Happy Thanksgiving from the aquarium, guys. Podcast. njo shrimpshack.com. In honor of Black Friday, Joe shrimp shack is going to be having an additional sale for 20% off all plants and livestock and 50% off shrimp King and all hardscape materials in store only. If you order online, you can go and use promo code Aquarium Guys at checkout for 15% off the entire rest of the store. The instore special is only good good through Sunday. If you do go in person, there's a drawing for all qualified purchases over $50 or more get you a chance to win a shrimp King ten gallon starter kit valued at $250. It will be drawn Tuesday in a group live video on Facebook. Again, thank you to Joe Shrimshack.com for sponsoring this podcast. Also, don't forget about reflowers and cobalt aquatics aquascaping competition. Submissions close December 3, and you could win grand Prize of aquariums directly from cobalt reflower supplies. Certainly check it out. The link is in the description. Sign up and you can set up multiple tanks. There is no limit. Also, Aquarium Guys merch store has relaunched with new designs. A lot of fun designs. There's throat punching, memes talking about endless or feeder guppies, even a really cool certified Aquarium Guys logo. Check it out. Use promo code either rob's, Robbz, Adam, or Jimmy at checkout to prove who's your favorite person from the Aquarium Guys for 5% off in the new merch store, please help us. It really does support us in a great way. Keep the lights on. Keep this podcast rolling. Now let's kick that podcast. Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast with your host, Jim colby and Rob Golden. Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Jimmy, I'm glad to see you're here. We got a first, like, real snowstorm going on in a while.

Yeah, we had a little bit of snow today.

Your your your bread truck didn't flow over the road.

I was able to get her max out about 45 miles an hour today.

Cooking, cooking, cooking, man with gas cooking. Well, I'm your host, Rob Zulson.

I'm Jim colby.

And I'm Adam El nashar.

And today, our wonderful guest that we've been looking forward to for a while now is ivan Mikoji miko. I keep butchering the name I prepared three times before this. Please, could you pronounce it for me? Mikoji Mikogi. I always want to say miko mikogei.

All right.

Mccogie.

I love it. Well, ivan, thanks so much for coming on the show. We appreciate your time. And you're coming all the way from Venezuela. So for those that are listening, if you hear the audio quality but scratchy that's really what we can do with the Internet right about where he lives right now. Before we get into too many topics, we're all gathering together today for your new book release. And it just released, is that correct?

Yeah, released. A short while ago, it was printing, and now it's all bounded, and it's going to start shipping in a week.

Wonderful. So he wrote the book Fishes of the orinoco. But ivan is well known for making documentaries about different fish habitats and just generally where our hobby come from. And we're just tickled pink to be able to read the book beforehand, go over some of your expeditions that have gone over, it looks like many years. And instead of having like an information topic, we just want to hear your stories on making this book and the matter behind it. So, again, thank you so much.

You're most welcome. Thank you for having me.

Like we do every other podcast, before we get into the deep dive and interview with ivan, we got a couple of questions from our listeners. If you want to put in a question to us, go to quarryguyspodcast.com and you will find in the bottom of the website our email address, phone number to call or text, however you want to leave us a message. And we got a couple of this week. Jimmy, everybody know well, says here from lj. He's messaged us before. Besides quarantining, what would you treat fish with? Anything preventative, like maybe aquarium, co op, meds trio or something similar. So he's been asking, when you get a new fish in, should you just medicate blindly? What would you put in a tank? And I know this is definitely something that you and I do very differently.

Jimmy.

If I get a fish in, like, we always preach salt. Use some salt if you can, depending on the fish breed and if there's plants in there. Otherwise I'm not treating for anything. I don't see most of the bags that you get from wholesalers already come with some medications, maybe a touch of clove oil, methyl and blue. I'm not going to treat it in my tank. I'm going to leave it quarantined. And unless I see it, I'm not.

Going to medicate it.

Now you, on the other hand, have a very old school method and successful method. What do you recommend, Jimmy?

Well, normally when I bring stuff in, the difference between robs and I, rob is picking some stuff up, maybe from the pet store or another person.

Right.

The individual shipper. I'm not getting 300 at a crack.

Yeah.

So I'm importing. And so normally what I like to do is bring the fish in and I like to hedge my bed. And when I say hedge, my bet is if I got a bag of 300 neons, I like to split that up to three different tanks. And anything that you import, generally, if you can get past the first three or four days, usually that will take you out of the woods. But if you start having problems at three to four days, it's very hard to get these fish back up on their little fins. So I use several types of chemicals for receiving fish. One is called receiver. One, I know it sounds stupid, but the other one's called Receiver Two. There used to be a company out there called kamakwa who are no longer in business, but I had bought several kilos of this stuff years ago. You treat the water, and like Rob said, there's some methane blue in there. There's some things in there that are antifungal, some stuff to help them breathe. I like to treat everything before it gets sick. The best advice I ever got from anybody with Paul norton. norton. tapa, Bay Fisheries. And he's always said, you can keep a healthy fish healthy, but it's the son of a gun to get a sick fish healthy. So I like to prevent it of care. But that's me because I'm bringing it from all over the world.

And I think there's a big lack, like you said, all these brands and stuff that I used to have, like blasting medications, now, really, they don't offer a ton of them. They've taken a lot of medications away from the shelves, whether it be trying, because most of the medications they use, at least to some extent, were intended for humans at one point, whether it's antibiotics or something else. And they've been just pulled from the shelves over the years, and it's getting worse and worse. So we know longer have these broad spectrum curalls that we try to use as preventative. At least there's not as many, but yeah, it depends on your application and if you're hedging your bet or just getting a few in.

Yeah, I'd like to keep like I said, if I get 300 neons, I take three different tanks and treat them all the same thing. But that way, if you happen to have some neons that crap out on you and they skunk up the tank while you're away from your shop overnight and stuff, you don't lose all 300. You might lose 100, which sounds terrible, but losing 100 or one third of your batch is better than losing everything. But there are so many cool things out there that you can use. But another good thing to do is when you bring the stuff in, especially if you're bringing stuff from overseas is after you get them acclimated to get them in the tank and stuff, leave them in the dark for about 24 hours. Only put the light on to kind of check on them to see if they got ick to see if they've got any problems of breathing. But for some reason, that 24 hours really seems to help. If they're in the dark because these fish are hung over, you have to realize that they probably were shipped on a Thursday from Venezuela. Venezuela, Colombia.

I've been packed it for us.

Probably packed it for us.

Yeah. wink, wink.

