Alright guys, welcome to the podcast. We're going to start off everything. This is normally the spot where we do the charity and the sponsorship, but since again we're waiting for sponsors, please contact us. We're just going to go right into our charity of choice. This week we're going to highlight Ohio Fish Rescue. Ohio Fish Rescue is a charity that started out of the good and kindness of fish keepers like you and me, jim's Heart, where they saw people just dumping fish, flushing them down their toilet. When they're done with them, they're throwing away pets, essentially. There's no humane society set up for fish. So they decided to be one of the first people to set it up, at least in their area. And they have expanded amazing amounts that tenfold. And they're very well known for large fish. These people will get fish such as alligator, gar, some crazy Amazon catfish, fish that grow excessive 5ft. And they'll decide that their 20 gallon tank is good enough for it. And when it grows too big, what do they do? Well, you get rid of it. And instead of doing that, Ohio Fish Rescue has facilities that they keep growing and growing to make sure they have places for these fish to be. They make sure they go to zoos, they make sure they go to pet stores. They make sure to take care of the fish and find them a home. So they do this again, they're located in Ohio, but they've done this for people across the nation. If they want to ship them the fish somehow or have someone deliver them, they do a lot of charitable work making sure that our rejected fish are taken care of. And we really encourage you to go to their website, ohiofishrescue.com, and consider maybe buying a T shirt, giving them a couple of bucks, or at least letting them know, hey, I really appreciate what you do, because sometimes money, you don't have the money. But they just need to know that you're listening, you care, and you're supporting them.

A thank you goes a long, long ways. It really does.

So just to up the ante, their number is 216-773-0407 and I'm pretty sure we don't have permission to give up their number, but it is on their website. So here we go. Give them a call. Just say, hey guys, thanks for what you're doing, have a great day, keep it up. And just that's it.

Even better than that, give them a couple of bucks. There's a link on their is it the Facebook or website?

They have it on their website. And again, they have paypal donation, patreon if you want to subscribe to their monthly charity and donate as a sponsor of Ohio Fish Rescue. Or they do have a Go Fund me page.

Fantastic. They're great guys. They're doing the right thing. And we need to support everybody in this hobby that does the right thing.

It only helps grow our hobby. And kudos to Ohio Fish Rescue. Thanks again, and let's start the show. Welcome to the Aquarium Guide podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolson. All right, guys. Welcome to the aquarium, guys. Podcast. We are happy to kick off episode two. I have my co host, Jim. How are you today?

I am rockin. I love that new intro that we got.

We actually recorded the first episode before we had the name site and all the details locked down. So we've been very busy this week.

Very busy. rob's has been working his butt off.

I've gotten skinnier sitting down and doing nerd things. Who knew?

Who knew he could do that?

So we have our website, Aquariumguyspodcast.com. We have the rss feed up. You can certainly subscribe right from our website. Otherwise, we are pushing this out to absolutely every single podcast store that is available. We are in Google Play. We are in spotify. We're on stitcher. We're in a pile. Apple is submitted. We should have that in the next couple of days. So certainly go to the website, find those and share this with your friends. But above all else, make sure you're subscribed. This is a podcast that we're not necessarily doing on a routine schedule. We're certainly going to do our best to stay on schedule, but we may have extra podcasts between our normal scheduled hours. So to get information of when that is subscribe and make sure it notifies.

Your phone, and if there's something that you want us to talk about, send that to us also in an email or a phone call to our website.

So we just set up a hotline for all of our listeners to call in and ask us questions directly to us. And it could be how much more than $8,000 did you lose, Jimmy?

You know what? We'll save that for an entire week long podcast.

See, that's why you got to call in. Otherwise he won't cough up any more information.

I'll have to ask my accountant, but I'm pretty sure it was more than 8000. But it's been brought up quite a bit that, Jim, you really sucked that first year. And yes, I did. And there's other years I also sucked. So follow us up and we will keep on telling you stories of the past, stories of the future, of what we're up to.

And just so you know, the information, call us at 218-214-9214. We did not decide to purchase a 100 number because that costs money. Money. We're trying to do this on budget.

I lost money. So, yeah, we need money.

So leave us a voicemail. And again, by doing that, we have your permission to put it on air, because if we can't share it with the audience, what's the point of answering your question?

That is correct.

So today, Jimmy, what are we diving into today?

One of our favorite things, one of the first things that people usually buy when they get their crim. Today we're going to talk about live bears.

So when we dive into live bears last week, we talked about guppies and your first experience. And I think that really kicked this conversation off. And live bears, by their nature, by their name, most fish procreate and produce eggs.

Correct.

These literally birth live young.

Correct.

And that's what makes them unique. And also normally if you don't have some 70s fungus on your fish, easy to breed.

Absolutely. These fish are a wonderful, wonderful first time fish, especially if you have children, because all of a sudden you've got 30 baby fish in that tank and your kids can't keep their eyes off that tank. They want to feed that tank all day long. And all of a sudden you go in from having six fish into there. Now you've got 36 fish.

It works pretty well. And it's not just they're breeding because they're easy to breed for anybody to do, but also because they stay a nice small size, they're colorful and they're super hearty overall.

Yes, there are so many varieties of different Lie Bears. Every Lie Bear, there's probably 15 to 30 colors that you can get. And constantly the numbers are, the colors are being worked on by all kinds of breeders across the world.

So, again, Jimmy and I have been wholesaling fish for a while. And just the lists we get from a lot of different places that farm them. We've talked about Florida before that's, again, the hotspot where you can farm and get fish. The lists that we see of names of these fish, it's not just it's a guppy, but we have, what, 37 different choices from different vendors to choose from. tuxedo, Guppies, cobra, all kinds of different ones.

Yes. And every guppy breed out there has its own color, its own name. But what's kind of confusing is what somebody might call a sunburst Platty, might be a yellow Platty from a different breeder.

So there's not a lot of consistency. And this started a long time ago, again, when this hobby exploded is they had some scientific names. It's not really easy to use scientific names in a pet store. So they didn't ask the vendor to tell me, well, what do I call these? They just came up with them on the spot. That's yellow. I'm going to make up some cool, fun name. So there's some that, again, like a sunburst platy is kind of like that yellow red hue splash across the fish. So there's some standards, but by no means do the same farmers ever use the same colored name. So if you're getting a platy, they'll make some names and you're hoping they're going to have a picture for you to get an idea.

That is the best way that when I purchase these different types of Plateaus Guppies swords, it's nice to be able to have a reference to look at, because some of these names are outrageous that they come up with. And then you order them up. You spend a couple of $100 on a bag of fish because they're packed 300 when I wholesale them. And you get in and you go, oh, this is just a plain old Red tuxedo Platy. But it's got a different name now.

So that plain old Red tuxedo platti may be assumed that it's a red black patty, but some other vendor could call it a candy cane or Santa claus Platty because it's red white.

Yeah you never know it's just like discus. When you're looking online at discus there is probably ten to twelve different types of names for just a yellow discus.

And it's actually a bit worse because you have some standards with discus because even if they come up with crazy color names they'll still have pattern association like snakeskin. That's pretty well established for discus everybody knows what a snake skin pattern is but got pieces not the same way.

No and then also with like the discus you'll have a yellow discus but some of them might have a red eye and they'll call it something completely different.

Right so going down the quick list and again we're not going to go over every live bear we're going to go over a generalization and this is one category to kind of generalize what lie bears do for you. We'll probably do another podcast on some of these species later but again on the list guppies that's a number one for most people in the hobby they're fun, they're colorful, they have nice big fins, platy or I always say veritas you scoop me on the name Veriatus so we're going to get to that. I want to pause on that one. I have so many comments for the very oddest and platy but next on the list is molly's, sword tails, mosquito, fish and then I even have some oddballs to throw in there at the.

End of the show I'm waiting for that.

It's going to be good. So to dive in again with all of these how do we say we call them bread and butter stock in the fish industry because if you have a pet store you have to have the set of light bears. If you don't have light bears you're risking a lot of those intro fish keepers or even casual breeders.

Yeah most likely when we say bread and butterfish as an example they're usually the number 1234 and five sellers of a pet store. It's hard to have a pet store not have an angel fish, not have a guppy, not have a molly and.

Not have a neon tetra correct. So again when we're talking about these we'll try to generalize them so all of these fish within a reason have varied temperatures so you can have a guppy anywhere from 72 to 80 the.

Other thing with the live bears is when they are imported or exported. They come from different salinities also. And so when you're worried about the temperature, you're also worried about the salinity that they're coming into. And right now I just wanted to say if you're bringing in Sri Lanka guppies, if the pet store says these are Sri Lanka guppies, these are being capped in a little brackish water, which with more salt, you can wean them off the salt. But when you first get them in, you should put a little bit of salt. Salt is good for molly's guppies, all those libraries. For the most part it's a little bit of salt.

And if your tank can tolerate it, you should use a little salt. Anyway, it's fantastic to use, especially if you're going to be purchasing fish on a regular basis or adding one or two every now and again to a community tank. Always quarantine. But don't be afraid of using salt on a regular basis if you can.

Every good pet store sells the box of salt for a couple of bucks. When you start using a lot of salt, you can actually go to a 40 pound bag of the salt that you buy for your water softener for your home.

