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Welcome to the aquarium, guys podcast, guys. Welcome to the podcast. I am your sole host today, Rob's Olson. I am going to be the host, but I'm going to have a few helper counterparts today. Adam's gone. At least I don't see him here yet. Double check.

Is that a good thing?

No, because I miss him greatly. So I don't see Adam here. So sorry. Adam, I have brought you a replacement. Derek Schumann from deez Fish. Go say hello. Hello. And just so you recognize voice, you know, voice to name, we're having a fish swap here this weekend. And it is when we're recording. This is 413, and we're having a fish swap tomorrow, 414 in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. And our guest speaker is going to be Chris Biggs, the Matt Aquarius himself. Hello, Biggs.

Hey, bud.

So excited. You haven't been on the podcast since episode 30 or 20 somewhere there. It's been years now. Yep, far, far too long.

We need to do a storytime one. That's what we need to do. You're going to find out tomorrow night at the time. Talk. You. We're going to have to do a story time.

I'm in if you are I know that you. We could do just stories of talking stories, you know?

I'm in already. Deal.

So now since coming up here, you have actually started consuming the podcast, not just being on it once. How is the podcast?

Podcast is awesome.

Any concern?

You know me, I'm not a tech guy. I'm not, you know, I'm an older dude. I've been a fish keeper my whole life. And the podcast now is one of the things I listen to all the time. When I'm traveling, I travel for my job. Six, 8 hours.

I'm so sorry.

This is exactly what I've been listening to. Loving it.

Any points of concern or notes?

Yeah, the Jim's decided to go for his I don't know how many years he's been married, but he decided to his anniversary tight was more important than showing up for this or tomorrow. And you know, Jim's a jerk. To be fair, he's right across the street.

You said that's where he lives.

Do you have eggs?

No, but I do have his code to his garage.

That's perfect.

So what I'd like to do is present you with something. This is from a fan.

Is this the dead pleco in a box?

No, but I'm glad you listened to that story. This is actually sent in and arrived yesterday from a fan. The fan. His name is Zach and I got his explicit permission to give you this. So you do in kind what you will. So thank you for taking podcast. Before you open this, I'm going to introduce our special guest, Dan Bunzee. Is that how you say your last name?

Yes.

Dan, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

You are coming on the podcast and this topic for the podcast, we'll get to it. The deep dive in a bit. You're an expert in pygmy sunfish?

No, I'm not. I'm super fan.

You are being a superfan and an expert is just if you get paid or not. So sure you don't get paid enough. So you are a superfan. Indeed.

What's the difference between a superfan and an expert? Is a superfan the one gets really excited when they collect one and they rub it on their genitals.

That's only fans.

That's only fans. That's different. I'm just trying to find where the lines are.

Ceiling fan. Onlyfans ceiling fan.

Yeah.

Okay, different.

So just a quick introduction on yourself. Where are you from and what brought you here?

I was born in Texas. I came from the south metro down in St. Paul. And I don't know. I've been keeping fish for four or five years, I think, consistently. Yeah. I don't know. I'm just really enthused by it, and it's a lot of fun to me.

And you dove head first to the pygmy sunfish topic, so been wanting to get you on the show for a while. And you're going to be having your own booth at the schwab. Now, back to the little gift here for you, biggs. This little red box. For those that can't see it online. If you're joining, you could actually see a bit of a webcam from the live discord. So join us.

Something I'm sure that's going to guaranteed. I'm going to get a finger on the way back.

I don't know. Do you have to declare this in the border crossing?

Clear everything.

Do you? Oh, well, that's going to be very awkward. Go ahead and open it, my friend. Thank you to Zach.

Again, there's no air holes, so it's definitely not a gerbil. So we're not expecting a felching incident.

Although it may need to be shoved up your ass like a gerbil.

Jesus.

All right, all right.

I'm not even sure what it is.

No.

Is it hand blown with love?

I mean, I'm gonna let you take it out and, you know, go through it.

I'm not certain I want to touch it with my bare hands.

Well, if you're not describing it to the audience, I have to.

You got a napkin there?

We could feed it to him orally.

It is brand new. I took it out of the wrapper.

I'm not even certain what it is. Looks rather deviant.

You know exactly what that is.

You know exactly what that is.

This one I'm intimately familiar with.

So I don't think you've listened to all the Aquarium podcast episode.

It actually looks like a tentacle.

Yes, it is a glass tentacle. Yes. So, in our world, here at the aquarium, guys podcast, we do something that's in high honor and esteem for our friends. We give away what's called the aquarium dildo.

Oh, I saw that in the chat.

Right. So an aquarium dildo is a dildo that you put in your friend's tank as a prank to show them that you care about them. And then what you do is you take that dildo and you put it in someone else's tank. I've done this to many people. Not to limiting, you know, people like the Ohio fish rescue. There was aquarium dildos that showed up in their YouTube videos when I went to go visit them.

But what if I want to take it home and display it on my shelf of curiosity?

You're welcome to.

Really cool.

You're welcome to. Or you can pass it on to another Aquarius. It is yours to do what you will with, courtesy of the aquarium guys. But more importantly, thanks to Zach.

Thanks, Zach. That's really cool.

Yep.

One of the most obscure things I've ever gotten. I did speak in Wisconsin one year, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one year. And the host that I was there with gave me a jaw of a donkey, and it was engraved from one jackass to another. And I still have it at home displayed prominently on my shelf, so.

Well, you have a very ornate box it's in as well. So that's.

Oh, talking about ornate boxes, I've got another gift I should tell you about. Maybe I don't want to save it for story time, but as a birthday gift, one of my dear friends in Winnipeg actually went to Australia to speak, and for my birthday, he gave me this beautiful, ornate box, and it was all velveteen on the inside. And what was inside was a bottle opener made out of the testicles of a kangaroo. It's the nutsack of a kangaroo.

Oh, my God.

With a bottle opener on it, and it's in this beautiful display box.

Well, now that we've lost all of our listeners, I swear this podcast will not be filled with smut much more past this. But we do want to go for the one last gift. So, apparently, Zach, one of the listeners, is also a Patreon subscriber. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can support on Patreon or discord and listen to these episodes unedited. And before they're released, he was able to actually go on Patreon, go to a certain Patreon subscription delivery, and, like, a level. A level. Thank you. And request a sponge filter, one of Jim Colby sponge filters. And of course, it got shipped out to him immediately, but I forgot that I should have put an anonymous return address, so he found my actual address. So in doing so. So that's how he bequeathed such a wonderful gift to you, biggs, and then gave to us these. I'd like to describe them. Dick fish adult coloring books. So I'm gonna pass these around. There's a couple of them. And enjoy those, gentlemen.

Wow.

Yes. They are literally just cartoon fish in the shape of dicks.

Why are the pages all stuck together?

That's a good question.

It was shipped by FedEx and FedEx hates me.

Oh, that's. That's the reason I would have gone with as well.

Yeah, FedEx hates me for sure.

You can color them, but do not grab them too tightly because they can behave unpredictably.

Oh, my God.

They are the fish of your deepest pleasure.

Well.

Oh, that's elaborate.

Is that a candiru?

So, yeah, if you want to haze me and send me gifts, just, you know, not send it to my actual address. But, you know, you live and you learn, and then you don't use your real address instead. If you so want to send packages to the aquarium, guys, we do have an appropriate address. It is 223 Front Street, West Detroit Lakes, Minnesota 56501.

Thank you.

And if you notice that that is the address for Dee's fish company, and he has agreed to accept our packages so we don't have to go. My personal address. So have fun with that. All right, well, biggs just got the coloring book in his hand. Seriously?

No crayons, no markers, no, no, no. Prepared.

All right, the last thing I'd like to bring up is there's a green jar in the middle of our table. Gentlemen, in the podcast studio here, if you see it's quite an old fashioned, ornate green jar. Now, I don't know if you gentlemen here know what these ornate jars work. They used to be called depression glass.

I know what it is.

All of these types of pieces of glass were made generally in the 1930s, late thirties, and briardgesthood afterwards. The worldwide supply of uranium was used for, you know, explosions. So this is called uranium glass. And when you use a blacklight, the shit glows neon.

Gary Bagnall, the zoomed museum, that history museum we were talking about earlier, you and me.

Indeed.

He has several antique aquarium bowls and things like that.

You're kidding.

Sandy has one in her living room, and it's really impressive. It's just a big goldfish bowl, but when you shine the black light, like you're doing, the thing glows neon green.

So that's what I did as I shined this. This one is not intended to be a aquarium bowl. So I've been hunting for something like an aquarium bowl for years. I told some of my retired friends and they knew exactly what I was looking for, pulled out of their backroom and donated this jar with lid as a project. And I would like to put in shrimp into said bowl to see how I can actually get neocardinia shrimp to go in a uranium bowl as a torture project.

Or maybe you could get them to the point that create the simpsons fish. Cause that's the whole point, right.

Fish.

This has very, very mild levels of radioactivity still.

Yes.

Radioactive Malaysian trumpet snails.

Yes.

Right.

Mutate glow snails. Yes.

So for those that are listening online live, I'm going to actually tilt the camera down so you can see this a little bit, but I do have a little bit of a black light and you can see this thing glow. The radioactivity on these glassware products are supposed to be so low, it's never to affect a human.

It's not showing up on your screen even though you're trying.

Oh, it is. It certainly is.

I guess it's not neon green like it is here, though.

Oh, no. But I mean, I'm doing the best I can.

It's the reason your camera's not working.

This is an audio podcast. Bite me.

So your target camera, your camera. You got it. Radio shack there is just not really picking it up.

Also, the stream labs that I was working with took a dump on my chest before we started the podcast. So I'm doing what I can, but regardless, smells real bad. The uranium in it is again, only supposed to be mildly radioactive and does not impact humans in any way, at least not enough to matter.

So anybody else feel they need to have like one of those lead shields that you do when you go for an x ray?

My question is, is keeping shrimp alive in there going to mutate extend or something else to them? I don't know, but I'm so excited to find out.

Well, the cool science aspect of like, you know, if you went for an x ray and they use that lead shield mainly is to protect your productivity. I wonder if you were to do shrimp in there as whether or not it would render them sterile.

Could. That's a very good probability. Who knows? I mean, they gamma radiate female guppies in Sri Lanka before they send them to make sure that people can't breed them. I mean, that's very common. So that's the more probable thing that's going to happen.

I wonder though, like how many molts would they get through before uranium might have an effect on them, you know.

Or maybe they won't molt at all.

Or maybe. Yeah, or maybe they never mold.

Who knows? But that'll be a fun project and I wanted to put that out to you guys.

Yeah, yeah.

So I will keep you guys in the loop on that when that project begins.

That's a really cool thing to get from a viewer, though. That is. That is really cool.

Is that not.

That's not something you can just pick up anywhere that is super cool, right?

Lead glass. That comment from yoglet.

Yoglet right above lead glass is different.

Lead glass doesn't have the radioactivity aspects. Lead glass is what you'd have in all the older homes, all the old pioneer type homes that had. That you couldn't see through the windows and stuff. That was all leaded glass. And back in the day, when they even aquariums were made out of leaded glass. I know the manufacturer up in Canada or worldwide, Hagen used to manufacture two types of aquariums, the unimagina manufacturer. Handmade tanks that were black trim, and they were made out of leaded glass, which had that real dark green color from the side. And then they also had the new modern ones, which were sold under the label of Marina. This is going back into the eighties and nineties, but now you have low. What's the. What's the ones called? Star fire. What's that? Low iron? Is that what it is that makes it low iron?

Low iron. All right, well, any other news from you gentlemen? Normally, this is where I talk to Jimmy and Adam to talk about some of their projects or details, but anything else we want to talk about or give a shout out before we dive into it, what's going on in your lives?

I'm setting up a new fish room.

Excellent.

I'm in the process. I'm 18 tanks in. I've got 25 more that are on deck.

Good deal.

19 of them contain Elisoma.

I wish I would. No, I've only. I've got about ten.

I know at Dee's fish company, you guys set up one out of the two Walmart racks that we got a hold of. Just to give a bit of backstory there. I was searching Facebook marketplace one day, found a person that had two. Not just one, two Walmart fish racks. And those confirm I'm still missing my testicles. I'm trying to lift those into the store. They're there. We got one, uh, one running.