And so that comes in ship Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, finally into my area on Monday. They've been in, in and out of a bag, you know, three or four times. And the more you handle the fish, the more stress you put upon it. So giving it overnight or 24 hours in the dark to kind of relax and kind of veg out it seems to be very helpful. I never believed in that. And then I learned that from another friend of ours that really does help.

Like when they're transporting horses or anything, putting them in a darker area, even like cats or they've proven that with gators, if they cover up their eyes, they're a lot more calmer during transport. It's just a natural given thing with almost any animal.

Yeah, that geo right now is running a whole bunch of different zoos. The Columbus Zoo has its own series. Zoo in North Carolina has their own series. And every time you see you move a large mammal or reptiles or whatever it may be, the first thing you do is they cover the eyes of the animal with a tall or a blanket just to get it to calm down. Because, of course, all animals want to do is you want to either fight or flight. And so, of course, the adrenaline starts pumping on these animals. So it's just best to keep them kind of in the dark to stay calm and not freak out.

Now, the second part of that question, because they preemptively knew I was going to say use aquarium salt, because that's what you use for every generic treatment is how much would you recommend using? Look at the back of your container of aquarium salt. They have recommended usage for just not necessarily medical treatment, but just for the benefit of the tank or trying to use for quarantine purposes. But I always like to do one tablespoon for three gallons. That's generally a recommendation just for I'm trying to think of the word not botanical, but just a general use treatment that you're not just treating a disease for, you're just being safe and adding a little salt to the water for the benefit of the tank.

Yeah. My friends over at cyrus Farms have always told me when you're treating fishing that you're importing a lot of the fish that that segres has has been imported. Probably been there two or three days, and you probably need to continue that a little bit once you get them to yourself. But if you want to be a little more aggressive, one teaspoon per gallon is what they recommend. Two teaspoons per gallon will put you into the brackish area.

Right. One teaspoon per gallon is literally how you treat sores or anything that you would treat on a fish. And be careful. People say that you can just put it right in the tank directly. But know what fish you have. If you've got bottom dwelling fish or fish that are dumb enough to swallow it, don't put it in there. I've had corridors fins burnt right off just because I didn't know any better.

Yeah.

For me, if you have a back filter sometimes it's easier to just put the salt in the back filter and it gets diluted a little bit faster, but it also doesn't sit on the bottom of the tank and just kind of fall apart and the fish pick at it.

Well, I think we covered that question, so the next question is a review. So if you're listening to this, we try to record episodes ahead of time. So for us, it's two weeks ago that we did Story Time Three, so we had joanne message us again, we leave last names. Hello, Rob, Adam, and Jim. I love the podcast and appreciate you guys, what you do a lot. The Thunder dome story has been keeping me up at night, and I had to write, losing a child seems to be the most awful experience a parent can have. I have a daughter and can't imagine how terrible it would be losing her. So please know that I empathize with the situation, but I still believe that there's no excuse. intentional animal abuse is never okay. I feel badly for that poor fish. I'm with Adam. They should never have sold them. If you're not, they're going to be tormented and abused. End of my rant. See you on the next podcast. Love what you do, so you better.

Explain that a little bit to people if they missed that.

So we do storytime. It's a series that we do in the podcast where we just when we started the podcast, we wanted to do each episode of the Aquarium Guys to be a topic. So you can go back and learn about a type of fish, learn about how to do care, learn how to build a tank, whatever it is that you would want, and have an evergreen library of resources. So you can go back and talk to the experts that we've had or listen to the experts that we've had on the podcast. And we've had, of course, tangents, because Jimmy, Adam, and I, you know, we're humans and we like to giggle about things that are off topic as well. We had fans that apparently enjoyed some of our banter and asked, hey, can you please put together just an episode of just Your stories? So that's what we did. And now it's by popular demand that people demand it. So we have Jimmy crack a beer, we all get around a metaphorical campfire and bring some friends on, and we talk about crazy things that have happened in our past, mostly aquarium related. And one of them last week was apparently a leukemia patient, or what could be assumed as a leukemia patient, maybe.

Even a Make A Wish patient coming.

In for their last wish of getting their aquarium.

And it was a young ten year old, twelve year old, if I remember right.

Definitely a decision where it's definitely in the moral gray, but we're not going to cover things up just because we think that it's too harsh for ears. We have an explicit label on it. We we didn't say anything bad about the person, but again, it basically came down to the kid who wanted a bunch of fish in a tank that probably would hurt each other and just for the kids what seeming to be last wish. So it was certainly a scenario to put yourself in, and we consider that a story of success because it made people feel things, whatever side they were on, if they were for the kid, for the fish. But regardless, it was an awkward scenario.

In our guest defense, it was our guest that was working at the pet store, right? He told the family and the child many, many times that these fish would not get along. And then finally, at the end, he the kid knew this, and he just wanted to have chaos in his tank.

I wanted a chaos and tank. So I don't know where you put yourself on the moral compass, but, you know, it made people realize they have a moral compass. And I feel like that's a good enough job if we can do that on a two hour podcast. Well, thanks for the information, and again, we never condone animal abuse of any kind, but we will get the crap.

Out of each other.

Treat your friend's right.

Punch your friend into the throat.

Treat your fish right. Punch your friend on the throat.

Thank you.

All right, that is what we got for questions. Moral. The story is ivan, you clearly need to listen to that story time three.

Yeah, he fell asleep. He's watching TV right now.

He's going like, what in the world is this all about? But, ivan, again, we appreciate you coming on, man. We got so many questions. We normally don't have a ton of homework. We try to brush ourselves up on the topic. We're not experts on everything that we have people on, for sure. And most of the time, I would put almost all the time. A guest always knows more than us on the topic. So getting a book for homework was about the most fun I've had in the last two weeks.

So.

Thank you, ivan.

You're most welcome.

So, ivan, before we get into this, we want to know a little bit more about you. So what got you into this hobby? And again, just for background, what got you into doing expeditions in crazy areas where these wonderful areas of wildlife are?

Oh, man. To me, it came quite easy. There's a lot of people that have to spend their life and they don't know what they want to do. And to me, since I was a kid, it was a calling. Everybody at the school, when they came out to recess, they wanted to play four square or basketball or soccer, and I just wanted to go out and explore. We had a big mountain in the back of the school, and the mountain is quite virgin. So there's pit vipers, rattlesnakes, coral snakes, and I'd go in there instead of playing and bring back a rattlesnake or something. And that's all I wanted to do. So it was clear enough for me.

Where did you grow up that you didn't get expelled for that?

He's going along so well with Adam and all these poisonous things that they love.

I grew up in between two cities in Venezuela, between caracas and valencia. And we lived in these two places. We had two houses, and depending where my parents had more work, we would move. And every time we moved, the first thing I put in the car was the aquarium. So I've been an aquarium guy since I was a kid.

