Are you looking for? Homebred dwarf cichlids, like black rams, Madaca rice, fish, neocardenia shrimp, or easy to grow aquarium plants? Look no further than Daku Aquatics at Daku. Dakuaquatics.com. This guy is a hardcore hobbyist that turned his passion into a business and now has a fish room. Over 100 tanks supplying homebred fish, shrimp and plants to other hobbyists in the USA. Don't believe me? See for yourself. He posts daily on his Instagram with over 55K followers. Check it out. Instagram.com, daku. D-A-K-U aquatics. He's also on Facebook. And TikTok too. Right now you can go to Dakuaquatics.com and take 10% off sitewide with the promo code Aquarium Guys at checkout. Let's kick that podcast. Welcome to the aquarium, guys. Podcast. Jimmy, I missed you.

Who are you, stranger?

It's been far too long.

I know what happen. We promised everybody we'd be back more, and then we lied.

Well, I just put two episodes out in a row, so people should get off my tits already. Two in a row? Yeah, two in a row.

I quit listening to this podcast so long ago, I couldn't even tell you.

In the last one I've heard two in a row. So let's kick off and have some fun, Jimmy. I'm your host, Rob Zolson.

I'm Jim Colby.

And I'm Adam El Nashar.

And in the background, we have Dan Piazza from D's FishCo.

Howdy, y'all.

You're just going to be kind of like the side regular. You're now the new Adam. Adam got upgraded.

Wow. Yeah. So now Adam's now up in economy class.

Yeah, Adam's in economy now.

You're still in the luggage rack there, Dan?

The luggage rack?

Yeah, above the seats.

All right, before we get into too deep of a topic, which we're going to talk about what you should be having on hand as a fish keeper.

Gummies.

Gummies.

Oh, fish keeper.

We always talk about a little our personal news. So this last weekend, we just got back from the Minnesota Co Op Expo. The naming really doesn't rattle my memory, but I just know it as the cool expo at.

Yeah, I was gonna say, the reason that doesn't jog your memory is because you got heat stroke. It was so goddamn warm out there.

We all got heat stroke.

So Adam joined us. Adam drove up an hour and a half robie and I drove down three and a half hours for this show, and Joe from Joe Shrimpshack sponsored this event. And for a first time event, it was freaking rocking. It was good.

It was good. Yes, it was easy. A couple thousand people. But again, it was hard to keep track because it came from all directions. And apparently we screwed up parking where all the people that were there parked in front of their own booths.

Well, living learn, I guess.

Next year will be better.

Yeah. So anyway, next year the plan is to bring it indoors, which would be a little bit easier because a lot of the vendors did have trouble with fish towards the end of the day when things were getting too hot.

Yeah, some of the vendors did it for the first time, and they didn't know to bring a canopy and then let the 90 degree heat bake under their fish bags and watch them die.

Right. And so we brought two canopies, and we lasted 5 hours longer than anybody else. But then at the very end, it.

Was still getting a little much. We had to put them back in the coolers with ice.

Too much?

Yeah. But we sold quite a bit of stuff. And we sold out of Jim Colby's famous car seat sponge filters.

That's right. We actually signed some autographs, didn't we, Adam?

We signed quite a few.

We did.

But I was sad. I only got one guy that wanted it on his butt, but I did reject it because his girlfriend was so he wanted the one on his butt a signature.

Oh, okay. I wasn't sure where you're going with that.

Yeah, you were a bit busy. His girlfriend was there. Yeah, that's how it goes.

I even sold some of the plant.

Oh, the plant was phenomenal.

You know this sexy Arab that we have in this podcast. This dude had his own little hustle. Like, he came up to hang out with us and help Jimmy sell, because it was Jimmy and Jen's Booth. It was three tape, big eight foot tables long. We had a lot of stuff to sell. It was a good time. But then Adam sits there hustling on the side and keeps pulling out this little baggie filled with the plant. And he would sell it literally $5 a strand for people as a plant. So we would have fans come up to us and be like, guys, it's so nice to meet you in person. And immediately like, hey, man, how you doing? Hey, adam has the plant.

Adam has some stuff.

Would you like a piece of the plant? And they're like, Hell, no.

And they walk off more than accepted.

It's true.

I mean, I feel kind of bad because I did accuse Adam of coming up and just selling, like, his pubic hair.

Right.

That's kind of what that plan looked like. But, yeah, a lot of people went home with some of that plant, so it's good to get some feedback next time we're down there from these different folks that bought it and stuff.

It was wonderful. I'd like to plan more of this. Like, if we go to an event, if you want to just come say hi to us and hang out, that's what we want. Consider that, like, your meetup space. If we're going to some sort of event and we're going to be there, we're telling you ahead of time, come bug us. That's what we want. Some people were just shy. Oh, you're busy. You don't have time for? No, no. We told you to come there to definitely talk shit in our face.

Yeah, we took a lot of pictures. We signed some autographs. The police asked us to leave.

The police?

No, they didn't. But no, it was a good time. And hats off to Joe from Joe Shrimpshack for putting this on. Did a great job. Next year, the plans are in the work to do it indoors during the winter months when we are all bored out of our gourd up here in the great state of Minnesota.

Right. I'm trying to think.

Still got heat stroke?

I do.

With the weekend.

It was a lot. As far as updates. Well, another update that I didn't let people know about is in my fish room. I've decided, like, I'm going to class it up, jazz it up about 15%. When people go out and have a hobby garage, what's the first thing you see? It's that Miller Light calendar with the 1980s Nudie girl on it. Right. It just doesn't work. I can't put beer on my wall and feel like it's Rob's. Rob doesn't even drink alcohol. So instead, I found myself a tasteful art print by a Ukrainian artist in 2016. That is a delicious gal reaching in, trying to scoop angel fish from the top shelf for a kid that's pretending to tie his shoe, looking up her skirt. Yes, it's wonderful. It's like a 32 by something.

It's actually pretty classy.

It's a classy picture.

It's a classy picture of it. My wife likes it. You should take a picture of it, put it on Facebook or something.

Beat you to it. I took pictures and put it on discord.

Well, good for you. But so that is actually a really cool picture. I looked at it and thought that'd be kind of cool in my fish room. But unfortunately, I don't have any wall space in my fish room. It's all tanks. All tanks. So, yeah. That was a beautiful addition to Rob's fish room. Adam, what did you get at the show that you put in your fish room? The little tiny little tiny people.

I got a pair of Pygmy sunfish people.

What's? The tiny people you were talking about? Those is that a joke with the dude he bought it from or?

No, he actually went home with two pair. I bought you a pair, too, didn't I? You did.

You traded some Crowntail Guppies for a pair. Another pair of those. So I have two pairs of them now and I'm very happy that I have them.

And so they came male, female. Right. I mean, they are actual two males, two females. You.

So they're going to be breeding. I cannot wait.

What are they called?

Pygmy sunfish. So I think these ones are the Florida Pygmy sunfish. So the males will turn black with blue spots all over. They only get about an inch.

These are the Eastern. So you are correct.

And how big do they get? Totally?

Like an inch. Total length? Maybe an inch and a half if you're lucky.

Stay nice and small because the ones.

That we purchased down at the show, they're about the size of your small fingernail. I mean, they weren't very big.

Yeah, they were unsexed youth. Well, he tried to sex them. He probably has better luck than we can. But yeah, I would consider them unsexed. And he was kind enough that if someone had some issues with heat that day, he's actually replacing them. He went on the show page for that next year, like you said, we'll be doing it inside. And you'll hear more information coming to the podcast here.

Yeah. As that comes closer to being I know it's already in the works. There's already talks there's already talking about different facilities to have it at. And we're going to do it in the wintertime so we can be indoors under a controlled environment. Because it got to be in the 90s down the cities, and it was just a little too much for everybody.

Now another update. People have been asking because we put out the podcast, talking a little bit, my saltwater experiment. I'm going to keep the update brief. The saltwater experiment is going very well. I now have introduced a Molly into it to help out. I'm going to keep that for another episode topic. I want to do it a whole episode on my adventure. That way I can properly piss off the saltwater community in kind.

That's important to make those people why.

Are people upset about saltwater mollies?

Not saltwater mollies. I'm specifically doing a setup we talked about on a podcast before, Adam, where my setup is a 60 gallon saltwater aquarium. But the rules are I am not to heat it and I am not to use anything with a motor. So it's all air driven. And let me tell you, I'm getting more than a re from anybody that's a salter. They're just losing their mind. So I'm killing corals and inhumane and all this shit.

Things look pretty good. So actually, it reminded me a lot of I came down the other day and you had a little bit of moss growing or what was that stuff that you took out? The moss that was growing a little bit in there?

Yeah.

And anyway, I thought the last time I saw this was I was in Mexico in December, and I was in the ocean swimming, and a bunch of that stuff got around my ankle. And what was attached to it? Plastic fork.

OOH, I should make it authentic. Put some trash in there, I was going to say.

So we should throw in a plastic fork in there.

Maybe just a lost pair of swim trunks. There we go. Women's swim trunks. I mean, let's make my basement classy.

I like it.

You don't want to see my swim trunks. Who will cover up half the tank.

Take up the whole tank.

Right. Well, anything else, gentlemen? Any other shares before we dive deep?

Adam, you got anything?

No, I think I'm good.

Well, time to do a quick check from our fan emails just to make sure we're keeping on top of that. We can do entire episodes, but you got to keep sending enough into us. All right, quick gal event through the emails. So where we last left off was March 10. We have Jeffy messaging in, saying, hey, folks, hope you all are having a wonderful day. My name is Jesse, not Jeffy. My name is Jesse. I started my first aquarium mid December, and I'm loving it so far. I discovered your podcast about a month ago, and I have to say it's awesome. I listen to it nearly daily. I have a question about the Khph, if you have a few. I test my water all the time. Have noticed my KH goes consistently on a gradual decline to zero. Not sure why this happens. I have a freshwater 20 gallon tank with a piece of dragonstone, large size, about a large potato, and a piece of spiderwood, a decent number of live plants, substrate of fluoride and sand. I have C chem alkaline buffer to help raise my KH, but it also has effect on my PH. My PH is 7.4, while my KH is at two to three degrees. My understanding is KH has a direct impact on PH. Having a higher KH can help with PH swings, but I'm reluctant to make changes as it seems my water will become too basic. I'd be interested in the advice that you have. Many thanks for the great podcast. Hope you have a great weekend. Jesse, adam. Jimmy, you want to take this one?

