Welcome to the podcast, guys. Always start with the sponsor, Ohiofishrescue.com. Go to their website, consider giving them money.

Probably give them some money and give them a call.

Give them some love.

So these guys are a not for profit charity group that take care of large fish that beginners have bought from a store and have no place to house them.

How big are they?

They're not going to fit in a ten gallon because that ball of shark has already reached 16 inches.

What?

So again, they don't have, like, an animal shelter or a pound. These guys are the animal shelter for fish. So buy a T shirt, go on their website, give them a buck, and their number is 216-773-0407. Give them your love and just call them and tell them, I love you, and hang up the phone.

Do it. It's the right thing.

We're just waiting to see because we're going to have an interview with these guys on the podcast eventually here in the near future. We want to see how many people actually call them and just say, I love you, and hang up. That would make our day.

They'll probably be so happy with us, they'll punch us into the throat.

They will. Tell them you love them. Give them a buck. Let's kick that podcast.

Yeah.

Welcome to the Aquarium Guys Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob tolson welcome guys to the podcast. Today, we're going to do an off topic episode. There's going to be no real guest other than one of our fans decided to join us on discord. And before we get too far, I'm Rob solson, and my host next to me, Jim colby, and we also have Adam in the studio. Say hi.

Hi.

I'm here also, but our guest star is Mr. pickles. Introduce yourself, sir.

Hi. My name is Mr. pickle. I'm from Canada. I'm 16, and a young chorus just kind of getting into the hobby, and I have so many questions.

So who better to help out than a bunch of old guys sitting on a podcast talking about fish all day? So we're appreciative to have you on again. This is a little plug. We have a discord, so if you want more than just leaving a voicemail for us, sending us an email, you want, like, oh, no, my fish is flopping. What do I do? Message us on discord.

Put it back in the tank.

The link for discord is on the bottom of our website, and we'd love to hear from you. And again. Thank you, Mr. pickles. Again. So we're going to dive in to a little fan mail because we're getting more of that now. What? We're popular, Jimmy.

No, we're not.

Yes. We're on our way to be at least number two podcast for Aquarium.

Out there in this town.

No, worldwide, sir.

Worldwide.

Worldwide.

Wow. We're shooting for the stars today.

Yeah, we got a flex.

Yeah. We actually had a lot of listeners this week. It was fantastic. Last week we had Steve ricky of Angels plus he gave us a wealth of information. He was so giving of his time and his knowledge. I just want to say, Steve, thank you again. And we're hoping to have him again on another podcast.

Also, I'd like to take a note before we get into fan mail that at the end of our podcast we decided to shoot a new outro. And I've been getting a lot of how do we say not flak. I've been getting a lot of people agreeing with us that endlers are feeder guppies. We're going to keep what?

This is a thing.

Now, I know one guy well, you know two, because two are in this.

Studio at least, and Mr. pickles is learning to be us.

Yeah. Nobody likes endlers Adam.

No, that was not our intent. We have an inside joke that we just refund Adam because he loves endlers. endlers are a wonderful species. They're extinct in the wild. We do love them. However, we're going to continue giving Adam crap forevermore.

Forever.

So I'm glad you guys liked that outro. Keep giving us the feedback. And now for our bit of fan mail we have from Andrew in Ireland.

Ireland? Minnesota?

No. Ireland. The country. I'm pretty sure we'll have to go through this ire. I can't give out that personal information, sir. This is anonymous.

Somebody in the country or listening lets.

Me know who knew, right? So it says, hey, guys, I was wondering if you could do a podcast on developing new strains of Guppies or keeping current ones healthy. I'm a breeder based in Ireland, so it must be the country for the last two years and have plenty to learn and think this topic would do well for other listeners podcasts if it isn't discussed, because it isn't discussed on any social media platform, you could discuss multiple fish, how similar they are. Except, again, thanks, guys, for doing a great job on the podcast. Listen up to every podcast so far. Thumbs up.

Wow. Two thumbs up.

Just one. We're working on earning two.

At least it wasn't the middle finger.

Andrew from Ireland, we got your request loud and clear. And have we a lot of podcasts scheduled up, so we're going to do some of these in between podcasts as well. But we will absolutely have a Not Angels, a Guppy breeder specialist, on here to talk about how to develop strains, how to do show. We have a lot of options. And even Steve or vicki was giving us some recommendations, so there's going to be a lot more to come. We are not going to ignore your request, but it's definitely going to be a couple of weeks out before we get that expert in the podcast studio.

Yeah, we're going to reach out to somebody, try to find out the expert who's going to know all the answers to these questions coming up this week. We're hoping to have Julie from seacrest farms. They sell thousands and thousands of guppies per week, and she does have quite a few interesting tidbits on how to keep a healthy guppy healthy. And we'll dwell into that a little bit, probably on Wednesday.

She's a wealth of knowledge. How many years has she been in the industry, from your guess?

I'm guessing over 30 years. I've been buying Julie. Buying from Julie for over 25 years. When my wife and I go down to Florida, julie and my wife and I always go out and have dinner and maybe have a few drinks and stuff, and it's just amazing. Every time we sit down, I hear a new story and learn a lot of new stuff. So we're really looking forward to having her coming up on Wednesday.

Perfect. So, again, just a little more clean up, guys. I'm so excited. We have the aquarium guys, official merch store ready for you guys to get that sweet aquarium guys podcast gear.

What can I get?

You can get t shirts, you can get hoodies. We even have female attire because clearly they have different shapes. We have crop tops.

What?

Yes. I don't even think that was supposed to be approved, but I don't care. I think on a crop top. We got a crop top.

I want you to wear one next week.

I tell you what, you wear the.

Crop top, and I will wear something sexy, too.

I'll tell you what, let's make a goal here.

What's that?

We get 20 people to hit our store. No, that's not enough. That's a crop top. All right. We get 30 different people ordering from a merch store. I will personally buy and wear a crop top and take a picture and put it on twitter.

Oh, that will make everybody throw up in their mouth.

Oh, my goodness.

I will purge.

I want you guys to just to take a minute below. Imagine the stretch marks that you're going to see.

Rob'S a large man.

I'm a very large man.

He's large.

I'm a lot to love.

Yes, it's a community affair to love rob.

It is. But check it out again. Aquariumguyspodcast.com on the bottom of the website. Merch store. Hit it up. It got great deals. And for the next I think it's twelve days, maybe it's eleven days. You'll see the promo code on there? They have a 15% off for us kicking off the store, so make sure to use that. I believe that goes towards your shipping as well, you'll see on the website. But again, 15% off. So hop on it and let's get me in a crop top.

Let's do it.

Wait. Adam. Adam. We have to do some bikini waxing, you and me, before we do that.

No.

Come on. You got to be in the crop top, too. I can't go so long.

No. Well, I could probably pull it off.

Before you could you'd look better in.

It, actually, when Jim should be in.

The crop top, you got that tanned olive skin. You know what I mean?

You are natural brown.

No one wants to see Jimmy in it. Like, there's me, you, and then there's him. So we'll just stick to us.

Wow. I'm right here. I can hear you.

I'm so sorry. We were supposed to hear you. All right, so let's dive in the podcast. What we got is a lot of different requests. Not just Andrew that had a request, but requests from a lot of our listeners, and they wanted a I'm a beginner. You guys talk a lot about breeders and the industry, and I'm a beginner. I want to start from here. I've never done a fish tank before if I've done one in the past, but it didn't work out. Please. Where do I get started? So we're going to do a crash tutorial podcast on getting started with your first aquarium. So, Mr. pickle, we are privileged to have you in here today, and you said you're 16. You're just getting into the hobby for the first time, is that correct?

Yeah, exactly.

So before we get into the whole beginner conversation top to bottom, which, again, we'll love your perspective as well, but you had a question for the show, and that's why we have you on the discord. So I believe you had a question about the cycle, is that correct?

Yeah, I just got my new ten gallon tank, and I'm not sure how to cycle without fish because I know the fish cycle, there's a chance you'll kill the fish, which is just kind of stupid and a waste of money. So how do I do a fishless cycle? How does it work?

Now, Mr. pickle, you live in Canada, correct?

Yeah.

And are you near major city or are you out the plains?

No, near a major city.

Major city. Well, most of your major places, such as your pet coast, your Pet smarts, will carry what I call bacteria in a bottle.

Yes. That's the best stuff ever.

And what is the stuff called, Adam?

Well, it depends. If he's up in Canada, he's probably got rolf C. hagens bacteria in a bottle.

They also have stress Zyme in Canada as well.

Yeah, but the rolf C. hagen stuff I found works better than stress dime. But stress diamond, if you're really hurting, will work in a pinch.

And the thing about this, all the enzymes that you can buy right now is probably the time you want to buy that stuff, because what happens when they ship stress zyme or any of this other stuff? If it freezes, it's no good. And so you really want to get it this time of year? You want to go out and buy it right now, because they've been shipping it all summer long up in Canada. It's nice up in Canada right now, and it'll be live. But going back to Stress Zyme, there's also one called Stress Coat, and you don't want to mix those two together. Stress Coat is basically an olive vera type product.

The declarnazer for your water.

Yeah, it declares your water. It also puts a slime coating on your fish, and that's also a great product. But you want to use Stress design, and for the most part, you can't really overdo Stress zion, can you?

Well, the idea is it's bacteria in a bottle. You're putting in essentially living a little bit of crap organisms in your tank. So the more you add, the more crap you have to really fully cycle your aquarium. So if you put too much, well, you just do a water change. nothing's going to hurt because of it.

