Hey, everybody. It's Jim colby with the Crime Guys podcast here in Minnesota. Normally at this point in our podcast, we would be doing a comedic ad for Joe Shrimp shack, but we wanted to take this time to remind you to stay safe during these riots and protests all across our nation. No matter what your view, please stay safe out there. As many of you know that Joe from Joe Shrimpshack is down the Minneapolis area, and he's been on the front lines night after night filming what's been going on so he can share it later. Please stay safe and know that our prayers go to the George Floyd family. And please don't forget about our friends over at the Ohio Fish Rescue. You can find them on YouTube. And thanks from the aquarium, guys. Podcast here in Minnesota.

Welcome to the Aquarium, guys.

Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolphin.

Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Today we are going to be talking something controversial. You know, we we had the dumpster Fire podcast. What do we call that one? I don't even remember the name. Do you remember the name, Jimmy?

I think it was just a scream or something.

Or we or read the podcast. It sucks, the podcast.

There we go.

Based off that, we didn't get nearly enough terrible feedback on that podcast, so we're just going to jump a little further into the fire.

I don't think that's necessary.

No, I was expecting to jump off a cliff, and we barely got tickled with a feather, but we were hoping.

You would jump off a cliff, so.

Let'S jump off of that cliff together in preparation of this, before we talk about the topic, I'm going to do a quick round of introductions. We have Matt peterson from Amazon Magazine. How are you doing, buddy?

Good.

Matt has aged a year and a half since we started this podcast.

We had some technical difficulties malpractice, and we're missing Adam. Adam is going to be getting a new PC.

Yeah.

We're hoping we're down one, but we're surviving and struggling through. Thanks again to coming back in the podcast, Matt. We're excited to have you back on.

I'm happy to be back, especially since you're trying to raise a little controversy with this one.

Hopefully we'll do a little bit more controversial than we can get in the magazine just because it's a podcast free format. But our next guest is Dan piazza. Please tell me I'm saying that correctly.

Close enough.

We appreciate you having it on, buddy. I find both of you right on. Matt peterson, you are representing the saltwater side of the house, and Dan is representing the freshwater side of the house. And this evening, we're going to be talking about aquarium bulls and jars.

Aquarium bowls and jars.

Yes.

Then why did I buy the gasoline and the kittens?

No, that's another that's what the whole big cat rescue thing is trying to do.

Hashtag.

Carol Basket.

That's right.

At least that's what I heard. That's it's not slander. It's hearsay.

Oh, my gosh.

Well, thanks again, guys, for coming on the podcast. I do not have any questions this week that I have prepared and saved up. How about you, Jimmy?

I've got nothing new. I'm pretty excited about this whole pet industry getting a little charge right now because people have some money. We're talking earlier with Matt. People are spending more time with their pets and stuff, and we're seeing a little bit of a lot of cat and dog rescues and things like that and stuff. So some good things have come aboard from this covis. So, I mean, at least some dogs and cats are getting adopted and whatnot. So for that, we're grateful.

Hey, maybe we can get a quick update. Matt, how is Amazon doing in this time of low?

We are cranking. We're busy. We've had our best month ever.

People are reading.

People are stuck at home.

People are finding the content and ordering. And we got a couple of fans message in that they're purchasing back issues. Is that something more common now in COVID?

Honestly, I haven't noticed any particular uptick of back issues, so I couldn't speak to that.

Got you. Well, I'm happy the business is going well there, too. Jimmy.

Yes?

You had a fish order that you had to drive all the way down to Minneapolis for because they wouldn't ship in to fargo.

That's right.

How did that go for you?

