank. Will this work? If so, how much per gallon? The tank is bare and a thin layer of crushed coral on the bottom. So immediately I take the opportunity to grab aquarium co op's link aquarium salt for sick fish.

Speaker A:

So you stole it from somebody else?

Speaker B:

If someone did other content. Well, absolutely. I'll share it. I can't recreate the wheel better than what's posted here. And the aquarium co op did a good job of this post. So they show in this particular post, and I'm going to open this for us to read along. And again, this is aquariumcoop.com on their blog. Check it out. They did a damn decent job. So they go into details of how it works, how you should use a salt, and they go treatment. So level one that they recommend is one teaspoon per three gallons of water. And this is poured directly. Hold on here. We've kept thousands of fish in our store, and this is level safe for virtually all fish except for anchor catfish. Keep the salt in solution for four to five days and increase concentration if there's no improvement. So that's level one, level two, one teaspoon for two gallons. And it keeps going up. Not better than give them the beans. The beans is one teaspoon per one gallon. And remember that salt does not evaporate out or get filtered out. The only way to remove salt is by changing the water. When you put salt in. As much as we've been a podcast that tells everybody with a sick fish, salt it first and then come ask us later, it does not get removed from the tank. You have to do that. So I posted that in there and he was nice enough to message back more details. I've heard successes keep leaning guppies long term with a bit of salt. Do you recommend this? And I said, absolutely. Salted up bay guppies are one of the species that you can have in all the way. Saltwater aquarium. You can put guppies in if you want to acclimate them slowly and keep building them up and up and up for the tolerance.

Speaker A:

You can acclimate them all the way.

Speaker B:

Up to be right with your clownfish in your saltwater tank, your oscellaris, clowns, whatever else. So having some salt in the water at all times for guppies, fantastic.

Speaker A:

I just saw people who love guppies have gone out there and seen these beautiful, beautiful guppy strains they've come up with that are coming from overseas, from Thailand, different places. I just came upon a really nice article talking about that these things are kept in salt twenty four seven and different countries at different salt ratios. And somebody had found out what they were and they posted them. And there's anywhere between one to three teaspoons of salt per gallon for most of these fish and from certain vendors, you need to keep it at much higher salinity and then you have to bring it back down once you get them to your place. But they've been held at such a high salinity. That's where they breed.

Speaker B:

Jimmy, you are the segue capital of the day, because that is what I want to do the podcast about. So he keeps on going to saying, I'm trying to get a line going using Jimmy's method of getting adults breeding them, and then when the adults die, rating out the fry and on gen three of doing this and seeing the success. But the water here is almost ro, so acclimating them to water is a nightmare, even with crushed coral. My new idea is to get some bulletproof guppies and adding salt and crossing them with endlers to get nice bulletproof hybrids, possibly to use as feeder fish for my fish room and the picky eaters. Sorry for the wall of text. So I've had this style question ever since that you've mentioned what you've been doing in your fish room. And I've had other people beg for you to do a section of the podcast where you're just talking about your guppy breeding and all of your research and study through the years, because we started this podcast, episode one Jimmy, talking about burning up eight k in Guppies. So, after all these years, Jimmy, can you give us a breakdown of what you've been doing, things you found, and what you recommend?

Speaker A:

Well, like everybody else, I come in going circles when I say that I'm in love with guppies this month. Next month might be angel fish. But what really brought me back to guppies is all these beautiful, beautiful different varieties that you see. And if you go on Aquabid, there's a company out of Thailand, I believe, that shows you all the new ones that are over there, and they're $40 a trio. Plus you have to pay all these transhiping fees and whatnot. And their reviews are pretty poor for getting them over here live. But back in the day here, about two years ago, secrets Farms was good enough to get me some crowntail guppies, which are my favorite, and that's ones I've been working with for the last year or so. And Crowntail guppies are called crowntail guppies in this country, but they're called other things in other countries. So if you're looking for them on a list, I've now have Julie, who was previously with Seagris Farms, and now she's now working with another fish farmer. They've been looking for Crowntail guppies from these other places too. And they can't even find anything. But they finally took some pictures of, I sent pictures of my fish to them. They sent pictures, they went, oh, they're called this and you would never know by looking at the list what they're called. It's just like this. What do they call them? It's completely crazy. What the hell was it called?

Speaker B:

Well, it's just like celestial pearl Danos. They're also called galaxy rasporas. I mean, plants, plants have different names as well. I mean, it's just a pain in the ass. There's no regulating body saying what we need to call things so people can have equal scale. It's some guy marketing trying to pretend that he has something different and cut it a different way.

Speaker A:

Yeah, I think some of them were called reticulated tail and different things and stuff. But I mean, I only know what I know from what I've bought them from.

Speaker B:

I've been doing a little bit this on my side as well. And I've seen at least three different names for that same crowntail gut guppy. Can I remember some of them? No.

Speaker A:

Yeah. If you go on Aquabid right now there's two or three different flavors on Aquabid that are listed and they're listed as crowntail. But there again, you look at the price and it's going to last you about seventy five dollars to one hundred dollars to land these things and hope to God they're alive, which they're not going to be if they're going to send them from Thailand in three things.

Speaker B:

So I'm going to interview you. That's what we're going to do here because I'm trying to whack 30 questions out of our audience with this bit. So number one, when you import something and you find a guppy that you want, what's the process? You find a dude on aquabid wherever you find it. What does Jimmy do to prepare and what do you got to do to make sure that strain continues on in your fish room?

Speaker A:

The first thing I do when I find something that I really, you want, I try to verify that's what I'm going to get because I cannot tell you when you're paying $150 for a bag of fish and I'm talking when I buy guppies, I'm buying 80 to 100. So I want to make sure I get exactly what I want. I ordered some full albino reds one day and they came in and they were full reds but they weren't albino but yet I paid the albino price. So I'm very interested to know exactly what I'm going to get. And if I could ask somebody, I'd like to wait until whoever has brought them in has got them sitting there so they can send me pictures. But when I'm ordering from people like dolphin or Z fish or aquinautics, which is a wholesale companies out in California, they're called completely different things. And so that gets to be really tough to try to find what you're looking for. I mean, Joe from Joe's shrimp shack helped me figure out when we're trying to find the different shrimp and they call them completely different things than we do.

Speaker B:

Well, there's places out there I won't use names, but these big wholesalers, the big boy wholesalers, where you have to get a half a box as a minimum order for one skew, these have country listings. So from Sri Lanka, there's 67 people that sell the same type of fish. So not only do you have to figure out the same type of fish, but then each person can name things differently. So you get skew numbers. So when you talk to your friends and when you're inside the game of a fish store and whatnot, you're like, hey, I know you ordered that from so and so, but there's literally 300 options. Which skew did you have for the yellow shrimp?

Speaker A:

Right.

Speaker B:

Neocardinia shrimp. Oh, this is the skew you need to use, and they give you the coat. That's literally what you have to live off of. You have to learn from somebody else.