But you put it in and what it's there for is to break down the waste. And I like to compare it to and it sounds really silly, but I'm an old guy and we used to have an outhouse back in the day, and when you go in an outhouse in July, it didn't smell good. It was not good at all. And so I kind of compare an aquarium. You put an aquarium together, you throw your first few fish in there, everything's fine and dandy for four or five days, but all that waste in the aquarium starts building up. And after it starts building up, there's nothing naturally in the aquarium to break down that waste. And so they'll actually kill themselves with their own waste. It's probably the easiest way to put it.

So to go through the actual cycle, that's what we do to cheat the cycle, because we're not going to wait and give the whole full amount of time for a cycle to complete. So the idea is, when you have an aquarium, however big, how big is your tank?

Mr pickles well, this one that I'm trying to cycle right now is a ten gallon tank.

What do you have in there for fish?

Nothing currently. But you see what I was doing, I have biomedia from my other tank that I put inside.

Bravo.

Perfect, dude.

Bravo.

There you go. That works.

Good job.

That's why I was going to ask, is that the same as like, buying a starter culture of bacteria?

It's even better.

It's better because it's already better.

So the idea with the cycle is fish produce waste, urine, poop, whatever else, uneaten food, and it all creates to ammonia in the tank. And if there's nothing, no bacteria to break down that ammonia, it becomes toxic for anything that's living in there, including plants. So you want bacteria to eat and consume the ammonia in the tank to create nitrite, and then you want other bacteria to turn that into nitrate and the cycle continues. So without that breakdown, you're just going to have an overload of ammonia in your tank to kill your fish. So again, when people start with just a bear tank, and they've been told by some petco person, just let it run for 30 days. That's not quite accurate. You either have nothing in there to start the cycle with, so when you have that bacteria in a bottle or you did it, the better way is grab some old filter media, maybe an old sponge from the other tank. Don't rinse it out and just throw it in there. That starts the process, and it starts the process right away. So you don't have to wait that big time period, because most people without a friend in the hobby or knowing that the bacteria in a bottle exists, they have to just put maybe one fish and then wait for it to start to build before they add a bunch more to risk the lives of the other fish. And it's not a fun process, and it's a lengthy time depending on how much you're putting in your tank.

And he also saved about seven or $8. So good job.

What kind of fish are you planning on putting in the ten gallon?

Last thing I'm trying to decide, I'm still deciding for a while. I really want to put in an axial auto, those little lizard things.

Okay, but we're glad you didn't.

Yeah. Because it's a bit of a small tank for that. I don't know, I'm thinking maybe a beta fish or I don't know, something like that.

Let's go from the top and we'll go through this and we'll have you listen in and we'll get some your viewpoints there, Mr. pickle along the way. And hopefully by the time of this podcast is over, maybe we can give you some ideas.

What do you have set up in your other tank right now? Do you have another tank set up?

Okay, well, you see, the other tank was because originally I wanted to get a big tank so I could get a cool set up. I found it from this old man on Kg. He couldn't really take care of it anymore. And it's a really decent setup. It came with a stand of 55 gallon tank starter. Yeah. The filter, the heater, everything, and also the decorations and the fish inside it came with four goldfish, a golden gurami, one cory catfish, and a massive pleco that was way too big for the tank. So, yeah, I did my research and I sold most of the fish that were in the tank already.

Do you still have that corey?

Yeah.

Okay.

Put the corey in the ten gallon tank. If you put some of the stuff from there, that way the corey will keep the cycle built up a little bit. You could just put a little bit of flake food in there.

Really? Okay.

Yeah, you got to have something in there to produce a little bit of waste or else the bacteria just kind of starves.

Well, what I was doing was putting in, like, fish food. I heard that does just as well as a fish waste. So I put in some fish food to start up the cycle.

It can, but the problem is it breaks down so much worse because you don't have all the bacteria. So again, you're starting at a different point.

Okay?

So the food will rot much faster than your filter that has already had some of the process started, won't be.

Able to keep up.

Right? So it's best to always use a filter media because that has good bacteria and the bad, whereas just putting fish food in creates the bad at first.

Okay.

Let'S start in and start from the top. All right, we have Mr. pickle here that he did some homework. He's an educated gentleman and decided that he wants to look into a tank. And what's our metaphorical person here? We'll put Jeff. Jeff is 16 years old and Jeff is looking for a tank. And he has different options out there. So he thinks start small, right? Small means easy. No, small doesn't mean easy.

Small means a lot of work. So if you're going to pick the.

Size of tank, we really recommend the bigger you can go, the better, and we like to say the most you can afford. But if you're going to start a tank, go on Facebook, swap and shop, go on your craigslist with your mom's help, and try to find a bigger system. 55 is perfect. It's nice and large. And the larger the tank is, the easier it is to take care of. You don't have to worry about if something dies, the ammonia killing the entire tank because you have enough water in there, you can easily build up more bacteria because there's more surface area of the entire tank and you're having the correct size for at least the majority of tropical fish to live out their entire lives. So you don't have to start with a small one. Oh, they outgrew it to not have to go buy another. So if you can start large but minimum for most of these fish that we'll recommend, a ten gallon will certainly cut it. 55 is the best, but try to get to a ten gallon. The nano tanks are way more difficult. If one tiny iota goes bad, that those small nano tanks you get at Walmart crash so easy with a large amount of water.

It's more forgiving when you have ten gallons versus, say, 20 or 55. Like rob's just said, you have one dead fish that passes away. It's up there in the corner of the tank. You don't notice it. You don't scoop it out right away. It just deteriorates and will take that tank down with it fairly quickly. So the larger tank that you have, the more forgiving it is, we all know. And if you leave for the weekend, that's when that fish is going to die every single time.

And even sometimes, depending on the fish. If they're long, thin fish, you'll have issues where the fish will die, and within that day when you're gone, they'll already start rotting because you have a small tank that's heated. It's the perfect storm.

It's a cooker.

You're baking your fish, not slow baking, at least, and they'll rot out by the time you get home. You have to do a massive water change. And oh, look, they already got sick from what happened.

Rob, who was that the other day? We got a nice email or something. Somebody had said that they really liked the steeper bickie podcast, and he said how much? Steve says he works seven days a week. This person said that they had been in their store prawnas. Yeah, with pranas. Two years they had been in there, and the only day they missed was like Christmas Day. And that was the time that their breeding piranhas kicked off one of the filters or something like that. And they lost everything.

Yeah, the intake filter.

So shout out to Anthony. Anthony is in Michigan, and he was messaging us on how he liked the podcast, but yeah, just missing that one day, he lost a big breeding pair of piranha.

Heartbreaking. It really is.

If you have a bigger tank and something like that happens, you have a few more hours for sure for even oxygen to be dealt with.

No. Was Anthony a pet store owner? Was it my understanding he was, yes. And he was producing enough piranha to sell for himself and also sell back to his wholesaler. So, I mean, a big loss of money for Anthony. But we all have a friend, his name is Tyler Tallestrud. And ty always says to me, he goes, I never say this is my favorite fish anymore, because that's the one that's going to be dead tomorrow. And ty has three children, and he won't tell you which one of his favorite is because he said, every time I say that's my favorite, and it's gone. So it's just law of averages, it seems like it always goes wrong.

So let's say they did what we don't recommend and get the smaller tank. So they got a ten gallon tank. Now, the next choice is what substrate do you choose? Now, there's two main substrates to choose for beginner hobbyists. Number one is pea gravel. You'll get this at, you can get colored, you can get natural color. I always try to dissuade people from getting the colored because, yes, the paint may be, quote unquote, aquarium safe and how they color these rocks, but they chip, and it just cruds up the aquarium very quickly, because that color, that bright neon color in the tank does not last forever. And the rocks will literally chip apart.

Yeah, because it's just quartz spray painted with paint.

Yeah, literally, it's just aquarium safe spray paint. So as you wash the gravel, as you take care of it, and as it runs, they'll chip apart. They'll look like hell. And any type of small algae, which is good for the gravel, looks like crud on that neon gravel. So stay away from colored rocks as much as you can and stay to the natural colors, because, again, you won't really see algae on them. They're not painted, they're not going to chip, and they're going to last literally forever.

It'll look a little more natural, but it's hard when you've got young children who are three and five and they want the bright pink gravel. I mean, you're probably going to end up putting it in, but like Rob said, you're going to see where that doesn't look so great after about a month.

So the pros and cons pros, the pea gravel holds a lot of that beneficial bacteria. It's going to hold a lot of the bits and pieces.

More surface area.

It's more surface area for the tank.

Correct.

And for some fish, depending on the fish, they do like to be able to pick up stones. Some cichlids like to move little bits of gravel.

Little bits?

Well, some are some whole mouthfuls, and.

They build they'll move £50 of gravel from one end of the tank to the other. jerks.

We don't recommend those fish for new beginner hobbyists, by the way.

They normally don't even get sold in the hobby, really. I mean, you have to go to, like, a specialty store to find him.

He's got to go to good people for cichlids. Exactly.

Yeah.