So just so you guys get the correct salt, when you go to the grocery store, you typically see like three or four kinds. It's always the extra course. And make sure it doesn't say anything about rust, rust product, just the generic coarse ground salt with no extra additives. Because you'll have like rust buster, I think it's the brand names they call them and stuff like that. You don't want any of those additives. Just straight extra coarse salt for your softener.

Just to give you an idea, it's the salt that looks just like gravel. If you put it in your hand, it's like gravel. You don't ever want to use any of the salt pellets. And the reason that is salt pellets are held together by water soluble glue and that glue will mess you up big time.

It's not even good for your softener to be heard.

No. When we put our water softener in 20 some odd years ago, I asked the guy that installed it and he says the only thing I would put in here is the salt that looks like gravel. What do you call that, Rob?

The extra course.

Extra course. He said if you put in the pellets, no matter what brand it is, and it could be your name brand, it could be your local brands, they are held together by water soluble glue and that glue will gum up your machine and it will kill your machine.

That and I've actually seen pet store owners, they'll actually have a bag of their own and they'll individually box with a bag to sell aquarium of salt for cheaper in their store than they can purchase. It's their brand at your own risk and they'll certainly provide that to you.

Yeah, and it will save you a buck or two, which then you can take and buy another fish, always.

So again, diving into the species. So again, 72 to 80, and they're normally very hearty. Besides these horrible funguses we talked about in last season.

Yeah, we got a lot of flak from that. But you know what, that's because it's not really seen all that much. But when you do see the Singapore slew, it makes you cringe.

I hope we never see it again. We can dive it into guppies. And again, a lot of these share the same breeding patterns. We'll tell you when they change. So just diving right into breeding live bears, how you sex them is they have their I always call it fish penis. You can see the males versus the females. The females will actually have the bottom fin extended where the males will have that lack of fin and you'll see a stick.

It's a gun, a podium. Yes, I might be saying that wrong.

But it's I think they nailed it, actually.

Yeah, it's a gun, a podium. So, I mean, picture the President of the United States standing in front of his podium.

That gives you an idea that's word references.

Yeah, think about it.

So the issues that we see with people buying them is males, especially guppies. Males are the ones that have the color. Yeah, females used to have color back in the day, but now, again, they're a lot darker and they're never going to be as colorful even if you do funnel them with color. So generally sex your guppies. But the problem is people go to Walmart Close now, but people go to a pet store and they'll buy guppies and they'll get all males and maybe a couple females.

Yes.

Worst thing to do ever.

No. Gets to be ugly.

So imagine you have in real life a bunch of drunk people in a bar, two hot chicks walk in and you're seeing this like, movie plot play out. They're just getting harassed. Everybody buys them a drink, they won't leave them alone. That's the same thing in your aquarium. If you have ten males to two females, they will harass them and stress them out to the point of killing them.

That is terrible. The thing we like to do, a lot of people like a two to one ratio, at least. At least two females for one male.

And for smaller tanks, I'll even go worse. One male to three females. Yeah, if you're doing like because these fish guppies can be perfectly fine. Four fish and a ten gallon, that certainly works because guppies are a lot smaller than they used to be. And yeah, three females to one male. Otherwise what you've been doing, Jam, as I've seen when you got these Sri Lanka guppies in Is, unless stores ask, you won't even sell them females.

No. Here's part of the problem that we're having from some of the overseas producers is they're somehow chemically sterilizing the females. And you can bring in 150 females. The males will hit them all day long and maybe you'll get six babies.

And they'll crap out.

Yeah, it's just amazing. I don't know what they're doing, but what they're doing is they're making sure that they have somebody to sell to. They don't want anybody else breeding them.

So I've done research on this on the Internet and I've also messaged some people that I know that live overseas and no company will admit to it. But again, this is overseas companies, so they're generally farm conglomerates and they'll literally radiate them for a short period of time, literally put them underneath gamma radiation like an X ray machine, radiate them slightly so they go sterile, but not enough to kill them.

Yeah. And it's a terrible thing that they do. The amount of female guppies that I personally sell, compared to male guppies, I might sell 100 male guppies to 20 female guppies just because everybody wants the pretty fish.

So again, we hold those back. And that's been working in a lot of pet stores we've been working with, and they'll have customers come in. Well, I want females and that's the opportunity, when they request it, to educate the customer and let them know that, hey, they will harass and make sure you have a correct ratio. And then it's if the pet store still wants them, we're happy to supply them. And they generally put them in a separate tank so they can just grab and go.

Yeah. And I've got some people that will come into the stores and say, I'd like to breed some my kids like to breed them for a science fair project. And then that's when I always turn around and I go to the Florida guppies. I've got different suppliers, different places we can buy stuff from. The Florida guppies come in and they're very fertile and they'll have lots of babies and that will make everybody that has a tank much more interested in the tank. When you're having little babies, I have people that come in that are so excited that they've got 30 little babies and all they want to do next is buy another tank.

Absolutely. So this is not necessarily strict to guppies. Plateaus, molly's, sword tails, they all have the somewhat of the same issue. Guppies are the worst. If you have a lot of males to female, it'll stress them out to the point of death. Plateaus, mollies and sword tails, not as bad, but they'll certainly stress them out. And, you know, two to one ratio, like you were saying before, but with the molly's plateaus and sore tails, the females have nice color.

Yes, I agree. When you have a black Molly, a black Molly, female and male look pretty much identical. But as you get into the guppies, the females are very plain. They're kind of like a peacock. I mean, when I say peacock, I'm talking about the bird, where the male is very beautiful and the female is.

Rather plain brown, if you will. So the only difference on because, again, platties and mollies, you'll see, that the same you had the word for the penis, sir. I'm just going to call it the fish penis, but no, it's the ganapodium. Thank you. So you can identify any of these species, ghana podium or lack of anapodium, but the sword tails have a unique characteristic. When they're full adults, the males actually have a protruding sword at the bottom of their back fin. And also now new species have veil tail, where they have like two spikes out of their back tail for them, like a fork.

Yeah.

So that's another way to sex them out. And again, when you have these plenty mollies and sword tails all do have colors, so it's much easier when they say, hey, pick two to two to one. They'll easily do it because they all have color. So we don't have a problem stocking up tanks at pet stores. We just make sure it's a higher number of females. So when they take a scoop and they have a kid that doesn't know what he's doing, odds are they're going to do it right.

Right. And what's also interesting about that, which is kind of nice about the female guppy, is that because she's just usually kind of a plain gray, you might get a tail that has a little bit of yellow orange on it. But from the side view, when you're looking at her, as she becomes more gravid and gravit is when she's carrying babies and as she becomes more gravid, her stomach gets a little black spot in the back, and it just gets darker and darker the closer that she gets to giving birth.

So on these particular ones, the easiest to breed, because you can see that spot and see when they're going to hold or when they're closer to actually giving birth is the guppy, because, again, the body normally a silver color. They're a little more see through, so that black dot definitely protrudes and you can see a nice fat female ready to go. So what's the gestation period on a guppy? 14 days?

No, it's actually 30. But if the water temperature does, again have an effect on it, if they're in hotter water, the gestation is probably more like 24 to 25 days. If the water is cold, let's say for some reason, you have them in a room without a heater and your room is 70 degrees, it's probably going to be 45, but I think the average is about 30.

So when you're breeding these fish, they'll continually breed their entire life. And even if you take the mail out, they're capable of holding the sperm for two more batches at least.

At least. I've had some up to four to six batches. They will store the sperm. It only needs to be hit once by the male. And if you're watching your guppies breed, he just kind of pulls up alongside of the female.

His tripod his tripod goes to the.

Left, swings over like he's taking a.

Left and then he literally fans them.

Yeah, it's kind of like a nascar move.

We're just trying to cut them off.

The road, trying to run them in the ditch. I'm not sure what they're doing.

So after you see this fish, you can watch it grow, grow bigger and you'll get an idea of when they start dropping their live young and you can watch them that's the fun thing for kids, watch them give live birth. They'll go in a corner, they'll kind of stay still and they'll hover and they will actually give live tiny babies out. So when they're getting that of this certain size, you can prepare and put them into a couple of different solutions. You can put a breeding basket in your aquarium, which is think of it as like a plastic crate that's covered by mosquito netting. You put the female in there, she has the babies. As soon as you see the babies, you take the babies out. It's not exactly my favorite solution.

Yeah, I'm lazy. I just take the female out, leave the babies in the net. That's what I normally do.

What I recommend is, especially if you're doing this either the first time or just doing this casually, is you can go on Amazon and type in Breeder Box and you'll see these fantastic there's a ton of different name brands on this. What it is essentially it's a plastic floater that sits in the top of your tank. It's independent, just free floating. And you put your female into it and there's two grates. There's the top section where the female sits and a lower section with a grate that the baby swim down into. So when your female is getting close and you think it's going to be the next few days, you take your female, put her in the Breeder box. When she gives the babies, they'll drop below and then you can just take her out anytime and they have more of a safe space because the females will eat a couple.

Yeah, Rob was explaining about the I think they're called like breeder boxes. The bottom of it is like a V with a small little opening. And so the babies, when they come out, they're kind of like a normal human baby where they're kind of unresponsive and they'll slide down the hole and then they'll kind of come to and shake it off and then the babies will stay at bottom and stay away from the female. So it works very well.