Speaker A:

You got to hope that you get some support there. I mean, it's like when you look for discus on these overseas list. I mean, a white pigeon blood might be called something else, might be called something else, might be called something else. And then you'll look on the Internet and you'll see four more names for them. So it's whatever somebody wants to call something is what you're paying for. So beauty is in the eye of the beholder for what you want. And what I was looking for when I got the crown tails is I wanted something different than nobody had, and I wanted to work with them because I can demand a higher price. But here's the problem, is that you import 80, you might get 25 that live longer than six months, right? And so now you've got to try to get them. I bring them in and I know that they're coming from a country with high salinity, so I bring them in with high salinity and as I do, water changes. I just slowly try to get them back down to my water because I don't want to mix salts or chemicals every damn time I do a water change.

Speaker B:

Yeah, we know better. To try to get a fish acclimated with ph buffers is just going to be a band aid to the solution.

Speaker A:

It just rebounds so quickly. So once you finally get them back down to where you're comfortable with the water parameters and they're doing well. And the one thing that I find out that helps me quite a bit, when I bring in, if I've got brine shrimp hatched, they'll normally go after the brine shrimp. And here's the thing is, they're in such high concentrations of salt, the brine shrimp last a very long time. I mean, they'll live 24 hours in there, and these fish will go after them because they're being used to being fed a lot of live food. And so, first of all, you got to get them to come in, you got to get them to settle down. Hopefully, they don't pick up any fungus or any odball stuff, get them acclimated to the water, and now you got to get them to eat. And once you got them, get them to eat, then you got to be patient to get them to breed. And so there you finally get them to breed, and you get, like, on the crown tails, they only have maybe eight to 15 little ones. They don't produce a lot of babies. So in my tanks, I try to keep a lot of duckweed. I've tried many times to pull the females out and put them in those little boxes. It seems to stress them out and kill them. Seems to make them abort the babies and stuff.

Speaker B:

I have very few lock unless they're just about to pop. They don't have really control over it. But even then, you could take, I've seen it where people, a guppy was mid birth. You try to scoop it, put it in the box. It will hold the rest of the birth until it's still birth and kill fry.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

So the box, I've had that happen, too. Yeah, the box. Unless you're using it up front and they're keeping in there long term and you're trying to, how do I say, cool them off or at least stabilize them so they're not as stressed out in the box. The box does not have a large amount of success. It's for the mom and pop hobbyists that want to teach their kid that babies can come out of a fish and they can see, one or two come out, but it's not getting actual numbers from a batch. That's not how you farm a fish.

Speaker A:

Right. If you keep your adults fed very well and four times a day isn't quite enough. I mean, we look at some of these guys, the guys from Aquarium Co op did a great thing on. What country was that? Where they went over to the big guppy production place out in the desert. Remember that? You watch that?

Speaker B:

There was a few different ones. They were definitely in arid countries. One wasn't Syria.

Speaker A:

Where was it?

Speaker B:

I think it was somewhere in India.

Speaker A:

I don't know. It was somewhere overseas.

Speaker B:

And it blew our mind. It was the biggest guppy farm that I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker A:

Yeah. And they feed their guppies 1012 times a day. They have automatic feeders that go over these big tubs and stuff. So once you get your fish to eat and you keep them well fed, if you have enough duckweed in there, the babies will tend to be able to hide good enough. So once I see that I have a ten gallon tank full of the duckweed. And you'll see with a flashlight, if you take the flashlight and you shine it up in the duckweed, you'll see little eyes that kind of reflect. I want to say glow, but they reflect. And if you look very carefully up in there, you can see there's ten, maybe twelve little ones up there. Rather than try to catch the goddamn little ones, I then grab the female and the male and I put them to the next tank. And so I might have ten tanks for one kind of fish. And so you can just keep moving them over. That's easier to move the parents than it is to try to catch the babies. And once you have the babies in the tank and the parents aren't in there, then they'll come out. The next couple of days, you'll see that there's three or four down there, and all of a sudden there's ten. And all of a sudden you'll see there's 15 of them down there. And they love to eat the baby brine shrimp. I use bare bottom tanks, which I like. I know you're a big sand fan, but with the baby brine shrimp, the baby brine shrimp, for some reason, will sit on the bottom and bounce off the bottom of the tank. And that's where the fish will usually go down and chase them down, especially the little ones. And I always overfeed. That's my biggest problem. I do two gallons of brine shrimp morning and evening. And that's what I feed to my guppies. The minute I quit feeding and try to go to, like, a pellet or a flake, unless they're adults, they'll kind of quit growing.

Speaker B:

Yeah, they stunt out.

Speaker A:

They kind of stunt out after that. So my whole thing is that I try to keep them on brine shrimp until I'm ready to sell them. But I'm introducing other stuff slowly but surely, so when somebody else gets them, that they'll eat that stuff. But I'm a big brine shrimp guy. You can go on brine shrimp direct, get yourself a can for 35, $40, and that will feed a lot of fish for a long, long time.

Speaker B:

Now, the other details that I like to point out, you said, like, the bottom of the sand, they bounce off the bottom and catch. Absolutely. Do that with your baby tanks. I'm not a sand guy for baby tanks, you can do it, but I'm more of the person that uses sand if you want a seasoned tank. So if you want to use big grow out tanks, like, I have a 55 gallon that I have at clear bottom. I'm only doing clear bottom because the cichlids in there, and I'm trying to encourage them to breed in pots. If I didn't have the cichlids in there, it would be a sand bottom, and I would try to season out the tank and then do that complementary mix of live food and crush powdered food for the live bears. Because they're not getting their primary source of food off of me, they're getting supplementary food off of me. A seasoned tank provides a lot of bionutrients, copepods, a lot of other things. So if you're not doing brine shrimp, that's the only other way to go. But still, there's a cap to that. You can't just sit there and control your copepods and microorganisms in your tank. You have to just have multiple tanks that are seasoned. Once they've essentially mowed down the herd, you either move them or then you have to go switch right back to something live. So the daphnia, if they're bigger, brine shrimp is always the go to. You can't get away from it.

Speaker A:

Yeah, I personally just love brine shrimp, and over the years, I've gotten a better way to grow it for myself. It works very well for me. It doesn't work for everybody else. I have a ten gallon tank with three gallons glass jars in the tank. I have one heater in the tank, six inches of water. I put an airline tube in each jar. But the whole trick to keeping your airlines clear when you've got those on it is you take one of the hard stems that you see for underground filters that sit on the inside. And so you take your hose and you put a five or six inch piece of stem on there, and at the end of the stem, you still want to add another three or four inches of just regular silicone hose. Because what happens if you have just a stem or a regular hose in there? Within 24 to 36 hours, it will get full of salt and quit. And quit producing current. And then your brine shrimp die, right. And so I know people that use airstones, which work fine, but that fine mist brings a lot of the eggs to the top, and then they end up on the side of the jar and they don't hatch and stuff. So that's just something that works for me, is to have the ten gallon tank, one heater, three jars, and then when I pull out the jar that I'm going to feed, I rotate down. So it's just kind of a conveyor belt type system. And if you've raised brine shrimp long enough, you can just look at the jar and go, oh, it's ready to go, or I'm going to let this go another few hours. I've had the same brine shrimp that I've set up hatch within 6 hours of each other. I put them together at the same time. They should have hatched at the same time, but because one probably had a little more salinity in it, it hatched faster or it hatched slower. So you just have to be able to watch and know when it's time for these fish to be fed. Then I drained the one gallon worth of brine shrimp into a huge brine shrimp net, which I got from up in Tampa, Florida, from the Florida fish co op. And my brine shrimp net is ten inches, and it's a hard wire brine shrimp net. I think I paid like 35, $40 for it. I've got a couple of them, and I'll drain the whole gallon of that. And then what I do is I put a one eight ounce jar of water, and I put the branch shrimp into that. And then I use the eyedropper that I got from Amazon, Adam, which is on the Internet, and then you can really measure out well how much you want to give them with the big giant eyedropper. So my eyedropper is probably about eight inches long. Really? Eight inches long? Excellent.