So the other substrate to choose from is sand. And there's a lot of different sand choices out there. Now, don't listen to these guys. I'm going to tell you the pros and cons and the reasoning why they're booing. rob's been drinking all sand is my favorite. The reason being is the cons against gravel is that food and poop particles fall between gravel. And you have to gravel vac continually whenever you do a water change. And you have to be very thorough. You can get these gravel vac kits at Walmart. They're around 1015 bucks. And you have to siphon and literally push a tube in this gravel, cleaning all the crap out continually. It's a big pin in the urine. And if you're not faithful or do it enough or you miss a spot, you're adding rot to your aquarium, and you're literally letting crap and old food sit there and rot in your tank. So with sand, the pros and cons sand does not let any particles, poop or food or otherwise through. And for CorridorAs and a lot of bottom feeders, it's really fun to watch them dig and play in the sand. It's a really fun space for fish, especially if you have it's legal in your area. dojo loaches or cooley loaches. They love to dig and play, and it's fun to watch through the cons. If you're in your tank with nets scooping around, you'll kick sand everywhere and it might get into your filter.

Number one, it will get in your filter.

It will get into your filter.

Yeah.

But the argument is most modern filters don't have issue with sand anymore. They used to be a burnt out, right away marine land, all kinds of stuff. I've seen literally like a half inch of sand in the bottom, and they work just fine.

Wait, in the bottom of the impeller unit or in the bottom of the filter basket itself?

A little bit in the filter unit itself. And the basket, they have bigger blades, they handle a little bit better, but you still can have issues. It's not guaranteed to not burn out your filter. And two, every three to four months, you're going to have to take just a stick. You can use maybe a crochet rod, you can use a dowel and just wiggle it around in the sand to let bubbles escape. So let's say that one tiny piece of something got in the sand. Well, it's going to decay and it's going to make a little air pocket in the sand because it can't escape because the sand is so tight. So you taking a stick, just knocks those pockets of gasses out of the sand. And you have to do this about once every four months. And it's real simple. And again, those are the real reasons people hate sand. So pros and cons. I personally love sand. And you can get good aquarium sand, 50 pound bag at your local hardware store for pool filter sand. And the reason I say pool filter sand, it's the correct grade, meaning it's not so fine. It's going to just cloud up your water and leave particles everywhere. And it's PH neutral because it's just nice, wholesome, pure, nice, blonde looking sand. Midwestern sand, midwestern sand, wholesome sand. It goes to chickfila sand. Not on Sundays because they're closed, but $8 for £50, just rinse it out well. And it works so well and works great for plants.

And that's about a four or five week process of going through. And I hate you rob so much. I am not a fan of sand. No, I'm not a huge fan of gravel either, but I hate gravel.

Sand. Sand is way better.

But what sucks is that rob's got a beautiful 125 gallon tank down here with 200 rummy nose. Got plants grown out of that thing like a bevy. I mean, just beautiful. And he's got great success there. But I'm still not a fan of sand. Why don't you just put cement down? It's just as hard and ugly looking.

Well, Jimmy is going to talk about.

Bare bottom here pretty quickly, but not your bare bottom. Not even a chance of talking about your bare bottom.

So those are the main two choices for sand. For beginners, there's other substrates, there's other substrates for sand or gravel. There's other substrates to choose from. But this is what we recommend for. Beginners going past that. You'll do potting, clay and all kinds of different software plants. Just stick to either sand or gravel. Know your pros and cons.

Yeah, you could spend a ton and ton of money on different substrates when you start doing shrimp and different things which are more advanced. And I have spent what size is my cube?

Well, they call you moneybags colby.

Yeah, exactly. Amazon has me on their birthday wish list.

Oh, my God.

But anyway, I've bought some pretty expensive substrate for my 90 gallon cube tank where I have discus, and it turned to kind of mud after about a year, and I was not happy with it. But, I mean, everybody that has their favorite substrate is just do your research and decide what's best for you.

Oh, and I'm picking on them. I'm like how much you spend on that. You realize it's $8 for £50? Come on, man.

Yeah. This brought to you by menards menards.

All right, so the next piece is decor. So before we do decor, you need to know what type of fish you have. Do some homework. pickles really showed initiative when he said I had to do homework. What I was supposed to do, try to find more about the cycle. He said, use filter media. Do some homework on the fish, look at their care needs, and they'll show that all they love being between large plants. Oh, they love a little bit of floating plants on the top. Oh, they love caves to go into. Do your homework, but start out, are you going to use plastics or live plants? And most people are like, live plants. This is already too intimidating. I'm done. So what we're going to do is, we're going to make this easy on you. We're going to give you five beginner plants that you can go out to your pet store and pick up that are really, really easy and low maintenance. And above all else, you shouldn't be able to kill real easy.

And the other thing, too, is, I've seen this worked a few times. Mr. pickle, earlier, we had him when we were off the air, he was saying, Why is everything so gosh darn expensive? And the one thing you can do and you can start out with some plastic plants. There are some very realistic looking plants. There are some silk plants. If you're new and you want to try live plants, go ahead and put in four or five plastic plants or silk plants, and then put in one or two. Live towards the front and just see how it goes for you. Depending on your water quality or what you have in your water and your lighting situation, live plants may be so easy for you. Life plants for Rob is very easy. He's got a beautiful set up over here in his 125 over in my 90 gallon cube. It is so deep, and my light is so cruddy that I don't have very good luck with plants.

So that he spent $90 on poop sand.

Poop sand. Thanks Amazon.

Thanks amazon.com. We are not sponsored by them.

Not yet.

Not yet.

We're shooting for the moon.

So number one on the plant list is Amazon swords. And there's a whole long line of diverse Amazon swords. But if you go into your pet store, they'll have whatever selection they believe in, probably that'll be closer to symbol your water requirements. And just ask him, I want the heartiest sword you have. And he will certainly direct you because almost every pet store has swords and a very, very common, easily just beautiful green, basic growing plant.

And with live plants, there's a little white stick. Usually in most of them, if you find the pot of plants, there's a little white stick in there. Take a second and take a look and see how big is this darn thing going to get. Because there's so many different Amazon sword plants. Some only get two to four inches, some will get six to eight, some will get 1416 inches.

Most that they sell for assorted swords stay a nice smaller size. But the ones that you got to be conscious of is melon swords. Melon swords, they're very beautiful. They're using a lot from angel fish and discus and they're very hardy and can take a beating, but they get big. There's giant leaves in your tank.

Yeah, you might want to save that one for your 55.

Exactly. Next on the list is dwarf sage. And this is held by many, many aquarius. Normally they throw them out every month in a small ice cream panel because.

They grow so much.

It looks exactly like crab grass and grows just like it. So it just has this nice little shoot out that looks like grass and.

It'Ll get off my lawn.

It will grow all the way to the top of your tank in some situations. And when it decides to multiply, it just shoots out more roots and continues a chain of grass growing down your gravel.

Yeah, it just shoot roots underneath or on top or both. And it just kind of multiplies by itself.

And this is one of the plants that you can actually have pea gravel with because most plants have a lot of difficulties. There's not a lot of nutrition in the pea gravel. So this is a great one that if you're using those actual pea gravel, it will burrow right through it and shoot up and sprout.

What else you got?

So we have the traditional guppy grass.

Very well.

I'll let you talk about this, Jimmy.

Guppy grass. I love guppy grass. Go on the Internet, type in guppy grass. It is not easy to find. It took me over six months to find somebody with guppy grass. One of my friends who own a pet store, they went down to a convention down I believe it was like Iowa. And they came back with these bags of guppy grass. And they're a great floating, great floating type of plant that sits on top. It's not really leafy. It's more kind of forked. But I raise a lot of shrimp, and the shrimp just go crazy gaga over it. And what's nice about it is, in a shrimp tank, you got to be really careful for when you start having live plants die. The shrimp love the dead plants, but the dead plants will eventually cloud up your water and make it nasty.

Well, if the plants die, the shrimp eat it and create more waste. It'll be an explosion of waste because they'll eat the dead plants so vivaciously and fast.

Yeah, but the guppy grass, there's so much area on it where they can just graze and get the algae off of it. And I love guppy grass. Like I said, it's not easy to find. You probably have to go on somewhere like aqua bid or bother bug your.

Buddy to give you a pump.

And so I recently what did I buy? I bought like six or seven bags of it, and I gave some to robs. I gave some to my other friend ty. And in case I lost mine, then at least I have a backup. And so that's always good if you've got friends who are in the hobby, if you've got something that you love. Like, Adam's got these crappy what are they called? endler guppies handler.

Live barrier.

Oh, that's right.

Feeder guppies.

And he gave them the robs. And you know what? That's a good idea, because if for some reason adam's got four children at home, and for some reason they're throwing a ball and they broke the aquarium and he lost the thing. Yeah, your children are perfect. I've seen them. And then at least he'd have a backup he could call. Rob said, hey, I lost all my fish. Can I get some fish from you and rob's? Go, sure. For $30.

We've lost more fish out of the hobby due to somebody not spreading them around to other people. Like Steve. ricky was telling us a story about the yellow betas that he said were just like neon yellow, and now they're gone because he gave them away and nobody else kept them.

Right.

So to go down the list again to get back on track, we have an acros. So, anacris is, I'd say, one of the oldest traditional plants because it's so versatile, and you can use it in cold water with your goldfish is really why it got popular. So an acre is this bushy stem looking plant, and this can be planted, it can be floating. And again, the colder the water, the better it works. And how they sell these in pet stores, because most pet stores have them, is they'll sell them with a little, I don't know, like metal lead.

It's a lead weight, like a lead.

Weight stuck to the bottom, holding them together in a bunch. So you can just plant that with the little metal weight that it has and plant that right in your gravel. Or you can take apart the lead weight and just let it float at the top. So it's very diverse verse type of plant. And again, if you're using goldfish, great plant to have. Although goldfish, again, they'll probably knob on some plants, but again, it does well in cold water on top of tropical. Give that to go. And the best one for last.