No.

Adam, it's you. Short straw.

K-H-P-H so many h's okay, what does.

He have for fish? Does he even say in there?

He did not. That would have been very helpful if he had cichlids or something soft.

He did say he had dragonstone in.

There, which will dragonstone, but not the fish.

Yeah, but dragonstone will throw things for a loop sometimes.

It's kind of what I'm thinking, isn't it? When he puts the buffers or whatever it is in the tank, some of it is landing because unless you dissolve it in its entirety, like, there's always clumps and shit.

Oh, like when you cook it in a spoon and put it in a syringe.

Let's pretend that he just has a bear tank, sanded plants. Let's just forget about the dragonstone. Because here's the problem. Anybody that has this thing called, quote, unquote dragonstone, you can't really import authentic dragonstone anymore because it's basically on import band lists. So the stuff that people get is fake dragonstone.

Adam can find.

Adam can find it. But if you're not Adam, good luck actually finding it. So who knows what actual stone he has that's leaching into the tank? But just pretending that that's not really a big effector. Would this be a normal thing, Adam, in your opinion?

In my opinion, yes. PH and PH go up and down throughout the days and nights, depending on so I don't worry about it at all.

You have things like if you're doing consistent water changes, is not added here because water changes, especially if you live in the city, your water continually changes as they flush it through the system, as you get rains that come into the system, all of that fluctuates. So keeping track of what your city is, it's difficult. Well water stays more consistent, but again, it's well water, it's untreated, there's more stuff in it. So that doesn't necessarily keep things at a hole. And you also have the quote unquote stones that are bleaching into the tank. I would love to know why in the world are you using a buffer?

Did he say he's using Zeolite, too? Was that in there?

Fluoride sand.

Oh, fluoride. Okay. Because Zeolite will throw things for a loop. If you're using Zeolite in there, there's a lot of disadvantages to that, too. My store that I had, my manager loved to use buffers for the cichlids, and every time he put a PH buffer in there, it just rebounded four days later. And that put more stress on the fish than just leaving them alone. I'm not a huge fan of PH buffer. I don't know if you guys are, but I've never had good luck.

So he asked for our advice. My advice is your stuff in your tank is going to leach into your water sources, may potentially change or be well watered, and then you still have a question mark. I would instead find your stable that you can create from tap and your system, get away from all buffers, and try to acclimate your fish or pick fish that suits the water parameters that you have. You will have a better time, my friend. Thanks for the question. Next one.

And probably spend a little bit less money, too, and all the things are thrown at it.

All right.

Yeah.

Here we go. Hey, Rob's. Question from Ethan. I have got the current podcast. I started at number one, listened through about four weeks. Love the content. Wouldn't say I'm new to the hobby, but I am green. My parents own a pet shop before I was born in the late eighty s. And we always had a tank that never really worked, just kept a few fish. I always felt like there's a lot more to it now that I'm a parent of four. Nod to Adam. My oldest two have requested fish for Christmas. I was excited to grant them their request, but I've always wanted to start a tank of my own. We haven't had a permanent living situation till about two years ago, so now I kind of have jumped in with both feet and found my own desire for fish keeping. We started with the old 29 gallon from my grandparents building that I originally came from my parents store, so pretty old tank. Now that there is a ten gallon in each of the kids rooms, I think we have done quite well. The main issue I keep running into is figuring out water chemistry. I'm a high school science and chemistry teacher so I understand how most of this shit works. But it's different in practice. I know everyone has a different water depending on where they live and I'm really interested in the best way to manipulate it to get the right type of breeds of fish. I am really interested in trying to breed and has been great learning experience for my kids. I have a well, so no chlorine, but hard water, lots of calcium. I heard y'all warnings about rodi. I've not done a personal deep dive into it. I don't know what would be worth a whole podcast, but I'm really interested in hearing you guys talk more about water chemistry and how to get your water right for your fish. In the meantime, do you have any recommendations? Suggestions? Start a deep dive in this topic. It's like they know they send emails in kind to each other asking these questions so we'll have to do an entire episode on it. But to help you out, if you're looking to do it the best way, like buffers is the wrong option. My opinion and using rodi and remineralizing your water is the best. If you have water that is just too hard, it's not the PH. The PH is too high for what you're trying to do and you're trying to do say, Cardenia shrimp. You're trying to do discus. Stay away from using your tap entirely. Use an rodi remineralize or do a mix 25% tap, 75% rodi and still remineralize.

Yeah, you can do a 50 50 and you can play around with it until you see your fish are happy. And you'll know your fish are happy is when they color up, they eat well, they come to the front, they will tell you if they're happy. If they're not happy, you'll know, people.

Say, well I don't have a meter that tells me that my water is correct. I'm like if I use a master test kiss, it just gives me numbers. I'm like, you have fish. What are the fish telling you? Are they acting shitty? Are they staying in the corner? Are they gasping for air? There's a lot of symptoms that you get to see with your fish. So do your homework. Purchase fish that are more applicable for your water. Otherwise rodi baby.

To be honest, I never used Ro water from growing discus out. I had well water in northern Minnesota and they grew just fine in that as long as their temperature was right, I think that they grow faster. If you're doing the water changes, they grab all that calcium and everything right out of the water and they grow better.

Yeah. There's a PH deal with a lot of discus that are sensitive, especially if you get them from overseas. And whatnot if you can get them from a local breeder? You have way better chance than if you import some discus in because they're already pre acclimated to the water. Jimmy, you just had a strain of guppies that you had to get in and pull all kinds of strings. You got a bunch of pears in and you didn't have them for long. You knew they were going to die because of the circumstances of where you got them from. You had them drop fry and the fry carried on the lineage.

Right. And the fry are doing great. So I brought in some Crowntail guppies from Thailand. I knew what the water parameters were there because I had talked to my supplier, they forwarded me the information. I tried to get as close as I possibly could to the parameters they came in. They looked pretty good but I started out with probably ten pair and the females that lasted the 30 days to give birth and stuff. They don't have a lot of babies, they'll have 1015 babies tops. And I kept all the babies and now I'm on f three generations of locally bred Crowntail guppies and they do very well. But unfortunately their parents all passed away because they just can't handle the shock of coming over the long trip. Plus the different handles. They're at the transhipper, then they're at the retailer and so I was just very happy to get a few fry and right now I sold quite a few pairs down in Minneapolis and now we're just working on bringing in other colors of Crowntail and I have that coming up here in the next 60 days. Yeah.

So knew that your water parameter is not going to go there. You knew that they're so sensitive that you're not going to be able to rodi it and go through the hell. So you decided to roll the dice. You knew they're going to get in. You're just hoping they're dropping fry because the f was it F two, how does that work again? Well, next lineage, as long as you.

Have a batch in f one, F Two, F Three, they're acclimated. Right. And then I visited with quite a few guppy breeders down at the show and they said yeah, they had probably twelve varieties of guppies and they said these are rock solid and these until you get your babies going, they're pretty shaky and same thing, everybody knew the same. One side of Thailand uses a lot of salt, the other side of Thailand doesn't use a lot of salt. So you have to know what part of the country they're coming from and that's always kind of shaky unless direct farm that's coming from.

Well, thank you for your question Ethan. We will definitely do a whole podcast on the matter. In fact, I think we got two separate people we could reach out to. There's a gentleman in the DNR in our local area, and we could also talk to Josh Price of the Ohio Fish Rescue. He's a water expert for the city of Strongston Strongsville, Ohio. So, yeah, we'll get her done for sure.

Yeah. If you want to get some interesting reading, you can go on Aquabid. There's a gentleman named Joe Gargis.

Gargus one of the best books ever.

And you can go and download his book for under $10, I think. And he is a water expert, and he has made water systems for cities down in Florida. It's an easy read and it's very, very informational. And so if you go on Aquabid, it's Joe Gargis. That's what he goes under. Joe has been breeding and in the pet industry for over 30 some years. So give it a whirl and see if you can find that information. I have that printed off. I know Adam has it printed off at our homes.

All right.

Yeah, I bought the hardcover book.

Yeah, I'm too cheap.

Next question is from Justin. Hey, boys. This won't be much of an email. Just wanted to say thanks for the entertaining work you do. I listen to the podcast every day and slowly running out of episodes to listen to, although it's super saddening. I look forward to listening to more suck Rob. From one fish loving dickhead to another. Thank you.

He got that right.

PS. How much you really spent on that? Nope.

Come on, Rob.

Nope.

Tell people. Could you bought a used car for that? Yes.

You know what? I will tell people, but I'm going to post it on Patreon because you got to pay a dollar to hear that news.

Oh, God.

That's how that works. So check out our Patreon page. It was a slash corium guys spend a buck. You know what I should do? Episodes unfiltered, Jimmy before they come out.

You know what I should do? You know how that chick was sell? Can I say chick? That dame, that broad.

There's a lot we shouldn't say in that podcast, my friend. Cunt.

No, we can't say that.

You're not British.

You're not British. All right, so that gal that sold her bathwater.

Oh, yeah. Belle Daphne that was for forever ago. Delphi, right?

I could sell the salt from your tears from when that Arowana died.

I could make millions.

It was rob cried for three days and I saved all his tears. And then they dried up. And I have salt pelts in a little jar.

I could send you y'all sons of bitches. You know that? That's what that is all about. All right, next one help from I'm gonna try to say this name. Forgive me if I butcher it. Sanjeev. I've started having fish a few months ago. I'm pretty new to this. I've seen a lot of guides, aquarium related YouTube videos. Not enough, I guess, because it's not helping me. The problem I've seen is there were tanks have no covers on top, which I prefer, but for some reason, my fish keeps jumping out. I've lost a couple and I feel stupids. So if there's any advice or ideas that would help, please let me know. Please share with me what solutions you have or something you guys did in cases such as this. Thank you. Worried fan to the podcast. So Jimmy and oh, God. Oh, sorry. Jimmy's allergic to your bullshit email. Oh, kidding.

So what happened? His fish are jumping out.