That was not any fun at all. I drove down to Minneapolis last Tuesday to pick up a fish order that would normally come into Minneapolis and then transferred to fargo, North Dakota. But they're not doing any transfers right now. There's such a lack of flights available for the most part. And the flights that are coming in are pretty uninhabited, as they say. I've talked to some of them where they're coming in with capacity of 143 people or something like that, coming in with 60, 65 people, and they're still seating everybody together and not giving everybody a seat in between. But I drove down to Minneapolis to pick up my fish. It went pretty smooth. I walked into the Delta cargo area. They stopped me within about six inches and took my temperature and asked me a few questions. They got my stuff to me very quickly, charged me a whole lot of money. There's a lot of different fees now throwing at us, and that was very frustrating for me. I think I spent $1,300 on fish, but 500 of it was in fees and shipping, which is not normal, but we're happy to get stuff. It is what it is. The stores are busy, like Matt had said earlier, our one store took over 500 shrimp in their store, and they were blowing through it on Saturday when I stopped up there. So very interesting run going on with this whole COVID thing, but it is what it is and we just keep on traps and forward.

What I'm hearing from a lot of the airlines and airline professionals that I've talked to is that they're just focusing on keeping contracts with certain airlines because if they don't fulfill flights, they quote, unquote, lose their spot in the airports. So that's why they're doing the minimum flights and only the minimum flights just to keep on that connection with certain city. And you hear that some airlines are dropping certain cities as a symptom. That may not be a whole lot of big airlines left after this.

Yeah, Delta Airlines just announced today that they're dropping all their triple 777, which is their big work horse airline. They are not as efficient in fuel and whatnot. So they are retiring those. I think they have 18 of those and 18 doesn't seem like a lot, but that is a lot of money sitting there on the tarmac. That's not making them any money. They're going to other more efficient, smaller airplanes and some bigger airplanes. They've dropped, I think they said ten different large areas. They normally go to New York, like in three different big airports and stuff. They're down to one in New York City and stuff and they're just trying to survive like everybody else. So everybody's got a great frustration level. But we're hopefully be able to pull this out because we do need our airline partners and everything else to continue bringing in fish for all the hobbyists out there.

Moving on from that, the only other thing I want to note for news this week is we get messages from a lot of our friends or prior podcast subjects to keep in contact. And I have a message from the Minnesota dnr. Minnesota dnr has been keeping us in the loop on some other states and species. And Michigan now has announced an invasive issue that they're having with the marbled crayfish. For those that don't know, marbled crayfish is not really that common in the aquarium trade, at least that I've seen or heard of. It's a darker, more speckled crayfish, but it's very unique because they're all females and they all self clone. So biologically, every one of the crayfish are biologically identical. The DNA level, they also call them.

The self cloning fish. Correct.

And some have got out in Michigan because neglect or someone releasing them and a self cloning anything is kind of a nightmare as long as the ecosystem can support them. And they're certainly proving to be very invasive in Michigan. A warning to all of you, if you have any, even if you're in somewhere in northern United States, Canada, a cold climate in another country, a species will try to survive and adapt no matter what. These may not necessarily match in Michigan standards, but clearly they're surviving and thriving. Even in Minnesota. We have the red swamp cray. That is not a traditional winter weather climate and has found its way into one of our lakes and is reproducing year after year. So nature will find a way. Do not give it the chance. Keep your pets in your aquarium or find somewhere that they can either take in a rescue or there is, as people don't like to talk about, humane ways of calling your creatures.

And also last week I shared with you and Adam down in Minneapolis all the holding ponds that are full of goldfish that people have released down in Minneapolis area. And I shared that with you guys on the phone and stuff. And it's just the pictures that they showed on there, there's just hundreds, if not thousands of goldfish just in these small holding ponds that have bred, and they're just doing great. And I made the comment to you guys. I said we should go out and rescue all these. Nobody responded. Everybody just, like, ignored me.

Tell it goes.

Yeah.

So we don't get an opportunity to get a head guy printed. Media on. Have you any heard any news lately that is worthwhile mentioning before we get into our deep dive subject?

Yes. Let's see. macna was canceled as of today, so there will not be a macna in Phoenix this year.

So just for the listeners, what is macna?