What do you got?

I have just recently, in the last two years, gotten into hornworth for the first time.

Oh, gosh.

And hornworth. I'm not exaggerating. I have a 55 gallon rescue tank up in my kitchen, and I planted one piece of it that was floating in a bag. Just one. I'm talking speck. I put it in my tank and planted it. And now every single week I take one of those big ice cream, pales full. And I'm not talking just like, oh, I stacked it. nope. I'm talking pushed, packed full. I throw away every week of hornworth. You cannot kill it. It can work in every tank. You can have it free floating. You can plant it. And if you want it to multiply, you don't have to wait for it to shoot out. You can rip it in pieces and replant it across your tank and it will grow up from the bottom in one day. I measured in the perfect, most perfect conditions. Almost an inch of growth.

Are you kidding me?

It's amazing. Now they look like little pine needles, kind of like the old traditional plastic plants. This is what they model off of. And it just looks like a clump of bushy needley type plant. They're not leafy at all. But if you want the hardest, there's no possible way I can kill a plant that is your best beginner plant I can possibly recommend. Just make sure to not let it overtake the tank. And you're going to have to do some weed trimming.

And you know, I have a store and I buy hornworth and Accurate, and that's one of my top two sellers because we're just basically a small store. But like Rob said, the hornworth, he's come over to my house with buckets of hornworth and I just throw them in my shrimp tank. And I saw that I had 100 shrimp in there yesterday. And now I look in there, now I feel like I got six shrimp because they're all hiding in the hornworth. And that stuff just floats on the top of my tank. I don't plant mine and it just goes and grows and grows. I hate this stuff.

All right, so now decorations. So before we get into decorations, there's these cool things at Walmart that you wanted to talk about, the traditional. What would you say? Treasure chest bubblers.

Oh, gosh, I love those when I first got in. Go ahead, Adam.

No, go ahead, Jim.

You're going to say everybody hates them?

No, they're not my cup of tea. But everybody likes them because they think it's the coolest thing in the world to have them.

Yeah, I think they're really lame, too, but I just like to get rob's going. But the treasure chest that you see in there, I used to have one of those treasure chests, and it would chop the head off a fish about once every three months. I swear to God. The little treasure chest?

The little treasure chest.

Seriously?

Yeah, I'm not dead serious. The little treasure chest and just chop it's. Hilarious.

Okay, I have that. Like, something like that.

I'll buy it from you, Mr. pickle.

So before you go too far, I'd like to point out that Jimmy is not a young man anymore, and the treasure chests that he has probably were made out of lead, and they were literally slashing heads off. The ones they sell now have smooth edges in our plastic from Walmart, sir.

The treasure chest from Walmart that they sell now, the plastic ones, they fade, and the paint gets in there and they just get nasty.

You got to have pros and cons.

I'm just going to blame the Chinese for that.

Exactly. That's the tariffs.

That's the tariffs.

But they're fun. You need aeration in the tank, and again, we'll go over the checklist of what you should have with your fish, and aeration is real high on the list, so if you have any tank, you're not going to be an expert of, oh, how much oxygen do they need? Just make sure you have a bubbler so you can pick up a nice blower aerator, put the cord right to it. And these bubblers are really fun for your kids. Don't get a big, heavy metal one that chops off fish's heads. And if you get a plastic one, it's probably going to fade and chip, and it's only going to last so long, but they're still fun for your kids, and they're very safe way to get some areas in the tank and make it look kiddish.

Yeah. I mean, if you've got young children, they're going to love it. If you're old like me, and it chops off fish heads, you're going to love it. No, you're not going to love that. But I tell you, I've still got the darn thing. I'm going to dig it out of a box somewhere. And the one I had was heavy. And for some reason, every time this little chest would open up after I fed, it would kind of suck in a little bit of food, and the food would be in that chest, and those fish would sit there and try to time it like they're playing miniature golf, and they'd get their head smacked. I don't know if I actually ever saw fish die, but I saw a lot of concussions happening there. It was kind of like the NFL on Sunday, but there's a lot of cool. What do I want to say? The old ones. I've got a ceramic mermaid that is just classic that I'm trying to find. Rob just came over to my house the other day and he stole my ten gallon stainless steel tank from what year was that, Rob? Do you think it was?

I dated I was supposed to be mine.

I dated it.

Yeah, Adam wanted it on the hood, right?

They had this suite. The hood is completely intact.

Yes. The hood that you never find.

This two prong not three prong plug because they didn't have grounding back then. Right? And on it, this is the light socket plug, right, Jimmy? It had patent pending. The patent wasn't even done for the light socket, it was so old. So I looked at the manufacturer and the time the patent was officialized was pre World War II, so it must be early 1940s, late thirty s. And.

This is a stainless steel ten gallon tank with a slate bottom. Usually you can find a tank here or there, but you very seldom get them with a nice top that fits that's not banged up because they're stainless steel, they're not rusty. I mean, this thing's in pristine's. And I've had it over at my house on a shelf down in my fish room. rob's comes over, wines cries he even he stole it. He even wets his pants a little bit. And he goes, I really want that, Jimmy. And I go, no, just to be a jerk. And so the other day he came over and he goes, Mine. And he went out the door with it. And so, anyway, once this podcast takes off, I'm reporting his butt to HR and I'm going to get him fired.

We need to get an HR department first.

You know what, Mr. pickles my HR guy, and he's going to mr. pickles loves me, sir.

All right. You told him about heads getting chopped off and now he's scared of you.

That might have been an exaggeration, but there was a whole lot of guppy concussions, let's put it that way.

So I'm going to keep off track on this one. And what I did is good luck. I took that hood because having the hood with those aluminum tanks are really hard to find. And I'll post it on our Twitter page to make sure that we have the video on there.

I did tweet out a couple of times this week.

Be proud. Jimmy didn't know what a podcast is. He's podcasting. He's never been on social media and now he has a Twitter account and posting that's. It Adam pickle. applause thank you, gentlemen.

Like my brother says, what is Facebook?

What is Facebook?

I don't have it.

So, again, we'll post it on the Twitter account. And what I did is I took the original hood, and all the electrical in it was rotten, so I had to remove the electrical. And then I used a Led light strip kit that was waterproof. I wired it into the original switch, the rotating clicker switch, and it works great.

Yeah, it looks beautiful. It's got great light, great light.

And again, those tops are stainless steel, so reflective. So you just stick on the Led lights. And I soldered it and hot glued the connections to make sure the connections were also waterproof. So when you look at the top, it looks all aboriginal. It still uses the same power socket and the same switch. So you turn it on and off the same way you did in 1930.

So there's a very good chance of being electrocuted and will probably die.

Hey, then we don't have to deal with HR now, do we?

No.

Man at a booboo. Stick your head in a metal old bubble to get your head chopped.

And so he steals this. He runs out of my house like a little kid, and my dog just watches him. Like, look at him go. So he brings it home and he does his hood, and he does a YouTube video. He sends it to me. Just kind of antagonize me. And then with the jerk did he he has the I don't know. The word is balls.

Cahoons.

Cahoonis. He had the Cohonis call me and say, yeah, it leaks. Yeah. What do you want your freaking money back? You stole it out of my house.

So I did some homework, and I found out that that tank was sealed with a mixture of asphalt seed oil and lead oxide. Apparently, that doesn't hold up after, I don't know, 50 years. 70 years?

Yeah. 70.

Yes. So back to decorations. I've got this really cool old ceramic mermaid that's kind of coming out of the grass and stuff, but it's just real classic looking. And what Rob wants to do is.

He just likes it because it's topless.

It is. Yeah, it is. But what Rob wants to do is he wants to take this tank and he wants to put it back in its original condition. We're going to use some black silicone, and we're going to tighten it up so it doesn't leak so much. And then he wants to put in white cloud minerals. Is that correct?

So I did a bunch of research on this tank, and I want to make it to the era. So I had to figure out what heat, what filter, what did they have in 1930? Box aquariums, because that's when this whole peak got up. Is the hobby started surging the toy market, got in. Sea monkeys kicked it off. Sea monkeys are and hasbro bought the meta Frame Company, which made all these aluminum frame tanks. They bought it as a toy product to sell the market, and that's what exploded out the hobby.

Did your homework.

I did my homework. Sir. So pre World War II, we didn't have commercialized flight. It was not available to send fish from other countries. And so we had a very limited supply that people could bring over on boats or whatever else they could find. So they had a lot of American killer fish, a lot of different types. They had goldfish, because again, those were everywhere. But there was very few very small selection on what there was available. They had the expensive fish for only the most advanced enthusiasts were neon tetras. Those are really expensive to get. Right?

They were expensive back in the day.

So most people, if they wanted to have a nice looking fancy fish, they named them the poor man's. Neon tetra was the white cloud right up your alley. Right. So the reason why I picked those is because in 1930, they didn't have traditional heaters. They didn't have really any heaters. So the reason that they had slate bottoms was not just because it was a cheaper than glass at that time, but also because they used bunson burners to heat the aquarium.

You're just making stuff up now.

They had weird pans they put on the bottom and cook a bunsen burner to keep the aquarium at a certain temperature. So you're going to put a bunsen.

Burner on this tank.

I can't wait.

I am not going to put a bunch and burner on this tank, because most people didn't go to that level. Most people instead got a fish that could accommodate. So white clouds are a cold water species that do not need heat. So then I also looked up what could they possibly use for filters. So the motorized filter was popularized right around after World War II. That's when it finally really hit the market hard. And these things, you'd have to oil them every three months, otherwise they'd burn out. They were gross and they drip oil into the filter. They'd be a big problem. And they weren't perfected at all. So what they did is they used how we're using it, traditional piston pump aerators, and they're using hang on the back filters that just blew water into them.