Well, Jimmy and I are very much fans of being topless, aren't we, Jimmy? If you want to pick top or don or no top, we're topless type of people now. In this situation, we didn't get the one piece of information that was most vital is what fish do you have that are jumping out? All right? Are they hatchet fish? Because there's no way you can have no top on your tank with hatchet fish swordtails. They are within hours guaranteed to jump out of your tank. Swordtails, most of the time will jump out of your tank. So many species that you can have that won't. These are guaranteed ones reading off to you.

Do you know what I like about hatchet fitch? After they jump out of the water.

They turn into chips. Use them for poker salsa.

Because they're kind of curved like a frito scoopy. I was going to say it probably.

Smells like a frito scoop.

Exactly.

Dan it's got that foot smell.

At the fish shop. You have to save the next hatchet fish that jumps out. And we're going to do a totito scoop on podcast.

Absolutely.

That's what we're going to do. So, yeah, if you have a fish that won't jump or is less likely to jump, because all fish can jump, then topless is a thing for you. But since it sounds like you are not picking the right fish, I'm guessing put a top on. So if you can't find yourself a pre done top at your local fish store, what you can do is go to your local hardware store and they can cut you a window pane, measure the top of your tank, go to the hardware store, they'll cut you it out for a couple bucks, whatever they charge. But make sure to take sandpaper and do two swipes to the edge because you will cut your whole hand open.

All the edges.

Jimmy and I have both cut our hands open.

Yes.

What is that corrugated plastic that you see all these YouTubers use? Yeah, that could work as well, that you can cut it at home, but that's not near as fun as having a pristine glass top. What was that?

That one song? Third eye blind and play them jumper.

Play them jumper. It's on my tip of my. Brain. Don't jump off the ledge, my friend. I don't remember. I think Jim Carrey sang it on that movie. Yes, man.

Yeah. I'm just going to say okay.

All right, we're almost caught up here. Let's keep doing this. Crank them out for the boys.

Hello. Hi.

Has your company lost a sale or no? No.

Have we lost sales from our Bud Light thing?

We don't like spam emails. All right, next one.

Have you lost sales because of Bud Light?

Let me help you, Lloyd. Oh, I'm going to cut that last name out. Lloyd says.

Lloyd Smith.

Lloyd Smith. I've recently had your podcast shared to me by a friend. I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far. One of the fish that I've grown to really love, especially in the community tank, is a Serpe tetra and candy cane tetras. I have done plenty of homework beforehand and learned a bit more about what types of locally available tetras work best for both my personal wants and for the fish I already have. I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences of these fish. There are so many tetra varieties with different needs and temperaments. They're great community fish. Definitely part of bread and butter stock. In my opinion, greatly overlooked. Thank you for your collective wealth of knowledge and amazing work you do in the podcast. I'm only up to episode 15 so far. Well, boy, when you hit 18 yeah, we'll full.

Fend you, Adam, what do you suggest? What's your favorite tetra?

He said serpes.

Right?

He said Serpes and candy cane. That was his two favorite.

Are the candy cane the 511s tetras?

Yeah, 511s. Okay.

That's my wife's favorite tetra, the 511.

They're pretty sweet.

Which ones?

What color are those?

Oh, man, they almost look like a bleeding heart.

Yeah, to the point. It's like a diet bleeding heart. They sell them around Christmas in most stores. Actually. We had it at D's for the Christmas sale. We sold a bunch of them.

511 is a pretty popular candy cane.

Yeah, candy canes.

I think we still got some of those in stock.

Reordered by popular demand.

We got a bunch of surpe tetras surveys.

They can usually hold their own against anything.

Always.

If you get a large group of.

Them, we got Chat talking shit right now. They say Serpes are assholes and Harlequin Rasboros is far superior.

Wow.

So. Thank you, Chat. If you guys want to laid the.

SmackDown on us yeah.

If you want to join us live, go to aquariumguyspodcast.com, bottom of the website. You'll find the link for Discord. You can join us live and have your own opinions thrown.

So what was the last one? He said? Serpent tetris suck.

And what rules harlequin rasboras? Yeah, it's known as pork chop rasboras.

Yeah, I use those to wipe my.

Imagine being named after a clown.

Pork chop.

No. Yeah, but harlequin. But she's hot.

Pork Chop the Clown.

I don't know what the hell you.

Guys are talking about.

Harley Quinn.

I personally think one of the sexiest is the long fin serpe tetra. Adam, what do you think?

Those ones are know, you know, the serpe has the regular, the red ones. And then there's the yellow variant.

There's a super red.

Yeah, there's the super red. I like the yellow ones myself.

Right.

But I don't have favorite fish because then you know what happens?

They die. I was going to say they die. You're asking for what we'd recommend also for these tank goers. And I got two of them. I go with penguin tetras, otherwise known as hockey stick tetras. Do those in the group.

Those are pain in the ass.

They are. Keep alive.

I have no problem and I've never had a problem with them.

I quit ordering them ten years ago because they don't live.

All right, well, don't be. These guys use tannins in your water and then lemon.

Dan's got something to say about Peg.

If they end up on the floor, you can use them as a hockey puck.

Oh, and then we could use hatchet fish as the puck. And then we could just play table hockey. Downhill table hockey. And have nachos and salsa.

The columnaris ones have that like, perfect bend in the spine.

The last ones to check out is lemon tetras.

I like lemon.

Same size. If you can get them in darker environment with a lot of coverage, they actually brighten up. Go figure.

The lemon tetras. Yes, the other tetras.

There we go. Chat says lemons are cool. Green fire are a nice variety.

Yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff out there you can find.

In your face.

In your face.

Chat's full of shit.

All right, I think that gets us caught up.

What's that?

Adam? Questions.

Amazonis had that Brazilian tetra booklet that came with their regular magazine. Did you guys get that?

If I did, I didn't see it.

There's so much in that book. I can only do an article at a time. Every blue moon.

That's because it's reading and not pictures, Rob's. Either video.

Guys, I only last three minutes and then I don't need the magazine anymore.

That's why your hands are so calloused.

You're right.

Why are these pages stuck together?

All right, moving on.

My fish magazine, let's get to the.

Topic we came to talk about why.

You suck so much.

Let's all go around the table and each name one of our collective must haves that we have on the shelf. So if you're listening, new Fish keeper. Old Fish Keeper, to remind you of what you should be having or checking stock. This is the aquarium guys official list of what we believe that each aquarist should have on hand in a case of emergency. Because if you have a fish that gets sick or you need to handle something, waiting for prime shipping does not cut the cheese. And you cannot expect that your local fish store is going to have all stock in at all times at two in the morning, at two in the morning when you need it.

Because if something's going to die, it's going to be your favorite damn fish every single time.

Also, if you're local, why?

You don't have favorites.

That's right.

If you're a local fish store, God bless you, because we know that you're the only saving grace of a lot of these naysayers that haven't had medication on hand when shit goes south. So, number one, here's a round for you boys.

Yay. Yes.

I'll start the party. I believe that everybody in the fish hobby, okay, should have some sort of hard detoxifying conditioner, meaning like a prime or amquil. So, so many times when people get in fish, even if they buy it from a local fish store, but most importantly, if they get stuff shipped in, it's been in the bag for a while. Most of the time, unless you're using a breather bag, is sealed. So that bag, with all their crap and piss in the bag, has been shipped. The moment you crack that bag open, that ammonia just immediately turns a toxin.

The moment it hits air, it goes south real quick.

So if you're going to try to save a fish and get ammonia out of the water, the best thing to have is some sort of product, like a prime or an amquil on hand at all times.

When I bring in the large quantities of fish, they pack 300 neons in a gallon and a half bag. I open up the bag, I shoot a wad of amquil. Why are you guys laughing?

Nothing. Continue.

So I shoot this huge wad of amquil in the bag. Oh, it's a huge wad.

Huge wad, no.

So anyway, I shoot this huge sticky wad of amquil into the bag, and then I reoxygenate the bag and tie it up and let it sit for a minute before I started doing water acclimation right and stuff. And I love Amquil. I think amquil is great.

So here's a story. I just got in a bag and it was stuck in the mail for over a week. Yes, over a week. This gentleman, I would shout him out, but I don't have his permission, sent me again. I'm always on this quest for fish that need help. So I got Cuban Lemias in. I was very tired.

Can I get a pair from you.

Next time I see you? Yeah, not a problem. Actually, I got a guy by you that could probably deliver it. He's probably an hour from your house. Anyways. Cuban LeMia is in. He paid for the two day guaranteed shipping from the post office. Mistake one, don't use the post office. And you technically can't use FedEx, even though you can still ship it if you don't declare it's fish.

That's right. It's just water.

It's just water. Don't worry about it. Bro. Nothing's live in there. But anyways, he paid for the two day guaranteed shipping, and it took over a week to get here. I'm like, they're dead for sure. So he was going to see if he can do a claim, the whole thing, go through the whole Rigam world, because it never even showed up to my house. Then it just suddenly arrived. And the post office gal says, yeah, this fell on the side of my car. Sorry. And then just drops it off at my house, WA, open it up. And I shit you not. Still, there's eight small babies in the bag. None of them have died. I'm looking at this going, the moment I crack that bag open, these things are going to have ammonia burn and just shit the bed. So thank God I had the bottle of Amquil because who knows if it was another hour before they die in the bag. If I didn't have that on hand, those fish would have been gone. It's something that you just can't plan for. So keep the amquil, keep the prime on hand for those moments. I opened the bag, dump my water prime in the bag.

Did you shoot a wad?

I shoot a water prime in the bag. Cool. And a little wad. They're doing great.

Oh, yeah, I saw them tonight.

Yeah, they're doing great. All right, Jimmy's turn.

What do you got?

Adam, first thing you should always have oop.

Pause. You there, Adam. I'ma pause you there, adam. We got some people from the Chat. They asked here, is amquil the same as primers or more to it? Now, if you contact the companies of Accordon or CCAM, they're going to say that their products are different. I'm here to have a unsponsored, unbiased, personal, only opinion that they're basically the same shit. There's a bunch of companies that have these detoxifying ammonia conditioners. It's basically the same stuff. Some people add more stuff to it, depending on your brand. There's an entire line up of these different types of conditioners, but the most prominent is prime and amquil.

Yeah, it's essentially thiosulfate. It's in everything. It's even in stress.

Isn't prime the stuff that smells really bad?

Prime is the stuff that Ohio Fish Rescue gets high off of.