Wonderful. And it just came, completely came natural. No family member got you into it. You're like that's just my calling.

Well, the aquarium is from my father was croatian, my mother from nicaragua, and they met here. So I'm like a parrot, stick with something, we won't tell, don't worry. But my father was the one that always had an aquarium at home. But exploring came. It was just me. When the kids, for example, in 7th or grade or something, they went they wanted to go to the movies or to the mall to hang out. I was going into cave. I was always exploring.

So did your parents encourage this or did they not know about this? Because I can't imagine having your young child run out to the cave would be an ideal situation.

They did not encourage it. And there's a good story about the caves, actually.

Well, let's hear it.

But I guess it was probably 7th grade, and we had a driver that would bring us to school. It was far away. I would always tell him, Listen, drop me off here after school in the caves. It's like a national park and it's a mountain. You'd go to the caves. And the caves here would not be like, probably in the Us. Or somewhere else where you have a boardwalk or something. This was like a bush. And the caves, nobody would go in. So he would drop me off. I would tell him, Listen, pick me up in 2 hours. And I'd go in and come out after 2 hours, then wait for him and go home. But one day I wanted him to come with me. I wanted to show the driver what I was doing. And he didn't want to go, but I bribed him. And to bribe him, I gave him a pack of cigarettes and a pack of matches. I bought him that and he agreed and he went with me. And we went deep in these caves, very deep, like it's totally burgeon, practically. And I don't know, we were a quarter mile down or something, and the flashlight hit a rock and it turned off.

I feel like this is the beginning of a good movie.

So this is like a Tuesday, 03:00 in the afternoon. Nobody was going to go there, not even probably in a week or more. So we got out with the last match from the cigarettes that I bribed them. So smoking saved us.

Atta boy.

First time that smoking was something that saved my life. So that was one of the incidents. But that's what I did. That's what I did after school.

Did your parents find out about that?

They were working all the time and I was outside in the bush.

That's a fantastic story.

I suddenly I'm going to keep smokes and matches on me at all times. What are you, a pack a day? Like no, that's emergency only emergency light. So I have so many questions. But first, what brand was it? Like newports marlboro. Now we're here today and you're pretty famous, especially on the likes of you, like YouTube. I know that's where I knew you before is from your documentaries that you've done in the past. And you've really brought some light to how these aquarium fish are in the wild. And now you have the book that's again coming out, being shipped in a week, fishes of the orinoco in the Wild and breathtaking. Got to say, was this a collection of multiple expeditions or was this like one two month span of you going out just for this book?

Well, this started the earliest picture in there is from 2008. So that was a five megapixel camera when the five megapixels were like, wow, I had a three megapixel. And when I got the five, it was like, I had the best camera in the world. So it's from 2008 to right now, what is it, twelve years of photography in there, right?

So you've done this length of twelve years of different expeditions for different purposes and mapped out how these species are in locations. You have a map in the beginning of the book and how it preludes. And for those that don't know, you need to go buy this book. Again, the link is in the show notes. For those that are listening, there is a promo code. It's aquarium guys five it's 5% off the book. Certainly hop on it for all that's listening. But again, right when you it's a great book.

It is a good book. Yes.

Right when you start off, it tells you a little bit more about you and how the book got started. But it also gives this wonderful map. Are these territories that are normally labeled like that? Or was it just people in the area that just call it the territory? Because you even have places called the Lost World, it seems almost Indiana Jones like, if you will.

Well, the areas are named. For example, the the Lost world is the Kanyma National Park. But in the Conundoyle story, that's where the Lost World, that's that's what it was called. That's where the Conundo novel came from. Like and where the Disney movies come from, the tepuys and those flat tops and the waterfalls. So that's called the lost world. Right. And I place the name of the places in the way that we call them when we go somewhere. And after ten years of being there, we call it we give it a name. That's the name that is in the book. So it's it's sort of a romantic name, but it does show you it does tell you what the place is like.

It really does give a full picture. And it is following inlets and outlets all across the Ornocco River, which goes across the spans of the top of South America. But it's not just like the river it's focusing on, because it's such a massive maze of water features feeding into the Ornanco. That is really the impressive part that really paints a picture.

Yeah. And each area is unique. For example, you got the Lost World area that for me is like a nursery because it's all these little streams that are crystal clear, and they also every 100 yards there's a new stream and a loose spring that comes out of the ground. So it's a nursery of rivers that's like where the water is born. So I was traveling for so many years, but I never knew how to put this book together, because when I started, I was always looking at the things that I didn't have to see. For example, when I started, I was always swatting the mosquitoes, getting stuck in the mud, and that's all what I saw. Nowadays, the mud and the mosquitoes are still there, but I'm looking at different things. I'm looking at the behavior and how everything relates. So I had to grow to be able to do the book. It took me 15 years to take the pictures, but I only felt with the authority to do it 15 years after.

It really does paint an experience. Honestly, I had no idea what was coming into this book. I figured it was going to talk about the expedition, some of your hurdles, showing off some of the treasures you found, but not 15 years of mapping out different species, right. In their biotope behaviors. It really paints a picture on each different species. It's like taking a traditional fish manual that you would normally get. Like I always mentioned before, like the axel rodi book, in the past, it was like Megan, the 1950s, it's really popularized people buy a tropical fish manual and it just gives you what's popular in the hobby. This takes the entire top part of Central America and maps out fish. Not in necessarily just the genus and temperature and size and PH, but you paint a picture on how you experienced it, live in front of you in their natural habitat and what's going on to them. Right now. We don't get that in any other book. It's something else. So you said that over time you had to grow yourself to figure out how to capture this. I want to know where did in the world did you take notes per species? How did you gather this? You said that you just took pictures. What was your intent going out 15 years ago and start capturing all of this documentary wise?

Well, I was always exploring, like I told you, right? And I was always into photography. My sister gave me my first camera and since then I was always either painting because I painted before, I was either painting, exploring, or taking pictures. And I was always drawn to water, rivers, the ocean, always near bodied as of water, but I could never put it together until I met Oliver lucanus. And once I met Oliver, oliver lucanus and I saw him working in the wild, then it's when I say, hey, this what it makes sense. I love photography, I love exploring, this is exactly what I should be doing. And I never could put two and two, one and one together to make two until I met all of them. So he's to blame.

Well, we'll make sure to send him compliments quite soon. I don't know about blame.

So how did you meet him?