Yeah, some of those first filters, you actually had to start to siphon yourself, and it was just a plastic box on the back with really I don't know if I had a motor or not.

They did not have motors in most situations, especially in 1930.

Yeah, it would just siphon out and drop it in there, and you'd have filter floss in there and some charcoal, and it would just go through that and then dump back out. The problem is, if you bumped it and you lost your siphon, you're kind of screwed.

So they improved on the design. So what people ended up doing is that wouldn't even work for them because they have your issues they described. So then they went filter lists. They went, again, no heat, no filter. Maybe they'd have a bubbler. And that'd be a rare situation because piston pumps were expensive, so they just go with plants. So that's what I'm going to try to do, is keep it of error and no heat. I'm going to attempt to do no filter, or if I can find one of those hang in the back filters, which having an original piece is extremely hard to find. And I'm going to try to make this an entire 1930s restored tank.

The nice thing about piston pumps is that they're so nice and loud that they'll keep everybody up in the house all day long and all night long.

Which means if I'm going to do it by by 1930 standards, I have to use oatmeal mixed with fish meal that I chop myself. So we're going to see how that works.

For what?

That's what they fed white clouds.

What?

White clouds are a species of carb cheaper's.

They are also extinct in the wild. What are wain clouds? They were only found in one tributary in China, in the mountains. And then, as far as I've understood, they're extinct in the wild. That's what I always liked about them was that they're kind of a common fish that everybody can have that doesn't exist really anymore.

Only Adam likes the fact that they're extinct.

Thank you, Cliff claiborne from cheers for that useless piece of crap.

That is actually an important thing because.

They'Re like really cool, hardy fish that everybody should start a tank with that wants cooler, colder water tanks.

Nobody keeps them.

I'll make a confession at them. I put white clouds out of my out of my 110 gallon what do you call it, horse trough out in my yard that I use for watering plants and stuff. And I put them out there, and I'm not kidding you, I kind of forgot I had them out there. And I took them out of the water, was like 51 degrees. And they're fine. They came out they came back in the house. They had the most beautiful color, and they're very nice. There's so many different varieties of the white clouds. I said, hey, Rob, do you want, like, the gold white cloud? And he goes, no. How about the longfin white cloud, would you say, Rob?

No.

Yeah. What do you want? I want of era boring.

I want the 1930s variety before they had the selective breeding. But we are boring Mr. pickle to death here. He's here to learn more about beginner aquariums, not about how they did in the 1930s from grandpa Jimmy over here.

Mr. pickle, don't listen to these idiots. They don't know nothing.

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

Wow.

All right, so next thing that you need again, we have aeration decorations covered. So let's talk about filters. So there's a bunch of different filter choices, even from the 1930s, and what we're going to recommend is two easy ones, right? Hang on the back. Filters have been done forever. But if you're going to use a hang on the back filter, you want to do that. Like we talked about the cycle, we want to have extra space for the biological bacteria. So what we recommend is go to Amazon and find yourself a marineland bio wheel filter.

Those work great.

The cartridges are cheap, the pumps work great. The whole filter itself is really cheap. And it has this patented, what they call bio wheel. And what it does is it gives you an extra like, what do you say? It's kind of like a polyester accordion looking water wheel on the front.

It's kind of like a cloth accordion type, but it's in a wheel that just rotates with the water.

So you never clean the wheel. You just make sure it continually moves. And what that's there to do is collect good bacteria to help keep that cycle going great in your tank. So I have a lot of people coming up to me, well, what size filter do I get? And they do a pretty good job. They'll literally give you a filter range, they'll say from ten to 20 gallons. Well, just if you're really concerned or you're going to get a lot of fish more than you probably should, don't overstock. But if you can't help it, they're.

Going to do it.

Because you have a fish, you're a new fish and you have a sickness. You want to buy more fish, all you want to see is more. And you're not going to want to set up more tanks.

Set up more tanks if you can.

Double what they recommend. So if they say or ten, either get two or get a 20 gallon filter instead. That way you have more flow in your tank so it can filter out more crap as you overfeed or as you have too many fish.

And most of those back filters you can adjust a little bit. So if you have that thing is wide open and you're getting too much flow in the tank, right, and it's pinning your fish on the bottom of the tank and they can't get up. But it's like that old lady from that commercial, I've fallen and I can't get up. Then you can kind of dial back that thing and adjust it for your tank and so your fish don't have to constantly swim against the current.

And also make sure that if you have a super big one that you protect the intake tube because long flowing finned fish will get sucked up by the intake tube and they'll get stuck to the side of it and then they die because they struggle and struggle and struggle to get off. So block it with some plants or put a piece of sponge around it or something just to help diffuse it. Baby Guppies they'll get sucked right up everything.

Hey Adam, do you think sand would get sucked up to it?

Oh, sand would.

Definitely get sucked up to it. Robbie.

That's why you got to get Marine Land brand filter to make sure you can handle the sand brought to you.

By actually, the hagen ones are way better, in my opinion.

Well, that's also a lot more money. This is beginner. We already had Mr. pickles yell at us already for making this too expensive for him.

Right?

I'm just saying, the Ralph C. hagen ones, I have not been able to kill those. I had a canister filter, a Flubal. What is it? fx Five. Those big ones, it literally ran out of water for, like, three days, and the impeller overheated, and I just put a new one in, and it worked.

You're the man.

You're the man. So the next filter on our list is sponge filters. These are by far my favorite filter because they hold the most beneficial bacteria. And if you have small fish like corridors or shrimp, they'll eat the food right off of it. So these you can get for as low as two whole dollars on Amazon or Ebay. You can even get these on ebay.

You can make them yourself, too.

Yeah, you can make them yourself. So Jimmy decides that he has this sweet idea because he has a bunch of fish rooms, right? He's got a ton of tanks to filter out, so he wants to make sure to save every penny, as any good breeder should, keep it cheap. That's how you make money. So he decides that he's going to go into an 87 cadillac and cut out the car cushions to it, and then cut the car cushions into squares, wash them out, and then stick pvc pipe out the top to make his own ghetto filter. But that's not the end of it, right? He realizes, is your car locked out here? I know I have to keep it locked. He realizes that these sponges float, right? So he decides to keep it cheap. He grabs a bathroom tile and puts the bottom, glues it to the bottom of these square cadillac car sponges. And it is by far one of the best, you know, do it yourself sponge filters.

I've seen what you know, when I had I think at one time, I had about 450 tanks, and you're going, Let me see what's cheap and effective. And so I made my own sponge filters. Where I got my idea back in the day was actually from Steve rubiki. And today we were going through some stuff at my house, and we found a catalog from what year was it, rob's?

1995.

And back then, Steve was selling these sponge filters, and so I was buying them from him for probably about $4 apiece or so. And then once I realized I could make them for myself, I started making them. And I still can make them to this day for about a buck.

So, again, $2 on ebay or a buck by cutting it out of the 1987 cadillac.

Oh, yeah, right. So if you're going to go and buy your own foam and stuff, the one thing you want to definitely stay away from is any foam, like your hobby lobbies and that sort of thing. Do not get the green foam, because the green foam is a fire retardant foam and it has chemicals in it.

They'll bleed into your aquarium.

But right now, if you go, you can find several places that gives good aquarium foam. A lot of our people, like Steve or vicki and all kinds of you.

Can get cut sheets of it, actually, and just order online. You can get a roll of it, a foam.

And to tell you the truth, it's just as easy to make one as it is to make 100, because once you get set up and you can make them, they work wonderful. And I have all bare bottom tanks for my breeding, and it works out really well for me, but they're not pretty.

So, Mr. pickles, you had a question?

Yeah. Okay, so on the topic of filters so for my ten gallon tank, I have a marina hang on the back, s 15, the slim version.

Good man.

And I didn't buy it. It came with the tank.

Even better.

So it uses three cartridges. And how often am I supposed to replace them?

So, number one, when you look at a filter, do you need to replace it? Most people just throw them out and grab a new one. Well, if you can look at the type of filter, is it falling apart? Is it dropping? Is it holding carbon? Is the carbon falling out? If it's not, take that over to your sink and wash it out with your hand. Just make sure to get all that you can out of it. Don't remove everything. You're not going to want this as like a dinner plate clean. You're not going to use any chemicals or soap, but take it over your sink. Use warm water, not hot, because you don't want to burn out the bacteria in your cool water in your filter. So warm is the most like a tepid. And just rinse it out. Make sure that you can push water through it and put it right back in your aquarium. Only try to replace those if there's a disease in your tank. And you want to make sure to eradicate the thing that may be catching some of the fungus or if it's falling apart.

Are these carbon filters?

Well, it uses three, right? One of them that Came was a ceramic no, one of them was a carbon one. And the other two ceramic water clear, something like that.

Okay, so that's the ceramic thing. If I'm correct, that's going to be where your biological filtration is in there.

That one, you just make sure water can go through it. You really never clean it?

Yeah, you don't clean that one.

Well, that's what I was saying when you told me to clean it with a tap or something. My uncle is kind of what got me into this. And he said to never clean it with a tap because the chlorine will kill the that's a great point.

So we are in an area we don't have to deal with a lot of chlorine. We test our water frequently and the city of insert here decides that they're not going to put any real chlorine in the water. So we don't have to even use stress coat. But in your area, yes, that is the case. If you have to rinse that thing out and you're in the city and they use chlorine, it will absolutely kill the water. So your family member is correct on that.