Their natural, how do we say, activity when they're born is again born. They come to and they go hide in weeds. They don't stay there, they get adventurous, which is the problem why you can't breed them in a tank. So say you have let's make this up a 20 gallon tank. You have four females and two males. Because you listened to us and decided that you're not going to have your fish harassed and they decided to drop their babies, it's inevitable that they're going to drop the babies, and you're not going to catch every batch. So when they drop their babies, you'll see little ones floating around. Try to catch them when you can with your net and put them in a breeding basket. But some people just say, we'll just put plastic weeds in there to make sure they have plenty of COVID Well, that's guaranteeing that probably two thirds of your stock is going to get eaten.

Yeah. I love baby fish. And the more I can save, the happier I am.

That comes from a true fish breeder right there. Got to make sure he makes his quarter.

Exactly. Well, I don't know if I ever told you about how I used to do it commercially.

So you taught me this. This was one of the funnest projects I've had, is you needed gumpies. And again, it was one of these issues where you couldn't get them to Florida. They were having stocking issues and like, all right, let's grab some of our guppies that we have in stock and let's let's do a do a breeder. I'm like, okay. And I just get out my breeding box and do it the old hard fashioned way. jim's like, no, no, this is we got to do this by scale. So what he does is we go to a hardware store and get these giant rubber made, like, 100 and 5300 gallon, 300 gallons. They're basically a cattle trough is what they're purchased for. You can get them at your local menards or hardware store, and we fill it up with water. We put an aerator and heater in it. And we put these pop up hampers that we get from Walmart. Or you can get them on Amazon as well. And these are just the fabric mesh pop up hampers. They have little tiny holes. And what you do is you take, say, two of these hampers, and you put it in this 150 gallon cattle trough. You put all the adults in the hampers, probably a couple of males that you want your select studs with a bunch of females. And you cover it, you feed them, they breed. And in the darkness, as they deliver their babies, the babies will swim out of the basket, and you just catch them along the sides. Now, a good 150 gallon tank this is blew me away. You can easily get 150 babies a day on full working order.

Yeah. When we were cranking them out, we spent a lot of money. We went over to our local I believe it was like a Home depot type place. We bought 7300 gallon horse troughs. And the reason we bought seven is. That's all we had room for. And they were about six foot long. And so by trial and error, we tried different things. We tried putting them trying to put a whole bunch of plastic plants in there and then getting the babies out of there. And then by talking to a few people down in Florida and overseas, we came to the idea that we're going to try these pop up hampers. Like Rob's just said. Can I say they're probably about what rob's 18 inches around.

They they vary because pop up hampers are done anywhere. Some there are square, some around. He's got to make sure that they're tall enough to go from the bottom of the trough to the top of the surface. Other than that, it doesn't matter.

Yeah. Because what we would do is is we I think we bought our our pop up hampers from the local Walmart, maybe. And I put a large rock on the bottom to hold it down to the bottom.

Yeah. Because it's fabric. They float naturally.

Yeah. So we put a large rock in the bottom. And this may sound a little crazy, but I throw in ten males and 100 females. You don't have to worry about water quality because you've got 300 gallons of.

Water, and you're still doing consistent water changes. And these bigger vats, you can do a trickle system, and we can get into that in another podcast, but it's essentially just a continuous water change.

Yeah. So we had this pop up hamper. It stuck up about two inches higher than the top of the tank, which was great, because they will jump. And so it probably was out of the water maybe four or five inches, kept the fish in there, and we were kicking on all kinds of babies. And then I was talking to somebody down Florida, and they said, well, do you cover your tank? And I go, I go, what do you mean? For evaporation? So they don't jump? He says, no, because even though you have all these babies swimming around in this tank, they still go towards the parents. And if they go back into that big hamper, which they easily can, then they'll get eaten. So what we did, we went out and bought another seven. And these were five by eight sheets of styrofoam that we bought.

And these are normally used for, like, bathroom insulation. They're just literally pink sheets of styrofoam.

About a half inch thick.

They're not loose, they're sealed, so there's not going to shake them. It's not like in actual insulation. They're just foam.

Yeah. And this foam that Rob's just described has a sheet of plastic on one side, because they're made for vapor barrier.

For a bathroom, they're very cheap. You can just take a box cutter, cut it to fit the entire surface of your cattle trough.

Yeah. So then we started covering them up. And so this is my favorite breeding project. I ever did. I'd come over to my warehouse and I would lift the top of the first VAT and start scooping babies off the the surface of the water. And there would be days I I would scoop three to 500 babies off of one of the seven tanks we had.

So when I started doing this, you got me into this and I really wanted to do different mollies. I had a selection of various, various mollies. So I I mean, I bought probably 200 mollies.

Yeah.

And I had a 300 gallon VAT. So that allowed me for three baskets in the middle to comfortably fit all the fish. So again, we started them out. We had lights. Again, they're not completely deprived of light all the time, but you start them out definitely having some light, they start breeding. And once you start seeing babies, cover it up. I started from getting ten babies the day I covered it up and did the very next 24 hours period. 80 babies that day. And when you open it up, you have these Led flashlights. You just kind of spotlight them. And that's really a lot of fun for my wife. She just loved the hell out of this. You spotlight them, you get a net and then you have baby baskets floating in this trough. So you just put the babies in the basket and you come and bring them up to growth tanks.

Yeah, it's the best thing ever. Just you're scooping babies, you think you've got them all, then you see another ten in this corner, another 20 in this corner. And it is so much fun grabbing all those little guys.

So this works for most libraries. Again, the platties, mollies, sword tails, and guppies. You just got to make sure that the basket suits the size needs of the fish. Guppies are a lot smaller. You can easily use the 18 inch baskets. Sword tails grow very big. You'd have to have either stick two baskets together or make sure you get a very big basket to give them enough comfortable space to to live. You don't want to torture your fish.

Yeah, just adjust your numbers per basket. But we found that with the guppies and stuff, if we gave them good water quality and stuff, them being in that basket, we had no problem with them still getting larger every day and still growing and being healthy and happy.

It was a great experience. So with these babies again, now we have all these babies and you grow them up, so that's where, oh, man, I have all these babies. What I'm going to do, I can't keep them in a baby basket. And then they go back to the pet store and buy another tank. So they have a grow up tank. And then either give them to their friends, sell them to a pet store for a low cost, because again, pet stores don't mind getting fresh, fresh product.

Oh, I love getting stuff locally. So cool.

It's great. So again, you take them out, they're in the basket until they get at least controlled enough where they're, how do we say, easier for transport. So you can move them to another tank without risking death.

Yeah, we'd like to get them up to a decent size, probably to like a quarter inch or more.

Then you move them into a growth tank. And normally what you do is there's two different types of foods. We always encourage using brine shrimp. Brine shrimp are excellent for young fish, but live bears have a certain size to them that egg beared fish don't necessarily have when they first arrived. So these small guppies will actually eat powdered, crushed flake, if you so choose. But what I recommend is there's a product called hakari Baby Food. You can find it on Amazon, and it's literally powder to give to the baby guppies. And they will absolutely eat it. It's a little bit dirty. You do have to do extra water changes when you apply this at first, but start on the powder, then you can move to crush flake. And again, since Jimmy and I are doing it in batches you had the greatest idea, Jim. He took a parmesan shaker, crushed up a pile of flakes, and put it in parmesan shaker. And he just made sure to feed these guys whenever he walked by because they'd eat all the time. And he's trying to grow them out. So he'd just be sitting there, what are you doing? It looks like he's peppering the damn tank.

Yeah, that's a great observation, Bar. I didn't even realize he noticed that. I would go out and buy parmesan shakers like the type you see at Pizza hut.

You get like four of them for a buck at your dollar store.

Yeah. And that's the only place to get them is your dollar store because we were trying to order them online and they are not cheap at all.

Yeah, so shout out to the dollar store. We use it everywhere in the hobby. There's all different types of caves and crap that we bought with all the plastic wear. It's just a really great place to get that. bottled containers, all that stuff.

And the other thing that works really well, too, is especially if you got, like, the baby fish, if you take a salt and pepper shaker, you can just take a drill and drill at those holes a little bit bigger or whatever size you're feeding. Let's say you're feeding pellets. It's just easier to put them in the salt and pepper shakers. For me, I'm feeding a lot of tanks, so it's just much easier to have that where you can feed 20 tanks and not have to continue to put your fingers in the food. Because when you put your fingers in the food, that food absorbs the oil from your fingers, and that will not help your fish growth at all.

So it's a rule of thumb. omega three fish oils are great for humans. omega fat human oils like jimmy's greasy fingers with chicken KFC on it probably not the best thing. Unless you have a catfish.

No, that's not exactly if you want to catch a catfish with your face. But yeah, when I went down to Florida one time and I was watching them feed, and they have plastic gloves on, and I'm thinking, why do you have plastic gloves on? It's just fish food. And they said, no, you don't want your human oils on the flake because it will not help the fish at all. It actually deters them from growing. I guess whatever helps.

It's the tiny things that make the difference, right?