And, uh, now there's some really cool features about those tanks, and there's some negative features about the tanks, which I'm sure you guys have been figuring out as you try to replumb them and stuff. But the one thing I absolutely love, and I wish people would think about it from an aquarium standpoint, especially at store level, is that slanted bottom. Yeah. Those things with that slanted bottom there for collection, and you're not putting any substrate in there for. From a store standpoint, those things make your maintenance absolutely awesome.

And the built in chiller and all that whatnot. That's real nice, too. They're pretty handy.

So you can set one up for fish and one for beer. Yeah.

Yep.

I can get.

Throw them in the bottom rack. You know, these fish 2.0, honestly, think about it, though. It used to be the bottom rack. Used to be the goldfish and koi and whatnot, right? So you put axolotls in there and you just float a couple cans of beer. Like, you probably get some of the locals that would appreciate the joke.

And then you open up after hours, right? It is lots of members only, and they have to pay to have a membership to be a part of that exclusive club. Just ease fish after hours.

Don't tell the USDA because, you know, salmonella is a thing, but I, you.

Know, I think sticklebacks with a bunch of empty beer cans in the bottom would be cool.

You guys have all like, I'm in Canada. I'm from Canada. You guys have so many cool native fish that just go completely like, the elisomas is one, but all those different types of darters and stuff like that. Like, you have some incredible native fish, even some of the minnows, like the chubs and stuff like that, like Rob's sporting right now. Those type of things are absolutely incredible when they go through their mating process.

I was concerned. You did send me a text message when you came over the border. You said, is my taint burning? And I'm like, itching. I said, burn it. Is my taint. Either way, itching. And you're like, because I'm an american, bitches. So I was. I was pretty excited. Well, thank you for coming. Now, just one last shout out for you before we dive into this. You can find Chris the Mad Aquarius bigs at his YouTube channel at the Mad Aquarist on YouTube. There'll be a link in the description. Check that out, because YouTube requires it, like, and subscribe. Lots of great content on there for many, many years.

One caveat I have to add, though, is I haven't released a video on there due to some family issues and stuff since November. But there's so much content coming. This just takes time to edit it. And if they go on the channel and they want to follow me for fish and fish sciences, that's where it's going to be. But if they go on there and they see videos about isopods and tarantulas and all sorts of creepy weird stuff.

Or his itchy taint, there's a separate.

Channel now for that all the bugs and critters are over on the mad aquarist realm. Natura. So the word nature, but with an a instead of an e. What?

A pinky finger to the air. You know what I'm saying?

You like that?

I do. Do I really do. Well, onward to the topic. We're going to refer to you as topic. Yes. So we're going to refer to you as bunz, because that's what we call you every day.

That works.

So if people realize that bunz is too much for us, it's just buns. So, Mister Bunz, the term of endearment, please. How did you get into specifically pygmy sunfish?

Well, it started with just accidentally keeping north american native fish, so I. And it's. It's funny Chris mentioning that is what reminded me what. What the name of it was. But I initially started with central mud Minnow, and its name is umbra limi. Is that correct? So I started with those, and then it just. It snowballed into looking more into the native fish, and I found out that we basically have a whole population of these sunfish that are, like an inch and a half long, and I think that's super cool. But they need some attention as far as their dispersion goes and their habitat destruction. You know, they need some help, and that's kind of my mission, is to help help out in any way I can, even if it's just by keeping glass tanks full of them.

Right.

And making sure they keep on breeding and live good lives.

Sure. So you said you've been in the aquarist hobby for five years now.

Yeah.

Is that kind of how you started? Is this particular fish or what got you in it?

Well, it snowballed into it. I mean, I started with keeping live bait.

Right.

And I would go out before bait shops would open, and then it snowballed into guppies and doing all this other stuff, and I just. I don't know. Somebody, I think somebody at a fish swap honestly told me about the fish, and I just went to googling, and I was like, yeah, this is. This is where I'm going as far as all of my attention. Right?

Double dove head first. Yeah.

From an aquarium standpoint, like, for those that. From the listeners that may not know what the pygmy sunfish are, that is an incredible group of fish. They have absolutely everything that everybody could want in an aquarium fish. They have incredible color, incredible behaviors. They're easy to breed in an aquarium. They stay small. Like, when I say incredible colors, most of them are like jet black with neon blue lights all over their bodies and stuff. These are incredible, incredible fish. But the other really, really cool thing, and you may touch on it later because you're the one that's working with a lot of these, is, these are things that be kept completely at room temperature. You could put them outside on your patio in a little. In a little tube. You know, they're so, so easy and versatile and easy to work with. And, like, you're finding most people don't know anything about them, but they also deserve our attention. All these species come from, like, Florida, and these species are, you know, as we all know, Florida is becoming a petri dish of non exotics, or exotics being introduced into the area. And most of the exotics are predators.

Yeah. They hunt these fish down big time.

And they look like colorful bait, so they really do.

Let's start with the elaboration, Chris.

Let's start with a couple of beginner questions. Most people think, oh, the pygmy sunfish, they don't understand that there's more than one. So how many, I mean, we can't get into the complete. But how many common species are found in the hobby?

In the hobby, only four or five. And. Yeah, and the other two are protected to the point where they're not allowed in aquarium trade. So boelkai, bohelkai, boelkai, and then Alabama are the two. No nos. But the other ones you can keep in aquaria, and they're legal to trade and sell.

So any idea why they're. No. No. This is just because they're completely crushed in habitat. And they're that rare? Yeah.

Yeah, they're that rare. They don't. They don't want them out in the aquarium trade. People potentially release them somewhere they shouldn't be. And I'm kind of. That's something I am diving into right now, is seeing, you know, what would be involved in the legalities of observing them in strict, you know, research only environment.

You're trying to get your no, no license, aren't you?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, buddy.

Well, the other challenges, too, like, from a scientific standpoint on my side, is a lot of them are almost impossible to tell apart.

Yeah.

You know, unless you have them and you're willing to, you know, to euthanize them and dissect them, to actually break down as to which species you have. A lot of them are very challenging, and a lot of the Florida species almost overlap in some of the areas. So there is a big posse of natural hybrids happening too.

So I keep my everglade on the other side of the fish room from my gilberti for that reason.

On that topic, there's seven common species. Where are these all located? Are they all in Florida, or where are these all found?

No, they're east coast and kind of. I mean, up as far as Ohio, I believe in some populations, but they're being discovered pretty much all across the eastern to, you know, the coastal hemisphere there, I think.

I actually read an article a while back that some Minnesota native species are hybridizing with the pygmies, which is why we're seeing a lot of smaller oogils, sunfish, stuff like that in the area.

I could believe that. Absolutely.

That hurts my brain. You see a sunfish about. Yay. Verily, when I'm holding my two index fingers together and thumbs together.

No, no, you're talking the wrong fish. Pygmy sunfish are not the fish you're thinking. Pygmy sunfish are this big.

That's what I'm saying. So he's saying bluegills, right? Oh, yeah.

You're talking totally different.

I'm saying, like, our native sunfish crossing with a pygmy.

Oh, that's the native.

That's the conspiracy speculation.

Yep. Well, the other aspect, too, and, like, again, back on the science side, without being too boring, is this is also a group of fish that really has not had any study in regards to DNA, and DNA is a big factor in regards to deciphering species now. So I think once they actually. Somebody will spend the time on that group of fish, there might be a lot more species or there might be less. There might be a lot of different things that will come out of that, because they are so incredibly simple.

Yes. Yep.

So I want to know more about these species, and so do our listeners. Let's start there. We only have seven to go. Let's pick through them.

Well, I mean, they're. They're basically like a pupfish, right. And they behave at, you know, you could google that. And they behave a certain way. They kind of fit that criteria.

You said pup fish.

Pup fish.

P U p. Correct.

Um, and, yeah, I mean, they're. They're. Shoot, I should probably get on. On one at a time because they differ a little bit. So, like, you should just know all.

Of this right off the cuff.

Yeah. Come on, now. You should know everything.

Not even prepared.

We're good.

And I'm so nervous.

Show them the glass right now.

Intermission. There.

I'm wearing a gray shirt. This is all.

No, I thought there was a bug there. Like, get off, bug. That's my jar.

So, like, we'll. We'll start with Gilberti.

You have a mosquito come down and touch down on that. And all of a sudden, it starts to grow right in front of us.

So it's a nice little distraction centerpiece.

So would you like to see my aquarium dildo close? You can rub it, touch it, lick it, do whatever you want, actually.

This is so beautifully.

Hey, hey, hey. We have a podcast to do here.

He's distracted again.

Put his toy dildo down.

So. Yes. On to our pygmy sunfishes.

All right, so you got a laptop in front of you.

Yes.

Let's hit the five other. Other species.

Gilbert. I was the first species I was introduced to, and I think those are.

The ones you gave to me.

Correct.

That is the widest dispersion of all the species.

Yeah. And then also popular you can get.

I put them in my 125. I've yet to see them.

You never will.

I don't think I will with cichlids.

No, no, no. It's pretty well planted. I mean, they can. They can definitely figure it out in there. But you're not going to see them. Yeah, I got my first set in, you know, the aquarium trade, and then now I. I'm a member of Nanfo. Right. So that exposed me to actually learning about them and going to work. So these guys basically are found in, like, shallow wetlands. Their. Their habitat is under. Under 3ft of water and they're just entangled up in weeds and. And just, you know, you would. You would never really see them if. Unless you're out dip netting for them. Like, it's. You're never going to see them otherwise.

Right at the shore, but.

Yeah, exactly. So, Gilbert, high on the red list, they're of least concern because they're. They have the widest dispersion and they're. They're being found even further north than what I'm seeing on this map and further south, but pretty much exclusive to the Gulf coast in Florida. And then they're. They're reaching out on the map as far as Georgia, it looks like. And then the rest of them, like Alabama. Alabama is pretty much only in Alabama, but they are a little further north as well.

These things that you said, they are so similar. Do they have color differences? Are they all traditionally that either that brown gray and then the blue prominence, the one dominant male slash female. I don't even know which one actually, as the prominent one. Is it the male.

The male, yeah. The male is. It's basically a pattern. Right. And then a shade of the blue or green one way they go or another, from what I've seen, and I'm not an expert, I'm a big fan.

You're 100% right.

It's more of a pattern thing in a body shape is where you can tell the differences. And like Chris was saying earlier, it's very hard to tell when they're all grouped together. You have to isolate them to actually, you know, get, like, the males to display. They're not going to do it if they see other male, you know, or there's only going to be one dominant male that does, and then they all look the exact, exact same.

One other thing that's of note is, like, when you go and search for these things online, 99% of the pictures you're going to find online is that one blossom is an incredible showing male that's also been completely photoshopped. Right. You know, like, these things are not, you know, like, lit up like Vegas nights, you know, these things are gorgeous, gorgeous fish. If you set them up nicely, like, I'm sure he'll go into detail how he keeps them. They can really, really show off. They're incredible, incredible fish.

Now, when I've had any type of pygmy sunfish, I've only had them in, like, the, say, a dozen, because that's literally how I've got the bag. Sometimes I've had them in from a vendor order in a dozen. I have them a crack at the time and one's blue. That's just how it is. I take the one blue one out. Suddenly, a few days later, there's now another blue one. So is that always the case or what? Do you have, like, bigger groups? Like, say if you have, like, 36, will. There'll be three blue ones?

It's all on visual barriers.

Yes. Yep. It's all going to detail how you.

Would keep them and why you would. How you could get many different colored males at the same time. And even in a small tank.

Yeah. Even in as small as a two and a half gallon, you. I mean, you could have two males, but you need to have it so full that you couldn't extract anything anyway. You should really only have, like, one pair per tank at a time while you're starting out. I've only recently started to do bigger squads because I've learned, you know, kind of the levels, the columns, the amount of space that they want territorially to where it's not, you know, it's not a deathmatch, right, in my aquarium.

And if the males are fighting and showing off for each other, you know what they're not doing?

Breeding.

Exactly. So, like, you know exactly what he's saying. If you want to breed them for breeding and getting that species dispersed and stuff through the hobby, doing it that way is exactly what you want to do.