Right. And anyway, prime smells horrible. Amquil does not.

Yeah. So they have their own blends, but essentially it's doing the same stuff. It's an ammonia detoxifier, specifically, not just like the stress coat or normal chlorine detoxifiers, although they do put, like you said, low amounts in them because it's in everything.

All right, Adam, you're a garlic freak. Yeah.

Adam hates vampires. Continue.

Garlic is important to have.

Why?

You should have it in your food. Well, you add it to the food, it goes in their slime coat. I think that it's the best thing ever. It gets fish to eat. It helps fight ick. So the garlic guard, whenever the liquid garlic guard, I always recommend you. Soak some frozen food in that and frozen bloodrums, frozen brine shrimp. You'll get everything to eat. I've had the hardest to keep for saltwater fish, like Mandarin gobies. I've done that with Daphne and stuff for them, and they've done good. So I always recommend garlic guard in the house.

Let me paint this out for you, gentlemen, before these two start bitching and arguing. Adam's very pro garlic. Jimmy believes, like, where is garlic in the wild and why should I be using it, right? And I'm kind of in the middle. I've used garlic with positive successes, but I have not set that self where I have to have a garlic on hand as an emergency purpose. Help me out for the listener. What do you recommend and why would they keep it on hand is for an emergency?

Well, the reason why is because have you ever noticed that sometimes you'll go and you'll add some new fish and you don't quarantine right or something? And then you get ick in the water. But if you can't hit it with chemicals because it's a planet tank, this is what you do. If you don't have a UV sterilizer because you dropped it, you broke the bulb, that type of shit. This is why you have garlic.

Guard.

Because Garlic Guard is just, in my opinion, is like the best thing ever. I use it all the time in my shop. I always fed the fish with it right away. It helped clean out internal parasites. I get a lot of wild caught.

Stuff, use it like a general booster when fish are acting up. Or is there specific things that you treat with garlic?

Well, ick, I've had it work with the flukes, the long stringy flukes that come on the fish. So if I notice something, I just start hitting them with garlic right away until I can get medications.

Isn't it also a natural parasitic there you go.

The only things that I've used garlic for is when I see the fish deteriorate and I cannot figure out why I'm doing water changes. Other fish are fine, but I have specific fish that aren't doing well. Like wasting just kind of wasting away where they have, like, wag for mollies. Just when their shit doesn't look quite right, then I'm like, all right, garlic this stuff up. And parasitic issues. If I have parasites, I'll take my normal medication for parasites. Plus I'll boost it with garlic. That's the only times I use it. And Jimmy, do you use it at all?

I was a firm believer in mellafix for a while.

That's a good thing to have too.

Is that on your list, Jimmy, for the next one?

No, it's not. I had Melafix and I used it. I ran into the rep when I was out on the road. He was at one of the pet stores, and I put it in my tanks. I followed his directions and stuff and basically it made my entire warehouse smell like Vick's Vapor rub.

It does.

And foamed up the water to the point where it was like in a rotating bathtub. And I never really saw any ill effects of it, but I never saw anything really great come of it either.

All right, so I'm going to take this one as mine, right? Mellafix is something I actually use and recommend, but only in certain scenarios. Mellafix is hippie shit. Remember the melaleuca? How do we put the diehard closeted Christian folk that would come door to door and sell you things? They would sell melaleuca generally at, like, a church bake sale, stuff like that. This is concentrated melaleuca that treats your fish. So I use it again when anytime you have fungus issues, anytime you have fin rips and injuries, stuff like that. But you have to and I'm dead ass on this. Shut off your light if you're going to treat with melofix. No light. They keep that stuff in a dark bottle. You put it in your tank, you turn on the light, it's just not going to work.

That's how I treat my ex wife. Keep her in the dark and keep.

Her in the dark. And when you say that your whole warehouse smells like VapoRub, I have a quick story. I'm going to throw Dan under the bus. I go upstairs. Dan is living with me in the house.

Are you guys a couple?

We are. I go upstairs in the upstairs shitter, and I'm taking a crap and I look over in the counter.

Hey, that was too much information.

I'm on the toilet, I'm taking a crap.

You're reading.

I look over in the bathroom counter and there's a giant bottle of mellifex. Now, I thought for sure that it was my daughter that found it in the basement and then brought it upstairs because she was playing with the bottle. And I'm like, I grabbed the bottle and I go down to take it downstairs. And then Dan comes down the hall, says, what the hell are you doing with my mellifix? I'm like, oh, I'm sorry. Did my daughter put it in the bathroom? No, I need that for my hair. The man what? So I was wondering why this guy smells like an old folks home with a VIX vapor rub. Oh, yeah, it's his hair.

You use it in your hair millifix?

Absolutely.

My God. Why you need to close the door of the microwave when you run it? Because all your good brain cells are pretty much gone. The shitter.

Oh, no.

I've been doing this for years for malifix.

So yeah, I had to let my wife know to leave the fish medication in the bathroom because it's for Dan's hair.

Needless to say, I'm pretty pro Melafix.

No, explain this. Why did me it's just tea tree oil. That's it. You said it was the best form of tea tree. That was your argument because you're trying to rationalize.

So my argument is it's a better grade of tea tree oil since it's used for a medication than what you're going to get in most cosmetics.

I got to give you credit. I haven't seen you with a touch of acne. Oh, yeah. And I see, like, your guy. You're a good looking dude, but you have what I can tell is, like, maybe some old acne pitting. And you haven't seen you with one pimple since you've been here, so maybe it's working. Maybe I'm a bit harsh on it, but still, I just want to hilarious.

I want to see him in the dark sometime. I want to see glows in the freaking dark.

Oh, absolutely. My piss is radioactive. Now. To backpedal a little bit, adam, you were talking about garlic. I sent you a academic article from the University of Michigan. They were doing a study on stress toxin in corridoris, specifically when they up a bag and poison themselves. And basically their method for reversing self poisoning in Albino and Bronze corridoris was to administer garlic extract. And they had something like a 100% success rate within two minutes.

That's insane.

That doesn't surprise me.

Procedure to produce garlic extract needed to be added to a hospital tank, one must first obtain garlic cloves. One pound of garlic that's a lot of garlic. Roughly produce 1 gram of garlic extract.

Let's stop there.

Holy hell.

Go to the grocery store and they have garlic extract in two ounce bottles.

That's why that garlic guard stuff, when you crack it open, dude, it'll clear room out.

Yeah. If you go buy garlic juice at the grocery store, which we use to inject turkeys, a half a teaspoon will do. 25 pounds of turkey.

Here's three sentences. Conclusion this is from the scientific study you posted using garlic baths both on Bronze and albino, CorridorAs were able to make miraculous recovery from self poisoning. Knowing that there is a cure for self defense mechanism is groundbreaking and reassuring to marine biologists and aquarium hobbyists, having the ability to revive and reverse self poisoning process opens the door to save the lives of many corridors.

Now I have so many questions. How soon do you have to administer this?

Is this like as fast as you can?

As quickly as possible.

If you get them in the mail as soon as you get them out, you do an immediate water change. You get them in a garlic bath, but you kind of want to keep doing, like, a few water changes.

Keep them so if they come in sideways yeah.

Especially if they ship them like, 50.

To a bag when they come over from the Orient. 250 to a bag?

Yeah, absolutely.

About two gallons of water. And they have them doped up pretty good and stuff. And if you drink that, it will mess you up.

I'm thinking some of the rare CorridorAs just don't get shipped because they have stronger poison.

But if you're one of the rare CorridorAs, you're only buying 612 24. You're not buying three is like twelve. Right? You're not buying 300 albino corridors, you're not buying 300 paleotis, because those are kind of the basic bread and butter of the whole thing. But if you're out there to be as a breeder, what a wonderful thing or a zoology type thing?

Well, I took it important.

Well, I haven't done anything yet. It's your turn now.

It's very Jimmy's turn.

I've been bantering. So I was doing some research, like we all do, and here's something that you don't really consider a medicine, but carbon. Oh, yep. And anyway, I pulled this up off, so I'm going to read this. I apologize.

Don't apologize.

But anyway, carbon. So for poisoning, active carbon is often used as a filter media, but more advanced aquarius don't bother with this stuff, arguing that it isn't necessary. But active carbon is supposed to keep the water clear and free of smells. But many will claim those conditions should be caused by frequent water changes. And anyway, active carbon can remove certain toxins in your tank, making it safe for your fish. So if something toxic gets into your tank, there's a charcoal can filter it out. What can it filter out? It can remove medications. So if you're medicating, something you over.

You put too much put too much.

In, the cap falls in.

Throw a bag of carbon in.

Yes. It also will take chlorine out and chloramines hydrogen peroxide. I didn't realize it'd take out hydrogen peroxide. Bleach. It'll take out tin. I don't know why you'd have a problem having tin in your tank, but it'll take out pesticides. So think about it. If you have a pond outside and you're spraying your lawn and the wind drifts a little bit, and now you're concerned about all your prized koi, well, throw in three pounds of carbon and see if that helps. Gold, acetic acid, vinegar, soap, iodine, silver and mercury. All things that carbon will take out of the water.

So here's why. In an emergency, I believe that carbon is a must. I don't think that people should be using carbon all the time. You can, it doesn't hurt. But the carbon only lasts so long. Throwing a bag in it will only do justice. It only has so much of a life in your tank, and you have to replace that carbon. So, because of it, I'm not just going to dump my wallet into putting carbon bags in every time I do a water change, right? So I keep it on hand as a medication. So let's pretend your mom, someone comes with a windex bottle and then just starts scrubbing your tank up. Suddenly you have all these toxic chemicals and you know it's going to kill your fish. Throw a carbon bag in, do another water change, keep that carbon bag in there because you're treating for the accident if you put in that too much mellifix, do water changes, and throw a carbon bag in if you're done using the medication.

Yeah. Here's the stuff that carbon won't help with, okay? It won't help with ammonia. It won't help with nitrates, microbes, sodium, fluoride, hardness, zinc, copper, and carbon dioxide, things that it won't help with. Well, when's the last time any of this happened where you had carbon dioxide?

Oh, no. Carbon dioxide, exactly.

So, anyway, I think it's a pretty cheap fix to keep it on hand. It's certainly not going to hurt anything. I mean, if you're throwing a long ball into the end zone trying to save your fish.