Absolutely. The other thing I want to throw out, too, that I saw in Florida for the first time is when you go into your pet store, you'll see that they have a bunch of nets, and they'll have the nets in a pale with some disinfectant so you don't spread disease from tank to tank to tank. When I went to Florida the first time I was touring, I believe it was 5d, if I remember right, and I looked over there, and what they had is they had a rubber made container that was probably about four foot long with about six inches of water. All their nets were laying in sideways, 100% submerged in this disinfectant. And I said to him, I said, Why do you do that? And he said, well, you have to realize that all these fish nets are made. They've got that twisted wire, and just because you're soaking the net in the solution, you still got six inches of twisted wire, which carries all kinds of cruddy stuff from the other tanks. And he says, what we found out, he said, now, if we have a tank that comes down with ic, we're not transferring it anymore because we have the nets 100% submerged.

You're dunk in it.

Dunk in it, but it's 100% dunk, not a 75% dunk. So with my pet stores, I always encourage them. I'm always telling that story. If you could just 100% submerge that net, it would help you out tremendously.

So going into the more details so we covered breeding. Breeding is real simple with these guys, and there's nothing to encourage breeding. It's not like another fish where you have to make sure you do a water change. Make sure you have all this set up for them. Make sure that you have a certain temperature. Make sure you're feeding them stuff.

They'll just screw all the time, all day long.

And if they're not screwing, they're sick. And you got to address the fish. Exactly.

One of my salespeople, Julie, she says, shout out to Julie from sacreds Farms in Gibson, Florida. And what Julie always says is, you could read those damn things in a toilet. Quote unquote, by Julie well, I feel.

Like that's coming too close to a real example she's had.

Well, Julie grew up in cheaper. It wasn't Florida, but it was a neighboring state and she grew up on a fish farm. And so she has been in the business her entire life. She has a wealth of information, and I love her to death.

I just feel like you offered her some money because you're already, when you went to Florida before in your 20s, you're like, you know what, marty? Is $8,000 down. I want to see someone breathing in a toilet just to make fun of me.

Oh, yeah, there's a lot of Florida stories we could talk about, but we'll save that for a later podcast.

Fine. Make me so going into this, the habitats vary a little bit for guppies and the veil tail versions of all the other bears. And again, veil tail have extra either points of the tail or just more tail overall. So you got to make sure that anytime you have a long finned fish like a fancy guppy, that you have soft decorations or make sure that you do not have spined plants. And to give you an example, if you get the plastic plants at Walmart, you'll see them looking kind of like a pine that's kind of like an imitation hornworth. That is the absolute worst thing to do. They swim by, it gets caught, they tear, and they get me to start getting infections or fungus. So be very aware of the decor you're getting. And if you're going to get a cave, because guppies do love caves, all these fish will use a cave. Make sure that you're taking your hand and going over the whole surface, because even if it looks smooth dipped or gloss or plastic, if there's a rough corner, damn it, that fish is going to find it. When you do a big old fat tear through its fin, yeah, a tear.

Fin will just like Rob's just said, will turn into a fungus, into a bleeding ulcer, all kinds of crazy stuff that can happen to these things. So you want to keep these fish as healthy as possible. The other thing you want to consider is their tank mates. And when I say tank mates, I mean the other fish that you carry in your community tank. Because we all know what Tiger Barbs do to big, pretty guppy tails.

So when we go over, because there is professional made lists and we should publish one on our website for our listeners, come to think of it, is a compatibility fish list. And that's our goal. By next episode, I'm going to do my best to create a compatibility fish list, but these are published with a lot of research backing them. And there's essentially three I use four different aggressions of fish. Live bears more or less are peaceful for at least these four that we're talking about. There's other live bears and we'll go over those later. But these are peaceful fish, they're not going to attack other fish and they excel in community tanks. But again, like Jim said, we have the semi aggressive, which they may not be aggressive, but they'll pick just because it's part of their species. Barbs not terribly aggressive, but when they see something flutter, their natural reaction is to try to pick at it because that's their instinct for hunting. They'll see something like a scrap of food or whatever else, and they'll grab a fin. So barbs more or less the entire family of barbs are known fin pickers. So if you have that Beta or you have that guppy, make sure you do not have a barb in your tank.

Yeah, if you do have a barb in tank, a lot of people like the tiger barbs as I do. I like tiger barbs. You almost need to keep if you got one tiger barb in your tank that you just love and he's picking on the other fish, try this, get three more tiger barbs because generally then the four of them will chase each other around all day and irritate the crap out of each other and leave the guppies alone. Not always, but I have had it.

Work before and do your homework on fish guppies, you can have just a couple and they will be completely happy. If you have a group, they're not going to particularly school, they'll be a gob of guppies and your tank swimming in all directions. But they can live or live without each other. They're completely happy with just a couple barbs. They're a schooling fish, they do better in groups of six or more.

Absolutely. Also, the tiger barbs also are a wonderful thing to breed. And we'll talk about those also in another podcast because one of my first trips to Florida, I got to go see how they professionally create all these tiger barbs that you see in these pet stores. Be it your pet smart, your pet cos, your walmarts, they all kind of come from the same area. I've met the breeders, I see how they do it people, they make it look simple, but they create thousands and thousands and thousands of tiger barbs per week.

So again, when you're looking for tank mates, make sure you're trying to do the best you can with peaceful tank mates. And what are some of the common things you see? So I love picking up the Walmart tanks. So you go to the Walmart tanks and you see a diverse selection. cichlids not a good choice because cyclists are in the aggressive there's peaceful, semi aggressive aggressive and then what I call extreme psycho. Psycho fish. I've had a lot of psycho fish. They're fun, like piranhas. They will bite off your finger if there's blood in the water. That's not one of those docile things you see on Discovery Channel. If they're eating and they're not going to bite you out of I'm going to eat your hand, they're going to bite you out of you're getting too close and I'm going to take a lap.

Yeah, we sold a lot of pranas back in the day and a red bellied prana. Yeah, they're aggressive, they have sharp teeth and they love to chomp goldfish in half. But do this if you have a prana. I mean, you've got friends have had a piranha, you throw in six goldfish and everybody stands around waiting for them to eat them. And what happens? Nothing. It hides back behind there and wait till the light goes off and then it eats all the goldfish. There's many different types of piranha and the one that I had one time that was given to me by somebody who just couldn't take it anymore, I was given a black piranha, which is very rare, very hard to find, which I still had him, but he passed away, had him for years. But if I dropped the net in his tank, there's no way that I put my hand in the tank. If I dropped a net in a red breasted prana tank, I'd keep an eye out, but I'd reach it and grab it.

So again, peaceful, semi aggressive and aggressive. You want to stay completely in the peaceful range when you're making a community tank. So the bad tank mates, again, any type of the what they call sharks, that's a semi aggressive. And again, that's just because sharks grow huge. People shouldn't have sharks in a pet store without warning that you need to have a minimum of 125 gallon tank. They grow very big and surprisingly quickly. Other bad ones are oscars. Again, they're part of the cyclic family. Very aggressive. I'm trying to remember excellent tank mates for any peaceful tank or some semi aggressive tanks. cory. doris cory.

Cats love them.

They're cleanup crew tetris, as long as they're the smaller docile tetris, neon tetras, glow light tetris, even some ember tetras. There's a big long list of tetris. Most tetras will go with them. Larger tetras like Congo tetras, they're semi aggressive and they'll fed nips. So the peaceful varieties of tetris, what's more loaches, as long as they're not the big yoyo loaches, there are peaceful loaches to grab. A single beta won't completely leave guppies, sore tails, mollies all alone.

Bristol'S placos also are a good one. And the reason I like the bristol's pleco, robs, is because they don't get big and people don't realize how big a regular Florida pleco will get.

So for the normal aquaris, when they get a pleco, they think algae eater, which is not the correct name. The walmart. plato is a Florida placo. Those platos get huge. We've been to Florida where they wild raised these things out of the rivers because they've gotten contaminated. They are as long from your shoulder to your fingertip. And I am a six foot one man. They're not small fish yeah.

When we were down in Florida once upon a time, we were over at norton Tampa Bay fishery, which has now been purchased by Secrets Farms. And they raise a lot of tiger barbs, a lot of placoes, a lot of different things. I asked Paul norton at one time, I said, hey, Paul, we're touring the place and they had probably about 75 ponds at the time. I said, Paul, I said, how big do plecos really get? I mean, I've seen some 1012 inches. He goes, Hold on, Jim, I'll take a quick swim here and show you. So Paul took and this man was in his seventy s at the time, and he jumped in the pond, which is about five foot deep, and he started feeling around, around the bank. And pleicos breed in the mud banks. They, they dig a hole in the bank and, and do that. Paul reached in, I could see he was fighting with something. He lifted up a pleco, like Rob's just said, that was almost three foot long, and I bet you it weighed ten to £12.

And people always say, well, the fish only grow to the size of their habitat. You know what, I'm not going to lie, that's true. They only will grow to the size of their habitat, but they stunt and their organs do not stop growing. So this fish that should have a nice, long, healthy life gets shortened or and only lives a year and a half because it wants to grow 3ft and now it's stuck in a ten gallon aquarium.

Yeah, absolutely. That's why I like to go back to the Bristol dose plecos, which probably what, how big they get robbed?

Four inches. Four inches. And that's a big bowl.