Speaker B:

Not ten.

Speaker A:

And anyway, when I feed this tank that's just full of babies, I'll shoot the whole thing in there. If I've got just a pair of fish or a pair of males or a bunch of extra females, you can kind of just gather how much you can give them and you can actually shoot it right down. So, like with the tank, with the babies, a lot of times the babies will hang out way in the back because they're kind of shy at first. And then you could shoot that with the eyedropper right in front of them.

Speaker B:

With an air gun.

Speaker A:

Shoot it right in, shoot it right up their nose. Yeah. But my whole thing with guppies is I love just to be able to keep running the conveyor belt. And Steve Bickey, who's been on this podcast the one time, was talking about how he'd rather sell a pair of fish for $250 rather than sell 250 little fish for a dollar apiece. It's a lot less work, a lot less tanks. And anyway, so with the high end guppies, when you can gather that, you can get $40 to $45 for a trio or a pair, to me, it's well worth just having 15 little ones at a crack. And then you can still call, you're still going to have a couple of bad ones. But even if you get a couple of females that just don't look perfect in your eyes, they still may throw fantastic babies. So, I mean, I still keep the extra females on these high end stuff and see what they turn out to.

Speaker B:

Now I want to go a little bit more over the kamikaze. That's what we get a lot of questions with the kamikaze method. And when I say this, I'm going to try to describe it. Correct me if them wrong, you'll find a guppy, you'll import it in, and no matter what you do, they're notorious. No matter the acclimation, the prep, they just shit out. There's just nothing you can do. Maybe you didn't know the magic recipe that this came from. Maybe they're a real weak line, but what you've had luck doing and that you brought to light and people had more questions on is you get them in, you keep them long enough to drop a batch, and then the batches are solid and acclimated afterwards. And you mentioned, I was mentioning in the comments about generation three is when they're good enough to go right, even.

Speaker A:

With the f ones, your first batch, if they have 15 little ones, as long as you can keep them from being cannibalized, you'll raise 15 because they're that solid. But to bring in 80 to 100 fish and end up with 25, and you can't figure out what you did, right for these 25, I've never had them. The imports last longer than maybe nine months.

Speaker B:

One of your crazy strains, and this is from me watching and listening to your bitching. The importer told you, don't get these, they're going to crap out. And it was the coolest looking beta. You call crown tails. These look like their fins are pre shredded. I put a picture in chat so people can get to see them, and it was a particular strain of crowntails that you've never seen before. And you said, I'm going to risk it for the biscuit. You got it in. I think you got, like, 100 in. Zero survived, right?

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

You got lucky with one of them dropping a batch, and now you're keeping the line going for a good long while.

Speaker A:

Yeah, they came in and they're probably 20% were dead in the bag, slowly acclimated them and watched three to five die every day like clockwork, no matter what we did, until they're all gone. Finally, there was one female that had some babies and stuff. So you go, here's my one fish that cost me $125, and it's just ridiculous.

Speaker B:

And we know you're lying because you spent more than that.

Speaker A:

Yeah. Some of these fish, we give Adam crap about those endler fish, but I'm seeing them now where they're packed 500 and they're $2 a fish. So you're talking $1,000 a bag for endlers. There's no way I'm doing that much crack.

Speaker B:

Now, to address this guy's question, or this is his thought, to comment on it, is he wanted to hardy up a line of guppies that he liked, so he wanted to get some guppies with some fancy details and then get some what he would consider sturdy endlers, cross them so he would have a guppy that he enjoys and that he could, again, just use for fish food as needed if it overpopulates in his tank.

Speaker A:

Right.

Speaker B:

I am adamant against that mentality. If you're going to do that, stop crossing endlers. There's too many hybrid species, especially in the guppy world, that we can't keep endlers pure. And I know that we are the feeder guppy people that make fun of these things, but to be all of honesty, to keep these going, some of which that are extinct in the wild or soon to be extinct. The only way we're going to preserve these for our kids is going to.

Speaker A:

Be in a tank.

Speaker B:

So if you're going to have a guppy and you want to cross a guppy, fine. But if you have a guppy, you want to cross with an endler. Stop it. That's just a bad habit that we need to discourage just about everybody from doing, in my opinion.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

If you're saying. Adam, I just had a question.

Speaker A:

I was wondering, are endlers, like, not hardy anymore?

Speaker B:

A lot of people think that endlers, as the common endlers are hardier than guppies. That is the thought. And what he was trying to note is that he picks his colors from the guppy. He's going to cross it with a hearty, ugly endler and he's going to have something that at least he knows he can trust.

Speaker A:

I didn't think it's called quit getting shitty strains of guppies if he's just looking to have extra guppies to feed his fish. I can pick up a box of 1000 feeder guppies for $30 plus shipping. You could talk to your local wholesaler and say, can you get me a box of feeder guppies? And you're going to get exactly that. But I have gotten boxes of feeder sword tails. Not exaggerating. And they came in and they were freaking gorgeous. And I went through there and I pulled out about 200 of them that were marigolds, red bricks and stuff. And I sold them for a premium and paid $30. And then of course I thought, I'm going to do this again. The next time I ordered them came in and they're all little tiny green ones and little red ones. I mean, they weren't big enough to even sell. So when I would request these from my wholesaler, I would say, hey, I want big ones. Again, if you can't get me big ones, don't send them to me. And I made a lot of money bringing in a box of sword tails for $30. And there's 250 to 500. All they do is they just scoop. And once one scoop is, and they're all different sizes, so you have to kind of sort through them. But that's a hell of a lot of fun. If you're looking for something just to go in there, grab something very cheap and then turn it into something beautiful, I mean, a lot of these things are already gorgeous.

Speaker B:

Tada.

Speaker A:

Hey. Oh, Jim, remember that conversation we had in the bathroom earlier? No. Earlier about my pygmy sword tails? Yes. You should ask that question right now. Yeah. So I bought a pair of pygmy sword tails from Fernando at that last fish show we were at, Rob. Yep. And that was a good fish show, by the way. There was a lot of cool shit there. People should go to those small shows. The Galaxy Danios and then the scarlet baddest were just phenomenal. That one table was bought. I had a pair. That was the last pair that Fernando had. And all my libraries are dying off. I can't figure out why. But you mixed them up with libraries with your sunfish. Little, tiny pygmy sunfish, right? Well, there's one in there. Yeah. But then I put the scarlet baddest in there, and then the galaxy's rasboras. I've kind of mixed everybody. They're all in 110 gallon tank. But my question was, that's a hell of a ten. I change 50% of the water every week. And there's a shit ton of cherry shrimp and red really shrimp in there.