Now, another cheap one that they don't really list there, because they're just talking about just carbon. Most of the carbons you get are a blend, so you get the other white pellets, and they'll do a mix of other things in there, and those are more focused for, like, ammonias and whatnot. So know that it does more than the list we suggested, especially if you get the blend.

And the other thing I'm going to throw out there, too, which is kind of in the same thing where it's not really a medicine that this particular guy wrote down. The other thing you probably should have just to be on hand, which has got nothing to do with medicine, is a battery operated air pump. Just throwing it out there.

Jimmy took two because we skipped him.

That's right. Well, I'm not done yet. I'm going to go on forever. Oh, no.

We got to take turns, Jimmy.

Oh, I know.

Holy shit.

Here. Who's turning now?

It's Adam's turn. But we got to go over battery operated air pumps. You can get these things on Amazon. Cobalt sells one. There's different brands, but you can also, in a pinch, go to your local bait store. They have what's called the bubble box. A bubble box is not just a rechargeable USB battery operated pump, but it's intended for your bait minnows. So it'll run on sometimes AA, sometimes nine volt. And it's intended to have a pump that hooks on your bucket for your minnows that you're going to be using going into for baiting. So if you just keep a bubble box on hand in case emergencies come up, whether your power goes out, whether you're going to drive six and a half hours to go pick up a specialty fish that you're worried about and you don't want to bag or can't bag, then keep that bubble box on hand.

Well, let's talk about what I brought to the show the other day that you guys saw.

That was sweet. What was that? A sun, Joe.

Sun joe battery pack. And because we were outdoors, I was able to bring a 33 gallon tank, which I threw a bunch of high end Arandas into. And of course, we're in the parking lot. There is no power. And my lovely wife found this online and it's made by Sun Joe and it's about $150, but we got it for $99, I think, because they had a sale on them. And we plugged in our back pump on that thing and it ran probably 7 hours that day. And we still had seven eighthe of a battery left on a thing. It's basically just a large battery pack. And I think I could power my fish room because most people who have a fish room have one air pump. And if you lose power for seven or 8 hours and after a couple of hours you'll see your fish are starting to have problems, then you could plug your one air pump, which is going to take quite a bit of electricity, but you could plug it in to your linear pump that we have and run air in the tanks of fish so you wouldn't lose any fish. And we've got about 75 tanks right now. We've got two breeding pairs of discus and man, I don't know what I'd do if I lost two breeding pair of discus.

It's insane.

Jen would have your nuts.

The thing has USBC, USB 3.0, it has wireless charging for your phone on top, it's got Led flashlights in the side. The thing's insane. If you go on our discord, you'll find the link for it. It's the sun joe PPG. 300. It has 298 watts or WH. That's not watts, I don't know what that measurement is.

Yeah, it will tell you, Rob, if.

You take portable power generator, if you.

Look at stuff, it'll tell you certain appliances that'll run it'll run a small refrigerator for a day and a half. But you got to realize that a refrigerator turns on and turns off and stuff, but it tells you different appliances, how long it'd run, it depending on how much and it will tell you. So when we bought it, we tested it, we brought an Oscillating standing fan into our living room and we just wanted to see how long this would last. And that was drawing twelve watts. And that thing lasted probably about 12 hours before it died.

Here it is. AC output, 230 watt peak. It's insane. This is $200 right now on Amazon. It's normally three it's on sale.

Yeah. And you can go on the Sun.

Joe website is not sponsored.

Yeah, the Sun Joe website where we bought it directly from them, and I think it's listed on there for 199 and we purchased it for like $150, $149.

Because you guys use the promo codes.

Yeah. And the thing is that they sell all kinds of garden appliances and stuff. We bought an electric rototiller for our garden and it's a Sun Joe and I thought, oh, electric rototiller. Because right now certain items like rototillers and things like that, where you only use once or twice a year, every time you use them, you got to put a new spark plug. In. You got to change the gas and stuff. So I thought, well, I'm going to try this because one of our neighbors has one of these. And when you go out to the rototill with this, yeah, you have a cord dragon behind you. This thing kicks ass and throws dirt for freaking four or 5ft. And you got to hold onto it with all your work. And so when Jen found that generator, it was made by the same company, said, I'm willing to take a gamble on this, and it works great. So I highly recommend having something like.

That reach out if you want to sponsor us.

There we go.

All right, Adam, your turn.

So you guys are going to laugh at me?

We do all the time. Care.

I just really don't care. There is a book from 1989, and it is a fish disease handbook. And I recommend that everybody has that book in their fish room, emergencies or not. You should just have that book.

What's the book?

The Handbook of Aquarium fish diseases.

The Hand. Oh, excellent. Who's it by?

It is by Dieter Untigasur.

Oh, my God. Spell that. No, don't don't spell that.

Anyways, this book has been great because you know how there's some diseases that look like other diseases, and if you treat it wrong, you're going to end up killing your fish or losing your surprised favorite fish? That's what this book is. It actually has, like, a chart that you can go down the line and go, does my fish have this? Does it have this? Does it have this? And then it goes, see, somebody found it. And they put it on the side right there.

That was me. That was me.

The best book ever. I'm finding it online on Amazon for $21.74. Hardcover.

Hardcover. Handbook of Aquarium Fish Diseases. And the last edition actually was edited by Axel Rodai.

Axel Rodai? You mean Axelrod?

I refuse to give his whole last name. He wanted to be pompous and name all the fish after him. He's going to be called Axel Rod Eye from now on.

Just buddy up to him. Just call him Herbert. Herbert?

Yeah, from our homie Herbert.

I love his yogurt.

Oh, my god.

Herbert's yogurt.

But I mean, this book helped my pet store out. Oh, it was before everybody had smartphones. And everybody's like, oh, you can just look it up in your smartphone. How many ass hats do you see that think they know what the they're talking about on their smartphone own? And they have a website, and then they go and they tell you the wrong disease and then you kill your fish.

All right, here's what we're going to do. I'm going to put all of these links so far. We have the Sun Joe, and we have the handbook. I'm going to put them in the show notes, but they're also on Discord. So if you are listening to podcasts, you will find the Amazon links in the show notes, and that doesn't help sponsor us. So still want to help us?

That was a good one, Adam. I'm not going to make fun of you on that, Adam.

There's no making fun of you.

No.

In fact, I've actually looked through that book. That's a solid book. My turn. The next thing you should have, methylne Blue, if you don't have methyl blue.

Was one of mine.

In fact, can you do yourself a favor? There is another K chemical that we can't get anymore called malachet green. Malachite?

Malachite.

M-A-L-A-C-H-I-T-E. Green. You can't get it in just straight form anymore. It's just kind of banned. If you can find it, stock up on it forever. I still got a half bottle left that I'm cherishing for the rest of my life. But methyl blue, I guarantee you, will someday be taken off of our shelves. And methyl blue is bar none. If you're going to use a chemical, the best way to treat ick, there's so many more fish diseases and ailments and using it for fungus on fish eggs. You should always have a container of methyl and blue and then make sure that when you use it to always use a glove because it will be on you like you choked a smurf.

That's exactly right. Yeah.

So have that on hand always.

Can I tell them the reason why they should always have some of this shit on hand?

Because they're going to take it away from us.

Exactly. So in my store, I had a vendor come back and they tried to take all my good fish antibiotics. And this is my tangent, so I'm sorry.

Back in the day when Adam had a store, adam could order fish antibiotics, like Amoxicillin, Cephalaxin, stuff like that, to treat things better than anything else. He could just order it and have it on the shelf. Now, to get those, you have to go through a veterinarian and have a prescription to get Amoxicillin and Cephalaxin. They have taken those away. Not entirely. You could still go to a vet and they'll look at you crazy, like you want to get a medication for your fish, but then they'll help you out. Most likely these have just been flat banned. I can't go to a vet and get malachiacreen. You just can't get it.

Yeah. One of my favorite companies that I used to deal with, I still have their book, and I cherish that thing because it's just about a twelve page paper handbook that I used to get. And anyway, this company was called Chem Aqua out of California, and they're no longer around. And they had every type of fish medicine you could imagine in huge coffee can type containers. And it was inexpensive. It would be at your door in two days. And after all the feds started regulating everything they had to hated that shit.

Yeah, I'm going to have to edit so much. You guys suck.

Edit this. Continue this. So anyway, Kim Aqua and going out of business because they just got so overrun with government blah, blah, blah. But there are so many different good medicines that they had. They had one called receiver One for when you brought imported fish. That was just kind of a combination of about four different things. Had one called receiver Two, where if they came in really bad shape, you'd put them in there. You'd put the stuff in there. And I know Methylene Blue was in there, the Mechanite Green, plus a bunch of other stuff. And you couldn't even see these fish you'd put in what they say, which is like a little scoop per ten gallons, and you wouldn't see the fish for a week. And when you did a water change, they come out of there. It looked like they just got spit shined in a microwave. It was just so good stuff.

Have you been spit shining things in your microwave?

I know you've been running the microwave with the door open.

Eyes. Jimmy, your turn. Next one. Well, this is we got to pump through these. We're an hour in already.

God, you guys, here's something. Peas.

Peas. Okay. If you're just a human, you should probably have a bag of peas in your fridge just so that when you whack yourself in the head, you have some sort of ice pack for your face.

When I had my vasectomy, that's where I put it.

That's where your nurse told you not to. Because if you see your balls covered in something green, you're going to call the doctor.

No, I use peas. It worked. Good.

How about you tell me never to eat peas at either of your houses?

Yeah, I wouldn't either.

Peas.

Peas are a good thing.

Peas are a good thing. So peas for your fish, for constipation? That's right. Whether frozen or raw, always have some peas in your fridge in case of overfeeding. If poor water quality isn't the number one cause of aquarium fish deaths among new hobbyists, it has to be overfeeding. Fish in the wild don't normally have enough food at a time to gorge themselves. They eat tiny, tiny bits of food here and there all day long. So their stomachs weren't designed to eat big meals like you and I. And because they are always in search for food, they will overeat and become constipated. So they're saying you could feed feed peas. Feed peas to your fish to help them become unconstipated.

And your jimmies. Feed peas to your jimmies to help constipation?

That's right.

All right, Adam, your turn.