When you see a four inch, that's a big male. What I like about the Bristol Nose plecos, especially, is the males get beautiful whiskers on them. And I just came over here to Studio B, here to Rob's house, and I stopped to say hello to his wife and I looked at his tank upstairs. He's got a beautiful, beautiful large male bristol's placo albino it's white. His whole face has just got all kinds of whispers coming out of it. And I said to tensa, I said, hey, I've got a girlfriend for him and I'm going to bring him over. And she goes, yay. Because Rob's has got some plecos going over at his house.

I breed. Jimmy has had a long history of not being able to successfully breed a lot of placos and all I have to do is just play some marvin Gay. And it just happens in this household.

Everybody loves a marvin Gay, gets sexy.

Let's get it out.

Yeah.

So again, tank mates stay in the peaceful genres. Don't be afraid of getting shrimp, but don't get what they call blue lobsters. Anything that they can technically grab, they'll eat. So if you have a slow moving guppy, it'll just and you'll just see them disappear for some reason.

Yeah. My next breeding project, and Rob and I have talked about this a little bit. I've been doing a lot of shrimp at my place and the next thing we're going to do now is my wife wants the Mexican dwarf crayfish, which they now have, of course, in orange and blue.

And the Mexican dwarf crayfish versus these like blue lobsters is size. You can get a Mexican dwarf crayfish, it looks like a little bit larger, traditional, like go shrimp versus the crayfish, which will actually get ten inches.

Yeah. The little dwarf crayfish over at my store where we sell them, I actually like to keep them in the feeder guppy tank. We have 500 feeder guppies in the tank and of course you lose one or two and they, they lay on the bottom and there's nothing more irritating when a customer comes in and says, hey, you have a dead fish. Every pet store owner hates hearing that.

And you do your best. I mean, the stores that we supply, they do their best. They do take fish out, they monitor it, but it's only human that they have other stuff to do in their store. So if a fish dies, if a customer sees it, what are you going to do? I apologize. Scoop it out and do your best.

Yeah. And what I like about because these are feeder guppies or tiny, those little Mexican dwarf crayfish, three or four of them will come over and eat them up.

They make them disappear within probably 30 minutes.

Yeah. Like Rob's just said, they're a great cleanup crew.

They'll definitely go through. Just a handful of those crayfish in pet store will definitely go through before they even have time to decompose and crap out your water.

Yeah. And that's the other thing too. We'll have a whole podcast on water quality one day. That's a whole other issue. But some of the best advice I can give to anybody, let's say you're having some trouble with your fish, you've got clamp fins, you've ruled out this or that and the other thing and disease. If you take and do a 30% water change every couple of days, you'll see a big surprise in how much better the fish do.

So back to the tank issues. So we talked about keeping it peaceful, but out of this list, platties and Mollies both get a decent size, they'll get three inches, they'll get a decent fish. But the sore tails in good growing patterns, they're larger than the other three in the list. So when you have sore tails, they will get big. I've seen a single male sword tail, and I'm not talking from mouth to very tip of its sword, I'm talking from the base of its sword. So where the sword starts out, protruding out the tail, probably a good seven inches.

Yes, they're very hard to find. I believe at one time somebody told me, and don't hold me to this, but I think it's like ten out of every 5000 fish get that big. And so, like, I have some suppliers that know I want the extra large sore tails. I just got some here about two weeks ago. The males came in, they're probably five inches, they're as thick as your thumb. And then add another three inches of sword on there and they were cleaning out their system. And what I mean system is they have a large VAT that holds all the water. And these fish had gotten in there somehow and all the food and all the other water from the tanks flow into this and flow out. And they had gotten trapped in there and had been eating and nobody knows how long they'd been in there. And they called and said, hey, I've got like 25 of these. I says, I want them all. And they came in. They're big, they're beautiful. I didn't pay much more than a normal price of a sore tail, and I was able to retail them for a really good amount.

So I like to put like a ratio on it. It's probably like 40% where you're getting them from, your breeder. And the rest is conditions. Food matters, especially if it's getting a lot of live food. And these guys are they're supposed to have a high protein diet, but they'll end up eating some algae in your tank, especially the mollies as well. So again, surroundings and condition. People have pond these sore tails to grow them absurd sizes. And these are just small, normally Walmart based. I keep using that example, sore tails and just the environment will make them explode. So when you're doing these, I recommend a minimum of a 40 gallon tank for swordtails, 20 work for just a few of the molly's, platties and Guppies.

One of my friends, Kim, who lives over near fargo, North Dakota, and just to give you an idea, we have basically about three or four months of summer up here. We don't have a long pond season whatsoever. He took and put a dozen sword tails into his pond. That's all he had in there was sore tails. He thought, you know, this is about two, three years ago. It's my experiment, this is what I'm going to try. He called me, I want to say, like, in October. I said, hey, can you come over and help me catch these fish? You can have them. I just want them out of here before it freezes. The water temperature was 59 degrees. We brought out the most, biggest, beautiful swordtails, and I think he started out with maybe a dozen. We took out 200. I said, what did you feed them? He goes, not a darn thing. All summer. He said, they just ate mosquito larvae.

They're definitely potable. And I mean, that's still how Florida does it. They have mud ponds for a. Lot of these fish, they may not do it with stories, but that's how they do. A majority of other fishes, they'll feed and just mud pond them. But no, as far as those breeds, there are some varieties in these. So we mentioned layer tail, additional tails, like long flowing tails, sword tails. They have a newer variety that's been bred called vampire sword tails. Again, it's another pet store term where someone's trying to sell them, but they're blood red, their eyes are blood red. They have two tails sticking out the back and they almost have like a slime coating on them that just deepens the red color. They're very hard to find. But be careful when you're getting these types of stocks. I mentioned these because not only have extra tail, so be careful with the plants that you choose and decorations, but they're very sensitive to water changes. So when you order these, get them in your pet store, you bring them home. They are much more sensitive to water quality issues and are way more apt to get funguses across their backs.

Yeah, I think hybridization is that how you say it, right?

Well, I mean, that's how dogs are.

Yeah. The more you sit there and try to hybridization these things, the more that they have problems with they're not as.

Hardy, they're not as proven. They have their own issues. Dogs are the same way. You have a pug, it's got heart issues, it's got nasal cavity issues because its face is squished. It's a lot of issues with a lot of different dogs. Well, fish are the same way. That's why if you're getting corridor's salt and pepper, bronze or albino, that's generally a normal mix you get from say, like a good farm in Florida. The albinos always have a worse time because they're just not as simply as hardy as the other corridor's.

Yeah. And when you go to goldfish and let's just talk about fan tail, goldfish, just the little ones that you see for a buck or $2 at your local store. The first one you're going to have trouble with, if your water quality is not where it needs to be, the first one that you're going to lose is going to be a black moor because genetically they're the weakest and I've learned that the hard way. So I have a tank of mixed, let's say calico red, fan tails and black moors. All of a sudden, I start losing black moors, I go, I have a problem, and immediately I do water changes and add more salt and the problem stops.

So going into more of the breeds of sore tails, that's the one I see in the industry. vampires are the ones that beautiful, very difficult to keep. molly's. molly's. There's a generic layer tail where they have two spikes in the back. They have salfin, molly's. All of these are hardy stock. They had this weird I think it started I don't know when it started? The first time I saw it was probably 18 years ago, 15 years ago, balloon molly started coming out. I don't know. You probably have more history. You've been doing this longer. When did you start seeing balloon molly?

Balloon molly have been around for at least 2025 years. And that's another one, too. Or amazon's magazine just recently had articles about all these man made fishes that they've done and done things to create a new fish for the hobby because there's only so many fish out there. And so they try to create excitement by coming up with a new fish.

So balloon molly is just to give you the body structure. And please Google this. You'll get great images of a balloon molly. You'll get any of the normal variety of molly, sailfin, lartail, or original, but essentially they just are, what, a third of the length of a normal molly, and they look like a giant ball. Like, essentially, you squish the molly and then pump them with air.

Yeah, it looks like they swallowed a marble.

Some are actually perfectly circle, and they swabble when they swim. And the biggest issue is you'll get it in a batch. Let's say you got 50, right? You risk 20 right off the bat with swim bladder issues just over a short period of time.

Yeah, once you're shipping these fish in and all these fish I don't care where you're from, most of these fish have been on an airplane in the last two weeks, and that will screw a fish up. We've had we brought in some beautiful things over the past and stuff, but you will get pressure problems. These fish are put in a plastic bag with oxygen. They're put in a box. They're put on an airplane somewhere. It might be Sri Lanka. It might be Hong Kong it might be Malaysia. It goes into Los Angeles or New York, goes to somebody's facility. It sits there for a day or two, gets rebagged put back in and put on another airplane and flown to whatever is closest to you. We're closest to Minneapolis and fargo, North Dakota. They come in now. These fish come in. They're jet lagged. They're beat up. And you got to be careful with them because they've already taken quite a beating getting here. So most of these fish then are immediately sold to pet stores. And so they've been handled four or five times in the last, say, week or ten days. And so you can get a lot of bladder issues with them when they cannot breathe properly or the pressure in the airplane was not correct. And it happens quite often.