Well, he came down, I used to have a discus reading, like a discus hatchery. I had a big discus hatchery and it got so big that I saturated the national market and I needed to export. So looking for a way to export them, I met people that would say, listen, we don't want discus, we want like Oliver Lucas, we want this rare piranha that comes out in that river. So I started going to the river looking for that piranha, I would find it and I started shipping them to him. So he's like, listen, can you bring me down and show me where you're getting all these fishes? And I brought him down and the.

Light bulbs will suddenly went off. We need to make a book.

Were you ever worried about like maybe is this guy just going to see where I'm getting all this stuff and then just kind of sidestep you? That might be the first thing I would think in my mind. If it's somebody you don't really know.

I don't think so. My discretionary was really big and it was probably 6000 sqft.

That's a lot of real estate.

That's a lot of real estate.

We were changing, I don't know, like 15,000 liters of water a day. We had a lot of discount. I actually was happy when he came and he showed me all of this, how he did it. I was really thankful and I owe it all to him.

So Adam, I know you did a bunch of homework on this and you were eager to get some questions out for ivan. Let's start with some of your questions.

So it said in your book that the cardinal tetras that they break. Off into smaller schools in the daytime, and then they form like one big school at night. Did you see them disperse early in the morning, or did they get together at night? Because I was always under the impression that Cardinal Tetras would just always in one big school.

This is the thing. When we go to exploring, for example, to a little stream, we pick a spot which is not probably 20 or 30 yards long, and we stay in this spot, for example, eight days, and we get there at 430 or 05:00 in the morning because I have to video or photograph the sunrise, and we're there all day. And once at night, you sometimes have to state a photograph or a video of the fish that come out by night or to video the sunset. So we're there from 430 in the morning till 07:00 at night, every day for eight days. So you see the behavior of all the fish. And Cardinal tetris, when it's dusk starts coming, they all gather together, those smaller schools. They all start gathering together. They start all going and staying in one place. They they stop schooling far. You know, they have an area probably 20 yards long where they school back and forth, and they never go out of that area. And then they stay in one place, and that's what they do. And then in the morning, they go again and they disperse into smaller schools. That's their behavior.

Do you think that they get together in a larger school for protection from predator?

Probably a sense of feeling. I don't know. Probably.

Maybe like a baby.

I was just thinking there's safety in numbers, and if a predator comes in real fast and you've got a huge school, you're more likely to live through it if you can run faster than your friend. That whole thing.

Listen, there's so many incredible behaviors that we don't get to see in the aquarium because our aquariums are not equipped for it. For example, if I bring you down and I bring it to a certain river and you see it's crystal clear, you're floating there, and you see a tree trunk that fell down from the forest right when the water edge erodes and the tree falls down. And if the tree stays two to 3ft underwater and not deeper, it becomes a biotope of five or six different species. If it's deeper, they're not there anymore. So if you find that sweet trunk at that level, there's fish that live on top of that sweet trunk. There's fish that live behind it, and there's fish that live under it, and that's where you'll find them. But if you don't have the current and you don't have it at a certain step in your aquarium, you'll never know that's.

What I liked about this book was that it said so much about the behaviors. That was just interesting stuff. The big one that I personally liked was the rummy nose tetras one.

That was the one I was just about to say myself that took me away. If I remember correctly, you stated that anytime that you see a rummy nose tetra school, or what you call a fire nose tetra, almost always there'd be a stingray underneath.

Yeah, that's the rule. And it works. And you're there if you see them schooling in the same spot, because rummy noses have also nine or ten meter range. That's the range they go back and forth, and that's all they do all day long. They never go out of this range. So if you see them schooling around in one circle, there's a stingray under them, and they go down, and they bite the stingray. It's the skin or the parasites that are on them, I guess, or the dead skin, but that's what they do. I know this is probably not known. This is probably not known. No, I have it on video. I have it on video, and I have it from four or five different rivers that are really far away from each other, with different species. Even with motorro or with obrini. They do it with different species, too, of stinglands.

The whole book covers this mantra that we take a species that we may or may not know. It gives you an idea of one is identified, and then it gives you the element of what you saw them in, the behaviors they saw, what's happening to their area, stuff that you normally never get another fish book where they just tell you it's like, oh, seem semi aggressive. Don't keep with these species. They like these types of food. Instead, you're painting a separate picture. You're like, these guys stay in this sort of an area. They're almost always found in this. This is how I saw them feed stuff that no one has insight in unless they've literally done expeditions for years. So even when you said, like the roma tetras, absolutely. That's not documented in other books. I mean, I've studied rummy nose tetras. I have 200 of them on hand right now in a 90 gallon aquarium. They do that back and forth, motion all day. And then I put a log in, and suddenly they're grazing on it, and the log was covered in little bugs when I put it in. Sure enough, maybe the same behavior as stingray. But there's no way I can even pretend to know what that is because they're not in a river system. I don't have that blanket to map that. And it gives us perspective that we can try to re emulate ourselves versus just having someone giving their theory of what they saw happen in a 20 gallon tank.

Well, I'm going to give you a little secret. If you read the book six or seven times and you really study it and map it out, you're going to understand that everything in there late. So when you hear the rummy nose Tetra and you're reading the Cardinal Tetra, you'll understand how they relate with each other and which fish goes next from there. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it certainly does.

I'm talking about one species at a time. But if you look well and you see the plants that are related and you see the phs and you see the areas, you're going to understand that these fish overlap with each other and they're all related in some way. It would be like being in the river. You'd know that the cardinator is going to be there, the Ssrinkus are going to be here, the geophagus are going to be here. So you can map out the whole system. The whole book is a whole system.

So it sort of acts like a neighborhood.

Yes. And a very diverse one.

Yes.

So Adam, what was your other questions you got for ivan?

The farewell is did you see those more active at night or are they nocturnal or diurnal? Because great ice they're diurnal.

Okay.

See everybody says that they're nocturnal in the books, in the old books that I have, they say they only come out at night and they're diurnal. That's what I was interested in because that's not in. I have some books from the old Axerod book and even some of the old care books that I have even as early as the late, early 2000s, they all say farewells are nocturnal, treat them just like a pleco. Placo's are nocturnal but these are diurnal. So that is important to note which you wouldn't even known and most people don't keep them but I like them and it was just interesting stuff. Like I thought about with the Rummy nose tetris. Why couldn't you put rummy nose tetras with your stingrays? Well be good for water quality with your rummy nose.

Exactly. But you see, the thing is with Fire Lowellas, is that you won't find them anywhere where they're not being say water blasted or sandblasted. You won't find them in the stretch of the river where there's no current. They're not there, they don't live there. So you have to go where the river narrows out, where it narrows in sorry. And it reduces in width and the water starts flowing faster and whatever branch falls in there starts vibrating up and down with the current. It's so strong and that's where you'll find them. If you look somewhere else, you'll be there all your life, you won't find one.