Speaker B:

I want a picture. I want a picture of this shit.

Speaker A:

Well, it's full of the plants, so that won't. I mean, nothing will get killed in that tank, but yet your fish are dead. What happened? No, here's my thing. The fish that should die, like the scarlet baddest, because those are touchy, the shrimp should die. The galaxy Daniels, I expect those to die. And those things are just bulletproof. But my damn pygmy sword tails and even some female guppies are just keeled over. It makes no sense to me. Has anybody got any ideas out there?

Speaker B:

Well, number one, Adam didn't use his quarantine process.

Speaker A:

I knew that was coming.

Speaker B:

Adam gets what he gets. You know what I'm saying?

Speaker A:

But, I mean, there you go. You're looking at some. You said you had little mini swords or something. What did you say you had? Pygmy swords, which are probably a little more delicate than a regular sword tail. I don't know, man.

Speaker B:

Just on that same tangent, I got some stuff from Fernando, or that same meeting from Fernando.

Speaker A:

I got Fernando.

Speaker B:

I got some stuff from Dee's fish Co. I got stuff here and there that I've been adding to my 125. And my 125 is just the biggest gaggle of different fish.

Speaker A:

Just a slew of shit.

Speaker B:

So what I do is I do the quarantine process. I put them in the tank for two to four weeks, depending on how long, where they came from. All the other information, I'll go through the quarantine steps, but then I still add them to my tank afterwards. And even after the quarantine process, I still can get unlucky. What happened to me recently is now Jimmy says that I'm rolling some mad dice. He knows that I have six zebra plecos in there that are just getting close to breeding size and they're just claiming tubes. But I have all kinds of other shit in this tank. So I'm adding these fish, everything from.

Speaker A:

Goldfish to pearl Guramis.

Speaker B:

Yeah, pearl Garami. Should I go over the list that I can remember? Shit, I got a bunch of sid the monkeys. These are chain loaches. The nickname is based off of their latin name. Phonetically, it sounds like Sid the monkey. Anyway, so I have chain loaches, I have red tailed bodia bodias. I have two of them, and they're full size. And all they do is just whap the snails in the tank. Because there's mts in there. They keep the numbers down. I have blue eye bristle nose, albino long fin, lemon bristle nose, placo. I have zebra placos in there and they're nice. I finally get the six of them.

Speaker A:

You've had them for what, four or five months?

Speaker B:

Yeah, pushing six now. Been trying to get those. They're slow grow. And my tank's not as hot as it should be, so they're even slower. I got proguramis, I have lemon tetras. I have red colombian tetras. I have some serpeys in there. Long fin, special serpeys that I got from these fish go. That I can't find anywhere else. And they are breathtaking. They're curtains. I have shit. I'm trying to remember. I have vietnamese white clouds which are somehow different than normal white clouds. They're way more red. I've never seen anything like it. It's kind of like a cardinal tetris.

Speaker A:

Anyways, so everything we've told you not.

Speaker B:

To do, I have humpback lemias. That a whole breeding colony in there. Anyways, going down the list, the more important things is I have neon dwarf rainbow fish and I have basami rainbows and quite a few of them. And they are breathtaking and huge, and they love the flow. But as I'm adding these fish in there, I get a rainbow specific disease. Doesn't touch a single other fish in the tank. It wipes out every single rainbow I.

Speaker A:

Have in the tank.

Speaker B:

Don't have a clue what happened. They immediately started to swell from the inside out. And as the end result, they fuzzed out and died immediately. It was real fast. It was some virus that just hit my rainbow fish. Now, the only thing I can think of is maybe I did it because I was feeding extremely high protein food. So maybe I caused it because rainbow fish over a long term diet can't handle high, high protein all the time. It's a big known thing.

Speaker A:

So.

Speaker B:

Still trying to figure it out. So, Adam, don't feel bad. Even if you quarantine them, you still possibly can have bad luck.

Speaker A:

Well, my whole thing is I've never had something just wipe out a specific group of fish to this point where it makes no sense to me.

Speaker B:

The same with my rainbow fish, brother.

Speaker A:

I figured if I'm going to lose something, I'm going to lose garland baddest. Those are touchiest galaxy Daniels. Those are touchiest. Even the shrimp. If it was a water quality issue, you lose shrimp, right?

Speaker B:

Yeah, I got the same issue. I have way delicate, more delicate fish than my rainbow fish. And those are the ones just nailed out and nothing else was affected. I was so like, oh, Jimmy's. Jimmy's going to make fun of me for losing these era plake.

Speaker A:

What just kills me is that usually with myself, the only fish that die is my favorite fish. Well, that doesn't matter what it is. If it's a big ass goldfish, if it's a big pleco of some sort, whatever. The one fish that I love the most in that tank, that's usually the first one. That's why I don't have any favorite children. I don't either. What's his name? Remember when we were seeing that big saltwater tank? What the hell was that guy's name?

Speaker B:

Oh, Sean Kramer.

Speaker A:

Sean Kramer. Yeah. Remember when he told us, hey, that's my favorite fish. And we just went, oh, no, don't say that.

Speaker B:

No, don't do that.

Speaker A:

The next day. Yeah. Who we're talking about is Sean Kramer. One of my personal good buddies. Works for this gentleman. And they have a huge saltwater aquarium. You can find it on YouTube. And they're producing a ton and what I mean a ton. They're producing a ton of coral and selling coral out of this tank. And it's kind of funny talking to Sean because Sean has got, what was it? 18 foot tank, 2000 gallons, something like that. Something like that. And all he wanted to do people for this tank, he just wanted to pay for his kids college tuition. That's all he wanted to do. Yeah, easy goal. Just pay for my kids college tuition. And they are doing it right now, and they're producing enough coral. And they're also doing these contests with other coral where they're buying this crazy ass coral for $1,000. And they split up a coral between three or four guys, and whoever can grow it the fastest gets bragging rights and whatnot. And they're doing very well. But the amount of money that they're spent on that thing is outrageous.

Speaker B:

But the moral of the story is this guy has this massive 2000 gallon reef tank, and he says, I think that's my favorite fish. And I can't remember if he pointed to some crazy expensive trigger fish or.

Speaker A:

Some crazy expensive tank.

Speaker B:

It was like a gem tang. I think it was what it was. And it's not just a gem tank, because gem tanks can be in and of themselves, like, over three k. Like, this one was a class of gem tang above those. So I'm thinking, like, double that or worse. And he says, oh, that's my favorite. And we're just like, no, shut your mouth.

Speaker A:

Yeah. A week later. So he bought this incredible cool fish that he wanted. Now realize they're just trying to grow coral in this tank, but he wanted a couple of fish in there, and they bought this fish that was super expensive. Like, I want to say, when I say super expensive, like $350. And in its juvenile form. And the person that he bought it from said, yeah, it's not going to touch your coral. And this thing grew about three times the size in two months and just grazed on coral and killed his coral. And now you got a 2000 gallon, 18 foot tank full of coral, and they're trying to get this fish out. And for four or five days, they spend three, 4 hours every day with nets trying to chase him, stuff.

Speaker B:

He finally got him out with a fishing pole.

Speaker A:

Fishing pole.

Speaker B:

He just sat there with a fishing.