So let's pretend, right, that you buns just set up a 40 breeder, right? That's a pretty big tank for this nano fish, right? And you had, say, four pairs for trios, however that works, and they disperse to different corners because you had a maze of decorations, plants, life and whatnot. They would claim their corners and territories. You would actually see potentially four blue males. And the moment that they see each other, they would spar, potentially claim each other's territory until there's one blue male for whatever they've claimed, or they back off, or they back off and keep.

Their territory where they see each other. And neither of them want the smoke, so they just go back home and they don't fight. But sometimes, yeah, they're just brutal to each other.

So they are completely, like you said, visual. So if I took that dozen, I had a. I put a divider between them where they couldn't see each other immediately. Now I have two separated colonies, and then I take the divider out. Poof. They would now be in one tank. Interesting, interesting dichotomy here. Merriam Webster defines dichotomy as something with seemingly contradictory qualities. How this worked its way into Rob's working vocabulary is a mystery.

But as Bunz has said, you know, like, you want to set these up in a way to mimic their natural habitat. So if you were to go, they.

Got to see each other.

Yeah. If you're dip netting in this area, right at the edge, you're going to pull up a full net full of leaf litter and all sorts of watermill foil and all sorts of plant life. You know, that is the habitat they want. So if you could have a tank full of leaf litter, tannin stained water, they're looking for garbage, hornwort or something feathery type of plant that just filled the tank, java, moss, or anything like that, they would thrive. You can have 40 breeder, you could have six or eight pairs going in there, probably prolifically. And they may. Some of them may never even see each other.

So it's fair to say that when you have these set up then, and you have that leaf litter going on, you have that junk. These things are looking like micro predators.

Yes.

They're looking for these small bugs in the water. They're going to be hunting, quote, unquote, their territory. And that's where they breed and keep to.

Yeah, they like hunting, dare I say it, stuff that occurs from aquarium neglect. You know, things, you know, things that only occur in really thick mats of hair, algae, or all that life that.

Comes from adding all those botanicals in the leaf litter.

They love to try to never see.

My trio in my 125, they're just going to keep to the probably the cruddiest corners of my tank.

They're ever going outside right now in your yard and get a, you know, bucket full of the leaves that are on the ground. Ideally, if you can, you can take them that they were wet from, like, a marsh habitat and throw them in that tank. That is all the life they're going to need. And honestly like to keep those fish long term. Someone like me, who travels all the time, they'll feed themselves of all that microfauna that'll emerge from all that stuff.

This is a controversial take. I don't intentionally feed them unless I am conditioning them to spawn at a certain timeline.

Now, you and I have had a discussion off microphone. And just to really paint this out, you painted the picture of this, where you had a plethora of tanks. You've had one that you fed and all. They all had the same amount of roughage. You've had one that you fed and the one that you haven't fed. The ones that you haven't fed did significantly better because of the microfauna. The amount of quote unquote schmoo. I think we even giggled about it together. Yeah.

Yeah.

And how much faster they grew, how much more they bred. And then you only added to the bioculture, to the tank is how you fed them. Or did live cultures. Live cultures. You were. You were big at.

I did buy a culture of blackworms to start out with, and then I started farming blackworms. So then I could just introduce populations of it in a controlled manner, you know, not like a giant bundle at a time. Just control population, stir them up so they reproduce, and they do just fine. And that's part of, you know, why I can leave my tanks and go for. I could go a month or two just fine. Well, no, I still have some live bears, so I take that back. But with my pygmies, I really, it's laissez faire.

You could get by with a lot more murder than you probably have, for sure.

So in your tanks, you'd put a bit of a substrate, like a sandy substrate or something like that becomes a base for, like, the worms and stuff, so they can populate it. That's awesome.

My favorite is the eco complete stuff. It's an inert substrate. It doesn't leech. It doesn't break down. You know, it's really stable, and it's good for your microbacteria colonies to hold on to. Like, I'll stuff those into some of my sponge filters that have a little cubby underneath the sponges. And I use as my bio, and I can jumpstart other tanks with that method as well.

Mister pet store man, what is this eco complete, and why is my brain going a blank?

It's the live culture substrate.

Is that that stuff I made fun of for having poop in?

It's from Carib Sea.

Yeah, that's it. Is the stuff with the poop in it.

It comes in, like, its own bag of everything.

And then I punctured it, and it sprayed poop on me.

Yeah, not really poop.

It looked like poop.

Their saltwater stuff will seriously. It will contain, like, live crabs, you know, that'll crawl out of there eventually.

Oh, great.

Yeah, yeah.

So it pooped, and crabs on.

It'll give you crabs.

I'm a little concerned about crabs coming across the table right now.

All right, Carib Sea, if you're considering it being a sponsor, you're over, because you gave us crabs.

Thanks.

I love the stuff. It's phenomenal.

It's a brand that's been around for a long time. When they launched that particular product, it dominated the industry. And the only thing that's even close to it is all, like, basically all those live bacterias that people buy, but they're the only ones that have a live living substrate, to the best of my knowledge, that is ready to go to help seed an aquarium right out of the gate.

And to add to that, I don't stick to just one method. Like, I'll show you. I think I've sent you an update on my fish room, but they're all kind of a little differently set up. Some of them. I have the soil method. I bury soil and then gravel and then sand cap. There's others. I do just gravel. There's other ones that just have fluval stratum, and they're. They're, you know, a lot softer. And because they were initially going to be carradina tanks, and I scrapped that idea. So I use it for pygmies because they're pretty versatile, and they could live in a super wider range of water parameters and not be negative effect negatively. I mean, even soft water.

Well, that's why that one particular species, the Gilbert eye you were talking about, has such an incredible dispersion, is you can find it in little puddles, you can find it in estuaries. They live in brackish water. It's everything that's it's fecundity is how it's so successful is it's been able to spread over this massive area because they can live and adapt to everything.

So I accidentally did an experiment without doing my due diligence of asking about tank parameters before they went in, a guy, I had a. I rehomed a pair to put them in his Cardina tank. That was 108 TD's. And what is it? Zero kh. And they. They bred, they live really long. They're still alive in that tank today and thriving. And there's others where they have 800, 900 TD's, same result. So, you know, as far as I know, if you're somewhere within that range and you don't do too much to interfere with your tanks, you'd be very successful having these fish.

Now, for those that are listening, I just posted a picture of Bunzie's tank that he texted me. I know I probably broke your. Your trust.

Oh, yeah, that's okay.

This is a beautiful picture of what exactly you're talking about. So if those of they're listening want to see this, you can check out the pictures on our discord. Go to Aquarium guys podcast. Bottle the website. You'll find the discord link. It's also in the show notes. Join the debauchery.

Is that one of the glass dildos in the back there?

You know, it should be.

No, no, unfortunately not. It's a disco ball.

So what species is that one?

Might I say those glass dildos are a nurt for those that want to try one.

So that is a male okati. So ilusoma okati is its name. And for context, this is a Marineland portrait. Five gallon that the pump broke on, and my friend was gonna scrap it, and I was like, no, no, no, I'll just put a sponge filter in that.

Na nae, we're good.

And. And, yeah, just. You drop your. Your Cadillac seed sponge filter in, you're good to go. And I just had it pumping air, and obviously I established it and I maintained it at one point to, you know, get it. Get it to where it could hold plant life. But then I left it alone. I had some. Some personal stuff come up. Almost had to shut the fish room down entirely, like, and almost got rid of everything I had. And these guys hitchhiked from floating plants as eggs. I did not introduce these as swimming fish. So I left this tank alone, and it grew these beautiful, beautiful fish. So, yeah, that's. That's a young male.

Have you ever kept them? There's a guy down in Florida, he's a big youtuber. He's a good, awesome, awesome Aquarius. But he keeps everything completely natural. No filters in any of his tanks. And his whole fish room is absolutely silent.

It's booming.

Yeah, this would be an ideal candidate for that. You know, you got enough plant life in that tank because that who, he keeps everything that this fish would be ideal in that scenario.

So certainly I'm a tee time here, just for the listeners. What we're seeing here in the picture is a tank. That's what, number one, nice, dirty substrate like you talked about, a different array of just random overgrowth of not just plants, but you also have different garbage, algae. Let's be real here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They serve a purpose.

They do serve a purpose. You have to have them for not touching a tank and having fry spawn and grow into adulthood without you doing a thing.

I introduced that hair.

Algae on purpose?

Yes.

Oh, good on you.

Good on you. And then you also have some sort of leaf, I'm assuming an almond leaf, in the background. And I see root roots shooting up all over the place. So it's just what be considered. It looks like a beautiful mess.

That's a swamp. That's exactly what they want.

It's a beautiful mess.

So this is actually just the eco complete substrate. There's no dirt. That's poop.

Right?

That's what I'm saying. I was trying to be nice the second go round. All right.

No, no, no, no.

That's fertilizer.

That's fertilizer.

As long as. So with, like, ammonia spikes, right? How. How can you tell an ammonia spike without your API master test kit and your Facebook friend group? You look at your plant growth, right? If you're. If you have an over ammonia, your plants are gonna die. They're gonna extremely suffer. And they'll, you know, they'll tell you signs when you walk by. Does a foul stench smack you in the face? If it does, you may need to intervene. Maybe you need to change a little bit of water. Maybe you gotta scrub some stuff. This tank hasn't done any of that for me.

Rob's got to scrub stuff all the time.

Yeah, baby.

Some of. Some of my tanks do. Some. Some. Absolutely. There's some tanks I have to work on.

Hell, my wife said bed, bath and beyond, and she came home with a soap that's in the master bedroom. It smells like cat pee. It's literally a bottle of soap. You wash your hands. It's like, what the hell happened?

Does it contain ammonia?

It's fish tank water.

It was supposed to be Windex. I don't know why you're pumping out of that. Container bags.

Yeah, this is only a two year old tank, too. It's not like this takes ten years to do.

Like, this is before I get fan mail messaging me. You stated a point that these fish came from eggs hitchhiked on the substrate or plants or something from this tank on my. Was that dry or was it wet? That's important because I would like to know how these eggs can survive on the oops. I transported them, and I was supposed to shut down the tank method.

So a member of Nanfa actually reached out to me about that group of okadi after a swap meet. And so it was. It was literally a matter of like, okay, he probably doesn't need, you know, the whole. The whole plant shebang. I want some to propagate. And I just grabbed a fistful out of that working okati tank where they were colony spawning in a ten gallon. And it just occurred that, you know, I had a handful of. I'm sure I had a lot more that survived that just didn't make the cut. You know, it's such a small tank and it, you know, I wasn't being delivered about it, so I'm sure there was some shmoo.

You would add bigger numbers and it.

Yeah, yeah. Literally, if it was just full of hooker Shea Moss or Java Moss or whatever, it probably would be 100 x what it is. But that was just a. Yeah, a hitchhiker or hitchhikers occurred in the tank, and then they've been taken care of just fine. I mean, and you can see, like, his stomach isn't smushed in like he's eating.

So how does the breeding happen? Does it. I think sunfish, I think of like, are, you know, catch and release sunfish here in Minnesota, they would, of course, spin into a disk, into the substrate. They would regard it with their life almost like a cichlid esque. Right? They would toss the eggs until they hatch and then they disappear. What did pygmy sunfish do? Are they just traditional egg scatterers? They leg lay into the mess. What happens. Especially when you told me that it's hitchhikers from the plant that makes me go, well, what are these? More like a tetra?

More like a killifishen.

Killifish?

Like a killifish?

Yeah, like the. The female, as they're doing their ritual, rubs up against stuff that could be substrate, that could be decoration.

That my wife does too, when she's doing a ritual.

You know, it's. It's a. Wherever you are, it's where it's gonna happen. You gotta.

That explains why my washing machine is lower than my dryer. You know, I'm saying it's science, but.

So, no. And basically they, uh. Once. Once the females are gravid and they come into a male's territory, he'll kind of inadvertently direct her to an area he wants to guard, that he knows is his, that he can protect, and then they'll do their kind of dance. I forget what the technical term has called for it. Maybe Chris knows they breed similar to.

A rainbow fish or achille fish. Yes. Like, they don't just like schmoo a whole bunch of eggs, like a kerosene and stuff like that.