Okay, that makes total sense now because I've had them and I always wondered because they never really said how to keep whenever I'd keep them in my store, I'd always just say, yeah, just treat them like a regular plea code. I wouldn't think of a fast moving current.

If you have the fast burning current 5ft in front of you and you're in the part where the pool starts, you'll never see it. You'll never find them. Got.

You see this is why people need this book.

Yeah. So the thing is, the book was intended to be a coffee table book, right? Yes. There's limited amount of information. There's a lot of more information that did not fit. We're trying to make a new I think there's six or seven areas that we cover in the book. And we want to make a series of six smaller books, probably soft cover, smaller books that go in depth in each area that will explain things, for example, that Ram Ciglets have, like apartment buildings, all these behaviors that you see in the wild that nobody knows about, right, until you're there for years. And so we'll try to cover it more in depth in future books. But this was intended more as, say, like a coffee table light reading book. But it has very good information in it.

So we're not going to be able to get through the whole book with you over a podcast, for sure. But what I want is stuff that maybe wasn't in the book or wasn't interpreted like some of the stories, some of the crazier parts of making the book going out in the expedition. What are some of the things that just absolutely took you and surprised you like no other? Something you never expected to happen that clearly went in the opposite direction you were never expecting?

There's many every trip has its own. But we have a show on YouTube that we made many years ago titled The Fish Guys, and it shows you how we did the expeditions, right. It's like the back, the camera facing towards us, and it shows you what we did, what we spoke about, where we went. But we went to this small stream, and there was a lot of green aquatic plants that look like little like eliot Harris polylike pipes, little streams of a wig, a very green wig floating around. And George Fear was netting these wigs, and he captured a green farewella electric green, and all its back was checkered board, like a chessboard in black. So it was black and green checkered board farlowella. So he starts yelling, and I swim downstream where he was. We see the thing in the net. We start jumping up and down, hugging each other because it was like emerald fluorescent green with checkered board. And the thing jumped out of the net and went in the river. And we were there for three more days, and we never found it. So things like that, you feel like.

You need a film crew by you at all times to prove these things. Like, no, it's not a fish story. I'm telling you, it has glowing eyes.

Would sound like crazy.

You know those vans shoes?

Yeah, I have a pair.

Yeah, but green and black wonderful.

You got to find that, go back, make some money.

Yeah, well, we live for three days. We comb the place, and we couldn't find it.

Now what's some species that you found, because, again, 15 years is a long time. And I know even on your YouTube channel, one of your most popular YouTube videos is New Unidentified plato. And tell us some of the stories, like, of stuff that you guys maybe discovered or didn't know a whole lot about.

Well, the latest one is freshwater sponges.

You didn't know about those?

Well, we found these not the small ones. We found some big ones.

Really?

Yeah, we found some big waters freshwater sponges that have muscles in them, too. So they live sympathically with muscles, and they're big. They're not like usually the freshwater sponges. They're flat and they stick to a free trunk or to a rock, but they're really thin. They're not bulging out like the ocean ones. Right. These bulge out.

So how big are we talking?

We're talking about that they bulge out.

Here you have one. It's now a loofa on a stick.

Right. Because I had to bring them back to photograph them and put them in the museum. So they probably have a height of over an inch or more.

That's definitely sizable.

Yes, probably like two inches, which is a lot for a freshwater sponge.

And freshwater sponge in that area, which is, to my knowledge, unheard of.

Yes, exactly. We find a lot of new species of sponge, of freshwater sponges, electrical green ones. But I've I've seen many fish that I can't capture because they're too deep, probably. I've seen things that look like green cranny siezla.

Green, really?

What? Green cranny sizzler. They look like how do you call this? A pike sickly green. But they're too deep. And I never use scuba diving equipment because, as I tell you, we spend ten days, 12 hours a day, we climb up waterfall. You can't ring cylinders and cylinders of air. So we do snorkeling. And I go down 5 meters, but after 5 meters, I can't stay much down. It's not like I'm a super duper. I can't hold my breath for more than 40 seconds a minute. So I video it or take a picture, and then I go up, back up. But you see some things that are really strange, but we sometimes capture them. We once captured something that looked like the weirdest fish we've ever captured. Looked like, let's say I'm feeling like.

There'S going to be a false sea horse.

Imagine a sea horse. Those dragon. Sea horses, right.

Leafy dragons.

Yeah. Okay, the dragons. But take all the things that stick out, just the fish itself out, all the fins and all that seaweed looking thing.

So kind of like it was a sea dragon.

Yeah. So, for example, let's say if you got like a trumpet fish or something, and then you made it really crooked, like a z or something, but it was a fish, and we found it in the leaf litter. So again, we were so happy, we put it in a bag we were going to put it in for mildehyde. Our friend said, no, I don't want to put it for milddehyde because it's alive. I want to bring it in alive. And he forgot it in the under the car seat?

No.

After three days of heat, everything was rotted and the thing was disintegrated, but it was the weirdest thing in the world. So there's a lot of things that need to be discovered still.

So you gave us a map on these areas. How populated are these areas? How many people are in there? Is this pretty deep in some forests where there haven't been people for ages?

Some of the Western guiana, some parts of the Western guiana shield that we have pictures of. For example, the cores las oh, my God, I forgot tempt colitis. I think it is in there. lasi and sisters. Those were taken on top of the Chawrita Falls. And I think nobody has been up there, only us. It's a place where nobody I tried to go up there the first time with Oliver, and we can only get to the base of it. And then after two expeditions, we were able to go up to the top of the fall. So there's clear places that are really remote.

I always try to imagine our little clip of it. Like we watch like, Jeremy Wade on River monsters, and it takes like two weeks to get to the one point where they want to try to find something and then find this massive arabima that no one's ever discovered. I'm just trying to imagine that. And you guys are finding crazy close to sea dragons. Checkered colored fish. You're really painting us as a picture. I feel like there needs to be a full on Indiana Jones movie that needs to be done there.

Well, watch the fish guys and you'll see how we did it. When you watch that series we have there, there's two expeditions uploaded from beginning to end. The third one, we didn't upload the whole thing. Try. If you see it, you're going to see that there's a lot of us tucking in the car. Because all these areas when you go down here to the Amazon, there's no airports. And the few airports that are there, they don't have place to rent a car. So you have to drive there. So for example, if you go to the Lost World, the first day you drive 13 hours. The next day you drive 12 hours. And then every day after that you drive 6 hours. And so you spend hours on end in the car. The expedition is 90% in the car and then 10% in the water. You're driving all the time. You have to keep that in mind when you're watching the fish guys. We wanted to show you what it's really like. So there's a lot of car footage.