Good job.

He said to use aquarium water that's already in the tank to do it.

Very good catch.

Okay, so basically the whole point of this was my question was these filter cartridges, in reality, they're not that expensive, but I'm 16 and I don't have a job and I can't afford to replace them every time. So would it be possible to say get like I was watching this guy on YouTube and he said he was showing a bunch of ways to make your own filters. lava rock works really well. I was thinking I could use that as biological filtration and put it in and then put like, sponges near the intake so that gets all the solid particles. Would that even work?

So in a pinch, if you want to do your own DIY filter and I'm not really reversed on the filter cartridge you have. So number one, the filter that holds the carbon don't have to replace it. Number two, the ceramic filter, definitely don't replace that. So it's just the mechanical filter, the one that's catching all the stuff that you're going to eventually have to replace. So if you can, you can pull off all of the polyester off the filter and you can wrap it and make sure that when you're doing this, that you're not making the pump catch any of the material and you're not blocking the water so it spills out and goes all over your floor. I cannot stress that enough. But you can use quilt batting that you can purchase on Amazon, and it's like $2 for a big roll of.

Quilt batting, lifetime supply.

And you can wrap it around the shell of that plastic filter cartridge. And that is the exact same material they already use for the polyester filters. It's really cheap. Cheaper than using kitchen sponges, which again, they work well, but they get clogged up a lot faster. So quilt batting, if you're looking for that ghetto, I can't afford it. redneck solution. That's what we even do with some of our old filters that we can't even buy filtered cartridges for.

Yeah, that's exactly what some of these guys are doing with all these different filters over the years. They still work, but all of a sudden they quit making them. They don't make the cartridges anymore. So you just got to save a buck.

Yeah. Well, the whole thing you were saying about only having to clean the mechanical filtration and not the carbon or the ceramic, that's what I found weird about this filter, because it didn't come with mechanical filtration per se. It just came with like the three cartridges. And the water only goes through those cartridges.

Well, the cartridges. So the carbon, that's your chemical filtration.

My guess is that's got the filter floss around that carbon.

Yeah. Like it has like, I don't know, some sort of fungi sort of thing around it.

Yeah. So what you're going to want to do is you don't need the carbon, you just need that filter floss and then that traps like, all the big particles. The carbon is like a chemical one, but half the time you don't need it. Really?

Well, that's what I was told because in my 55 gallon tank, my uncle had told me to take out the whole carbon package, little thing that's in it, and I could replace that with biomedia. And that was like, I don't need the carbon.

Correct.

That would work, yeah. And the thing is, too, you can also buy bulk carbon, so you can replace the carbon inside that little bag and that's relatively inexpensive. But they have some stuff like black diamond, which is very good carbon, but it's super expensive. So, yeah, I think it's a good idea. Where you're trying to save a buck. You're a new aquarius, definitely cut corners where you can you're not really going to hurt anything.

And just for those beginner people that are listening, the carbon is the chemical filtration to try to make the water a bit clearer. The ceramics, or what we call biological media, like beads we put in there are the biological filtration where they have the good bacteria sticking to it, and the filter floss or polyester quilt batting, is the mechanical where it actually catches the pieces, the crap and the water, the excess food.

Mr. pickle 55 gallon, is that the old style marine land ones where it's got the double cartridges on it? It's got like an open cartridge. Okay, which kind is that one?

The one that I have. It came with the guy gave it to me with the tank. I'm not sure what's called. I know it's fluval something.

Okay.

In the back it has this big sponge that has bigger holes on one side, and on one side it has a lot smaller holes. And then after the sponge, there's the carbon.

Okay. And the carbon is in a bag, right?

Yeah, it's in like this little baggie you can tell he hasn't replaced. And my uncle said from the way it looks, the bag is probably going to break and I'm going to have carbon everywhere pretty soon.

Just throw it away?

Yeah, throw that away. You don't need that. Yeah, the sponge save it until it falls apart and then just cut a new sponge and put that in there.

Yeah, well, perfect. And what else is there?

Then there's the biological media, which is like these little ceramic sticks.

Okay, perfect. The little baggy that you have, you could literally take, like, pantyhose and put carbon in there and drop that into your filter, into your big one.

Make sure you wash it. You don't want mom's perfume on it.

No.

Yeah, well, no.

Yeah, he said I don't actually need the carbon, so I shouldn't have to worry about getting that. I could just replace it with biomedia. That would work, right?

That would work just fine.

Well, perfect. Mr. pickle, I appreciate the question. So let's dive on again. Those are the two main ones. And again, just to go back in the sponge filter. The idea of the sponge filter is you take a sponge, a tube goes in the sponge, and at the bottom of the tube, air blows through and the water sucks through the sponge into the tube and out. So it's just cycling the water through the sponge, and the sponge collects all the garbage. That is one of my favorite filters. You can't go wrong, and if it just doesn't catch enough, you can either add another sponge filter or just turn up your aerator.

So you only need an air pump?

Only need an air pump, yeah.

Oh, I saw the sponge filter. Was the thing you put on the intake of your actual filter?

No, but we'll make sure to have a link to a couple of good sponge filter options on our Twitter account for you.

There we go. So, yeah, the thing with a sponge filter, it's more for people who have multiple tanks and are trying to save a buck. They're not pretty to look at, to be honest. I mean, so your filter that you have sounds like an excellent deal. You don't have to really look at anything but the intake tube. So I will continue using that. But sponge filters, we use a lot. They work really well for, like, a medicine tank, if you've got a quarantine tank and it's just kind of like off in another room and it's not your show tank. But yeah, you don't want to use sponge filters. So much for show tank. They're just not pretty, honestly.

So, next couple of things on our list is heat. So if you're having anything besides white clouds or goldfish, you have to have heat. And for beginner aquarist, they have to do a lot of homework of what should I put it at? And I don't know how to read the thermometer correctly. So instead, you can go to Walmart and purchase a very cheap heater. And they come, they're preset heaters. They're based for the average tropical fish, and tropical fish, an expert might say, oh no, they need 80 degrees. Oh no, they need, you know, 72. Well, trust me, both of those fish will live in a 76 degree aquarium just fine. So you're a beginner. Go out, get the preset filters or heaters and real cheap pickup of Walmart, Amazon. You just drop them in and they're completely submerged. Do not leave the top where you think that oh, water is going to get in and short my heater. No, these are completely submergeable filter heaters that they have nowadays. So don't be afraid. And if you do water changes, watch where that heater is because if the heater is out of water, plugged in, you'll burn it out really quickly. If it's not submerged underwater, it'll load. It won't be a happy camper. You'll either electrocute yourself, your fish, it won't be a good deal.

Go ahead.

Sorry. Okay. Sorry Jim. Here's a trick that I did, and I don't know if Jim was going to tell the same thing. With those submersible heaters, you can put them underneath because they're fully submersible. You can put them underneath your outtake tube, your outtake flow of your filter and then the water will go over that and then spread the heat more evenly across your whole tank. Don't just stick it far in the one corner because then it's always on.

It'll be like putting a space heater in your house. The living room will be warm, but the rest of the house will be cold. You want to make sure it's where air is moving or in this situation water is moving.

I liked put mine at least halfway down the aquarium just for the fact that when I do a water change, I don't want to have to crawl them back and unplug the darn heater when I do a water change because then half the time I forget to plug the heater back in. The next day I see my fish, I've got clamped fins and I'm kind of going, what's wrong with you guys today? Oh, I forgot to plug back in the heater. The other thing you got to know when you're buying a heater is you need to buy the correct size. And each box will tell you that this is good for a 55 gallon tank. This is good for 100 gallon tank. I think the rule thumb was what is it, Adam, is it like five watts per gallon or something?

Yeah, that's what I usually did. But if you do the submersible ones and you put them in the middle of the tank underneath that filter, you actually could get away with a little bit smaller one.

Right. And the thing is, heaters are not cheap to run. I mean anything that draws a lot of power that creates heat, like your regular blow dryer or the heater that you have out in your porch to keep your shoes warm, all that stuff runs expensive. It runs up your heat bill. So that's why you're talking to like, people with Steve rubiki who heats his room, because he's got 400 tanks, and that makes total sense. But when you've only got the one tank, you can, of course, have the heater. And I think what Adam said is put in the middle of the tank underneath your intake and you'll get better circulation that way.

So getting closer to the end of our list is lighting most of these tanks that you buy either if you buy it used or if you buy it as a kit at Walmart or whatever. You purchase your tanks on Amazon, they'll come with a hood. If they don't come with the hood, you can buy hood specially made to fit your tank. And they'll either come with an Led light, which is the preference, because it's easier on your electrical bill and it doesn't add excess heat to your aquarium or a traditional screw in bulb. So it's not necessarily what hood to choose. Any hood that fits your tank will work. It's how long you run the light. So when you're setting up a new aquarium, positioning your house matters. If you're going to put it into a sunroom where there's three walls that are nothing but windows, you're going to have a ton of algae without any light. So make sure that you're not putting it into a super well lit room with windows, you're putting it somewhere where it has a little bit more shade away from a window, because you're going to have a bunch of green in your tank. So even if you move your aquarium to a windowless room, you're still running your light and that's still going to create algae. So what I recommend beginners to do until they realize how much algae is built up in their tank with the ammonia cycle when they're first cycling is only have your light on from the time, let's say, that you're a kid or you're an adult and you go to school you get off school and you come home turn your light on then you'll have your light on for, say, from 330 or 430 when you get off work or school and you'll have it running until you go to bed. And that's a good six hour cycle where your fish are getting light, your plants are getting enough light, and you're not going to have a bunch of excess algae growth right off the get go. Later, once you understand how your plants are growing, how the algae is going in your tank, then you can turn on from when you wake up in the morning to when you go to bed. But to start off with, I always recommend once you get home from work, turn it on until you go to bed.