Speaker A:

Pole and a little tiny hook and a worm. And they got it out of there. Yeah, pretty cool. So even though you think somebody's really got their stuff together, it's like we're all doing stupid crap all the time.

Speaker B:

So one more thing that we get a lot of questions about, and I just want to reclarify. We've talked about this, I think somewhat in episode one is you have your different 20 longs that you have near a tank with. Each 20 long has a different species of guppy. And you gave them a bit of a tutorial on how you handle as they drop their fry. You'll pull the parents out and then grow them out. If you really wanted to get creative and fancy with it. But there's also the farming method. Can you explain more of the tote pop up hamper farming method again to the people in detail?

Speaker A:

Oh, people like that.

Speaker B:

It's only been 100 episodes since we talked about this.

Speaker A:

101 probably. So when it comes just to having your basic guppy, your multicolored guppy, your cobra guppies, your blues, your reds and stuff, you can buy those pretty inexpensive. And when I say inexpensive, like 25, $0.30 apiece wholesale, that's where I'm getting them from. And I'm buying 200, 300 at a crack. And what I like to do is I'll bring them in and throw them in a 110 gallon fish or horse trough, what it is.

Speaker B:

Now, I want to clarify this because I've done this with specific lines as well, so I can do this with a ratio. In that same horse trough that you're talking about, you can get just like, let's pretend it's a Moscow black. Just Moscow blacks work as well. You don't have to do the multi, but seeing them in these troughs, there's less attention to detail. You have to pull them out, you have to put them to cups, and then you have to grade them versus them being in a tank where you can see them, you can call them. So doing a mix is better when you can't see them.

Speaker A:

Right. And these horse troughs are rubber made. They're big. They're probably three foot by five foot, hold 110 gallons of water.

Speaker B:

So 110, 150. And I have them all the way up to 600 gallons. These rubber made troughs you can buy, and you can find them on a Facebook marketplace as well. Just go to your Facebook groups that are generally farmers and they'll have an old one they're kicking around.

Speaker A:

Yeah. And if you can find them, and I have found them, I've never bought them, but I know where there's two of them right now. They have some that are in a light aqua blue. Now if you get a chance to buy the light aqua blue ones, you can get the babies out of there a lot easier because you could see much better in them because mine are all black. And so what I end up doing is taking a twelve inch net and just scooping the bottom to get all the babies out because the babies love to hang on the bottom. You've got that many adults. But what I do is I go to my local Walmart and I bought these pop up hampers, which are probably, I want to say, 18 inches wide or in diameter, and they stand up about 3ft. And you can throw in 50 females and ten males in one of these pop up hampers. And as the females drop the fry, they will swim out of the hamper into the big tank, and then you have to hunt them down in the tank.

Speaker B:

So these pop up hampers and you got to make sure, essentially, I'd buy them in person, or if you're willing to do the Amazon return game. But they have to have those hexagonal holes. They seem fine, but it's perfect space for even the biggest of live fry to swim through.

Speaker A:

Yeah, and they're like $910 at Wally World. And here's the trick that somebody taught me that when I was doing, I had nine of these in my warehouse, and I was producing enough guppies to supply myself and 19 of my customers. I was collecting about 500 babies a day. And I had so many babies, I was actually selling my fancies as feeders also. But I took and closed. Somebody said, if you close the top, so it's completely dark in there all the time, then when you pop it up, you feed them, leave it up for 15 minutes, and then you scoop the babies and you cut about, put it back down so the adults can't see the babies. So then another guy came over my place, he goes, hey, let me one up this for you. Why don't you just take a small, little, tiny Christmas light bulb, those little two watt light bulbs, and I put my nets on the end of the tank, which is like 3ft away, had a little light through the. I use a piece of four x eight piece of styrofoam that I would cut to fit. I put this little Christmas light on the very end. And for some reason, those little guppies will just come to that light and just kind of sit underneath that light. So when you lift the lid, if you're quick enough, you can just scoop and get 300 babies or whatever for the day.

Speaker B:

So let's go over an audit of the supplies you need. Number one, you need the trough, the rubber made trough. Number two, you need the pop up hampers. Now, you can put to your discretion if you want multiple pop up hampers or just one. But in there, I would put a mixture of one male to every five females. You don't need much. In fact, I've seen an entire, like, 100 females with three males. That really gives you the control of picking your best studs to farm out, because those three studs will work. All those females, I mean, they'll be tired, but they'll get it done. You won't have a lapse in production because of not enough males. So don't do any more than one per five. Then for the rest of the supplies, you say the foam, you said, what was it? Quarter inch, half inch.

Speaker A:

I buy the half inch foam. It's in four x eight sheets that you can get from menards, about $12 a sheet. But then you can take that.

Speaker B:

I would stick with the bathroom foam. It's generally a pink and it's already treated to have water on it while being nontoxic.

Speaker A:

Yeah, it's got two different sides. It has one side with plastic on it as a vapor barrier and one side of the foam. And I always have the vapor barrier side down because with the tanks will sit there when they're heated. You'll have the water, the condensation.

Speaker B:

Condensation, and then it'll drip on the outside of the tank. Making a mess on. Making a mess on your carpet.

Speaker A:

My warehouse, I didn't care. Yeah. And the other thing is, I would put in six, eight four inch filters, foam filters. And the other thing you do too, is you can put one of them at a low, like if you have had five or six of in there. I put one that had a real low flow rate. I'd put that one right in the hamper, which then would help push the babies out of the net. But you have to kind of adjust it really slow so you're not beating up your females because they got nowhere to go. They're right above them. But the whole trick for me was when I got that little light on each one of these tanks, then I wasn't chasing baby guppies every day because that was my favorite part of the day. I'd come in and grab baby guppies. But if you can come in with a big twelve inch net and scoop one time and get 300 guppies, you're making some money right there.

Speaker B:

And you should be able to find on Amazon a waterproof tea light that you can hook up. Either plug in or you can use battery if you want to keep swapping them out. But it's kind of a pain in the ass just finding a tiny waterproof led light.

Speaker A:

The other thing, too, that I never thought of until.

Speaker B:

You don't need a lot.

Speaker A:

Just a second. Don't eat a lot. You might be able just to actually cut a hole if you have light in your room. If you cut a small hole size of a quarter on the opposite end of where all your adults are, that should allow enough light from the room through there, possibly if you do some experimentation, you still have to trust that.

Speaker B:

The light's going to be on and most people shut their lights off and then that whole process is kind of dim for you. But in my warehouse, I just got a message saying a guppy glory hole question mark. Absolutely.

Speaker A:

Oh my God.

Speaker B:

Cut yourself a guppy glory hole.

Speaker A:

Absolutely. But there's nothing more that I enjoy in the whole hobby is baby fish. And every time I come over to Robbie's, the first thing I do, I go over and I look, see if you have any baby cichlids. I go see if you have any new baby plecos. I go over and see what else you got laying around over here. Every time I come down to your layer, always something.

Speaker B:

Now, the next things that you need for any tank, stick to sponge filters. Multiple sponge filters across the whole bottom. Jimmy uses his Cadillac sponge filters that he cuts out. They work great with the slate bottoms. People ask, what do you do heat. Well, if your house is warm, you don't really have to, but you're going to get a faster breeding schedule if you feed them more, if you water change more, and if you turn up.