Are you guys sleeping in the car then at night? Or are you guys throwing up a tent.

Sometimes we sleep in the tent. Usually we try to sleep in a town because we have to charge all the batteries from the cameras. And I also need to check the pictures I take because if you have, like remember, I have to have in focus as the eye. If the eye is not in focus, then a magazine won't take it, for example. So you have to check if you were photographing, let's say, a killy fish, and you have to check all the pictures you have of that killy fish before you leave that area for 8 hours away. You have to check if you got one with where the eye is in focus. So you have to check them on your computer. So every night you have to go through thousands of pictures just checking to see what you did to see if you got it in the can or not. It's a lot of work.

I'm exhausted just listening to all this.

I swallowed a lot of water to do that book.

So when you're in the orinoco, is there any South American river dolphins in that river?

Yes, and we also got manatees.

Oh, you have manatees as well? I didn't know. I thought that was for some reason, I thought that was, like a North American stable. And we had the only collective of them.

No, we have them here. And now there seems to be two species of freshwater dolphins here. Really? There's a rapid called the Aturis and My purest Rap rapids down in the Amazon state here in Venezuela, in the border with Colombia. And these rapids are so strong and so violent that the freshwater dolphins haven't been able to go up or down for millions of years. So now it seems like the ones on top of the river are a different species or subspecies. My friends are doing now all the DNA and all the scientific research.

So what is it like interacting with a river dolphin? It's just like such an alien world to me, just trying to think of a dolphin just going down a river. Are they more aggressive? Are they more curious? Is it something you got to be wary about, like stealing your equipment?

How many times have they your photographic evidence?

Right.

I've seen them a lot in the wild, but I've never slammed with them. Once you stop, if they go next to your boat, once you get out, they flee. They go they don't come up to you. If they come up to you is a place where they're being trained, where people are feeding them. You know what I mean? Yeah. Got you. I've been swimming for 15 years, and none have come up to me and said, hi and swim around with me.

A few years back, rob's and I, we were down in Florida, and there's one place, Clear River, south of Tampa, where it's the only place you legally can go swimming at the Manatees in the United States, and the Florida dnr is right there kind of watching. And I've done it twice. robson and I've done it once. And the Manatees there are very friendly, and you can get some great photographs and stuff.

But yeah, they don't really care about you. They'll push you over to get a good chunk of ocean lettuce or whatever is there in front of them.

So they're very much fun for us. I was amazed at how large these creatures are.

I got a very good iconic picture of freshwater dolphins, and they were taken here. There's an aquarium in my town called the valencia Aquarium, and it was the only place where they had them in captivity, and they were breeding them, and they had to train. They did it like a show, like in seaworld, but with the freshwater ones. So when I wasn't going on expeditions, I'd go there every Monday when they do maintenance, and they let me jump in and swim with them. So I would swim with them and take a thousand pictures. So I have thousands of pictures of these freshwater dolphins, but they're all in this humongous pool. They're not in the wild. Got you. I shot them from the bottom towards the top so you can't see the walls of the aquarium and stuff, but they're not in the wild. I have never had the chance to get them to come closer. Once you're in the aquarium, they try to get your gear. They take your snorkel off. You have to be careful they don't puncture your housing. And they're so bored, probably in there, too, that they want to play with you.

So what are some of the biggest dangers and risks of going out in the middle of the oracle and oko and trying to capture all of these on pictures and film?

The gorilla.

A what?

The gorilla.

The actual gorillas.

I'm assuming that's not the animal. I'm assuming we're talking about some sort of people.

The people, yes, people. Humans. Humans. The real dangers is humans.

Poachers, drug cartel. What are we talking about?

All of that. Whatever it is, that's the only thing we're afraid of. I've swam with the coral snakes, with electric eels, with cayman, with all of this, but I'm really scared as of people. Humans.

So have you ever found a white lobster? A white lobster? Like a ballo? Cocaine, just floating down the river? Random.

Where the hell are you going with this?

No, no. We found them with a lot of I have many I've had many stories, but I can't tell him like this.

His life will be in danger.

Are we going to have to wait for book three stories?

But in one of the fish guys, you could see some one of the episodes.

Can you tell us, like, an older story that's safe to give us a hint?

None of them are safe in the fish guys. You see a part where they're they're they're smuggling a lot of gasoline and stuff, and there's drums and barrels, hundreds of drums and barrels, and people just smuggling them, but you can see it in the video.

So once you run into this fine group of people, once they find out you're just a fish geek, do they leave you alone or do they raise you quite a bit? All right.

They're classified, Jimmy.

Listen, Oliver and I, once, he always said, listen, I want to go and find some of them, because that would be the best picture to take a picture of you with them in the wild with their machine guns and stuff. But once you're there and they're with their machine guns, you don't want to take out your camera.

No, of course not.

So I've dealt with them. I've been there, but the first thing they say is, don't touch the camera, and I don't want to touch it.

I mean, that's only fair.

That's a good idea.

That is only fair.

Follow the instructions, and I'm still here.

So as you go to these places over and over again, do you run into some of the same ones, or is it always somebody new?

Somebody new, okay.

I was going to say, I hear they replaced their help a lot.

They don't have somebody new.

And the rules change and the situation changes, and whatever they're doing changes, whatever the goods are changes. It's always different.

Are you saying the cartel union doesn't do their job? Jimmy? How dare you?

Yeah, no, don't give them my address.

How dare you? All right, so out of all of this, because again, the whole idea is you're painting us a picture of what you're experiencing with all these different species in their natural habitat and how they all have different effects, some of these you even paint out some of the habitat that's happening. So out of all the areas, what's the issues that are happening to some of the habitat and specifics in some of these areas?

Okay, specifics. Well, you see, there's a mix of them, and I'll give you an example. There's river near well, not near my house, like an hour and away, called the Lemon River. And the Lemon River, there's pictures in the book of the Lemon River. There's pictures of Poisilia and of plecos. But that river, I think, like 20 years ago, had a tragedy where I guess for global warming or something, there was a big landslide, right? It rained so much that the river filled up, and all the fish that were in there got drained into the Lake of valencia. Right? Now, because there's a town in between the mountain where it's born and the Lake of valencia, there's a barrier by humans, which is pollution, right? The river gets polluted in the bottom so the fish can't go back up. So now you've got an extinction there that was natural. It was a nature but the river can't get more fish in it because there's pollution along the way. So there's many causes. Every place is a different situation but usually it's people involved as usual and we have treated our rivers as badly as in Europe and as badly as North America has in Central America everybody has treated their rivers bad right. Nobody gets out clean.