Yeah, a lot of people want to pretend it's a night light and leave it on all night long. And if you're not getting any light whatsoever during the daytime, that works. I don't like having the aquarium light on at night just for the fact that the fish kind of get screwed up a little bit. And so during the day, they're not very active, and during the evening, then they just party all day long.

So if you want a light light for your kid, there's two compromises you can do. One, glow in the dark accessories. You can get glowing dark plastics. You can get Glenn Arc caves, and those work really good. They'll give you a nice 45 minutes light cycle until they fall asleep. It may not be enough to glow the room, but at least enough to attract the kid's attention until they fall asleep. If you still want an actual nightlight, they have hoods or light accessories that either go white, bright white for the day, and you can turn it on to moonlight mode, which gives a nice blue dim light across the entire tank. But that also does gain a small amount of algae. So be aware of that. That would be a day and night cycle that will be applicable. So you can have a nightlight for your kid?

Yeah. These new Led lights, they come out. There are so many cool things that these things have, and they've made it so much easier to grow plants, to have a night light, to have different spectrums that you could adjust. So if you have certain fish, like Steve Rebcck was talking last week, he's got the angel fish with the blue, he might be able to adjust that Led light to give your fish a little more blue color. The things out there are just tremendously. So advanced.

So Jimmy and I, years back, we bought a bunch of different lighting accessories, trying to find what's cheap and what works. And we got this cool light set up that we were trying to build, and we're trying to emulate it off of a different light set up. We were borrowing it from a friend. So we tried it and had the remote control, and it had these lighting adjustment options, and it had this demo feature. So it was showing in a store. We turn on the demo feature, and this thing looks like it came out of David bowie's rear end. Just flashing colors, lights, like a disco, just strobing all these colors and mixtures, and it was just beautiful. And then we realized that two of the neon tetras were having an epileptic seizure in the tank and died.

Pretty accurate. Yeah.

Like right then and there, the neon is just like, spun in a circle and then just flatlined.

Yeah.

So be careful. Don't just flip on and off. How do you like that when you're in a completely dark room? It's just that much worse for your animal.

Absolutely. What else you got, Rob?

So, last bit on the lighting. Be a cheater if you don't want to do it. You don't trust your kid with responsibilities. Go to Walmart. Buy yourself a timer. Put that light on a timer.

Oh, that is a great idea.

All right, so last little accessories is every tank, no matter what you have, will have algae. Even if you're on the six hour schedule in a window room, that's just part of regular maintenance. So get yourself a good algae scraper. There's essentially two different kinds they have in the market. You can either get what they call a blade on the stick or a brush on the stick. They do work. Jimmy and I'm favorite is we like the magnetic ones. It costs a little bit more money, but what they do is they have two magnets one six of the inside of your aquarium, the other six to the outside. And you just take your hand on the outside of the aquarium and move the magnet across your aquarium, scraping off the algae. And you can just leave that in your tank.

They also have go ahead, Adam.

Until it gets old and disgusting.

No, until it gets until you put it all the way down to the bottom, and it picks up a whole clump of sand, and then you drag the sand all over your glass and scratch all your glass up.

Yeah, that's why you shouldn't have sand in your tank, Adam. Wait, it wasn't you. It was rob's.

Like sand or don't let your kid use the magnet.

The one thing that robs just said is my favorite is the magnetic one. I like the floating magnetic one. So when it falls off, it goes up to the top of the tank. And you're not playing that game that.

You go to the get the net, try to get it squeezed out, and disturb your tanks. Knock your decorations over.

So by the floating there's. I think a good brand is a magnet float. They have different types. The bigger your tank, the thicker the glass, the more magnet you need. There again on the outside of the label. And you buy things that say up to a 55 gallon tank. I've got one that I use. I have a 220 gallon tank that we do some maintenance on over at a nearby town in a hospital. Hospital, yeah. And that magnet, if you're not careful when you're trying to you can't pull it apart. You got to twist them apart.

Little rip the pacemaker right out of your chest.

Right out of your chest. This thing will bust your finger. It's so powerful. You got to be so careful with these big magnets. Just make sure you get one that works for you. And then I like to take them out of the water so they don't get all crusty like Adam and Rob, but they're lazy.

All right, so now we've got the tank. We have the substrate. We have the decorations, maybe plants. We have this cool bubbly chest that isn't wapping off fish's heads.

Okay?

Right? We have heat we have a sweet filter that we got from the uncle and gave some great advice on the uncle. What else is on the back? We have lighting. We even put it on a timer because Mr. pickles keeps forgetting to shut off the light at night.

But we're golden. Then we're good to go.

Where'S the fish, bro?

What? Yes, we have to tell fish stinking fish.

We have a list of fish that we recommend for beginners. And goldfish are not on this list for obvious reasons because goldfish poop like clydesdale Goldfish poop a lot. They're poop machines.

Poop machines.

Poop machines extraordinaires. So number one on the list, and we're going to be a little more vague on these topics, is number one is tetra. Tetras are great selection for fish. So tetras have a long, long list of different types of tetras.

Many, many tetras, many tetras, some easy to take care of, some not.

Just do your homework, do your homework, find which ones you're picking. But you can't go wrong with a lot of tetris. Some are a little more finicky. Neon tetras can't stand disco parties, right?

Emperor tetras are a little harder to keep.

Cardinals, Congo tetras grow massive. I mean massive like so big they'll outgrow your tank, right? But most tetras are really hardy otherwise. There's even some I think the worst tetra that you could possibly get as a starter is a blind cave tetra. Sweet.

I like those.

They have no eyeballs, they're completely blind, so they're hypersensitive to noise, vibration and smell. So if you put flakes in the water and they see a guppy's tail, they'll just grab it because I think it's a flake food. So do your homework. But most tetras are extremely placid. They work with almost every community fish out there. They're actually normally the ones that are getting targeted in the tank. And start off with your rummy nose, start off with your bleeding heart tetra. There's a lot of great tetras out there. Glow light tetras, or even what they call those glow fish tetras. They have daniels white skirt tetras that are all bred to have these, like, neon colors. People might not like them in the hobby because they don't call them authentic fish, but they're still a great fish for kids to start off with. Next is live bearers. So most any live bears, but of course the guppies, what everybody starts off with.

Love the guppies.

Bright colors, continually moving around and have fun. They breed like rabbits and which works out well for kids to watch the whole process in front of their faces. And they're really hearty, I mean, overall. And some people don't ever get out of that phase and just keep feeder guppies around.

They are not feeder guppies.

Let it go at it. Let it go, let it go. No good area, bad air out, bad out.

And for the bottom corridors, oh, love them. So get your most pet. Stores have a stored corridor. They come in essentially three flavors. There's bronze, they have this kind of brown orange color on their back. There's salt and pepper, which are speckled paleopic color. And they have albino.

If you're going to the albinos are usually of the bronze.

Right. If you're going to pick them, pick the salt and pepper or bronze. The albinos are the least hearty, just because albino's, by their nature, the genetics, are not that great. So pick the other ones if you can, so help it.

Yeah, because the spectral ones are called paleotis and the green ones are called I'm not making this up. Green anus.

No, anais.

Anais. But I like Anus better.

I like anus better.

Anus better.

And then, of course, the albinyls, the albinyls are genetically the weakest, and so I would not recommend them for beginners.

So the next is you've been your kids favorite. They got to cut them for years.

Oh, when my kids would make me mad, I'd get 405, 600 bedas in, and I'd make them stand at the kitchen sinking. And they'd have to cut Betas because they come in little tiny bags, about an ounce and a half of water, and then they would stand there for hours putting bedas and cups. And I still love Betas. My kids don't, but they're grown up now and they have their own house.

So betas 101. Betas. Betas. You do not put a male with a male, but you can have females with females.

Correct.

So you can have a sorority of multiple female Betas, and you can request those at your pet store. They're real hardy. They can withstand a lot of different temperatures. They can withstand low oxygen environments, but contrary to popular opinion, they need heat. So when you see a Beta in a bowl, ask their owner, do you have a heater? Is it by a heated vent in your home? They do need a higher temperature, but otherwise they're one of the most hearty fish. They used to ship them on paper towels, just moist paper towels. And because they can breathe oxygen, that's how they'd ship them overseas.

Back in the day, yeah, many years ago they would do that, but now they're a lot more humane in the way they do it.

They can take a beating. And that's really what you want for a beginner, beginner fish.

I'll give you a little hint. So up here in the northland, even though it says 72 degrees on your thermostat, your house is still pretty cold. And I've had people say my bed is just not as active during the winter. And if you take your bed a bowl, if you just have a bowl with a bed in it and you put it on top of your refrigerator, your refrigerator gives off enough warmth to warm up that bowl and make that fish a lot happier. Don't put it on the back of your $1700 TV to try to warm it up, but on top of your fridge works pretty good. And I've done that over the years.

I've measured fridges with the beta sitting on top up to 76 degrees.

Yeah.