Speaker A:

The heat a bit and you'll get a faster growth rate on your babies. So I mean, if you don't want to burn out your breeding stock, keep them at 74, 75, but then put your babies up to 80, 82, you'll see a much faster growth rate.

Speaker B:

Now the last thing that we spoke of is that if you can get the blue tub, but most of the time you're only going to be able to get a black tub. Let's be real, they're cheaper. So when you're in there, Jimmy, just once a day at least, goes downstairs and just blatantly scoops the bottom. Whatever he catches, he catches. Now that is the method of getting it done. Use a big net, lift up the pop up hamper so you make sure to get up all up underneath and then just blanket scoop to see what you can catch. My wife is not that person. She refuses to miss even one. So what she does is she grabs a flashlight and I found out the measurement. You get a 5000 lumen flashlight off of Amazon and you spotlight from above. And the shadows the little babies create with that much light, you see them pop up easy like they're a target for you. And then you can individually scoop them up blind.

Speaker A:

What's that, Adam? And they're blind.

Speaker B:

See, that's where I was very precise on 5000 lm. Because if you go over 5000 lm, they will be permanently blind. And I only know this because I've killed a lot of guppy fry from 10,000 lumen. Flashlights.

Speaker A:

Yeah, don't buy that one that you see advertised saying, I was in the military for eight years and I could start a fire with this flashlight from 200 yards away.

Speaker B:

So people ask, like, how do you know they're blind? Because they're swimming in all directions when they're swirling and they can't see food in front of their face.

Speaker A:

Little seeing eye dogs.

Speaker B:

Yeah, they get canes and glasses. They get real goofy. So 5000 or less people, all right, that's a hard limit.

Speaker A:

So now what I'm going to try this summer is I'm going to put a bunch of ponds on the south side of my house where it's much more sunnier because last year I tried them on the east side of my house and every time I checked the temperature all summer long, it was too cold. Right. And so this year I'm just going to put out some guppies on the south side where it gets a lot more heat. And the other thing I'm going to do with these tanks, I'm just going to replace it with glass to see if I can get that water temperature up.

Speaker B:

Ooh, greenhouse effect, baby.

Speaker A:

To 85, 90 degrees during the day. So during the evening it stays within 70 because it will cool off pretty quick.

Speaker B:

That way you can petri dish out your guppy glory hole.

Speaker A:

I love it.

Speaker B:

Now people ask, like, what do you actually produce out of these things? I've done this before. Jimmy's done this 100 times.

Speaker A:

Oh, Jesus.

Speaker B:

150 gallon. Here's kind of the estimated measurement from mine and Jimmy's results. 150 gallon trough with one basket full of guppies can produce easy 80 fry a day, easy.

Speaker A:

Yeah. I kept good track for a long time and my biggest day was 750 out of the ones that I had going.

Speaker B:

And that was after a rainstorm, barometric pressure, everything dropped. And you went in there and there's just a zoo.

Speaker A:

And anyway, I didn't chase them all down. I mean, there was a lot more in there, but I was just one scoop as I lifted up. And there's a lot of damn fish in there. So when you put them all, you put 300 in a 20 gallon tank and stuff and you start feeding those things, I mean, you can go through a lot of damn food and a lot of brine shrimp really quick. So I learned really quickly to start putting them in bigger tanks. But when they're really tiny. You have to keep them in smaller tanks so they can find the food. It doesn't take long. After a couple of two, three weeks, you put them in a big tank and they'll chase down for sure.

Speaker B:

Add salt. I think we gave you a ton of other recommendations. I really wouldn't worry about temperature if you're keeping them. Only add a little bit the temperature to that. 76 degrees if you're breeding.

Speaker A:

The only thing I can stress to everybody is get good stuff to start with. Don't skim. If you know somebody locally that you can buy from who's got good stuff, start with that. Even if it says 1520 females and that's all you can get, start with that.

Speaker B:

And if you're having a bad time and you did buy the wrong one. Kamikaze method, my friends.

Speaker A:

Yeah, I mean, our newest place that we've been buying angel fish from. Just dead set. I mean, I've got angel fish now that are acting like angelfish, breeding like angel fish and come in and they're fat and they're sassy and they're aggressive compared to. When I try to import some of this stuff, it just comes in and they're lethargic. They're skinny. They got. Look. They look a lot like you, Robbie.

Speaker B:

Thank you. I've never been called skinny before, but that's okay.

Speaker A:

I said pathetic. Too lethargic.

Speaker B:

Such jerks. Let's see here. I'm trying to see if there's any questions, just to make sure which is easier. Madaca? Rice fish or guppies?

Speaker A:

You know, guppies. Guppies for me. But rice fish.

Speaker B:

I don't have a problem with rice fish. Don't get me wrong, that's a close comparison. A rice fish. I'm not as good as farming and prolific as farming, but I have bred them. That's more of the set it and forget it type of thing. That's where you put out a pond in your backyard. There is no scooping. There is nothing. You just make sure it's a maintained thing and then you pull 1000 of them out the end of the year.

Speaker A:

I mean, wasn't Anthony doing just a ton of rice fish? Yes, and stuff. And he was just doing it outdoors. But he's a little bit farther south than the rest of us, so he's got better weather and stuff. I mean, up here in the Northland we only got probably 90 days to put stuff outside.

Speaker B:

What you don't do is you have electricians come to your house, knock out your airline and then kill your madaca rice fish. That's what you don't need. They can't survive that for some reason. Let's see here.

Speaker A:

When you hire the cheapest of the cheap, that's what you get, Rob. Spend a little dough. Yeah. Right.

Speaker B:

In your measurements. Jimmy, what is a question from a user? Live food. How much difference do you see as a measurement from production of dry food to live food?

Speaker A:

30% easy.

Speaker B:

30% easy. Actually, I felt that was going to be more.

Speaker A:

Yeah. And if it's equion food, it's like.

Speaker B:

70% if it's equion food, they will shit gold like the golden goose pooping out gold nuggets. Yeah, it's like, what's that alcoholic drink with the gold shavings?

Speaker A:

Gold schlogger.

Speaker B:

It's gold schlogger for goldfish.

Speaker A:

I mean, if you want to increase production with brine shrimp, go from three feedings a day to five feedings a day, and you'll have another additional bump. And the thing is, just remember, the more you're feeding, the more you're changing water. So if you can do automatic water changes, more power to you. But like I said, you watch these professional people that are feeding 1012 times a day. They're almost hourly. Right. And we watched them hatching brine shrimp, and they had what I think it was a 300 gallon vat of brine shrimp going, yeah, aggressive shit up in a silo. I mean, they're hatching out a can of brine shrimp, a 16 ounce can of brine shrimp a day.

Speaker B:

Pop the top, baby, and just pour it in like you just can't stop.

Speaker A:

Yeah. And these guys were going up and down the, up and down the lines with all these guppies with beer pitchers full of brine shrimp, just going.

Speaker B:

Now the question is, when you go to hooters or when you go to this place which has better tits, holding those things of know brine shrimp and the hooters outfit, I can see it. Could you see it, Jimmy?