Sure.

They're more like an obligate, obligate spawner where they individually fertilize and then place. Like.

But you shouldn't drink. Dry them.

No, no, no.

Keep them wet.

No, you can transport them with plants. Like, I'm going to digress for a second, but like killifish, right? I get anybody that knows nothilbranchius killifish, which are all the ones from West Africa, which are the true annuals. The bulk of those species that are available now in the north american or global trade came from a guy that lived in Regina, Saskatchewan. I know you're going to love the name, but that's the name. The reason it's called regina is. That's latin for queen.

Yeah, not Regina.

It's the Queen city and Regina, Saskatchewan, it's the one province over from me. There was a geologist, the head of the geology department. There was doctor Brian Waters. And he would go over to Africa regularly and take geological samples of soil and ground and everything like that, and bring them back. And he was not a fish keeper. And inadvertently, one time, while doing some sort of tests on these soil samples, he started getting these fish appearing. He couldn't figure out what it was, so he got into fish that way. And he. In the killifish hobby, he's like a God because he introduced all these species of fish. That are just not available. They just weren't available anywhere. And it's all because of, like, that transference that's unknown. Transference, like you saying with the plants.

Yeah. And with these guys, it's. I didn't find the name, the technical name, but they do almost like a figure eight in place as sort of their dance to kind of distract or hypnotize the female in a certain way. And then he'll just. He'll crash right into her and knock the eggs out and fertilize them on the way, like. And they're just. They're stuck there. And then he'll comment, and then he'll just. He'll chase her and every other fish around.

Come on, we've all been there.

Yeah. They only take, like, ten days to hatch.

Room temperature.

Yeah, yeah, room temperature. Leave them alone.

All right, so we said the safe word for a lot of people is killifish. So people are listening. I'm like, okay, so you keep them in small tanks. They're super hardy. They egg lay like Achille fish. Do they have short lifespans, like Achille fish?

Yes, they do. That's a good point.

Not. Not the same as, like, an annual.

Kill, but how are we talking, boys, how long these things live?

Gilberti, you know, would be, like, semiannual, maybe. Maybe four or five years. You know, I'm still learning more about them and their lifespans, and I feel.

Like you would have the better luck, more than an average person. You'd be like, no, that's grandpa wheely up there. He's been here for four years. The average is me. Like a year and a half.

But we're not talking, like, true annuals. Like, there's killifish, like nothobranchius fuscutaneatis, which is used for genetic studies. This is a fish that'll. From the minute it hatches, from the egg to old age and dying is six months.

Right. There are killifish. That's a very short window, you know, like you said, six months. I've heard of certain ones that do the 90 days.

Well, not only that, that particular species. The eggs in the mud or the peat that you're going to dry.

Right.

The parents are long gone before you're gonna. They sometimes need, like, eight to nine months to incubate before you hatch them.

And then when you.

And they're really. And I mean to take over the conversation, chilies, when you. When you hatch a nothobranchius egg of something like that, is nature's provided a way called diapause that basically doesn't let. So when a rain comes, theoretically we're gonna wet our eggs for our killifish and then all the eggs will hatch, right? No, no, nature's made it certain because if it rained and it was a flash flood and then it dried up, theoretically that species would be wiped from the planet. But it's called diapause, so not all of them hatch at the same time to survive the species. And that, to me, is just super cool.

I noticed that with my rice fish.

Yes.

When I kept Madaka rice fish for a short time, I was babysitting them and they spawned for me, and I was like, why aren't they all like.

What am I doing wrong?

I later figured out they're supposed to, to hold some back. You know, by nature they hold some back. But I've got the actual list of what I've got working in my fish room at the ready, in case you ask me that, because I'm not gonna remember. But I mean, we, we go from, I'm just dabbling into gdayad, so I may not know the pronunciation.

So trust me, if you've listened to the podcast before, I am shit at pronouncing Ataniobius.

Tauri is a blue tailed gadaide. San Marcos. They're one of the bigger gads, I found out, but somebody literally handed me the, the bag at a swap and was like, take care of these.

And then I, those are the ones that are super popular in the hobby, and they're trying to give them the name the rainbow Gadaid, but it's never gonna happen. They're the, you know, four or five color variety. They're the, some even made the joke at the last swap. They're the LGBTQ gadaid.

The. I'm not sure, you know, I'm just diving into the gadad lore, so I'm not, I'm not super familiar, but I'm learning.

I'm helping beginners here for funsies.

Oh, I gotcha. I gotcha. Now, these are so, I think you're talking about the San Marcos red tail is they actually have a really more colorful body. They're all the different blues and greens and reds and orange. They are very beautiful fish. So, yeah, I've also got zonautica, dodrioi, zanatica, izanai. The dodrioi I actually picked up from these fish company, and they were juvies. And they were honestly, for a fish I bought from a store of some of the best fish I've ever brought home to my fish room. No lie. Really easy to work with. I've also got posilia wingai. Those are just yellow tiger endlers. Really, really pretty fish. I've also got Lemia vitata, which is a cuban molly, and then lemia perugia, which is a peruvian molly. So right now I'm keeping four species of the ilisoma, so it's five that are legal to keep. And I've got four of them. So that's Evergladii, Gilberti, okati, and Zonano.

And you've had them all in the past.

I did have them all in the past. I had to rehome them because I thought I was getting out of the hobby against my own reconnaissance, so. But we're back into it, and we are neck deep.

So, another thing is the food. We talked about how they like to hunt in their areas and find the microbacteria and whatever, of course, pests or bugs they can find. So that tells me, of course, that they're opportunistic. Does that mean that they should have a protein based diet? If you're trying to introduce food, something like that in my mind, especially with this new food that I got from Dee's fish company. I got this thing from zoomed. It was the coolest. In fact, it's up there. It's that little can up there. Derek. It's called Cyclops in a can.

Cyclope.

Hold on, I'm going to turn. You know, Chris took a giant piss in the toilet, so I muted him. So cyclopes just cyclops.

Cyclop.

Well, you're right, but that's. I'm saying the brand is Cyclops in a can that can osi.

Both wrong.

Look at that. Look at that. Check that shit out. Even comes with this cool folded spoon that I think they stole from Taco Bell. Sport, take my money, check that shit out.

Looks like an army ration, right?

So I tried that out, and one of the harder things that I have to feed is any type of baddest, right? If I got to feed a baddest, it's a bad day, because I believe.

You'Re supposed to put it in the fridge after you open it.

No, no, no. If you let it fester, they like it a lot more. I promise you. Although it may make you gay, this.

Is a real deal.

That is the shit. I promise you. Anyways, so I got some, like, banded, banded tiger, whatever the hell they call them, badger. And they're real finicky, right? Basically, you got.

They'd be the same way as keeping some of these things. They need minute little food.

You got to give them a good, like, microbacteria. Otherwise you have to give them brine shrimp. That's my only two options that I have. Well, guess what? Or like other cultures, vinegar eels name it, right? So it's either I do something alive or I have to write, you know, poop in my tank.

I don't know. Vinegar eels would work for baddest because baddest are always near the bottom of the tank.

Right.

You'd maybe microworms would they work because they sink right away.

I have a whole rotisserie.

They do pick off the ground. I've had mixed, mixed results. If I have a smart one, they'll get right on it.

I love culturing vinegar eels because you could forget about it for a year. Trust me, you're not going to forget about culturing. If you misplace a micro worm culture, you're not going to forget about it.

No, it's what you want.

But this carries, like, don't keep that.

This can was the coolest thing. I went over there, dumped it in. They hit it right away, baby. No, no. The little scoop that I put in, the little tiny, like, micro poop scoop. So as far as a not live product to feed them.

Yep. And that's exactly why that product.

That's the shit.

Yep.

So zoomed. You continue to be my favorite product line of all time.

Yep.

They have a whole line of the cano foods.

I swear to God.

Blood worms. They have Daphne. They have a whole bunch of cool stuff.

You said the gentleman's name is Greg?

Gary. Gary.

Gary.

Gary Bagnell. Yeah. Incredible guy.

Gary, if you're listening to this, I have a spot on my body for your tattoo for Zoom head. I'm waiting. I'm a huge fan. Every time I open one of your products, like, even, like, the, like, considered to be dumb products in the hobby. Like, the beta leaf is the coolest shit that works. I don't care if you're making fun of it. That little suction cup leaf, it sold so many when I was helping out these fish go. And my wife even bought one, I'm like, well, that's a stupid leaf. Stick it to the side. That son of a bitch is sleeping right on that leaf.

Yep.

And loves it.

It works well if you ever get the opportunity to go there. Gary has. Basically every product they ever come out with is tried in house. They have tanks and reptiles and stuff absolutely everywhere.

I love that.

And it's all like really cool. It's like, it's like it's the coolest fish room imaginable, but in a business, and he's got all this cool stuff and every single product, some of them like, people look and go, why? But it's developed by people like us and are passionate about something and they find this random little niche idea that little. And they remember the little tiny, like the floating ball with the little mirror.

Yes. That got real popular for our communities. That was them.

That was zoomed. Yeah. Damn, I just love these people. But Gary also produced all sorts of random cool stuff. Like, you probably don't remember it because none of us are the age, but like in like the thirties and forties, aquarium ornaments were these bisque style ceramic ornaments. And Gary actually went and bought molds and remade these bisque mermaid ornaments.

No kidding.

And usually at some of the big conventions, they often donate some of this stuff. So like, you know, you'll go in your goodie bag and like, oh, I've got a nude mermaid in my bag ornament. But, you know, like they're super cool because they were all turn of the century type stuff, but they may not have mass appeal like a SpongeBob house, but they're just something different.

So quick tangent here, gentlemen, and I know that we're, we're talking about this. Just before I leave, I want to try these. I'm going to send you with that little touch of the can. I want to know how pygmy sunfish hand diesel cyclopsy.

I love it.

Cyclopsy.

No, it's can of cyclops. It used to be called cyclopes. They also have a full line of reptile stuff, so you can buy dubia roaches, caterpillars, grasshoppers, all sorts of stuff that is all ready to go.

Sure. So my, my podcast editor, it's his birthday, so I'd like to say happy birthday to Dalton. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, Dalton, you sexy muffin. So for his birthday, what I did is I sent him a aquarium ornament. And you know what? You know, you got to make it personal. So I sent him this aquarium ornament, which I'm going to post the picture in discord for those of you that want to see.

Is that displayed in his aquarium?

That is not. This is just a preview of the product.

Dalton, we need to see an after image.

Yes, before.

And ideally, it'd be best if it was like a pristine, planted aquarium or something like that, you know, like, and he had to go and put something like that right in the middle of it. I think it'd be exceptional, right?

So for those of you that know that, like, one of the most treasured objects by, like, you know, stupid men in the hobby is probably, like the old mermaid that's topless, you know, that you get in the, like, it was lead painted, the whole thing. So this is, like, homage to that, but more garden gnome style. So there are just two garden gnomes that are kind of naked. It's got a man garden gnome with his dick out, and, of course, his tuft, pubic hair is white. And then it's got the female garden gnome. She's wearing panties, but her tits are out, and they're both kind of, like.

Ready for the beach.

So it's full on lacquered and ready for your aquarium. They're intended to be aquarium ornaments. So I sent him that. He was tickled pink to get it. I just wanted to put out there. Let's share the picture and just put the picture on discord there. I know, tiny tangent, but we were. We were talking about cool zoomed products.

You ever look random out there? Horrible aquarium ornaments. Have you ever seen any of these ones of, like, skeletons doing it?

Oh, yeah.

What market is this for?

The skeleton sex with bubbles? I don't know why they have to put bubbles out there. Ass. That's the weird one.

Bubbles always make it better. Bubbles just make it better.

We were talking in one of the podcasts in yesteryear about, uh, some of the old, uh, was it the treasure chests and how they used to be, like, metal and how it used to just chop your fish in half?

I have one of those at the store right now, but it's missing a few pieces.

Like a chop your fish in half version. Oh, my God.

It's not. It's not metal. Uh, it's ceramic.

Oh, something. It was heavy enough to.

So now he's glued little used fish, cleaning razor blades on it and stuff. It's now like it's a fish guillotine. They got to run the gauntlet.