So the last couple are resboras and we're trying to sit there. We're prepping for the podcast before this. There's not a whole lot of reservoirs we can think of that would be bad for your tank. Even the larger resbora breeds, which is like what they call the Rose Line shark, is a type of barbed resbora. They're great community tank fish. They'll grow a little bit bigger, but they'll even leave neon tetras alone. They're a hardy species of fish and there's not a lot that you can go wrong with.

You know, even though Rob says he like a Rose Line shark, well, you're always going to have your bullies in the fish world. And I've had neons that have been mean as heck. I've had jeepers, I've had some male bettas that would leave the females alone. I mean, you never know. There's always the bully in the bunch, so you always just kind of want to watch. Just because we say Rose Line sharks are pretty good doesn't mean they're all good.

I mean, Jimmy and I, we're good humans, but Adam can be a real pain in the head.

He can be a jerk. Are you listening?

All right.

Love you. I am. Love you a long time.

Yeah.

All right. Second to last on the list is dwarf gamis. So garami's normally as a species, get really big. They're normally aggressive. Dwarf garamis hold a lot of color. Normally they come in either blue or blue red varieties. The classic dwarf grammy is a blue striped red fish, and it's very pretty. They stay very small and you can get just one to add to a community tank because they don't mind being alone. They're more of an antisocial fish. They're not mean, they just keep themselves and they add a lot of color. Adding one to a community tank goes a long way and they stay nice and small. And last but not least, and the most that we're most conscious about is a playoff and not just a plato. So if you go to a normal pet store, if they're a good pet store, they're going to warn you about placo's. So if you get what we call a Florida traditional plato that they used to carry a walmart, walmart no longer carries fish. Those will get as long as your arm. They grow massive sizes. So if you have a 55 gallon aquarium, you probably can have one for quite a long time.

When Mr. Picklebught his, he had a huge pleco there, didn't you?

Yeah, it was the sides of my arm. I sold it last week.

There you go. So what you're going to look for, and what we recommend is Bristolnose Platos bristlenose. Platos only grow to about four inches max, and they're extremely vivacious and clean, clean, clean all day. But what we were most concerned about is when you're starting out, add the plato. Last, start up your tank, get a couple of fish going, make sure the cycle is working, and give your tank at least a month to start building up algae. So do not add a placo to your tank unless you see algae in your tank, because they have nothing to feed off of. And then when you do, if you have a small tank, like a ten or 20 gallon, get algae wafers for them as well, because the algae in the tank is not going to be enough to feed them.

And if you're feeding flake food, normally not enough flake food ever hits the bottom for them to ever get, and they don't normally come to the top. You'll have your few flakes that will come to the top searching for food, but for the most part, they're going to lay on the bottom and go, Feed me.

Seymour so what we do around here is when we start up, either breed, platos grow all playcos. Whatever we do, we try to use some of our local harvest. So, zucchinis, cucumbers, melon, they love almost all types of melon.

I have a crime to report. rob's so last melon melon last Thursday, I was doing my normal job and I made the mistake of going to this small town in northern Minnesota, and I made the mistake of not locking my door. And I came out and I had £95 of freaking zucchini in the back. And I looked over and my customers are all laughing their heads off. And this has happened about ten times this summer, and I thought, oh, zucchini season is over. I was wrong.

Everyone in Minnesota, especially dumps zucchini off and everyone it's a going joke. Like, I heard this from Jimmy, not the first time I've heard this. Yeah, people will literally, if you have a truck, like a box bed truck, they will come. If you park at any local place, a grocery store, they will come and just dump it in your truck because everybody grows it, but no one uses it for anything.

Well, they get so gosh darn big. Some of them will get as big as your arm and weigh £10, which are pretty much useless.

They don't have flavor. You can't use them for cooking. Some of them are partially hollow.

When I had players love them. Yeah, when I had all those Brussels plecos that I bought from Stewart down in Arkansas, I came back and I probably brought back about 3000 placos. And so I was telling all my customers, I really want some zucchini if you got some. And that was a mistake. And now I don't have that many plecos. I got very few plecos, but I've got a lot of zucchini. I bet you I have £200 of zucchini in my freezer.

So, fun fact, like jimmy just said zucchini cucumber for fish keep frozen. So slice it up, cube it up. slices work better. Don't use, like, small cubes and freeze it in ziplock bags. It can get freezer burnt. It doesn't matter. Just take it. You don't really have to even unthought. You can just skewer them to the bottom of your tank and your gravel, and as they melt, placos will just come and destroy it.

Yeah. Right now, Rob has got a pair of placo. He's got all kinds of babies. And if you take a piece of zucchini the size of a hamburger slice, and if you put on the bottom, he'll have 100 plecos on that darn thing.

And as you train them and get them more used to eating zucchini and other fresh goods that you have that you normally throw out, they will literally come eat it off the top of the surface. So you throw a piece in there, zucchini floats. They will go to the surface and suck it off the surface of the water.

Yes. And the next day, you'll have nothing but a bunch of pleco poop on the bottom. And the rhine.

The rhine.

The rhine just floats to the top, and you just take it and throw it, and it's throw another piece in.

But they will don't leave the rhine in your tank. It's more crap for you to make more ammonia.

Right? But they will eat themselves to death. Those things will eat and eat and eat and poop and poop and poop and grow like weeds.

So just to recap tetras live bearers cory, doras, Dwarf Garamis, Betas Rosboras and plato's after you have algae are all great beginner solutions. Give those a try. And again, we love questions. Thank you, Mr. pickle, for joining us. It was enlightening. And if you have more questions, we'll certainly follow up with you after Mr. pickle. But we love your emails. We love your voicemails. You guys send us. So continue to do so. Aquariumguyspodcast.com. And on the bottom of the website, again, is our number 218-214-9214. Give us a call. We'll air your question right on the show.

Yeah, we had our best week last week. We've only been doing this for, what? How many weeks are up?

Six, seven weeks last I think it's like four weeks. But we got six episodes. This is number seven.

Number seven episode. And we had a tremendous amount of listeners last week. Thank you guys for doing that. Please tell your friends to tune in. Please give us ideas. We're not here to say that we're experts on any of this stuff, but we're just here to try and answer some questions. If we don't know, we'll find it. We'll find it for you and stuff. But we're here to help you succeed. That's the only reason we're here. We want you to succeed because people aren't in this hobby anymore like they used to be, and we want to see this hobby succeed because we love it so much.

So if you love us, go to our website, buy a T shirt, get a mug, whatever you can find on a merch store. And again, we'll be ready for your questions. So, Adam, what I like to do is you were talking to me about adding a segment to the show. Do we have that ready this week?

Kind of, yeah.

So what we talked about is doing, you could say, the fish of the episode, since we do this more than once a week on occasion. So what is the special fish of this episode, sir?

The special fish of this episode is freshwater candy cane gobies. And they are awas. flavus, I think, is their scientific name.

Not a beginner species. Not a beginner species, no, not a beginner species.

But they're really fun. I actually put them in with my discus because they could take the heat of the discus tank. And males are about three to four inches. They're brightly colored. They hop on the bottom like a classic goldie. They love frozen bloodworms, live bloodworms, live blackworms, whatever you can feed them.

Beef hearts.

Beef hearts? I didn't really have meat, beef heart, but I just had them eat kind of a little bit of mostly insects.

Carnivorous?

Yeah, they're carnivorous. They never really went for flake food or pellets or anything that I could see, but maybe you could try it with some of the newer pellets that they have out now. Those were some of my most favorite fish because the males would go and they are a little bit aggressive towards each other, but not really towards any other fish. And the males will brighten up and have displays, and they'll throw out their top fins and show off. And they'll open their mouths, and their mouths are really big. Each other show off. And the females are a little bit smaller, like two, three inches. And they like to hide in clay, flower pots or caves.

So, like most gobies, these species, again, if you can do brackish, certainly put them in a brackish tank. Otherwise, if you're going to have them with other freshwater species, add some salt to the water that complements them really well.

Yeah, I love them. Those were one of my most favorite fish for keeping, because they're just weird unique. They only come in, I think, in March, april. I think they come from Brazil. Yeah. They're a seasonal fish. You almost never see them because people just don't get them.

So what we're going to do is each week we're going to try to grab a new, unusual species that people might not have ever heard of. Most people that are either getting the hobby or even been in the hobby a long time, haven't don't know what's been out there or what is no longer offered. So we're just going to try to do the obscure species of the week or the podcast and maybe you'll learn something. Well, Jimmy, is that all you got?

That's all I got for you today, Bob.

All right, Adam.

That's all I got.

All right. Thanks again, Mr pickles.

Yeah, thanks to you guys for having me on the show.

Yeah, it was a lot of fun, man. And I hope you guys have a mild winter up there and I hope you have great success. Please give us an update. He Laughs we're from Minnesota. There's no such thing as a mild winter, you wiener.

Yeah, no, exactly. We have no mild winters.

Yeah, we have snow up to our eyeballs. And that's only because we're standing on top of our car.

All right, thanks again, guys. Let's cue that outro.

Thanks, guys, for listening to this podcast. Please visit us@aquariumguyspodcast.com and listen to us on spotify, iHeartRadio itunes and anywhere you can listen to podcasts.

We're practically everywhere. We're on Google. I mean, just go to your favorite place, Pocket casts. Subscribe to make sure it gets push notifications directly to your phone. Otherwise Jim will be crying into sleep.

Can I listen to it in my tree house?

In your treehouse, in your fish room. Even alone at work.

What about my man cave?

Especially your man cave.

Yeah.

Only if Adam is there.

No.

With feeder guppy?

No, they're endless.

You imagine loving, flag sucking mother flag.

Well, I guess we'll see you next time. Later.