Speaker A:

Hooters is a wonderful thing. I love hooters, and they wonder why.

Speaker B:

I call us misogynistic.

Speaker A:

All right, you are. Yeah. So, guys, we've been listening to this podcast. Thanks, Rob. Yeah, you're welcome.

Speaker B:

You shit on Aquaon. I can at least be know, it's.

Speaker A:

It's funny that I'm the voice of reason around here. Yeah. I mean, that scares the shit out of me.

Speaker B:

It is terrifying.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

And to think I'm the sober one. I'm the sober one. Just going a bit of cleanup. So normally, we don't tell you what's going to happen next in the Aquarium Guys podcast. A bit of cleanup, clean up an aisle seven. Normally, we don't tell you what's going to be happening coming up in future episodes of the Aquarium Guys podcast, but I'm going to give you guys a little bit of a listen. So next one we're hoping to have, considering his mic, Jack doesn't explode again, Oliver from Oliver's aquatic Garden on the podcast to talk about pallidariums, that's been requested by quite a few different people. So I'm excited to get him on. He's been a fan of ours since the very beginning. And part of discord time to source some knowledge in house. Jimmy.

Speaker A:

There we go.

Speaker B:

Another podcast that we're going to be doing is we put out a meme in one of the podcasts that you guys did not attend, Jimmy and Adam, we had a bit of a meme where, I don't know, we spoke about having a fish room in the bathroom. It was one of our weird.

Speaker A:

Oh, that's right. We started doing that, and then, I don't know, I went on vacation or something.

Speaker B:

Yeah, you went on vacation. So what we did is we just, out of a joke, I said, whoever can send me, because we were talking about the fish tank in my bathroom. So I watch hermit crabs wrestle while.

Speaker A:

I take a shit. Wait a minute. Are you watching it in the tank, or are you just watching down between your.

Speaker B:

No, no. In the tank.

Speaker A:

Okay. Yeah.

Speaker B:

Which is right to my right. I mean, it's inches away while I'm shitting.

Speaker A:

Right.

Speaker B:

Like, I can touch the aquarium with my nose. Yeah, those are different crabs. Anyways, so we put an APB out to the world saying, if you have aquariums in your bathroom, submit a picture to Aquarium Guys podcast, and by the end of the year, we'll pick a winner. Well, let me tell you, we got a guy. We got a guy that his entire bathroom is his fish room. So he sent in a picture, and it's gold. It's going to be the COVID of the episode for the podcast that we're going to do with him. We're going to do an interview with that guy about doing a fish room in your shitter.

Speaker A:

I'm excited.

Speaker B:

I'm so excited. He is such a good sport. He took a picture of him on the shitter with a fish magazine. So it's going to be a great interview.

Speaker A:

I'm scared.

Speaker B:

Yeah. If you're sick of deep dives and just want to go with how you need to piss your wife off more. This is the podcast for you that's coming up. We still am trying to get locked down. The Axolotl podcast. We've been working back and forth with that one. Oh, boy. Dalton, what was some of the other ones we talked about?

Speaker A:

Well, I think we are researching ways to kill off some trumpet. You had a discord supporter. Well, yeah, I agree, but I think he had a whole experiment going. It was. Yes. Well formed, well thought out.

Speaker B:

This one will have to be delayed. So we talked about this, another podcast.

Speaker A:

It involved nuclear fission because they can't kill them. Nuclear fission.

Speaker B:

Yeah. So we have a gentleman named Pax. He's in our discord. He's in Alaska. And he wanted to take our idea of taking MTs malaysian trumpet snails, a awful pest snail, and see what it literally takes in a lab environment to kill going to. We shot every type of idea at him, and he was going to prepare test tanks where you urinate in a tank, where you get iodine in a tank, where any idea you want to try to kill trumpet snails with. And he's going to document what it takes to really kill trumpet snails out of its aquarium. So that was the idea.

Speaker A:

However, he found out that Peter got all of him.

Speaker B:

He found out that these cool little blonde trumpet snails are not trumpet snails at all. And they are a new invasive pest that's blowing up across the aquarium culture right now called New Zealand mud snails. They've been around for a while.

Speaker A:

I want some.

Speaker B:

Adam goes, they've been around for a while, but the problem is now they're beginning to explode. Kind of like moss balls with zebra mussels. This is now the new pest that's happening, and there's not enough education for it. At least we got the education out for zebra mussels. And right now, if you go to your pet store, I guarantee you there's no zebra mussels in your moss balls. This particular snail looks very similar. It's got that same cone style shell, but it's half the size of an MTS blonde. And they are much worse than an MTS snail. The malaysian tribe, they are awful. I don't know if they're federally legal, but most states flat ban them, including the state that he's in. But he didn't purchase them. They came as a hitchhiker to his aquarium. So I think that he's send them to rob. He's going to destroy that aquarium, move on, and do the actual MTS test. But it will take time for him to get mts, get the MTS culture going and do the test. So I have been trying to reach out to experts in the invasive species area, trying to find an expert to bring on the podcast talking about these terrible snails and really the scary impact they're going to have on the aquarium mojave and the effects. So if you know of an expert in the zebra mud snail, please email us at the aquariumguyspodcast@gmail.com I have been reaching out to plenty of people with many phds. I have unfortunately not come with success, but that is another one we have to do for the sake of our hobby.

Speaker A:

I just read an article today about Japan has found some new snails and they're doing a whole bunch of research on them too. And they look like malaysian trumpet snails. That's why I clicked on it. Might be I'm trying to find it right now, but I can't find it as we're talking here.

Speaker B:

If you want pictures, certainly pop into our discord. We can direct you to the pictures and we found quite a few of our listening audience that has them or knows someone with them. We would like to educate you as much as possible to know exactly what they are, identify them and eradicate them because they do massive harm to aquarium. But more importantly, if they touch a natural waterway, there's no going back.

Speaker A:

Cool. Something I wanted to share really quick. We just came back from vacation. We were on vacation for about ten days. We took a cruise out of Miami, went and visited Punta Gorda, Dominican Republic and then we went over to the US Virgin Islands. And while we're in the US Virgin Islands, we took a ride on a boat to go out snorkeling and we went on these little sea scooters find out that we get there, the people that are running it are from Wisconsin. That they went over there on vacation a few years ago and never went back home. They went home and sold their house and went back to the. So this is St. Thomas, I believe. Anyway, what was the coolest thing is they took us out about 3 miles off the coast into this little area so we could go snorkeling and ride these little sea scooters. And we watched blue tangs breeding. My wife and I watched blue tangs breeding about 15ft below us. And it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen out in the wild. The only reason it caught our attention is that the male blue tang was swimming in circles, like 810 foot circles at the speed of sound. He was going around so fast and I thought, oh, great, he's dying. And now sharks are going to come in here and eat him and then eat me.

Speaker B:

Now you know why they're so hard to breed in captivity.