Well, the lid. The lid of this thing is so heavy that when it finally lifts and it comes back down, it just slams your crap. Old scuba diver and his arms lift up the. The lid of the treasure chest, and then it just comes down with a lot of force.

Oh, man. Well, I'm trying to get back on John.

You asked him to go and talk about all the species. He said one, and then we went off track.

No, no, he said three.

Well, he talked about the two, and then you said the other five, and you only got to introduce one.

Keep going.

That's okay. And I sent you some photos if you want to show the viewers my. My working fish room. It's not the prettiest, but it works.

I will make sure they get posted, the discord. So you can follow up. Check it out.

The best fish rooms are not pretty. If it's pretty, you're not spending the time doing the right things for the fish, especially the fish that you're working with. You're talking fish that live in, like, a three inches of muck swamp full of plants, you know, like, totally inhospitable to us. That's exactly what they want. And that type of fish room produces results.

Yeah, for. For lack of better terminology, they're a toilet fish. They're. They're a little cichlid. If they. If they get a chance. And they're.

I don't know. I don't know.

We want to go little cichlid.

You see that shot fired there?

Wow.

To the cichlid van in the room.

Behaviorally, very different. Very different.

I like it. Know your audience and shit on them. Excellent. Fist bump. You know what I'm saying? That's what I'm talking about.

I'm trying to. I'm trying to chameleon my way through this.

You're getting it done.

Chris is more on my side of things, but, you know, I want to actually communicate things that are in a palatable way.

Let's at least get through the species list. But my main thing is, if they don't really act different or there's no real subtle differences between them, I'm not really that big of a concern. Yeah. Is there any between these five on the list?

Like, just pattern?

Has a giant got a ponium?

No, no, just pattern. Body shape and dispersion.

Yeah. If you had all five of them in a. In a pair in a bag right here in front of you, you wouldn't be able to tell most of them apart.

All right, I'm good. Then if you want to check it out, you can. You can wikipedia.

No, that's fair.

I mean, let's get on to the dire questions, because I. When we do these podcasts, I get advanced Aquarius and beginner. So they're going to want to know some of the secrets that you get for getting production results. So, number one, you both were clear that since you both had them, that you have to have.

I'm nowhere near on the level. I've I've kept probably four. The floor. The main ones from Florida, I've kept. Well, still kept them all, bred them all. But like, nowhere on the level of passion that this guy has.

I had them four times, you know, I've had a four times, bred them once by mistake.

This type of passion is something in the aquarium trade that, you know, you know, commands a certain level of respect to me because it's any of those people that want to take on those fish. They're not necessarily more challenging or harder to breed or specialized water, but they were just require somebody with that extra eye to quality and extra eye to detail to make sure the fish are producing and doing the best for the fish. That's commendable to me.

Can you pop that men's collar right there? Thank you. You know, exhibit that shit. Like it pimped my ride.

Oh, you've officially been pimped.

There you go. Excellent. Thank you for your dedication for this fish species.

Yeah, I super appreciate it. It.

What do you do for best results? You have to have a swamp tank. We went over that. But is there anything special that you would have to have? Like that one, you know, secret sauce you won't tell your other breeders?

No. That's also what's controversial about me is I hold no secrets. I hope.

Excellent. Drop it. Tell us right now.

There's a. There's a million ways this can cat, as the saying goes. The most effective way I've found to get numbers is by rotating pairs. You rotate individual pairs tank by tank by tank.

Hold on. What does that mean?

You put them in one tank and you let them do the birds and the bees. And then you see swimmers remove them. You know, you see swimming.

That gives the best results because they're.

They're gonna predate on the fry. They just do. It moves and it's small and it's food, and that's how they operate.

As the parents are successful in that type of environment that he's set up for food and long term maintenance, it's easy to care for him that way. The fry are exactly the same. The fry will even eat microscopic stuff, which is. Is abundant in that type of a situation to maximize your yield. That's why he does that.

So basically what you're going to want to do, right, if someone's listening to this, they're going to want to go home and they're going to set themselves up with a rack of two and a half gallon tanks, of, say, 22 and a half gallon tanks.

That's only if they want to breed them for volume.

Absolutely. We're talking volume here. That's what a lot of freaks message me in about. How do we do volume? Didn't talk about that.

Yeah, but what are you looking for? Like, realistically, like, if you're a member of an aquarium society, you want to breed a species, you need five or six.

I got weirdos.

I got weirdos that want numbers and you disperse it. He is one of those type of passionate people, like the killy people, like the Gadad people, those people that have that unique personality, that want to work with that species and make it the best for what's the biggest yield I can get out of it? That's not the average aquarius. The average aquarius isn't going to go set up twelve tanks and like saying, with all the shmoo and all those other things, that's going to give you the best yield. But you could keep a pair of them in a fairly small tank, without substrate, without anything, on a bare glass bottom, with a sponge filter, and feed them bloodworms and cyclops like, out of the can and all those type of things, and they will thrive and they'll breed, no problem.

My best pygmy tanks are retired guppy tanks, but still.

Right, let's go back to that 1220 tank, two and a half gallon tank scenario. Then you have only a handful of pairs. You have all of the tanks getting ready with the biofilm Shmoo cycle. You make them like the millie swamps we talked about. And then you simply just take those pairs, they drop babies, move them to the next ready and bear tank.

You don't even have to wait.

No, nope. You can just do it on a schedule if they are in contact with. The exception being as long as the female is gravid and conditioned to spawn. Outside of that, just like Betta. If you're just gonna introduce them, not good things are gonna happen. He's gonna chase her out of that habitat and not want to see her.

They need to be nice, a nice.

Pair, like fish farming, like when they do angels or barbs or anything like that. I've been at some of these large facilities where they'll do, say, cherry barbs. And they'll have one person that's in charge of the cherry barb house. It'll be a full size area the size of a single car garage with jars on shelves. Jar jar, jar, jar jars. The whole walls are all covered with jars. And on Monday he'll introduce females to each of the jars. And then on Tuesday he introduces the males to the jars, and on Wednesday they take the pears out and that's it. And I just rotate them through. Like he's saying is like, the ideal thing is if you had two, three tanks and then one kind of nice, average fish tank, that was your community tank, you could take the pair out of your fish tank, take the female out first, like he's saying, put it in that one first breeder tank and kind of fatten her up a little bit of give her the best of the best, give them a good quality water change, introduce the male. I'd probably give them a slightly cold water change once the males there, and then the day after, like 24 hours later, I would take the pair and move them to the next tank and then that tank and just let it sit there or whatever time period.

Precisely. Can I pause you right there? You reminded me of a very good point to spawning them with. Deliberate success is, yeah, changing them with cold water. When I make my rotten, it's. I'm down in the basement and this. This filter is down at the farthest corner away from any heat, and it's like 55 degree water. So I bring it up to the top of my rack where, you know, all the heat rises up and it's got that insulation up above. But one day I was just. I was kind of being a little lazier about it, and I introduced them. It was only. I mean, it couldn't have been a lot of water. It was not a massive water change. It was like a top off, if anything. But I gave him some cold water and I saw all the males flare up to the females and it started like that, literally like that. And I triggered them all by mistake, but by accident.

See, right there. That is a brilliant ingenuity.

No, but in mistakes in fish keeping is, honestly, is the one that provides the best. Like, we talk about people, they're fish breeders. And I've bred hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of fish and stuff like that. It's not. It's not as. I don't want ten. That is a gloating. But two thirds of those are us putting fish together and trying to figure out the pieces of the puzzle.

Sure.

You know, like, what are we missing?

You make adjustments as you go.

Yeah. Anything from South America needs triggers.

I'm not going to another, not once have. Have meeting you or hang out with you or any time that I've talked with you has it been, you know, I'm going to do eight weeks of research before I get this fish. You're that type of guy. Instead of like, here I have this fish, let's see what I can get done. You know, that's. You're that. You're that type of guy and that's me too. You know, that. That's the real brilliance.

Passionate Aquarius. Like, you know. Yeah, you can even contest to this because, you know, he's almost falling asleep here because he's not even in part of it anymore.

Oh, don't worry, he's had enough work of trying to prep for this swap. Prep for. Prep for you. This is his relaxation period. We're just chiming in when we need product advice.

But you think about it, for the most part. If you're a store owner or a real passionate aquarius, and you got a fish room and you're planning on going away, you know, you can do everything you want, get everything ready, the little baggies, little jars of. You're gonna have your neighbor come in, your neighbor, unless they're the same as you, will never have that same level of eye. And like, to me and you could attest to this is, I can tell you, before a fish is gonna break breakdown with ick or epistylus or something like that, I could tell you that in the ways that the fish is going to behave, you know what I mean? Like, when you keep cichlids long term, you're going to notice behavioral changes in the fish, you know, and if we adjust to those before it becomes a problem, we can solve problems, but often those cues are either aggression or breeding, or one form or the other, or a problem in the environment. But the fish will always tell us, we just, you know, we just have to sit there quietly, and they're not going to tell us physically with voice. They'll show us that something's wrong and we can solve those problems, but that's only going to come with experience. And like, with all the experiments and the playing around and figuring these things out, that's how you get more and more successful at breeding these different types of fish.

I keep a journal as well. Yep, journal per tank. Tanks are numbered. The start of the page has a number, so it's for that tank.

Jimmy and I were talking to a pistol gum breeder, and one of the mistakes that he found, we always love these little, like you call, we refer him to this podcast, mistakes. But one of the little things he discovered that I find that just fit this whole topic perfectly is he kept the nightlight in his room by mistake, didn't realize that his nightlight was in the room, because the wife just got pissed that it was on the counter. So she plugged it into his room, figured that he'd take care of it, and noticed that suddenly he had a lot more fry that just suddenly.

Yeah, yeah.

Lived like the parents weren't eating frye.

At night, like mimicking full moon.

Yeah. Like scenario. He. He firmly believes that they could see them versus if the light. There's completely black room, they're just feeling vibration. And if they feel something, it's food. They don't know it's. It's young versus a small light.

Two points. Like one point. There is any time you have fish, and the older, the more primitive the fish. And I'll use Madagascar species as sure there's a Madagascar species that I've never been successful in actually rearing fry. I've bred the multiple times, and it's a very, very highly coveted fish. It'll never become popular in the trade because it's absolutely super aggressive. However, when I had them, I brought in full adults from leif demacin, an old world, and I introduced them into a 750 gallon aquarium that was a community aquarium with all sorts of new world species. Old world species are much more primitive. Ancient. Like, you think about the paratropolis from Madagascar, the indian chromides. These are ancient, ancient fish. In the wild, they didn't have any competition. So when they bred, they didn't really have to tend them the same way as modern fishes do in like, South America, Mexico, and stuff like that. They just never had to do anything. But in a captivity, we put them in a mixed community like that. They'll go and breed. The minute you cross the threshold of your house door upstairs, the fish already have sensed a vibration that is channeled through your floors, through your house. Whether you sense it or nothing, that vibration carries. And fish have a lateral line. That little line of dot you see along the fish is different depending on the species, the grouping. But that is a sensory organ that picks up everything that happens within their environment and any sort of vibration or movement. That's why, like, you come downstairs here at your fish room, the minute you were able to look, before you even all the way down, you could look at your tank and all the fish are at the corner already, because they know something's coming. And they're trained to know that. That's where the guy comes and feeds me. The magical guy gives me food there, right? But some of these, when I did a mixed in a central american tank, I didn't have a hope in hell of having success. They would lay on the wall, on the rock, on the pot. It didn't matter the minute, any sort of vibration. They were the first fish to abandon it. New world fish. Modern fish won't do that because they have so much complexity in their environment. For kerosene's live bears, so many other predators and all these other things around them that they have to defend it. And they'll often defend it till the. That they will die of old age or of starvation just to defend their offspring. So that's really, really cool and important. Now, the second thing completely separate to this. Do you know who passed away this past week?

I don't.