So, again, be worried for those. And I'd like to start the conversation between the platti and I keep saying veritas.

Veritas.

So there's two different species, essentially, of platy. And this has been a debate for a lot of different people, especially for newer people that have been in the hobby. There's the Southern platti fish and then the Viratus Plattie. Yes, they are two species. They're very similar. They do have normally distinct variations between them. But the ones that we see now, no matter where they're bred from, I don't care. I have not seen a full variatus. That has been documented from many years ago. They're all hybridized.

Yeah, I agree. Most people will try to tell you that a variatus is a cross between a sword tail and platy. And like rob's just said that the variatus was actually its own what do you want to call it? Species. But there are a lot of variators that are sold in pet stores that are very beautiful. The merry Gold is my favorite and there again, keeping it is just like taking it a regular guppy platy. You just want to keep it well fed and in good conditions. And they are also live bear that will produce you some very beautiful fish.

And it's again, extremely subtle differences that they used to be, but now everything's hybridized. It's a Platty so we can order from farms. They'll literally say variatus and they'll slip Platty in different skews. You order them in, there's no way to tell. There isn't. I know you order variatus on it from time to time.

I sell a lot of them, actually.

Yeah, I still have not been able to tell. They're all hybridized, man.

To me they just done they look like you've taken a platy and you have stretched them a little bit. They have more of a body of a swordtail and I've handled so many over the years and stuff I can pick them out.

But that just makes me feel like that's possibly a platy that's crossed with the sword tail because that happens.

It happens a lot that's a lot of people claim. I've asked the fish farms and stuff and never really gotten a straight answer.

Also, quick FYI there don't have patties and store tails together. Pick one because they'll interbreed.

They will. If you want to have colors in your tanks and let's say you want six different colors, carry all females or carry all males and then you'll stay solid with that color, man.

I thought it was going to be a debate.

I think very artists are very cool and I know you were kind of.

About okay, I feel the same way. Here's another example in the library family, right? I got a friend shout out to Mike Hayes. He is a killy fish and enders library. No bear elders. librar, right, I've seen and he spends at least used to spend a bunch of money trying to get a hold of these elders libraries. I'm looking at them, I'm like, what's going on? They look like a feeder guppy.

They do.

Tiny. They have just that little touch of orange that barely any color like you get for a feeder guppy. And again, feeder guppies are just essentially culls from normal guppies that are inbred to hell. Tiny size. They're meant for feeding. That's why they're there. So elder's libraries are traditionally half the size of a guppy and they are a complete separate species. But no matter the cool colors and patterns you see, in my mind, it's a feeder guppy. Why would you buy it?

I got a good friend, lives down by Wabshow, Minnesota.

Adam.

Shout out to Adam. And he has got a wild strain of ENDLER guppies that he has had for years. And he swears by him. He loves them. He kisses them, he hugs them.

We're going to have to get Mike and Adam in the same room.

Adam is going to be on this show. He doesn't know it yet, but Adam is going to be on this show. Adam is a wealth of information. Adam is a previous pet store owner.

Well, we're going to take him hostage then.

And he is a breeder of a lot of different lizards, which I don't like lizards, but Adam loves his lizards. So we'll get Adam on this show and talk about in their libraries because he has got some incredible stuff down there. He's he's had them for years and years and years and it says private stock and he won't sell them to you.

We'll do like a jack Hannah thing. We'll have him on the show and we'll put animals on you that you don't want on you.

Oh, yeah. Tarantulas and different things. that'd be fun. You'll get everybody.

You'll just start tossing. that'll be great.

I will be f bombing the entire world.

I didn't know. I'm going to order tarantulas now.

Tarantulas don't scare me.

What does carney's frickin folks smell like cabbage.

You know, my ex wife scares me a little bit.

Not a shot.

Not a shot. Out. No, we're not shouting out to her because she'll drive over here and kick my butt.

She'll bring the paddle.

Paddle, which usually have to pay extra for.

So I don't think we missed much as far as the four common main libraries, they're very easy to do. And if you're going to start, the goldfish is an extremely hardy critter. And that's always the stereotypical. Let's start here. Goldfish, however, grow very big. They need a 55 gallon aquarium. Even those 25 centers you see at stores, they get eleven inches and sometimes bigger. Their carp, they will adapt to their environment. And again, they'll stunt because goldfish live for years. But they're shit machines, right.

It's like having a clydesdale in your tank.

The carp fish species have no stomachs. It's just one giant intestine. So they eat and they can eat every 15 minutes and poop all day long, every three minutes, 24 hours a day.

Not our local dnr, but the local dnr down by Minneapolis just recently got a call and I read the article several times. I think I sent it to you. And somebody reported they found a part of a river down towards Minneapolis that was, let's say it was drying up in any way. So they found, I think it was close to like 2000 goldfish in the river in this area that was shut off from fresh water on both ends because it had been a dry time or something like that, a drought. And they showed pictures. And all these goldfish that were in there were at least six or seven inches. And there's, I want to say, hundreds of them.

Oh, they're huge. I've explained last podcast that Jimmy Knight accepts all donated fish, just like Ohio Fish Rescue. If there's a fish that you guys need in our area, certainly reach out to us. Again, our number and contact info on the site. But people have donated. And the biggest, just common, basic goldfish I got was eleven and a half inches. And he said that he put it in his Oscar tank to feed other oscars just in a bag as he bought a Walmart. They left this one alone, and it grew up and started picking on the oscars.

It became their friend.

Yeah, he needed to make it go away. So he donated it and said, if not, I'm just going to flush it on the toilet. I'm like, I'll take it. So this is a really weird deal. It wasn't pond season, and I had a giant fish that pet stores wouldn't take. So I just listed on craigslist. I made I went on my computer on photoshop and created a certificate of badassery for bubbles the Goldfish.

Bubbles?

Bubbles the goldfish.

Not a stripper.

Not a stripper. I figured that would be the best title. I didn't want to call him cinnamon the Goldfish.

That's right.

Number one. You'd spell it with a Y?

Absolutely.

So I made a certificate of badassery certifying bubbles the Goldfish. And I also wrote up a whole story of how, you know, he came out of this hellish life living with predators his whole life and then grew up to beat their asses. And I put on there that I have to find a specific person worthy of purchasing bubbles the Goldfish beg me for this badass. I put on there that bubbles the Goldfish and the framed certificate of Badassery would go for no more, no less than $10.12 in strictly change. A can.

Why $10.12?

A can of beef ravioli. Chef boyer. D. Not the generic, not that crap. A 20 ounce bottle of Diet Mountain dew. I am a diabetic.

You are?

And a framed picture of betty White. I had somebody messaged me within 20 minutes of the post saying, I'll get what you want. Let's meet up and sure, shit, they delivered. I had a framed it was like an eight by ten of betty White in a framed photo.

Oh, so that's where that came from. In your bedroom?

Yes, that's exactly where that came.

That story just came full circle.

Full circle.

Full circle. Hey, before I leave, can I borrow that tonight?

All yours. I need it back.

I like betty White, man.

I need it back.

She is badass, betty White.

So off topic.

We got off topic again the three.

Hottest women of all time. You got scarlett johansson, right?

Yes.

That's number three.

Okay.

Margaret robbie right.

Okay.

She's off the suicide squad.

Yes, I'm with you.

And then number one is betty White.

Betty White.

Okay. Not safe for work. Notice spoiler here. Go on Google, type in betty White nudes and you'll find, like, some 1950s playboy.

No kidding.

She shot for it. But I don't think they ever used them. And they actually came out in public.

Wow.

Betty'S got it going on.

I'm taking your word on that. And I'm going to go home and wash out my eyes with gasoline. gasoline. gasoline.

If you say so.

Here's a strange thing that I just heard. This is totally off topic, but that's.

What this is so off topic.

This week I lost. Everybody that knows me knows I am a rock and roller. I love the 80s rock. Love it. I've met Eddie Money, who just passed away this week. 70 years old of cancer. I've met Eddie Money.

Condolences to the family, man.

Met Eddie Money so many times. Nothing but a class act. Nothing but a class act. Always gave us an autograph, always gave us a picture. My brother and I ended up having drinks with him one night after a show in a bar. And here's something I read that was weird to me. So these stars will put out, rest in peace, Eddie Money. And you get things from, like, D cider from twisted Sister and stuff. The one that threw me off today was it said, I'm sorry to lose one of my best friends, Eddie Money, and I worked for him back in the day as a backup singer. Do you know who that person was? maureen mccormick?

I was going to say celine dion.

No. maureen mccormick. marcia from The Brady Bunch.

Saying I had no clue who that was.

I forgot that you're only nine years old.

I did not know. Now that you said marsha, I'm like, yeah, I've seen that.

Marsha Brady. I was going to say, is she.

Part of the mccormick Salt shaker Company?

If she was, she'd probably be worth chasing because maybe there's some money there. But I've been watching the Brady Bunch thing on hgtv here recently about The Brady Bunch house was bought by hgtv for a lot of money and they turned it into look just like the Brady House that was on TV all those years.

I'd like to point out that Jim colby is not retired. He just is a big fan of old television.

I like marcia Brady. Who doesn't like marcia Brady?

Well, that's clearly number four on the list.

Now, you probably think Alice is hot, but you're probably wrong.