So is it just the pollution that you see, or is there's a for instance right, we see in a lot of north america of species being wiped out over the past hundred years, even in our own area. Because again, we're in minnesota. We have 18,000 lakes in minnesota. It's really dense of water. And we've seen river systems that have set up different small port damming where we thought that fish could go through, but they couldn't. And we've killed off species of sturgeon. And even in our own we're close to fargo, north dakota, and even in our own red river up here, they had to reintroduce sturgeon. They had to rebuild different flows on dam so fish could get past and you know it takes 20 years for them to mature. So now we're 25 years in we're seeing the first babies of sturgeon reintroduced. Is it just pollution or is there damage going on in the orna codeco?

The oreco doesn't have any damning what there is, is mining. There's oil rigs, you name it. For example, in the area called the yanos that you see in the book, if you if you drill for looking for water, for example, you want to make a well, you'll get sulfur, and you'll get gas, and you know, you have to patch it all the way down. Because if the government finds out it's government owned, it's not like in the Us. Where you hit jackpot that you find gas. So whatever gets drilled everything spills into the river. So it's a problem with oil, petroleum oil spills. It's mostly human related but that's the way it goes. As I tell you, we've treated them as bad as anywhere else.

Adam, do you have anything else on your list? I know we could derail from it.

Well I just have so many questions and I don't want to wreck his other books.

I'm excited now that there's going to.

Be more care because literally kid in.

A candy store right now.

Yeah. So it's like the care stuff is important because it just opens your eyes at a new way of keeping something. So, like now, actually, when I get my room up, I'm going to put rummy nose tetras with my stingrays because and then I'm thinking, I'll know the water quality, because if the rummy noses noses are bad, then my stingrays water quality is probably going to be bad and then I won't have to worry about death curl. Plus they'll pick parasites off. Did you notice all the piranhas are finnippers right or do they attack smaller fish and. Eat the smaller fish in the wild.

Hygienentris. kariba they attack a lot of schools of fish, but they eat them whole because they're larger piranhas. But the finn nippers are usually juvenile piranhas or the species which are the finnippers. Right, yeah.

Okay, because I was just wondering, because I was trying to understand adults, if some of the piranhas were finnippers on bigger fish, or if they would just they would just go to eat smaller fish.

Well, depends. Remember, you, you got a system, for example, the flooded areas, the flooded savannah. You go to the flooded savannah, you got thousands of acres of crystal clear water, and piranhas are sparse in there. There's eleven or twelve species. But if you put five piranhas in a, I don't know, 50 gallon or 40 gallon aquarium, it's different. My observation is the wild is completely different than confined in a glass aquarium. Right, yeah. If you put five piranhas in a small aquarium, it's totally different than if you put them in 20 acres of water. The behavior is probably going to be different, too. The same with the rummy nose tetris, probably. If you put the rummy nose tetras in with the stingrays, the stingrays, when it goes 6 meters deep, it gets a break from the rummy nose. But if you keep them in an aquarium combined with a rummy nose, they're going to be biting that thing all the time. So I don't know if they're going to hurt them. So these are all observations of how they do in the wild. It's like a natural history, what was there at the moment and what they do.

Wonderful. So we asked you before, again, trying to discover new species, and you told us a lot of different examples. Have you ever found species that were thought to be extinct in the area, but then suddenly appeared because you said you're filming for eight days at a crack in one area.

Yeah, well, we found species. For example, I got an article on my website, which I published on psh a long time ago. It was price to brake in carspenus. That was a piranha that was described with one sample. Nobody knew what it looked like live. It was a dead sample in a museum, and they described it with just that thing. So I went to the type locality and I went to look for him, and I took the first live pictures of the fish in the wild. Ever live pictures, ever. And the same happened with Sara salmos Nelson I, which is piranha, which is an endemic from the eurocoa River. And the same with saraso Never reentered, which is another piranha. There was a time where they called me the piranha man because the piranha man, because I was photographing all these piranhas that had never been photographed before. And the same happens with other things. But my inventory of plant photograph or flowers in the wild is much bigger than the fish one. But people know me for the fish. But the same happens with the orchids. I got pictures of new species of orchids. I got species of orchids that had been described but nobody knew what they looked like alive because they did it. They described it from a dead sample which was dry and they didn't know what color it was. But people don't know me for that. They know me for the fish. But I want to put that in the other books. In the books. I want to do I want to do them, for example, like the Echinaceal trips of Humble where it's like a captain's log of what you see every day and the plants that were next to it. When you're down in the Amazon and you see all these neon tetras and there's no aquatic plants, practically, but all the edge of the water is full of how do you call these things? beam, the spy traps. And they're full of all these carnivorous plants that are right along the edge of the water because they live in that moisture. That's the aquatic plants that live with them because they swim around them. The neon tetras are swimming around hard neighbors plants. Nobody knows that.

Do any of those plants go after the fish?

That would be kind of cool.

I pay $10 to see that.

So I have to write all of that down, and I will. I got it on video too.

Wonderful.

I need the time.

I just want to have a book of each topic. Like one of the stuff you've discovered, stuff that you thought was extinct, stuff that's never been mapped before. I like your slogan on your website. It says you can't let me pull it up here again because I'm actually looking down your articles and you said that you can't preserve something that you don't know exists that really is proven here. You think of the world as being this explored, mapped place. But just these small points that you get in some of these fish just prove on how out of touch we are with even, like the common everyday species of fish that we have in our aquariums, much less all these other species we really traditionally don't hear much about.

And the fish are starving when they are in areas where there's no trees.

And why is that?

Because 90% of the food they eat.

Comes from the comes from the tree, you said?

Yeah, from the trees? From the canopy up there.

Explain that. Explain that process to some of our more beginner aquarius. Like, how do how does trees provide the food for the fish? The leaves go in tannins. It breaks down, creates micronutrients. What are you speaking of?

No, I'm talking about the camicazzi insects. That's what I call them, the camicazine insects. Every time the wind blows the canopy, there's a shower of ants, termites, you name it that fall into the water and the highest aquatic habitats are all the bromlins that are on the top right that are filled with water and are filled with amphibians and frogs and lay their tadpoles on the top. Those are the highest. The aquatic ecosystem doesn't start in the rivers dumps up there in the canopy, and there's all these insects that live that they don't come out of the river like most damsel, flies and other things. They come out of the canopy from the water that is up there. So there's a lot to learn. There's a lot of things. And I have to put those books together.

Yeah, no doubt.

I'm just thinking of all the different things. Like, I have more questions.

So every time that the trees shake out a whole bunch of insects, then they hit the water surface and the fish come to feed.