Well, you took my Methylene Blue. Yeah. And then you told me not to go on my rant about how the government ruined my fish medications.

If you want to take a peek.

I think we should have an episode called Adam's Rants.

Talk to your buddies. In Canada. Canada has it so much worse than America does. They can't use any fish medication at all. It's ridiculous.

Well, they also don't have freedom of speech, any rights.

All right, politic podcast next. What else you got?

Go ahead. I got to think now.

Okay, I'll take another one. He has to think. All right, so everybody should have something for parasites. We talked about the garlic, but that's specific. I believe that you should have something like a no, no.

Metronidazole.

Everybody should have yeah, again, metradazinol. I enjoy prazzipro. There's other ones. What was the one that we found from Dr. Smith and Foster that had the methanidazole in it?

You guys are so good at pronouncing all these names.

It's metradazinal, assholes.

Metrodazinal.

Metrodazinal.

You always answered the question for that dude, too.

Metrodazinal.

Metroplex.

No.

There we go. Thank you. Yes.

Metroplex is just another form of Metrodazinol that they named for fish. Metrodazinol can be used in humans, all.

Of these medications in most forms, actually. I don't think the methylne blue what.

Metropolitans are good for.

Oh, no.

Treating internal parasites instead.

Regardless, you should have something for parasites on hand. That is more of a general cure. I love Prazzipro. I've used Prazzipro in a lot of applications. I think that specifically Prazipro is a great choice out of your options for a broad spectrum. For parasites. It will not do everything but have something for parasites on hand. I even go a bit further and I had a bunch of pond fish. And anytime you have pond fish and you get rescue fish, you got to deal with anchor worms, flukes, lice, shit. So I have a special treatment on top of it for ponds, for lice and anchor worms, because I deal with goldfish so often.

I have a wife who takes ticks off me.

Have you done that to your goldfish? You ever taken a tweezer and have to take lice off your goldfish?

Yeah, but it's more fun to have my wife take ticks off my back.

Because she rewards you afterwards. Excellent.

You know what's really good to have on hand? It treats literally everything 100% effectiveness.

Gummy bears, iodine.

No, it's kidding. Clove oil. Clove oil?

Yeah. That'll kill everything.

Fix everything.

Fix everything.

That's dan's recommendation. Now, real talk, if you have a fish that was not going to be rescued and you're just trying to end it nicely, clove oil is the like you take your dog to the vet and put them down. This is how you take and put your fish down.

Wow.

You get ace, you get a bucket of water, you'd add your clove oil and you just watch them fall asleep and never wake up again.

Why does it work?

I don't know. I don't ask questions. I just put the juice.

But seriously, why does clove oil work? Juice in the bucket use it to fish.

They use it for surgeries. I've actually done it for fish surgeries as well. Like. I'm a surgeon. Mine. If I have to cut something off a fin, I'm going to knock them out with clove oil. Not enough to kill them, I'm just going to dip them until they kind of unconscious.

You're hoping cut it out of the.

Fin and then revive them. I've done this many times.

Thank you. Bill Cosby.

You want Bill cosby those fish. That's how you get it done.

You guys are a bunch of sick.

All right, quick tangent. I'm sitting there, I got a 1949 Dodge, and I'm trying to talk to pickup, I'm trying to talk to the mechanic. I'm trying to get some ideas of fixing something that's wrong with my truck.

Even clove oil.

I'm telling him, the only way I can get the vehicle started and I'm telling him, So you got to take the air intake off off. And then you bill Cosby it. And then starts right up. And he looks at me like, what are you talking about? I'm like, Little ether, little can of starting fluid. Bill cosby it. And he just lost it.

Oh, my God.

Hey, Robbie.

Did you think of your selection there, Adam?

No, but do you want a bottle of Malachite Green? Because I can get you some.

We must be very quiet.

Okay. Kid, some green. Hey, kid wants some green. All right. Adam? What you got?

One thing you should always have on hand. In case of an emergency or just in general life. Titanium grounding probe.

There you go.

If you don't have that, you're absolutely.

F. So the reason that you have a titanium grounding probe is, if you have an aquarium you care about and you have a heater in it, glass, especially titanium. Any heater that heater will eventually burn out and when it does, it will electrocute your fish to death. So if you have an old heater, have a grounding probe. If you have a new heater, consider a grounding probe. If you don't have a heater, have a grounding probe anyway in case you change your mind and add an heater, have a grounding probe on hand. My friends.

Yes. Let's take a second and talk about what you and I talked about last night coming home from the fish meeting.

God, I don't remember.

There's a lot our experiment with a cracked heater.

May I?

Yeah.

May I?

Go ahead.

So, Jimmy and I have want to do an experiment. Now, we don't think we should, because it's unethical. But you never know if you were to take because we know that fish in an aquarium when electrocuted, can die, right. But we want to know how much kills a fish. So, if you have, what do we say, a big fish, a small fish. And then we had parasites.

Parasites.

Some sort of maybe we'll call it even. Like fish lice.

Fish lice. We want to see it. What?

So if you were to take and put the volts in the water and you just gradually turn that electricity up which dies first? Is it the big fish, is it the small fish? Or is it the parasite? Right?

Because we're thinking you may be able.

To use low doses of electricity to kill parasites and leave the fish alive. Just chalk them a bit like ick.

What? Adam?

No, it doesn't work. So in my 75 gallon tank with discus the size of dinner plates robbie, I don't give a shit. You're going to have to edit the out of this podcast today. I left and I was gone for 5 hours and in 5 hours it wiped out my entire tank and I'm talking about probably ten or twelve discus that I had in there for breeding pairs. I had some L 46, I had some guppies and some sword tails like it killed just about everything but one fish.

What was the fish?

It was a female sword tail, I still don't know how she lived so.

You weren't there to witness it. So we don't know what died first, the parasites or the discus so I think we need to do this experiment or maybe we should do it for Vasectomies.

The discus were the ones acting goofy and that should have led me to believe something was wrong in the first.

Place because when your fish are being electrocuted they are darting around the tank, they're acting crazy, you put your fingers in the water, you can feel a little zapping.

I just still believe that if you're going to do the full experiment big fish, small fish, lice which dies first right?

Yes.

I understand that yours burnt up but you also didn't control it, you didn't sit there watch it and every five minutes turn it up a little bit.

Think about it, if we could kill parasites like ick on a fish then we could take it to a new level and we could cure cancer. I feel like we're cure cancer robbie.

Right now you and I are scientists from the Third Reich, we got that same mentality, we're just cure cancer.

Wow. Let's do it.

We need to shut this down and not do this to fish ever. Our imagination got a little too far ahead of us and you had too much beer Jimmy.

No coral on the other so yeah, there you go.

All right.

No, they grow better with electricity.

We're on a time cap gentlemen. All right Jimmy, what else you got?

Well, so Dan brought it up and so I'm just going to go down this rabbit hole metrodazinol. Metrodazinol. And now I know why Dan is so high on this because it's good shit. Does metrodazinol treat chlamydia? When metrodazinol is given as a follow up treatment for persistent symptoms of chlamydia really? Usually in addition to other antibiotics such as erythromycin no shit. It provides treatment and possible bacteria causes and yeah, chlamydia.

So I'm too embarrassed to go to the doctor and get your chlamydia treated. Go to your fish metroplex. It's a metroplex.

I've had people call in and ask if we have fish mocks for their house pets, like their cats and dogs.

Right.

I would not be surprised if somebody with an itch came in and was like, hey, you got any Metronidisol for.

Also, my hair is a little screwed up. You got some mellow fix?

I got this trout.

It's got a problem.

So I want to put this out just so people don't email us and we don't get in trouble. If you're listening to this and you're a dumb, do not even not go to your fish store and purchase products for human use. Do not do this. We are making jokes.

This is the reason why I lost my antibiotics.

We do not do this. It is jokes. This is also why we had a bunch of COVID remedies and stuff taken away from us. Don't do this. It's not intended for human consumption. We are making jokes.

They're saying it does not treat gonorrhea. So if you've got gonorrhea, skip the Metrodazole. I'm just Googling this stuff because chlamydia, though, is good.

Yeah, excellent. Adam got one.

No, you took away all my good ones.

Okay, I got the next one. Definitely going to have just basic water conditioner. If you're in a city and you don't have well water, you got to have water conditioner.

Didn't we just say that?

We talked about amquil specifically for ammonia. We did not talk about just generic water conditioner for chlorine. Now, this also takes supposedly more out of the water in case you have harsh crap in your well water. But if you're drinking it, it should be okay for your fish, but still keep it on hand, especially if you're in a city. I live in Perham, and Jimmy and I both know that we have almost no chlorine coming out the tap. However, there are days where we'll sniff the water and it smells like pool. Guess what we're using?

Oh, pool?

Yeah.

I thought you were sniffing Dan's hair.

Baby.

This might be a crossover with the Deep Fried Conspiracy podcast, but a good thing all fish keepers should have on hand, especially in case of an apocalypse, is iodine.

Why is that treating your water. Really?

Let's say you have a whole bunch of filtered water in your house. Make it work to your advantage.

Or chlorine tabs. Yeah.

Really? Water tabs. So you guys are kind of like doomsdayers type people, right?

Preppers.

Preppers.

We have a name.

All right, well, I'm going to state something. That special club. Yeah, you guys spend too much time in the basement already. So I'm just saying as you groom each other like a couple of monkeys sitting there going through each other's hair, pulling up ticks and shit.

Whoa. Just because our grooming doesn't end up with a happy ending like yours, doesn't mean we need to be a haze.

Hey, speaking of that, I had a massage today, but there is no happy ending.

Can you get to your next subject, please?

Listen, Captain obvious salt, water aquarium salt or rock salt for injuries and illnesses, you should have some salt at hand. Okay, why we have bitched about salt day one.

Why isn't someone pick that as their first product?

See, I know I'm stating the obvious here.

Every person that goes to discord, they're like, what's wrong with my fish? And we're just like, salted up bitch. Then talk to us.

Yeah. Every fish keeper knows that at some point a fish will get ill or at least hurt. You can buy some medicine in advance as a safety precaution, but fish medications often cause more harm than good. You have to be absolutely certain what the problem is. And you'll need to know if it can harm any other species in the same tank. Which is a good point. We haven't talked about like if you're treating this, it might hurt your clown loach because it's scaleless. We haven't talked about that yet.