I'm not going to say who's. Alice.

But her picture is right next to betty White up in your bedroom.

There you go.

There we go.

So back on back on track. We got you. That was a tangent.

That was but it was fun. Yeah, it was fun. I enjoyed that.

All right, so going further than the list that we have, is there's a few others that we see, some details in the trade? One that we see that's not common necessarily for hobbyists, that I think is a fun fish, but has a lot of red flags. It's why it's not in the hobby is the mosquito fish. The mosquito fish is the females look like an extra large female. That's just beautiful big female. They have generally dark tails, so they look like they have some color, and they're maybe 30% bigger than the big females we can get with a guppy. The males are quite small and they're black, and they don't have the normal same body structure like a guppy. But they're beautiful as well. And what they do is these are super, super hardy fish that are live bears, and they multiply so fast. What they do with them is they're called a mosquito fish because they put them in mosquito ponds down south, but they can't drain. So when Hurricane katrina hit New Orleans, they had all of these pools and water everywhere that didn't dissipate, and they they couldn't afford to go empty or take care of these pools or have, like, public city works with all this destruction go take out of it. So to prevent the mosquito population from exploding after the hurricane, they went in all these public pools and they take a cup and they just dump a handful of mosquito fish in each pool. They breed on their own. They'd eat all the mosquito larvae, and they explode. So it's used to control the mosquito population, but they really haven't done the actual pet trade. You'll see them in ponds. People put them in their koi ponds to keep the lottery down in high mosquito areas. And you can purchase them from some pond dealers, but they're not used because they're so crazy aggressive. If you have one female, she will rip apart everything in your tank. I've even seen them hit cichlids.

Yeah, they are incredible little fish. And like you said, they're hard to find. I have gotten them for customers. The only place I've ever found them was from a goldfish breeder down south.

Pond dealers are the ones that have them, and they have them on for those city public works in Louisiana and down south. And I got one. The way I discovered them is I was younger, much younger. Went to a local pet store. I thought, wow, that's a crazy size female. That is a beautiful female. I need it. I purchased it, brought it home. I had a 55 gallon aquarium. That fish destroyed everything. It killed my plato. That was eight inches. It ripped everything to shreds. They have teeth, like full on teeth through cratic cats.

Really? I did it.

They're insane. And I brought this thing back to my pets, the pet store, and like, what the hell am I supposed to do? And he looked at it and like, it's a guppy, man. I'm like he had it all in a tank alone with just some feeders. So it's probably hitting the feeders. But I put it in his tank and as we put it back in his tank, it started hitting his barbs.

Really?

In front of us. It was insanity. It didn't even alcohol made it just start hitting things.

Wow, that's an aggressive fish.

So he did his homework and he found out that someone had the same issue and dropped it off. So we don't know where it came from. Right?

Yeah, it's amazing. But I have ordered them in for I did have somebody who had an issue that they wanted some mosquito fish. They bought some from me and when they came in, they were very small and so I never had any dealings with them. I got rid of them pretty quickly and stuff. And I saw him later on and stuff and asked him how it worked. He said that was fine and that's all he really said. So he was putting him in his, I believe, like a cattle trough or something that he had where of course you keep the bugs down, but a little part of history. I don't know if you knew this, but when they built the panama Canal back in whenever a long time ago, teddy roosevelt era. Yes. And they were used a lot. It was out there when they were building the panama Canal back in the 50s or 60s or I don't know.

I just remember it with Teddy roosevelt because I did some school work for it.

Really? So you paid attention for one a little bit, apparently.

Can't enough to remember the year, but.

Yeah, I remember watching some documentary on it and stuff, and they're putting mosquito fish in these ditches to try to control the mosquitoes. Because of a lot of malaria at.

That time, that would definitely keep populations down.

But now we just spray with roundup and kill everything.

So, again, they're used in certain controlled areas, but they're also highly invasive. They're small enough where a lot of local species can eat them. But if it's a pond, it'll hit frogs. It won't kill frogs, but it'll certainly hit tadpoles and shit.

Yeah, tadpole is another crazy thing that we get in with goldfish once in a while. And that is kind of fun too, to watch. We do a podcast on tadpoles and.

Then he eats the legs like his French ass does.

I am not French.

Let me get that croissant.

Exactly.

All right, so going beyond keto fish and only do two more here the ones that I love. I love oddball.

Not these. Oh, my God.

I'm all about oddball.

We need to talk about these. Really?

We do. You're a bread and butter guy, right? You're coming from fish breeding. You wholesale. Me, I love the weird juice.

You like the freaks.

If it was just discovered in science, I need it, right?

Exactly.

I need to learn more about it. I need to publish anything I can find for a hobbyist standpoint. I need to get it in my hands. So the ones that you don't see in pet stores are Wrestling halfbeaks. And they're so fun.

Very seldom do you see them.

So there's a whole different subspecies of Wrestling Half peaks, but the ones that we get are essentially they're white wrestling Half peaks. And they're real small. They only grow about two inches. And literally, they look like tiny pike. Just eatty bitty, tiny baby pike, like.

A little needle nose gargina.

And the bottom jaw is stuck out like a needle, and it's 50% longer than the top jaw. So what you'll see is these are live bears. Again, they'll have the fish penis, the gun and podium. Thank you.

And Wang chung.

The Wang chung. And again, same issue. You want to one to one male to two females. But the males, in a mating display, will interlock their beaks and wrestle back and forth. And they do not harm each other in this process. Some bigger breeds do, but these small ones, they'll grasp on each other and wriggle back and forth the fight. And whoever loses gets kicked out, and the male gets to breed with the females.

Wow.

It's a really fun process to watch these things. The only problem with these and why they're not so popular, because they're very pretty. They're white with little cold specks on their tail. They're very pretty, small, tiny fish. And they don't pick on a lot of other they're very peaceful fish. They're just wrestling with themselves is they're exclusively the top column of your tank. They're going to hunt back and forth. They're waiting for flies or bugs to drop or larvae on the surface. So they'll hunt all day up top. And the moment you put flakes up, or the moment that some guppy breeds, they'll hunt the little babies, they love the little stuff.

Yes. I've had one of my friends again shout out to Adam. Adam used to always want the gold wrestling Half Beaks. And what he did with them is beyond me. But we'll ask him when we have them on the show.

And they're basically inexpensive. You can certainly go to your local pet store, ask for these fish. They're a fantastic fish for starter people, but remember, it's just the top. So add them to your community tank. If it's a peaceful tank and they're a fantastic fish to add to the top column of your water, and there's really not anything past care. They follow the care of the other traditional live bears. You just got to know not to have too many males because they're going to wrestle and it's going to be fun to watch them.

So, Rob, I am not up on my wrestling half beak information. How many babies do they have at a crack?

I've had because I'm only going from my experience. And again, these are just what we call the gold or white wrestling. halfbeaks are very small. I've had ten in a batch. They're lower batches, I've had up to 20. Really?

How big are they? Are they the size of a baby.

Guppy or exactly the same size as baby guppy? And I treated them the same way, the baby guppy, they stayed in the middle column until they got just a little bit bigger and started showing color and whoop. Right up to the top column they went. But they hid just like a good baby guppy and always tries to so.

How long did it take it to get them up to size? Do they grow fast or they grow slow?

Not going to lie to you. People loved them so much when I saw them. I sold them all when they were young.

Oh, so you just abandoned them like a bad father?

People offered me cash. I can't look at those things and not say like no, cash is beautiful, innocent bills that need to be my wallet.

That's right. And they all fold up so nicely. So nicely.

And they smell like a cheap dinner at denny's.

You know what? The last time we went there, it wasn't cheap. I took my son out, who was in his twenty s, and we had breakfast at denny's.

Well, he wanted to go to ihop, but you were being a dick.

Dick. A dick, yes. $36 for breakfast. Oh, $36. What? Four and a half dollars for your orange juice.

You were in the wrong business, sir.

I know. I'm selling guppies for a nickel. What's my problem?

Right? So the last one I want to go over and this was the freaky one. This is the freaky one. I did this out of my research. It scared the shit out of you big time. You wouldn't even grab the bag when it came in.

Like these damn things.

So I did a bunch of research, and I told you guys in the last podcast that I got into my hobby for my grandmother. My grandmother gave me all her notes in a bunch of really old aquarium books that she just handwrote the notes on every species in. And I'll probably bring the book to the podcast here soon if I get the name of it. I cherish the book.

What was your grandmother's name?

Arlene Lewis.

Arlene, right.

And she wrote does she pose for playboy?

Like betty White?

I don't want to know. I don't want to know, okay?

Because if you want to buy some naked pictures of your grandma, let me know.

Thanks, Jimmy.

I'm.

Glad I was unprepared for that.

Blindsided.

Blindsided.

Okay, back to arlene.

Anyways, they had this crazy fish and all she wrote on it was do not get. And underlined it three times in big bold she like took you could see it's all in pencil. So she took the pencil and like rewrote over the words do not get.

What did that mean to you? When it says do not get, what did you think to yourself?

That's a challenge. That's like a beat grandma. Damn it. My grandma is good at this shit. She's breeding betas and all kinds of crazy crap.

Don't be beating your grandmother pretty soon.

We got social services at the competition.

Competition?