An absolute aquarium legend. And in North America, this is probably one of the most prestigious people that has ever passed away that his contributions to the aquarium hobby is Rosario la Courte. He passed away just this past week at 95. So when we talk about all this tinkering and mistakes and stuff like that, try and think back into the day when you had an individual like 95, and he's kept fish his whole life. When the biggest tank you could ever buy was a ten gallon tank, steel frame, slate bottom. Why did it have a slate bottom? Most people didn't know it was the reason because there was nothing electrical. There was no heaters whatsoever. So they used a Bunsen burner to heat it. And that's how they warmed it up. And, you know, think about it. And that's why you have fish like convict cichlid. That's why it's given that name. Jack Dempsey was a famous boxer. Wild angelfish, oscars. Try and even fathom if you've bred any of those fish. Try and imagine trying to breed them in a ten gallon tank. Wild angelfish. Wild oscars are nowhere near pet store fish. These things are wild and waspy and aggressive and like, they're totally different than their pet store counterparts.

Absolutely.

And like this is. This is one of the absolute pioneers of the aquarium hobby. He just passed away. So I just want to make sure that, you know, we're kind of known acknowledge that, because, like, this guy paved the way along with many others. Incredible hobby that we have.

My research folder. I'm always.

But it's the tinkering that, you know, he would. There was no tetramen fish food, which was the real first fish food. So the. All he could do was go and collect.

Exactly.

Yeah, you know, like, that's all he could do. He'd go down and get mosquito larvae and, like, put him in his tank. And now he's got mosquitoes in his house, you know, like, or black worms. And now you, like, you're doing in the soil, cultivating them to try and grow them. Because, like, he's up in New York. It's not like he can. He's like us. Like, we're in Minnesota right now. It's like you. You can't go down to the pond in the middle of winter here and collect if you wanted to. You're not going to get anything.

I do leave scuds going, you know.

I do leave buckets outside deliberately with, you know, whatever in there.

Daphne and stuff.

Yep, that's. That's how I got into Daphnia and seed shrimp and all that. And, yeah, that's. That's partially due to me getting into the pygmies was like, okay, what other live foods can I just grow without having to ebay them in and do what, you know, when I was still learning it before I figured out how to culture live foods deliberately. Like, white worms and grindelworms and vinegar eels are like, my three primary go tos. I suck at brine shrimp.

I suck at white worms. Because they need that temperature. They have to be kept in the fridge.

Yeah, yeah.

Grindelworms are awesome. And no maintenance.

My fish room. My fish room. The. In the basement floor, it's not insulated. I only my racking system is.

Is you keep your white worms in the fridge.

Whiteworms, for us, we had to keep.

In a wine cooler.

Yeah.

Is like, what's best for them.

Like, I keep them right on the counter in the store.

Grindelwald worms or white worms?

They're micro white worms.

No, that's Grindelwald.

If they're tiny, tiny. They're grindles.

White worms will be about the same size as, like, a black worm.

But they're just white.

They're bright white. And you usually put a piece of milk soaked bread or something like that on them. They usually need to be in the fridge.

Mashed potatoes.

Yeah.

I feed them moist cat food. And that is it.

That's why I use for my grindelworms at home. And, like, that culture can go for, know, three months and just totally forget about it.

I had. I was going to bring treats for everybody and I had an accident in the fish. I had an accident in the fish room that resulted a lot of my live cultures not making it.

So I can take a culture out of Rob's armpit or something if you want.

No, no, no. My itchy taint. We talked about this.

Even better. A little cheese.

It just uses the little. That's what the scoops for.

Yeah, there you go.

He needs a scoop.

You gotta see this. Like, I make fun of this scoop, right? This. This is the coolest little thing. So it's just like a tiny tuna tin that you get with these cyclops. And then on the top, it has like a plastic cover so you can cover the little ice cream.

How old's everybody? Everybody remember the little ice?

Yeah, those wooden little spoons. This one is like that wooden spoon but folded in half. I don't know how they made it, but it was the coolest little idea.

Yeah, love zoomed around when they phase those out. Give a point around.

Yeah, we all started eating the spoons.

Picture on your thing, that's black and white. That's what everything looked like when we were kids.

Oh, my God.

There was no color yet. Hadn't been invented.

Well, you guys probably talked to each other, knocked on doors and left notes too, huh?

Oh, my God. Wait, whoa, whoa. Back on track, back on track. What temperature do these things should be kept at? These are not tropical species, I'm assuming.

No, they're temperate. So anywhere between 55 to 80, you know, is kind of their.

That's a hell of a range.

No, but that's why they're so adaptable. And honestly, if you really want them to thrive, literally go and get like a. Like a half oak barrel or something like that size of a pond deck patio in the summertime and fill it with water and take some plants out of the slough beside the house and throw them in there and these things will thrive. And like anybody that's ever grown fish outside, rainbows, live bears. When you pull them out of the fall, they're just breathtaking for color.

Great pond fish.

Have you noticed? I do. They handle, like, fast temperature changes well, as well. I know you said you did. You did like a cold water water change one day, top off or whatever, but can it like, drop down to the bare minimum all the way up to 80?

Let me interject. So you just had a terrible situation happen at your house, right? You live in, I'm assuming, an apartment with some friends. And you had either one of your friends or the landlord or something come over and basically shut off your heat, right? Yeah, we live in Minnesota. Shit ain't warm around here.

That was a month ago.

That was when stuff was cold.

So before the palm trees started budding out here, right.

So we went from like, what, a 76, 74 degrees in your basement to a, what, sultry 40 a balmy.

Yeah, a balmy 45, I think. I put my temperature gun up to the water, saw what it was. I was like, well, that's why, you know, all my. All my guppies were bloated, you know, live bears. It's not in good shape. I won't get too in detail about it, but it was just really, really shitty or crappy. Bummer deal.

No, but, like, even some of the areas where, like, when we showed it, when he was talking about the dispersion of the Gilbert eye, you know. You know, most of, you know, that whole area of Florida and stuff like that, they get snow sometimes in those areas. They get frost regularly. Right.

But he. He went from this temperature to that over, like, couple hours.

No, no, it didn't happen that quick. It's not like the landlord opened every door and window, and all of a sudden.

How quick was it in the house took?

Well, I was. I was gone for three days.

Three days. That's a good thing. And it was.

It was pretty much right after I left that he was like, oh, he left this on. And, you know, it was a miscommunication to your listeners.

How many people out here, like, at home, like, you talk about using ro water. I have 180 gallons of ro water on my disposal every day because that's what I have, well water. So my well water sucks, so I use ro completely. But my well water, like you said, comes out, like, cold, like 52 degrees. My well water fills up my 180 gallon reservoir and stops at, like, room temperature. So that. I don't know if that's on your scale, what's room temperature? 21. That's what? 21 on my scale. So, like. And that's where my water sits?

Yeah.

I don't heat it. I don't do anything. I don't treat it because I live in a well, so I don't have to treat for chloramine, chlorine, anything. And I do water changes.

That is not the case for us.

Half a tank. Quarter tank, you know, anything like that. Without any issue on all my fish. Without any problems. And I've. Even when I lived in the city, I've even used colder tap water. Like, all my automatic water changers and stuff were all straight cold water into the tank. And healthy fish will tolerate these variances. We're not talking. I'm not, you know, going all of a sudden taking them from, you know, 80 degree water to 50 degree water.

These are two and a half gallon tanks. What size tanks are these?

They were in anywhere from ten to five to two and a half is kind of how I have the rack.

Set up so it's not doing a 90% water change. And the water temperature gradually cools down.

It holds temperature.

The heat got cut. It dropped down to 45 degrees in three days. In a three day time in these small tanks. Or assuming by the end of the second day it was probably about that temperature and it still took it 45 degrees.

Yeah. You know, you wouldn't have a neon tetra cardinal tetra ram. You won't run anything like that, Grammys.

But that's a hell of a statement right there for people that are listening that want a hearty fish.

What's. I mean, they can go up to hundred plus degrees outside, you know, and then at a night it might drop down and might go down even close to frost nights on sometimes, you know, depending on when you. Before you pull them out.

I'm just saying I got rice fish that wouldn't take that, you know, I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah.

Yep. Honestly sensitive, but they are not temperate. Right.

But people still claim them to be, you know.

Yeah, well, I would argue and say that. I wouldn't say they can. They can handle mistakes as much as, like maybe a happy accident. Like, okay, I accidentally changed water a little too cold or I overfed a little bit with, with blackworm, you know, don't go pouring, you know, 409 into the tank and, oh, yeah, they're fine. You know, it's.

Don't make a habit of it.

Yeah, yeah.

Let's put it this way. If you're going to go to your normal fish room right now, you have the normal gamut. And then you have a couple tanks of pygmy sunfish out of your normal gamut of bread and butter stock. If some guy goes down to the basement, you know, drunk, hisses into a tank, they're probably the fish that are going to live. Let's be real. That's gonna be your bulletproof fish.

It's only a two gallon tank. So, you know, maybe after a few drinks, you know, I might. That's like a water change. I don't know.

Even if that's a third urine, they're probably gonna live through it, boys. You know, I'm saying they're a lot of fun.

We joke about it, but you guys, you know, you guys are all from Minnesota and I'm from Canada, so I'm only, you know, 3 hours, 4 hours and stuff like that. Oh, yeah, we're all the same. Like, you know, we go through the whole cold winter and then once it's like, like ten degrees, you just got.

Better chips than us.

Above freezing, we're outside in t shirts, you know, like, it's like, it's all. This is the peak of summer. Like, it's not. It's still freezing to most people. If you're from Florida and you came up, they wouldn't tolerate that. We bring people up from Florida in, like, the spring or the summer, they come up with jackets. But you or I, you know, like, as soon as the snow's gone, it's like t shirt weather.

I went to Vegas a few years ago, and everybody was able to point us out as Minnesota.

Did you turn the ac on?

70 degrees outside, and we're walking around. T shirt and shorts.

Sorry.

Here we got a video. While Oscar still does kind of have the personality, which is cool, and they sent us a quick video.

Here is the wild oscars have, like, they don't even live in the same way. Like a pet store. Oscar is kind of a dopey fish.

They become.

They train you. They become like a pet dog. Yeah.

See, right here, you can look at this Oscar. Look all at it right now, how it doesn't give a shit about him. Yep. That is not a. That is not a domestic oscar.

But this species in the wild, normally, most an Oscar is not one species anymore. There's. There's several species. But these oscars in the wild, the. The patterning is a very cryptic patterning, and it's designed to conceal them amongst the tangles. They would pretty much live in the type of habitat, like a discus would. All the tangles of the wood and everything like that, and all the leaf litter. And then the spot on the caudal, which is the tailfish, is to mimic an eye to stop a larger predator from coming at them. Because most predators will often take out the eye to disable.

Right.

And that's what the purpose behind it. And that's a great looking Oscar, right?

That's beautiful. And that's how you can really tell the wild oscars is that eye. I mean, without that, they're. They're super domestic.

And now in captivity, we've read that to the point that we can buy them in long fin and lemon yellow and neon pink.

What was the one that I got sent by that special vendor we don't talk about by mistake?

Chili Red.

They were called super, super Neon Red.

They were really expensive.

Right. They were dumb.

Yeah, but they were like, neon red, like a fire hydrant.

They were like. They were. Went to the kitchen and got injected with some shit. Yeah.

That's all stuff that comes out of the asian and the asian community. But, like, when you got to think about it as you look back at times, like they're the ones that are bringing all these things, flower horns and all these hybrids. And some of us are purists that we may not like, but go back in history, you know. What does a carp look like? Well, that's where your goldfish came from. That's where your koi came from. That's also where your telescope eye bubble eye goldfish came from. You know, this is all about line breeding to develop some sort of unique trait. So the thing that, you know, I'm basically a purist. I prefer natural species to show their natural beauty. But, like, you know, you know damn well there's somebody out there. They could find an electric yellow, and they could somehow breed it to be hot pink and be the first one to market with it. They'll make their million dollars off of it, because that's what that whole community overseas in Asia, that community is all driven by that.

So just going through the last couple of details. Thank you, Yaglet, for sharing your picture of your Oscar. And then we have here from bones. If Caribbean gave me crabs, I'd be grateful. Just saying. And then she posted a picture.

Not the salt water.

Yeah, that's right. The saltwater one. He's buying the wrong one. That's why it says right on the saltwater one. Include crabs.

I forgot to mention.