Yeah, can't use copper if you're going to be using that, so might as well use something else.

But here's some things that it will help out tremendously.

You're distracting Jimmy. Continue.

God. Dan's in here doing drugs or something? I don't know.

No.

So anyway, what I used to buy, I wish I still had it, but I used to buy goldfish from a certain company and they once send a piece of paper telling about the eleven diseases that it will cure. A goldfish of the salt. And anyway, I wish I had to save that, but I don't have that anymore. But here's what aquarium salt covers a range of illnesses. It removes external parasites such as ick. It prevents bacterial infections on fish with torn fins or open sores. It treats external fungi. So that stuff grown on your junk, dan might put some salt on it. You can even protect fish while other nitrate penis. I didn't want to say penis.

That's the word. That's the word of the evening.

Do we have to bleep that?

That's the line.

Penis.

I hate you all.

I can't say penis.

Okay.

So it can even protect fish from nitrate poisoning during a cycling tank. The disadvantages of salt, the drawback to salt is it can harm invertebrates and scaleish fish like cory, catfish and stuff. So you just got to be careful on what you're doing with salt. But salt, when I go down to the Florida fish, all those different places we go down and visit like Secrets Farm, they have pallets, pallets of rock salt. When I say rock salt, I'm talking about the 40 pound bags that use for your softener, not the pellets. We've always talked about the pellets and they're held together by water soluble glue and that will kill your fish. Plus it will kill your goddang water softener. So it's just this stuff that looks like crushed gravel. It's the cheapest salt you can buy. And we went over to visit and they had pallets and pallets and pulse of salt just sitting there. And they were throwing 40 pound bags into their reservoir just to keep salt on there to help the slime coating of all the fish. So salt is probably the cheapest thing you can have on hand, and you don't need to buy the aquarium salt that your local pet store sells.

Buy the extra coarse, softener salt, right.

And save yourself a little bit of money.

All right, I'm going to answer a couple of questions. In Chat we have says most companies don't even sell methan blue anymore. I think Cordon is the only one that does. There's a couple other companies, but they're not even labeling pure methyl blue. They generally have something like ickure or something in the main ingredients methyl and blue. But yes, if you want pure methyl blue, the only way I purchase it right now is Gordon. They also said, never heard of fish lice. These things look gnarly. I now have new nightmares on hand or always in an expensive tank for the grounding probe boys. If you're doing it right, if you have an aquarium and you have a heater, grounding probe. If it's expensive, definitely grounding probe. Yeah. The way that I would keep it on hand is if you don't normally use a heater. If you have a cold water tank, whether it's goldfish, whether it's feeder, guppies, endlers, same thing. And you want to treat Rob, you want to treat something like ick. You want to raise the temperature. You want to get that over, like, what, 82 degrees? It's kind of the mark that I use. And that's the time where you'll temporarily use a heater. Guess what? Temporarily use a grounding probe at the same time. So, yeah, always in if you can, baby. Next one. Oh, extra airline tubing. We should put on the list if Rob's will be visiting. Thanks.

Yes. Because you put so much because you put up your butt sometime.

All right, back to the list. Next one I would have is a UV filter. You don't have to use a UV filter all the time. If you have one built in your canister filter or hang on the back filter, great. But if you don't keep an extra one on hand, you can buy the UV filters. They're actually pretty expensive. What is it for the nice AquaTop one in store there, Dan? Like 100 and something 80.

Depends which one you're the size you're looking for.

I mean, from $60 anywhere from sixty dollars to one hundred and forty dollars for brand name UV filters.

Typically they're around $100 for a good one with the built in filter.

Keep it on hand and run it when you need to. I mean, if you have ick, you can treat ick without ever putting a chemical in your water, just put the UV filter in and it does a great job of killing ick. A lot of pet stores use UV filters just as a quarantine procedure. So if you want a cheaper method of having a UV filter, you can get a UV bar or a UV drop in light for the back of your hang on filter, something to put in your sump. What you cannot do is you cannot take that same UV bar or UV drop in light and just put it in your tank as a cool little light decoration. I know that because skin cancer is real and fish get it.

This is why Rob wears glasses.

Yes, it is.

I thought it's because he touched himself too much.

Imagine yourself going to a tanning booth, right? That you're in the tanning booth, what, 1520 minutes? Half an hour. If you're a freak, you come out, nice golden toasty that's doing it the same shit to your fish. You are putting your fish you're turning their tank into a tanning bed all the time.

And so that's why I want to go to our newest sponsor, goldfish glasses, little sunglasses for Goldfish. We're going to be selling them for 1599. And if you want to stick your little probe thing that lights up in.

Your water who told you my probe was little?

And then you can put these little glasses on the goldfish. 1599.

We will also have a link in Amazon for one of these UV bars. Drop in lights as well. Cool in the show notes. What you got, Jimmy?

I've got something kind of as a I call this a catch all. Okay. It's general cure it's. API sells it. It's a freshwater saltwater fish powder medication. It's kind of like if you don't know what you're doing, just throw this at it. And so anyway, it rapidly eliminates parasitic fish disease. Pretty general. What kind of fish disease? It's used for parasitic fish disease symptoms such as gill and skin flukes, swell and abdomens, hole in the head and wasting disease. So it's kind of a catch all. So if you're new to the system, you don't know what's going on. It's relatively inexpensive. You get a ten pack for, like, $15. And you can purchase this and try saving your fish if you don't have a clue what you're doing. But it's just got several different types of medicine in there. Kind of like talking about earlier about that stuff that I would order from Chem Aqua, where it had just kind of a combination of things and tried as a catch all. So it's very popular, and I use it on occasion, but I try not to. But if you are worried about certain things, buy one of those.

Well, I don't know why we haven't picked on this yet, but master Test Kit. If you don't have something to actually read your water, especially when stuff goes wrong. Jimmy. I Adam. We've all. Mentioned that. Quit testing your water. Don't worry about your PH, and just put the fish in there instead. Have an environment to support good fish and acclimate them to your water. But you still have to have a master test kit to see if you've killed your cycle, to see if something is going haywire, to see if that new SpongeBob SquarePants pineapple is leaching stuff into your tank and changing your environment. Knowing what's in your water is part of the battle when stuff goes wrong.

Thank you, Dan. That was wonderful. Thank you.

Jimmy, what you got?

Well, the one thing that I like that I do use quite a bit because all my tanks are too full is a TDs meter.

Yeah.

And I like TDs meters because they're easy to use, they're quick to use. They're inexpensive to buy. You can buy them for $15. You can buy the juice to redo it, and that's like $12. So it's very inexpensive to test out your water to see how goopy it is.

Jimmy, I'm a new fish. Goer. Why does TDs matter and what is it?

TDs.

Total dissolved solids.

Yes. Is the amount of crap ola in your water. The higher it is, the worse it is for your fish. You want to try to keep it down between zero and 50. Once you get a little bit higher, it stresses out the fish, and that's when your problems start. So, basically, what TDs meter will tell you how dirty your water is, and you simply can just change that TDs reading by a water change. And if you have 400, 500 neon fish in a 55 gallon tank, and your TDs is very, very high, when you check it, do a water change and then check it the next day, you can't go from 300 down to zero without screwing your fish up. Yeah.

You want to go gentle. And then you can also use it to test old Ro units. If you have an old Ro unit you bought from a dude, you want that water to be pretty damn close to zero. The entire idea is you're stripping the water to bare nothing. And if you're getting a huge TDs reading, your Ro machine is not an Ro machine.

Yeah, those filters clog up and they quit working. So it's just a cheap and easy way to fix things. But TDs meters are very inexpensive, very easy to use. It's probably the thing I used the most.

Adam, you got one?

Well, you guys are taking all my shit. I'm just listening at this point.

We gave you turns, my guy.

I said chlamydia, and you could have jumped right in.

All right, I'm going to do one last one for you. I believe that you should have some sort of even if it's just in your sponge filters. But if you don't, a bottle or the powdered form of bacteria in a bottle, there's plenty of different things. Stresszyme. I've had powdered versions, which powdered versions are by far the worst.

Just need some shit.

You just need a little shit to go a long way. If you're going to start a new tank, you got to have a little shit. If you have a pad in the back of your hang in the back filter, squeeze that out. There you have it on hand. If you have sponge filter that you haven't rung out recently, boom. There you have it, on hand. Just make sure that you have some sort of bacteria culture or bacteria in a bottle on hand. And if you don't have a friend that does, don't start those tanks without it. You can, but who wants to wait the four to six weeks for the tanks to cycle and build that up when you can just go.

I mean, how many times have we brought fish in? And you go, Holy crap, I have an extra bag of fish here. They sent me that I wasn't planning on.

Guess what I got to start up a tank for?

Start up a tank. And I don't have a tank with a good cycle going. A lot of my tanks have four sponge filters. I'll grab two from this tank, two from that tank, and then squeeze another one in there and you're up and running in five minutes.

People have asked us what's the appropriate brand or type of bacteria bottle. If you don't have something that you can squeeze out of your own filter or tank. I don't care about name brand, but apparently I've been told that only like two or three name brands have the real, actual bacteria in a bottle that is aquatic. I believe the API version is supposed to be one of them. Again, I don't care. That's pretty good. Yeah. Apparently all the others use what they call a terrestrial, meaning that bacteria came from outside an aquatic environment. But how it works is, even if it's terrestrial and you got that specific brand that has that, it will still denitrify until the aquatic bacteria appears. That's how those bottles will work. I'm not going to say which is better. I'm just saying they all work in their own way. I'm not real picky on the name brand or if it's going to be some, like, fritz one you keep in the fridge. Don't really care. They all do the job as long as you're following the recommended instructions. The only one that I would be cautious of is the dry powdered ones right now in my hand. I don't mean to shit on mucha. I've tried some of their products. They're good. It's more of the product itself. This stuff I got as a gift to try out, and it's powdered bacteria. And let me tell you, using the recommended instructions on this, it's too strong. You put it in there and you're essentially turning your tank into a petri dish.

Pass that over here.

Yeah, this is the smoke.

Some of this shit. Ever light one up with that stuff?

I know, right?

It did the job, but it just put too much bacteria in the tank.

This is awesome.