The moment the student can pass the teacher.

Yeah. I thought you were sucker punching her in the throat or something.

No, so I kept this in mind. I've done a ton of research and I couldn't find any of these things.

Where did you find some?

Later down the road, I met this guy named Jim stud and Jim opened my world to the wholesale propaganda that is fish market. And guess what came up on one of the sales?

What's that?

From Florida.

Florida?

Annabelle. annabelle. Also known as the four eyes. Yes. This is going to be a very hard one to Google. You can Google four eyes, you're going to get crazy results. But annabelle is spelled A-N-A-B-L-I-P-S. anabs. annabelle is a very rare in the trade live bear that grows a foot long and it's exclusively, it's like I call it a fish frog. They are a cork that stays at the top of the water and they're shaped like a normal, I don't know, silver, long bodied fish. But their head turns up like a dolphin and they have these really giant Google eyes on top of their head and they have two pupils per eye. So one looks down in the water and the other looks above the water like it's a frog. It is the craziest, cutest, most adorable thing you have ever seen in your life.

They freaked me out. I don't like them.

So what they do is they require a very niche tank set up, if you will. It's not even a tank. You're supposed to have these things in a very shoebox, interesting setup to keep these things in because again, they're a foot long, but they dive down like a dolphin and they splash and play. They play all day long and they grab food while they're playing. It's the most adorable shit. When you walk in the room, they'll quick turn over to you and all you'll see is a bunch of eyeballs sticking above the water looking at you.

Kind of like bats and scooby doo in the cave.

It is the cutest shit that's it's not cool.

That scares the crap out of me.

So I don't care what they cost, I had to have them. I bought a bunch of in. I got six of them.

They weren't cheap either.

They were not cheap, but I didn't care. I needed at least six to try my experiment. So I got these things in and I put them in a kitty pool. The reason I put them in a kitty pool is they only exclusively live on the top of the water. So who cares how the depth? As long as they have, say, surface four inches of water, they're happy. They just need surface area. So I got six of these guys in there, and they're like a foot long, and they're playing all day. They dip, dive, and just they're the funnest damn thing.

Dip, dive, and dodge.

Dip, dive, and dodge. They're like little, I don't know, freshwater dolphins, but they're not cute. If they have an issue or they're scared, they'll go hide underneath the water in the corner. In the moment that they see that it's disappeared or they feel comfortable, they'll pop back up and where do you go? It's like a mongoose in the water. It's the cutest shit ever.

Not a lot of people you're killing me here, small.

Not a lot of people have these, so there's not a lot of information out there. So I will give you my experience that I've learned. They love pellets, and you'll have to train them on whatever food because wherever they got them, who knows what the hell they fed them. Because, trust me, the people that have these, unless you're a farmer and trust me, these are not really gotten in farms. Unless you're in South America, no one has a clue. They just take them. Hopefully someone buys them and they don't have to get a batch in. So no Florida people keep these on hand. They're bred in South America where they're originally caught. So you grab them on pellets, because pellets are nice, they're visible and they float on top of the water and they will grab them and bring them down and pop up with them and play with the pellets. Cutest shit ever. So I use Pellets. I'm assuming you can use live food, but again, everything has to be surface oriented. If it's not flopping in the surface, they don't give a shit about it. Don't use sinking. You can use flake, but they have to see it. Pellets are the thing to go.

Do you think they'd hit on live crickets? Live crickets?

Yes. In fact, I had some crickets that I was selling to people that had lizards. I threw them in there gone. Anything surfaced at a wiggle on top, they'll hit.

So did you go skinny dipping in the pool? I just want to know if they hit everything on the pool.

I didn't, because there wasn't enough room. I'm a big dude.

I know you're a big dude. I mean, right here.

Who knows, they might bite some, right?

Yeah, whatever.

You called the fish penis before the.

Gunnapodium so look these guys up.

Annabelle, Annabelps. But the breeding on these were really interesting. They're big, but they only have six pups. That's how I like to put these things. They're not real fish. They stay by mom and dad. It's real weird. And they're born huge.

Don't they also like, stingeries? Don't they call those pups also?

Yeah, but that's because it's coming from a shark species. This is actually a fish species.

No way.

Right? I just call them pups because it's a completely weird behavior. It's something I made up. Okay, but they only come in like the breed. They only do up they're like six. But their penis you called the county podium, right? Is huge. Take your index finger. That's it.

So this is the Johnny home.

It's not as big. It's as long as the index finger underneath. It's not as big as your finger around. But they stick up above. And females and males have their genitalia positioned either to the left or to the right. And this is very crucial when you're trying to pick out anabelpts or because you have to order so many just so you have a hope of breeding them.

Really?

If you have a male with its peanuts to the right, you have to have a female with its junk to the left. Otherwise they can't breed.

Now you're just making stuff up.

I am not making you're making this up. You can look it up. This shit is on wikipedia.

This is like nascar. You pass on the left and you're hoping right?

They're hoping the gas cans there on the right.

You are out of your freaking mind.

Same deal. So if you have a female with the stuff on the right, you have to have a male with this thing on the left. That's why I got six. And that's how I got them to breed, because I was lucky enough to have one male compatible with two females.

Okay, I just got a quick question here. How does one check if one's got a podium hangs left or right? Just curious.

So when you see the fish, you can actually see it positioned to the body or it's either to the left or to the right. It's kind of like I don't know how to explain it. A kickstand on a bicycle.

So if you view them from the top, it's probably the easiest way.

No, you have to view them from a tank or the bag and you'll see it kind of positioned to the left or right or by scuba gear. Scuba gear. You have to have them in a fish tank to do them. Or you take them out in a net and you can see it in the net.

So damn weird.

Robs it's so fun if you can find a kiddie pool and filter it, right? Have heat. It's a very complex way of taking care of fish. They just need surface area. My favorite fish of all time.

Oh, my God. That was incredible. And creepy as well.

It's just big, giant googly eyes looking at you. You can't help but go, oh, my God, it's so cute.

You need to get a life nerd, I tell you.

So not for the I don't know. I wouldn't say advance, but definitely an intermediate fish. Do not start with an anabolbs. Number one, good luck finding them. It took me years.

Your birthday just went by here recently, and I wish I had known how much you were in love with this googly eyed fish.

I love my favorite fish.

I would have bought you that in an Arrawana and a Big Red Tail catfish. And we could fed them all to the big Red Tail catfish like you normally do.

Oh, come on, now. That hit low.

That's a long story.

You could talk about my grandma naked, but don't talk about my arijana getting eaten.

Yeah. Wow. Where do we go from here? We must be wrapping this up pretty soon.

That would be the list. There are other live bearers out there, but again, it's a very niche species, and it's just really nice that we can have colorful fish out there that people can start with. And it's a great if you want to try breeding, this is the fish to do it with. You get a concept of how intricate the small ones are, how to transport them, temperature needs. It just gives you a more comfortable, easy feel to start breeding on your own.

We know so many advanced hobbyists, so many judy robbins and I, we know so many people that are into fish so deep. Here's a secret. They all keep tanks of libearers for their children, because here's what they want to do. They want to keep their children involved. They want them to have their own tanks. My friend Sean lives down south. He has got multiple tanks for his children, and they raise all kinds of different things that the kids do, and he's really into all kinds of other different fish. But like he said, he said, I want my kids to come down, take care of their own tanks, and then they'll gain a love for this other stuff that's more advanced.

It's not hard.

There's great ways.

And we'll do low tech tank care. We'll do information of tanks on a budget. We can do ghetto ass tanks. There's so much content that we need to do in this. We just got to dive in one episode at a time, Jim.

Deep, deep dives.

So again, what we want you to do is we're going to be setting up a Facebook page. We're going to set up some Twitter. We're going to get Jimmy over here tweeting stuff all week long, going to pop out his ass. And he's like, you know what? I'm going to get a pull on this.

What's a tweet.

We'll get there. You know, first you asked what's a podcast. And now we're here.

I know, I know. When you've promised me not chosen beer, I'm going like, okay, I'm in.

You're in?

That's right.

If Joe rogan can do dmt and whiskey, I mean, we can at least do not chosen beer.

That's right. Absolutely.

But the point is, go to our website, aquariumguyspodcast.com. Share this with your friends. Subscribe. And we want to know you can send us an email. We have our contact information at the bottom of the site. Or leave us a voicemail with our telephone number, and we'll answer questions in the site. But we want to know, what do you want to hear about? We know extensive people throughout the hobby. What do you need to know about in the hobby? What podcast should we deep dive?

Absolutely. If you love this podcast, let your friends know. If you think it sucks, keep it to yourself.

We don't care about it.

We don't?

No.

Yeah. We're like ducks. It just rolls off our backs.

You're making fun of rob's grandma being naked. That was inappropriate. We don't want to hear it.

I've got pictures.

Oh, God. All right, guys. Well, that concludes our podcast. Thanks so much. And just a quick reminder for Ohio Fish Rescue. Thanks to good, kind people out of their heart taking in fish so they don't have to go into our lakes and streams, or worse, just killed for no reason.

Yeah, please take the time. Send them your love, send them a little money, whatever you can do. But they're doing the right thing. They're great guys, and we love them.

Buy a T shirt. All right, podcast out.

Podcast out.