Wait, hold on. Does it really?

No, I would love.

I would love that, though. May include crabs.

May give you crabs. May give you crabs.

I buy it just for the bag.

I forgot to mention kind of an important detail of another fish. I keep. Dario. Dario Scarlet. Baddest.

Right, cool.

Same way I keep pygmy sunfish.

There's another fish that's also gone through, you know, massive nomenclature changes. You know, baddest. Baddest was the only baddest that was in the hobby for three, four decades. And also they're exploring these regions and finding all these fish. And, like, it looks like it, but it's not related to it at all.

Yeah, that's a. That was a. That was a swap meat fish. That was a. I took that one, and I was like, oh, you can keep them. Kind of in similar fashion that I already keep my other fish. So that's the only reason I got it.

You should do a. You should do a podcast one time, talking to old fish keepers, not myself, because I'm still really really young. But old fish keepers, like the thing I've never understood.

I want to get father fish on this guy just to see how he buries dead fish in a substrate, because that's. That just. I love it to death.

But if you look at all the really accomplished old aquarists, they keep apistos achilles, all these micro fish. I wear glasses now because I need them to read. I need bigger fish. You should start off with the small fish and then work your way up, like, okay, I have a ten gallon as I'm a kid. And then when I'm a teenager, I can get a 20 gallon, you know, and it slowly get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then you basically use. Your goal is, what's the biggest tank I can have before I keel over?

Well, so maybe if. If you're visually challenged, the, uh, enneacanthus might be a better route to go in. Ennecanthus gloriosis is a blue spotted sunfish. They look very similar to elisoma, but they are more. Behaviorally, they're more like, uh, like your bluegill, right. For a sense of familiarity.

What?

That's still only a couple inches, though, brother.

But the gloriosis, it's about how you use it. The gloriosis only max, at two and a half, three inches long, that's all you really need.

All right.

She calls them old glory.

All right, gentlemen, help me out here. Is there any don'ts with this species? Like, you don't put them with this. You don't use these. Don't do salt. What are we talking here? What's the. No nos?

Don't put them with fish that use their mouths as their eyes, you know?

Wait, what? What the hell does that mean?

Well, predators, goldfish, these are fish that you should keep pretty much like they would be like the people that are passionate.

Like, keep them with fish, with finesse, with small.

I would probably personally like you do. You keep them pretty much by themselves. You breed them and you work them through, you know, like, you could put these with small shrimp, and they'll control the population of the small, small, the little tiny, tiny. You might not get any shrimp out of it, but they're not going to take down the adults. They'll just, you know, they'll cohabitate together. But if you want the best results, like, he's trying to breed to get this maximum yield, to get the species out. Traveling in the hobby, he's only keeping them by themselves. Now, I can control it.

If you're a person that insists on having tank mates. I'm assuming like sparkling grammys, scarlet baddest. You shake your head no on all of them.

No, those are all fish that would eat their fry.

Yeah.

Or if you don't care about their.

Fry or the fin flaring, that would. That would. I mean, that's just gonna stress it. Stress out the fish. Right. And they're not.

Don't play well with others.

They're not gonna be happy. I mean, it's different in like what you're saying that you have so many.

Wait, wait. That's different. So I have 125 gallon aquarium that you're talking about. About. It's 6ft long.

Yeah.

Right. It's filled with all. It's a menagerie of shits. Uh, all small shits by jew.

The only.

The only big fish in there are, uh. You know, sae. Right. So that tank you say is somehow better because they'll just keep the little corner territory. It's a lot going on that.

There's a lot more going on. And there's a lot more places for them to talk into that are. That are within reach. Right. That are kind of within arm's reach of them at all times. So find a little pocket, you know, like, like Shelley's as soon as you see them and they just go into the shells. Right. You know, they're kind of that.

They need to find a gigantic community aquarium where they can find a pocket to themselves.

But even then, you're not that big of an acute community aquarium. Most people are not.

Yeah, most people are nuts. Like me.

That setup right there is very out of the norm of what I've seen. At most people's fair, at most people's houses that the average, the average aquarist that's diving into it recently had a goldfish die and they're looking for something else is cool.

You know, anybody's interested in keeping fish should not do what Rob does in that tank, is what we're saying.

This is true.

That's very, that's.

This is true.

And that's also. You should controversial here. That's calculated risk.

When I have L 46 platos in there and like, you know what I need? I need some pygmy sunfish and I just toss them in there. Yeah. Cause I just, you know, you look.

More of like somebody that should be breeding finches.

All right.

All right.

Let's go around back and have a tilly.

What about like, like chili rasbora or the birgitae kubotae or something like that?

That's a more peaceful kind of fish that's like we said before, that doesn't see with their mouths first.

And I think, like to add to his. I think that is a species that we often use. We call them dither fish for like, cichlids, that they might make the bond of the pair better because there's. They'll see. Because this is a species that's literally lived its whole existence. Kind of like an epistle. Hides under a leaf for its whole life. Looking out, you know.

Yeah.

Cave dwelling death awaiting me. You know, anytime I poke my eye out, and if you put little tiny fish that are above it, that are completely oblivious to what's below them, then if they're out swimming, everything's okay. And then the pygmy sunfish will just be probably better.

When I was doing fish, when I was doing a pistols, I had Pigby's in with them.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right. Not. Not when the pistols were conditioning to spawn, obviously, at that point, they got removed.

But there we go.

Like, as the chat. Like the pencil fish.

There we go. I was gonna say we're gonna. We're gonna go to chat questions. Can you keep with pencil fish? They have incredibly tiny mounds.

See, but they're a much larger fish.

Yeah. Pencil fish has a lot of personality for such a little mouth. You know, that's. That's gonna. That's gonna rob, too, though.

No, a lot of personality. Such a pretty mouth.

Pretty mouth.

He's got a pretty big mouth.

There's a reason I invited you here. You're redeeming yourself. All right. It's my first time seeing or hearing about the pygmy sunfish. Anything I've ever known about sunfish and crappies, as you can catch in Ontario as a kid.

Yeah, totally different group of fish. Like the crappies and the sunfish that he's referring to. Look more like a bass. Like, bass, like style fish. These would be more like achille fish. Like, these things are only about an inch. Inch and a half. Yeah, these are maximum size.

These are little, tiny, little. Yeah, yeah, these are tiny, tiny little dudes.

No, you can't find them in the Great Lakes.

You cannot. You gotta let me read the questions. Darn it.

I was gonna go make.

Next question. Could you find him in the Great Lakes? He's reading ahead. I see the.

If there's some tributaries and they could hold, you know, it was really shallow, maybe.

I see the pygmy sunfish. I google it. Way different. Be careful when you're googling the pygmy sunfish. They have cleaned it up since. But I have had people google the pygmy sunfish and have quite an array.

Yeah.

And they actually had a start with.

Start with Gulf coast. Start with Gulf coast pygmy sunfish because that's the most widespread, that's the most updated one.

Okay.

They did clean it up. I did go to the version. This is a quite nice Google page. It used to have pumpkin seeds in here and all kinds of craziness.

I remember that.

So that one on the bottom left there, the second one in there, that's a bottom, right? Yeah, that's a little doctored. That one there. Right there.

Oh, not that.

That's a different spring pygmy sunfish. I'll tell you which one that is.

Well, he got all excited.

Hold on. I think because that's one.

That's the one that.

Yep, yep, yep. That's on my hit list at the very top.

You'll never have that fish.

I do have a question. Is it best if you can, uh, you know, put a diecast dukes of hazard car inside the tank for Alabama specifically?

Well, that's photographed. That's Derek Wheaton. He's one of the big components of the north american tropical fishes. If he's got the fish, he's. You should get him.

I got to get in touch with that guy.

He's a great guy, but I have.

To go through a certain. There's got to be something in place.

For me to have just a slightly doctored, just a little bit, you know, just. Just gently kissed with the enhanced button right here.

That one up top.

This one was the one that was donated to Petco.

That's highly stressed. That's a. I think I'm gonna die.

That went through the blender. All right, well, let's wrap up a couple quick ones with questions. So let's go to our discord page again. If you have questions, you can go on here and ask the community. And our community has been fantastic as of the last six months. I don't see a question unanswered in the 24 hours since we've been really pushing this in here. We have this channel in discord called ask for help. And this is where I'm going to take our discord questions, and we're going to see how well our community's been doing and how. You guys are wonderful.

Let's all the questions to him.

Would you all. No, no. We're going to go. We're going to round robin. So, yes, all the derrick.

We'll give input here.

Excellent.

Can I go make a drink?

Number one turtle id. We have a picture of a turtle. What type of turtle is this, mister Biggs? Go.

It's a turtle.

Excellent. That is the number one question.

It is yellow eared slider, right? Turtle from Florida.

We have no idea.

I don't know either.

Yeah.

Why are you. Why are you bringing turtle shits to my aquarium?

Fight crime.

All right, that's Donatello.

In fact, you know what? Big says it's Donatello. There we go.

That's factual.

Says it's donate. Hello. Excellent. Next question. We're getting to the good stuff. Oh, I'm gonna wait for biggs on this.

Ooh, I like that algae.

All right, this one's for you. Derek Otto stuck in the sponge filter. This little guy did a dumb. And he was sitting inside of a sponge filter for at least a couple hours. I got him freed after I realized he was indeed stuck. Now he's pretty scratched up. I didn't get a photo, but his belly has a red spot on it and is bruised up. Should I be concerned? I did add to the water. Do I keep an eye on the healing? I feel bad for the little dude and his picture of what can only be described as an auto syncless that has been thrown through the blender.

Yeah, I would say just add a bit of salt to the water. Not table salt, aquarium salt.

Yeah.

Now we're seeing a bunch of crypts in the water as well.

So not almond leaf.

Not enough to harm your plants. Follow the instructions and do just a hair less than that. I would say therapeutic level.

All right, so let's go through some of the options. I put an option on here. I said you have two options. A, let it roll, 75% chance he'll be fine, b net him out and drop methylene blue direct onto his wounds and put him back in the tank. Still, 75 chance that he'll live due to the stress of that procedure. And I said that because of the plants in the tank.

I've found that crips kind of handle salt pretty well. Honestly.

Next question. We have. What the hell is this algae? What on earth is this stuff? Go buns.

That stuff?

Yeah, that's a perfect spawning mop for pygmy sunfish.

Excellent. We're seeing a picture that looks like a dollop of pub hair.

It almost looks like what it. What is the algae that the original. The moss balls? Is that the one that's mentioned that.

It'S not the maramino balls.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, that looks like Shrek was shaving over the tank.

I was gonna say, honestly, it was.

Date night, so he was shaving.

That's the itch on my taint, for sure.

No, I don't know that. I don't know algae id, but I like it. You can send it to me.

So let's go to the crowd. The crowd says, oh, man. It's as if the moss balls you forgot to put it in one point came back to remind you that they're once young and foolish. Life finds a way. Excellent. I also agree that this is non stereotypical hair algae. I think that this also came off of either something that traveled in or a moss ball itself.

You guys like us in the springtime, because you're an agricultural area, same as us, you get this massive boon of phosphate in your water in the springtime. Yeah, yeah. I remember we used to carry phosphate remover at the pet store, and, like, the time we always would, people come in, it's like, oh, my tanks looking weird. I tested like, I did not care about anything else. All I had to do was test phosphate.

That's why I went ro. So I control it.

Next one, thoughts and tips on using forage national items in a tank. I live near a beach, and I've been enjoying eyeing up the driftwood and rocks and don't want to start chucking stuff into the water and hoping for the. I have fresh water, if it matters. Thanks. Around the table. Derek, what do we do for this boil.

Except for rocks. Never boil rocks.

Okay. And biggs, you're looking confused and judgmental.

Boil. Boil rocks. You shouldn't boil. You should throw them in the fire so they never explode.

Well, they do that when you boil them, too.

They do?

Can confirm where I live. The Red river, where you guys dump all your garbage.

You mean. You mean the red.

And when you have the floods and all the garbage that you dump into your red river.

We have that same river. Yes.

That literally flows right through winter and.

Wait, that flows north, and then I.

Go, yeah, that's the problem. That's why the flooding happens. Because it's frozen up above and it goes to Lake Winnipeg.