Yes. For example, you see the canopy, which is way up there, say 25, 30 meters, which is 90ft up there. And the wind blows. And you hear it. You hear the wind, and the wind sounds like rain. You sometimes think it's raining, but it's not. It's just the leaves, how it sounds. And once you hear that, the water surface starts going, the water surface starts sounding because all these insects fall, and all the tetras and all the astronauts and all these things start feeding on them. And once the wind stops, the sound on the water surface stops because there's nothing else to feed on.

That's incredible.

It makes sense. It's like an automatic fish feeder.

Exactly. But in the spots where there's no trees, boy, the fish are hungry in there. The fish are always starving. So if you go to certain areas and you try to fish, the fish won't bite your bait. It's because they're well fed. If you go to a place where there's not so many food, not so much food, then they'll bite. And this is how if you go in the book and you go to Amigramas levi's amigramas levi's, there's a story there. And then you'll understand the story that is there about the fish that are always hungry. There's a nice story there.

Well, moving on. You said about the other books you're doing, but what other projects are you going to be doing that's coming up again. You've done a bunch of film documentaries. You've done this book. You have plans for other books. Is there different expeditions in other parts of South America or any other location that you're planning on and doing in the future?

Well, my problem is time. I got over 300,000 images. I got hundreds of hours of underwater footage and flower footage and footage of landscapes and everything, but I need the time to do so. It's a question of prioritizing. We're trying to make a plan of what people want to see and want to know. So once we have that together, we'll know what product we are going to go with next. We're going to ask people in the near future. We're going to put out a lot of questions and ask people, and we'll prioritize from there.

Right now, here in the United States with the coronavirus, most people got more time than they know what to do with because a lot of them are quarantined at home. Is the coronavirus affecting you guys out there?

Yeah, we're still confined. We got it late. We started probably three months ago, so we're still in the end of the first, let's say the first wave. So we got it really late and we have a problem here, which we have no gas, like gasoline for your car. So that is taking a toll on me going places. But I have so many pictures and so many videos that I really don't need to go out anymore. I go out if I need something specific because I got so much. I really don't need to put more than three. I already have 300,000 images. Plus, why am I going to go get more if there are species in there that are not even described? So I have to prioritize and see what I'm going to do next, see what is viable too, because I have to make a living out of it. So I have to see what people want and what people would be willing to pay for. Absolutely. Yeah. You have to make choices in your life. You can't do everything. So hopefully you guys will help me do some asking questions to your community.

Absolutely. And again, if you guys want to follow along with ivan's work, certainly go to Mikolji.com. That's where you'll find all his articles that he's putting up on a regular basis, his films, books, and more information about the expeditions, including some of the series that he mentioned on the podcast tonight. Again, we can only cover so much. Trying to review just a small picture of what Ivan has done in the Ornacoo. Certainly go on his website, follow through, follow him on social media. Again, we'll have links in the description to purchase his book promo code. Aquarium Guy is five for 5% off fishes of the orinoco in the Wild. Ivan, it's been wonderful having you. Any other last notes towards the end of the podcast here? You want to tell the audience, I'm.

So glad the internet hasn't failed. It's just like a miracle. The last thing is, I always tell people that the most important thing is to go out to the nearest body of water that you have and go there and get to know it, see what's in it, bring your kids over, and it's a way to create empathy towards freshwater and whatever water you have, or salt water. Just go to their body of water, bring your family, have fun there, get to know it, make it yours. And that's the only way that to put a little bit of empathy in it and preserve them in time, build.

That sense of wonder, for sure. I want to put just one aneurical note before you leave. So I've been in the hobby since I've been a little kid. My grandma got me into it, and I grew up in the area, and we went to Ferguson Falls, Minnesota, for different tropical fish. Most of the time. There was a wonderful place called Ben Franklin, and growing up, that was the best place to get fish. It had a weird, eclectic arrangement. Every other week you get a little bit of something different you've never seen before. And one of my favorite fish, and it just brought this point of nostalgia, seeing a diamond tetra in your book with wonderful pictures of it in its natural habitat. And for those that don't know, you can still get diamond tetra. They're not necessarily rare. You just don't see them. No one knows about them. They don't keep them in a ton of them in the hobby. And they're a gorgeous fish. They're a larger sized tetra with a wonderful curved fin, and they literally look like they're glistening, the little diamonds across their scales, and they have a wonderful little red tip to their eye. And no one knew anything about them, how to feed them, how to breed them. They told me, oh, it's a tetra. Treat it like a tetra.

It'll school.

I never had that luck. And then I'm reading in this wonderful book of yours and really getting a picture of my childhood stuff, information that I could never get a hold of, telling me how they behave in the wild, how they don't really school. Matching some of my details, giving points of how their habitats affected and their populations are going down in certain areas. And it just resonated to the mystery of me being eight years old, ten years old, going to the pet store, finding this wondrous fish and just looking in there, and it brought me right back to that level again, like I know nothing. I'm learning about a fish for the first time. And just that bit of nostalgia really paints a picture of what this book does to avid fish keepers. I can't that stressed it enough. Go get this book, guys. Jimmy, thank you for being that person that got those diamond tetris at that pet store for me.

That was probably me.

Yeah, that was certainly you.

I want to read one one thing.

I fish.

Yeah, I want to read one, one quick paragraph that that's in the book. And this was written by eduardo. This is about Ivan and I I just want you to take this to heart. It says with more than 100 expeditions of innumerable publications in different countries, ivan has demonstrated the authenticity and originality of his artistic passion for photography and painting. The philosophy that moves his creative will is the urgency to preserve the aquatic ecosystems of the planet. And as a first step, he considers it necessary to make the richness and beauty of these biomes known. This is why he maintains you cannot preserve something that you don't know exists. And to that work, he has dedicated a large part of his life. And I thought that was just beautifully and well said. And I just want to thank you for taking the time to spend with us this evening and talk about this. This has been an incredible night.

Yeah. Pleasure. It's mine.

Well, Ivan, we're going to have to have you back on again. You're going to do more books. There's going to be more information, and we want to help broadcast that in any way possible. But for those who are listening, if you enjoyed the podcast, guys, you like what you hear, help us keep the lights on, go to court. You guyspodcast.com, bottom of the page. You can find a place to give us a few bucks. Otherwise, support our sponsors. And Ivan, thank you so much, buddy. We're going to leave it off there. We'll talk after. But for those that are listening, catch you next week. Thanks, guys. For listening to 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 never knew that a minute Minnesota act like be so sexy until I heard adam's voice go Frank yourself.

Don't you know that's my boy? Don't you know.