Speaker A:

Yeah. And so the female would come out of this area through the rocks. It must be a little rock cave down there. And she'd come out there and drop her eggs and he'd come by there and do his thing. And this went on for like 20 minutes. And we watched him for probably 10 minutes and then we went off. And when we came back, they were still going at it, but it was some of the most coolest, probably the best snorkeling I've ever done. We've done snorkeling in probably about six locations now. And this is in us, Virgin island. So if you get a chance and you're on vacation, this place goes out there and takes you out there on these little sea scooters. And what they look like is a little tiny floating motorcycle. And you put your head in this diving bell and they drop you down about 8ft. And what was so weird about it, there's a shipwreck 55ft below us. And because of the distortion of this diving bell on your head, it looks like you were going to be able to touch it with your feet. Wow. And so I really got a cool perspective of what living in a freaking round fish bowl would be like and how horrible it would be because it was so distorted. But they drop you down about 810ft and there's a big balloon that's attached so people can see that you're underneath there. And they had 15 of us underneath on this scooter. So we went snorkeling for quite a while. Then we went on this little sea scooter and it was probably the best money we spent on vacation. It was just so cool. And the water was 77 degrees when we got there. And this was second week of December when we were over there. I'd highly recommend if you can go out and watch these fish in their natural habitat. It just gives you such a deep, deep appreciation of how cool nature is when they actually see stuff like that that you see in aquarium whatnot. I pissed myself when a six foot nurse shark came by and I'd be like, shark. And they go, nurse shark, I don't want it nursing me. And my nipples are going to get hard.

Speaker B:

Thank you for that image. Yeah, that'll never leave my brain. That's a new tattoo wedding that happened.

Speaker A:

Yeah, that's right. There's a lot of fish, too, that looked like a northern pike. I don't know what it was, some sort of barracuda looking fish. And then that was about four and a half, 5ft. But they said there's no reason for major sharks to come into this area because there's no food for them. They're not looking to eat little tiny damsel fish and whatnot. Sure, super cool.

Speaker B:

Last one. And this is a long shot. I need your help. I'm calling all aquarium guys listeners. If you're listening to this, don't harass the guy. I don't want you to dox someone, but if you know of this man, know him personally or know a friend of a friend, I'd like you to.

Speaker A:

Politely reach out now.

Speaker B:

You guys have been a double edged sword for me in the past. There have been other people, experts and content creators that you've reached out to and harassed the shit out of. This is not what I need from you people. I need you to put on your big boy pants. I need your respect and politeness. Put your courteous foot forward. There's a gentleman named Cortland. I'm pulling up his last name here, Courtland Hunt. He is in the Florida area, I believe, Tampa, if I'm not mistaken. And this gentleman was famous. He's one of those Florida men for taking an underwater Glock and shooting lionfish point blank. I want him on the podcast.

Speaker A:

He goes out and wastes lionfish.

Speaker B:

Yeah, this is know. He probably got famous about eight years ago or so for going down on diving expeditions, and that's all he did. And him and his budies would go out and they'd film it and they'd find all these invasive lionfish killing areas and they'd just shoot them point blank in the face.

Speaker A:

Is that why you want everybody to be super nice? Because this guy has a Glock and he may come after you.

Speaker B:

That's one. But two, I want him on the podcast. And if I have you weirdos going out there trying to harass the guy, he'll never come on. So be nice. If you know him, message us. Aquariumgyspodcast@gmail.com I have messaged him on Facebook. I have got a message back from him. So maybe I'm going to get lucky and have him on the podcast. But not only is he that just a fantastic story altogether, but this guy is a jeremy wade in his own right. He's a world renowned fisherman that goes around fishing river monsters and doing different expeditions. So he's a wealth of fish knowledge deep in the heart of the places that we get all our aquarium fish from. I cannot explain what a fun guest this would be if you know, Cortland hunt in the Tampa area. The fish Glock, man, I would love for him to come on and tell us how he glocks fish and his other expedition, please.

Speaker A:

That'd be a good. He lives in Anna Maria island specifically, or he's around there. But let people harass him, man. The guy shooting Glocks underwater, he can handle himself. Let him harass him. There you go.

Speaker B:

No, don't harass him. Get somebody. Kiss my ass.

Speaker A:

We're going to get somebody's ass capped. The Aquarium guys podcast does not support this.

Speaker B:

You guys don't understand. You guys are the best and worst fans all at the same time. You guys engage with me, you come on. You help support the podcast, you give us a little bit of your money to keep this thing going and help get Dalton paid somewhat. But on the other hand, you guys will go out, you'll harass youtubers, get me banned from places that I've never met people before. You guys are just the best and worst all at the same time.

Speaker A:

You sound like somebody I know from January 6. See, you people are bad because you're getting me in trouble.

Speaker B:

Yeah, you're getting me in trouble. I don't need this.

Speaker A:

I didn't want you to do that.

Speaker B:

I didn't want you to go there.

Speaker A:

We didn't need. Wait, are we banned from certain things?

Speaker B:

Yes. There are a couple of places in this world that if you say I'm part of the Aquarium Guys podcast, they'll close the door.

Speaker A:

Where?

Speaker B:

Well, I can tell you a couple of them. I mean, one of them is an aquarium that heard that you bleached some blue ring octopus. That's for one. Well, and Aquion, you just. That's what. All right, I don't want to hear it. Don't pretend that you did that to us.

Speaker A:

This is going to be our next podcast, is how Aquian hired Guac guy to come shoot us.

Speaker B:

Guac. Can I get a tableside Glock, please?

Speaker A:

Guac Glock. Same thing. One's an appetizer, one's a gun.

Speaker B:

All right, we're too far down the beer. One last tangent. I'm not going to tell the guy's name because he was really nice. I got a private message from one of our fans, and I just wanted to thank him. He reached out and said that we're a bit of an inspiration. He loves us. We got him through a couple of depressed times in his life and reached out to us and said how he was really admiring me for saying that I don't drink at all and how he is a recovering alcoholic and he's been thousands of days sober and it was just a really good inspiration for him. And I told him, hey, man, I appreciate that I could help you out and I gave you a moment, but I've never drank. And he said, that's even more of an inspiration for him. So thank you, buddy. Now, Jimmy, can you crack?

Speaker A:

How about all the people that we've driven the drink? Think about that. How many people were normal? And they're like, jesus, I can't even drink this.

Speaker B:

Yeah, they're sitting by their aquarium doing a water change and they're just like, you know what? Open that beer up. For the first time in 25 years.

Speaker A:

I just listened to podcast number 102 and I'm like, I got to start drinking.

Speaker B:

I just want to thank you for marketing department. Before we get silly, before we get silly, I just wanted to thank him. I'm glad I was inspiration somewhat to you in any way, if positive effect and great. And thank you for sharing because regardless, it meant a lot to me. All right, gentlemen, anything else?

Speaker A:

I'm just wondering how many people that we've gotten to do hookers and blow.

Speaker B:

I'm just saying when this episode comes out, hashtag exactly. When this episode comes out, hashtag guppy glory hole. I want to see a trend.

Speaker A:

No, I don't want to see that.

Speaker B:

Until next time, fell Ellers. Thanks guys for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, wherever they can be found. Like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this.

Speaker A:

Put a little bit of Adam Lambert sprinkle dust on my face. I don't want it nursing me and my nipples are gonna get hard.

Speaker B:

Apply it to my ass.

Speaker A:

Woohoo.

Speaker B:

Please get in there.

Speaker A:

Your mother.

Speaker B:

I'm trying to whack. Cut yourself a guppy glory hole.

Episode Notes

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