You have to take the dirt road. Or is that.

No, no. Like, that floods for miles and miles and miles, like grand forks, so you.

Don'T have to take a dirt road.

I peed in that last year.

So if I were at the Red river and I would find a stump, like a big stump, for, like, a 700 gallon tank, and I winch it out with my wife's jeep. Yeah. And then I put it in the back of the truck or something, and I bring it home. I can't boil to. I don't have a cauldron that big. So what I do is I just literally leave them on the driveway. And you know what the best sterilizer out of all of them is? Is the sun. I just, literally, to me, unless you're. If you got an area, like, I agree with Derek in regards to boiling stuff, that makes sense. But if you're pulling from an area that you have concerns about, it's a little bit urbanized or anything like that. Like, to me, I'm not looking at driftwood, just from a fish standpoint point. I'm thinking driftwood botanicals, leaves, twigs, branches, lichen, for all my vivariums, all my spiders, all that stuff that I do all the time. I live out in the country, and I'm pretty safe harvesting anything I want anywhere around me. But if you're. If you think they're suspect where the water, you're pulling it out. If you find this cool piece of wood, if it's too big to boil it, I would leave it on the driveway and let. And then if my pressure washer is nice and clean and no soap at all, then I'll pressure washer, and it'll remove all the loose material because you can't guarantee the stump or piece of wood you're pulling out is going to be a hardwood. If it's a softer wood, that pressure washer is going to carve it up pretty fast, and then maybe you might not want to use it because it's going to break down really, really fast in the tank.

But no, it became leaf litter.

Then I showed one of you guys a video I did of me introducing, I did it on Instagram of how to put botanicals in your tank. And I literally just took a handful of leaves harvested off the ground, and I just threw it in the water, and I said, that'll do, you know, like anything, if you're going to boil anything, what boiling does, it does sterilize. So I understand that that aspect of it. But boiling also breaks down cellular structure, so it's going to make it sink faster. So if you're finding a piece of driftwood and it won't sink on its own, that's the kind of the premise behind it. That's why, like, you know, instead of maybe finding a piece of wood at your beach and. And going to one of your pet stores, like your local store here, Dee's fish. And buying that piece of malaysian driftwood or mopani wood or spiderwood or whatever it is. Those type of products have been cleaned out, stripped, ready to go. There's no introductions of anything other than beneficial stuff. But then you're also supporting local without the aspect of introducing anything negative to your tank buns.

Your take to, to add to that, research the body of water and research if there's any invasive species, if there's any pathogens, if there's any known a local lake. I used to fish and actually harvest fish from and eat from, I will not ever eat from again. Because there's mercury. There's mercury. There's all kinds of pollutants, stuff from that lake. I would never take real hippie research.

That's where we're going.

What's that?

Hippie research. I like it.

Cause that's what everyone's gonna do.

Absolutely.

I'm gonna spend, you know, 30, 40 hours research. I'm actually gonna apply to the DNR and see if I can get all the feedback from them of lake patterns and stuff to be able to find out this twig that I found.

Not gonna lie though, if you do a slight bit of homework, it'd be. It's kind of fascinating what you find. There's a, there's a town called Parker's prairie in Minnesota, and there's this little lake next to it. And if you just do 10 seconds of homework, you find out that that used to be the city sewage. Know that's suddenly off limits from any rock picking of my choice.

Friend of mine set up a tank materials, and he got leeches. Might not be a rock leech infestation. You can. He can never get a hold of.

Okay, you know, 1 second. Rob, though, before we, like when we talk about this type of a subject.

Sure.

There's lots of angles to it.

Yes.

Reality is, we just finished talking for about an hour about adding handfuls of muck leaflets. We did all that stuff to create this natural biology.

We did.

I could literally take a dump in your 125 gallon tank. And if your environment is stable, it would take it. It would break it down. Because in the wild, there's no filter. There's no, you know, move a bunch of branches and all of a sudden there's a big eheim canister able to handle this giant lake. There's nothing there. And if a deer dies, heart attack, swimming across the lake and falls into the bottom and rots, it's. The system has to handle it. The only time systems are out of balance is usually when man interferes.

Correct. That's why you got to look up, like when the man decides that lake's going to be their sewer system.

Yeah. So don't overdo it or run off. Don't overdo your research.

I'm going to add one last one to this. This. So boil it, spray it, do your homework. All right. I'm going to go with the sure and true treatment that if you're not going to boil it, because I like that one. That one's my favorite, is using chlorine tap. You can get yourself water drinking chlorine tabs. There's ef chlor you can buy on Amazon. They're pretty easy to use tabs. They're literally, the idea is one tablet, drop it in, purify a gallon of water in a camping scenario where you have to, for drinking water, use that and, you know, I double, triple the dose. Put this rock, put this log, whatever you're in and then, you know, chlorine the shit out of it.

Now your viewers, how many of your viewers will be here tomorrow for the talk? Because there's something in my talk that I want to introduce to this, this topic, but I don't.

Let's look right now, right now, because we've had, there was like 30 some listeners, right.

That there will be something that you guys, from a stories, story time standpoint that you guys will appreciate for sure.

So we have, oh, there's probably going to be at least four of those people. Five of those people are listening right now.

Okay. Do you think you'll be upset if I share this story with your other listeners?

Oh, I don't think so.

Okay. So I've had large aquariums, I've had fish rooms in the three. 4000 gallons. Right. One of the stories that's in my, in my talk is the story of me finding these giant stumps. When you have a 750 gallon tank that's 8ft by 4ft, 3ft tall and you want to recreate kind of a riverbank type environment. I want big fish to be able to disappear in my tank like big three foot catfish or whatever you keep in it.

Oh, for sure.

So I'm always looking for stumps or things that are, that are eroded that I could winchester that are like the size of a pallet. Those are what I want. I have literally one sitting on my driveway right now. And it's on my driveway and it's gonna sit on, it's been through a winter on my driveway for a reason years and years and years ago. And you'll see the tank in the talk. I had a 750 gallon tank, like I said at my old house, it was 21 years old. It was a plywood tank. And then when we moved, we bought this new place, and the new place was. The whole basement was built around building the new tank. The new tank. Glass, 13 sheets of plywood. All the epoxies at my house. And it's a 1700 gallon tank because you always go to go bigger, not smaller, because we're getting older. We covered that well. We found this incredible stump at one of our cottage beaches, and I winched it out. Took a whole afternoon to get this thing out of the ground, put it in the back of my truck, brought it home at my old house, put it on the driveway, and it sat on my driveway for most of the summer. Then I got the sawzall because I wanted to place it in the tank. And the stump is usually kind of round. It's got roots that go all over. So I wanted to kind of cut the two corners off so I could wedge it into the corner of a tank and had all these sprawling roots. And I want to be six to eight inches off the bottom of the tank so fish can go and hide under it, like, beside the riverbank. Right. And I had this. Sat there forever. We sawzalled it, still left it on the driveway for weeks, pressure washed it several times, let it sit on the driveway for weeks until the time that a buddy came over to help me move this into the tank, because it's huge. We haul it downstairs without damaging anything, get it through. I get into the 750 gallon tank, and I'm in two, two and a half feet of water because you have to drain it down. You know how much it's going to disperse. I have all these big boulders around me, you know, like 50 to 100 pound boulders laying around, because sometimes when you find wood like that in the wild, it's not going to be like the pet store would. It's not going to sink. You have to kind of weigh it down. Yeah. And we literally hauled this thing in there, and he just kind of pushed it over the ledge and it fell on me. Now it's floating. So now I'm trying to take this giant stump and sink it into the tank and lift these boulders onto it. And we finally got it in place. So after this ordeal of about an hour, we sat out front of my 750 gallon tank in my basement, and we're watching it as the tanks refilling and all of a sudden, the apocalypse happened. In this tank. Carpenter ants started pouring out of this piece of wood. These are, these are a black ant that's about an inch, inch and a quarter long. And they eat wood, so they're always in rotting products and stuff. Always, you know, and they are pouring out by the thousands into this tank. And the thing that was the most obscure is you can't even. These ants seem to. Didn't even understand they were underwater. They're just walking around on the wood like, what's changed? And so as they're coming out, we're trying to catch them with nets, but they're climbing out of the net as fast as we're getting on. There's thousands of them. Do you know what houses are made out of?

Wood.

Conveniently made out of wooden wood. So my wife's downstairs just laughing. My buddies just laugh when we're trying to control and get all these ants out of this thing and kill them all as fast as we can. So your boiling idea has some merit.

Well, for me.

For me, the biggest thing is not necessarily the natural things that are going to be found, you know, bacterias and whatnot, even ants, more about. And this all depends on where you're collecting from again, but field runoff, pesticides, stuff like that, boiling it is going to get as much of that out of there as possible.

Yeah, same as even some of the pet store woods like Malaysia or Mopani. If you boil them, even though they'll sink right away, if you boil them, they'll release the. The big abundance of tannins. So you're not going to have that black water tank for the first six months of owning it. Yep.

Well, guys, I think that runs out of time for us. Number one, Daniel Bunzie. Bunzie, bunzie.

Friendly fish, mn.

Friendly fish mn. That's on found on facebook. You'll find the link in the description. Certainly follow him. He is a full on rebuilding the fish room. Trust me. It'll be three months and he will be up and fully running. So if you want to get yourself a pimmy sunfish, he will be the guy to message for sure. Come see him at a swap. He will definitely be visiting us more often because again, we're doing swaps at least three times a year here in Minnesota. Mister Biggs, it's a thank you for coming. We can't wait for your presentation tomorrow, especially if it's going to be a hint of stories such as the carpenter ants. That. That's insane.

The talk tomorrow is basically 100% introspective. Look at myself and all the stupid things I've done for the fish without consideration of the family, the house, the wife, the kids. There's a lot of stuff there. And if you are coming down tomorrow for the talk, I strongly encourage you to bring your partner or spouse with you because they will enjoy it just as much as you will.

And if you didn't get to see it, you lock us out because it's not recorded. You got to be at these things live. Check it out. Watch the Facebook page. D's Fishbow Co. Facebook page, actually, because they're going to keep up with the swaps in our area. And of course the two channels at the Matt Aquarist and the other one.

Was the mad Aquarius. But if they look up realm natura instead of nature, end it with an a.

And we're going to have that in the show notes. So check that out.

That's all for bugs and critters and reptiles and stuff for sure.

And Derek, as always, thank you for doing this. And thank you for being a sponsor of, you know, getting Biggs down here. It was these fishco dollars that helped pay his expenses to come down this direction.

Thousands and thousands of dollars.

Let's be real here. You helped him with gas and hotel, which again, that's, you know, thank you for just being that cheap. It is. It is a very nice of you because you're normally not that cheap.

I would promise spooning.

Oh, we'll get to that.

Easy, baby.

We'll get to that.

You call me first. We got a shit in my aquarium and it's absolutely my pleasure.

Can I. Can I give one special shout out here? Special shout out to all the local fish stores and for all the people that put in effort to keep this hobby going, especially you. You inspired me to keep good dads and to go so much deeper into it than I ever probably would have, or at least this soon.

Check it out at Fish Co. And I made the website me.

Use that in a sentence, please.

Right? Can I use that in a sentence now? You did promise to bring a bag of deez nuts. And that's okay because you brought us instead all dressed chips. And for those that have never been to Canada, I've never had any chip as delicious as all dressed chips.

Have you ever had a butter tart?

But in your face we have.

Oops.

All crunchberries.

What the hell is.

I never had a butter tart.

Have you ever had an animal bar? No. What? I should have. I should have done more shop.

It's all right, we'll keep our guns and freedom, you know.

Keep your healthcare.

Until the next episode. Catch you guys later.

Thank you.

Bye. 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. I'm going to actually tilt the camera down so you can see this a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they rub it on their genitals like the chubs and stuff like that. Like Rob sporting right now.

Now the shit glows neon. Took a dump on my chest before we started the podcast.

Jim's a jerk.

Radioactive malaysian trumpet snails.

This is an audio podcast. Bite me. Looks like a dollop of pube hair. That's still only a couple inches though, brother.

It's how it uses it.

And why is my brain going a blank?

Just add a bit of salt.

Oh, for sure.