So the problem that we have, we're up in the northern part of the United States, we're 200 miles from the freaking Canadian border. Well, we got to be careful with bacteria in a bottle. If it freezes, it's no good. Yeah. So if you're going to buy bacteria in a bottle and keep it on hand, the shelf life is how long on that stuff? Ad.

Each one has an expiration date on the bottle. It's supposed to be like a year plus.

So I remember what we used to do is just before it got really cold up here, we would order a bunch in because we know it hasn't been frozen. But what happens if they put it in the back of a semi and they ship it up here in a 30 below and it freezes and the pet store takes it, puts it on their shelf. Or anybody takes it, puts it on their shelf. It's killed all the bacteria a lot of times, too. I buy bacteria in a bottle from one of my wholesalers Seagris farms and they've got four different varieties and their stuff is so concentrated, like one bottle with 2oz will do like 50,000 gallons of water.

Now I've heard this, I've done some of the homework from one of the fans that have messaged us, apparently. So they say bacteria that you can squeeze out of your own filter if you're getting it. That correct. Bacteria you can keep in your own container and store for up to one year as long as it's in the refrigerator. So if you want to and you want to be that guy that puts poo in a container, go for it. Get yourself a little canning jar, mash some poo in a container and keep it in the back of your fridge to piss off your wife and kids.

Waffle stump it right in there.

Yeah. And then put on their kombucha.

Kombucha tastes the same, guaranteed.

Yep.

Kombucha all the time.

Adam, can you send me some kombucha to start a tank up with?

Mix it with the male fixed hair.

Let's mix it with this Taiwanese ecological powder.

What else you got, Jimmy? What else we got?

I think that's about it, man.

But we're doing well. We got a hell of a list.

Devil's advocate, if you guys want bacteria, just be a man and go out and get yourself some good old fashioned creek sledge.

Oh, that's brave.

Wow.

Don't do that. If you're listening, don't do that. Parasites. Scuds. Legalities.

Legalities.

Yeah.

Gwen needles, gun.

I've seen too many magnet fishers to know I shouldn't scraping anything from a river.

You want to make some tough fish, you start with the good stuff.

Oh, boy. My only other thought along that lines is maybe go to the strip club, pick up four or five strippers, come home, everybody could jump in the hot tub, take the hot tub water, bottle it up.

What was that chlamydia medication again?

Metro dazzadol.

Excellent.

If you guys ever run out of.

Methylene blue, just know that they use that to dye blue jeans blue. So if you take some fresh jeans, you get them nice and wet, ring them out in the tank.

So Levi's could save your fish from Mick. Is that what you're saying?

It's possible.

Methane blue.

I love that shit.

Methane blue also is used medically to bring more oxygen in your blood cells.

So what it does is it causes blood to use more hemoglobin than methyglobin, if I remember correctly, because one of them is better at transporting oxygen through a bloodstream. So that's kind of how it works in the bag when you're shipping fish.

All right, wrapping up. I'm going to do a couple of questions from the live chat.

Those people are all drunk.

The live chat.

Special Ed wants to know what y'all think of formalin.

Is that a name or a title?

That is special ed in discord. He is now infamous. I have not used formalin in my hobby. Again, I'm not a big saltwater goer. Formalin, otherwise known as formaldehyde, is most commonly used for dips in the saltwater hobby.

So formalin is a solution of 50% formaldehyde.

It's not pure.

I have in my possession two gallons. Two gallons of formaldehyde, the pure stuff.

So.

The list of cancer causing things that formaldehyde does. Now, think about when I was in high school, we would sit there and dissect those damn frogs that were soaked in formaldehyde. Formaldehyde is so easily goes into your lungs and into your fingers and stuff. It is highly carcinogenic.

You guys were eating paste and sniffing glue, huffing frogs.

Yes, we miss your generation.

And anyway, so we can't get away with shit. So formaldehyde was at one time used for trying to get rid of the guppy. The guppy saddle back. What do you call that columnaris? The grampositive gram negative bacterial fiction that the guppies got.

Okay, grandpa, take your medicine.

So anyway, you know, it's going to be so much fun when dad explains to his wife someday I remember back.

In the day, and he goes, Ship better, son.

I used to be able to have children, but then Jimmy got a hold of my nuts and ripped them out.

That seems dead accurate, except it would definitely be husband.

Yeah, for sure. So anyway, I bought formaldehyde, and the only way I could get it was to buy two gallons at a time. Cost me $125 back then. And I have tried to take the formaldehyde and drop it off at, like, when the local landfill has their turn in your paint.

Oh, yeah. And they won't even touch it.

They go, no, we don't want it. I have two gallons of formaldehyde in. My Godding.

All right. So just to let you know, formalin is not just pure formaldehyde. Formalin is a solution that's 37% formaldehyde.

Sorry about that.

And contains twelve to 6% methyl. Meth. M-E-T-H-Y methyl alcohol. Methyl.

Methyl.

I want to say methyl. Methyl.

Methyl is another word none of you can pronounce.

We can't pronounce shit.

And then the other thing.

So we have you here.

Math and alcohol.

Mouth and alcohol.

They make such good grills. I love I use a grill all the time. That George Foreman grill.

George formaldehyde.

Formaldehyde. No, that was okay.

Okay, what next? One.

There's more. Are we getting paid extra for this? Because this is going long.

Absolutely. Scrape the scum off the top of a hot tub and you're good to go. Can confirm. Hot tub scum starts a cycle every time with strippers. All right, here's an actual question.

Keep some Metronidis all on hand.

Vallowmc asks. I have pinot Dan help.

Pinot grigio.

P-I-N-O-K-I-O shrimp. And some guppies killy fish coming from Indonesia at the end of June. What should I treat the tanks as? A preventative measure, if anything? I live in South Africa, and products such as API General Cure are just not available. We have a local herb based general product, heal all. Worried about my fish on import.

Wow.

All right. So if you're getting that type of stuff, especially shrimp, limits it. With shrimp, you can't use copper products.

At all with inverts.

Right. So you're already limited. I would be definitely using a little bit of prime when you open those bags after shipping all the way from Indonesia to South Africa, when you crack those things open, otherwise, be very ready. That the moment you crack them open, you have to instead of just acclimating them, drip acclimating them. You have to be ready to dump and scoop. The moment you crack the bag is when the water goes to crap. So be prepared for that. And then if you have just herbal general heal all products, only use a UV sterilizer. And just keep it in there for the first three weeks.

Interesting. You know, it says heal all. So I just Googled it on my inner tube here, and it's a beautiful purple flower that's used to create I.

Don'T think the Heal All was a brand. I think that's just oh, no, it is a brand. Comma heal all. It could be a brand.

Yeah.

All right.

Anyway, it's a plant based medicine that they use over that neck of the woods.

Interesting.

Heal all. It's like Indonesian mellifix.

Don't put it in your hair.

Put it in your hair.

It's a low growing, spreading perennial of the Mint family. It's been very distinctive. Puckered leaves with an leaves. Puckered.

Puckered.

I just want to kick you square in the nutsack.

Okay. Special ed says strip. Test the water before dump and scoop. Yeah, that's fair.

That's not half as funny, though. I'm not going to take advice.

Okay, here's the problem with Ed's method, right? If you don't have prime, it's been sitting in the shipping way too long. The moment you crack the bag, that becomes real bad. That oxygen hit the air, hit the ammonia in the bag, and now you're going to burn your fish. So you got to be real quick with that strip bud if you're in that particular set of instance. So if you get lucky, maybe use some of the water that dripped in the box to test on the strip before you crack the bag open. I don't know. Scoop and dump is not my favorite method, but when you don't have the products to do it oh, well.

What did you say the active ingredient was in Heal All?

I'll tell you, I got it right here. Heal all has a long history of medical use. It's used to heal all manners of wounds both outside and inside the body. Steven recommended making a compress, a bruise of leaves and vinegar and placing on your forehead to help with your headaches. To me it sounds like a little.

Bit like we still don't get the active ingredient.

Aloe vera. Aloe vera will help your cuts, but it really will take care of your sunburn or any burns you get from the kitchen.

But does it say an active ingredient?

Yeah, but it doesn't do anything for Chad.

You would know.

Does it have an active ingredient? You said it was from the flower.

Of from the flower of a Heal all plant. Oh, we don't know.

They're keeping their secrets to themselves.

It's from the mint family.

Damn it.

You know what? Choose a fucking double mint gum and call me in the morning.

So I am calling you out. Heal all. Get on the podcast. We need to talk to you and see what type of voodoo shamanry you're selling.

Get some muan.

Sweetwater, sweetwater. Oh, yeah. What was it? Cordon Wonderwater. Cordon Wonderwater, I think is what was it cordon, though? I don't know. It's really hard to because all the stuff was taken down on the website. We did the research on that one, but attentions tangents. Anything else? Adam, help us.

No. I'm going to hook you up with some shit.

Hot shooting there, Tex.

You're a scholar and a gentleman.

The last time you hooked me up with some shit, it took me a long time to recover. Dude.

I had to call my doctor after 4 hours.

No, it wasn't that. If it lasts longer than 4 hours.

Why would you call doctor?

Why won't you just call your neighbors and go check this out? Look, it's a tall rack.

I have to stop answering your phone call because of that very sentence.

If it lasts longer than 4 hours, call more people.

Get a pinata. There you go. Do you got anything else, Jimmy?

I know I'm totally frustrated sexually and emotionally.

Guys, I hope this helped you. I know this is going to generate a ton of questions. We had to cover a lot of different topics that probably could have been their own episodes. So message us. Go to Aquariumguyspodcast.com Bob, the website you'll see discord. Bombard us with questions. Email us, we check that. We just did it, this episode.

We check it every six months, like.

We do that now. And you can also throw a buck in our direction for patreon. And you can message us there as well. Get the episodes unfiltered. And we have a merch store. Buy a hat. We have a clock. I mean, they got the I love cock shirts. Shirts back now. What?

Yeah, that's a whole episode in itself.

Right there at flowerhorn cock. K-O-K Celtic. So, yeah, love you all till the next podcast. Thanks, guys, for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be Spotify, itunes, Stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this. Guys, I only last three minutes and then I don't need the magazine anymore. Mash shampoo in a container and keep it in the back of your fridge to piss off your wife and kids.

So anyway, I shoot this huge sticky wad of amquil into the bag and then I reoxidate the bag.