Macna is the Marine Aquarium Conference of North America. It is put on by the marine aquarium societies of North America which is masno. So, yeah, they had to cancel it. It's pretty much the biggest marine aquarium conference. There might be some frag swaps and stuff like brief appaloosa that might bring more people through the door. I'm not here to debate numbers, but macna is kind of like the one that everyone goes to if you're really into things. And people travel from all over the world to come to macna. So they had to cancel due to pandemic related reasons. I know they were trying not to, but that just happened today. What else? Hawaii. The marine aquarium fishery in Hawaii is coming up on their last environmental impact Statement to try and reopen that fishery. So they're looking for support right now, statements in support of sustainability.

Man, it'd be nice to have him, like, every week, like a little blip in the news.

I'm not even done yet, guys. So yeah, I got one more good news related item, but two Master is also still accepting nominations for the Master Award and the Aquarius of the Year Award. That's on the saltwater side. And there are still two scholarships open for applications. So people who are in the marine sciences, there's both an undergrad and a graduate scholarship. As far as I know, those are still occurring. So if you're a student and you're looking for free money, I've sat on the committee to evaluate applicants once, and the people who do this work to review the hundreds of applications. It's bear the talent that applies. It's worth it. There's $4,000 on the line for two students. And then the last thing that happened we're going to have a lot more on this. In the forthcoming issue of amazonas, brazil changed their export laws, so instead of having their white list, you could say they're moving to a blacklist. And I'm really glossing over what's going on, but basically, this is going to potentially open up several hundred freshwater species.

We've been hearing a bit about this. Do you have details of what that's going to look like in the end? Is there some species that are just going to magically appear on people's lists?

Yes, they don't have to be on the list anymore. There are still endangered fish that won't be available, and there are certain endangered fish or threatened fish that will be available through special dispensation, for lack of a better word. But in a nutshell, if you could imagine maybe there's 5000 species of fish in Brazil that could totally be wrong there. But let's say only 400 were on the list in the past. And if you weren't on the list, you didn't get in. Now you don't have to be on the list to be exported. You have to be on the list to not be exported.

I mean, that's a crazy way of thinking because there's still species that can be discovered.

So one of the interesting things about that is that undescribed species don't have to be evaluated anymore. That was part of the problem with a whitelist, is, hey, we've got this sick lid. We don't know what it is. Well, it's not on the white list. Can't export it even if there's a Jillians of them. Now you just have to have specimens on deposit at one of the museums, and then it can be exported. So it's going to change the freshwater trade from Brazil dramatically if we see shipments coming back in the future, because there's many more species that can be commercially exploited now. And then there's a few marine fish that potentially could come back. I don't know how many people are familiar with Brazilian grandmas, but that species could now potentially show up on Brazilian fish exports now, whereas it couldn't before. It's a couple of other species. There's a lot more info coming. I don't want to talk all day about that. But that's big news on the freshwater side and slightly saltwater as well.

Now, you guys are sharing some more information in the next episode of the Amazon magazine, correct?

Yes. There's a full interview with one of the authors of the new law. We've got a little bit on the Reefs rainforest website, and then we've got more coming in the magazine.

Something to look forward to directly from.

The horse LOACH'S mouth.

There we go.

That was a terrible pun. I apologize. I watched you cringe on that.

Yeah, I just saw Matt take a shot.

He's like, okay, not even another one.

Got to be one of those nights.

Yeah, I'm actually thinking about going to the doctor, just having an IV put in so I can have alcohol continuously in my system for this podcast, because it just makes things much easier every.

Time you make one of those jokes. Remember the stories of the powdered alcohol guy you told me about?

Yes. One night we had been partying a little bit, and we came up with this great idea about powdered alcohol. Like crystal light he gets little tubes of powder and he poured it in your bottle of whatever, of water or whatever. You go to the ball game and you pull out some vodka out of your pocket. We thought that was a great idea. About six months later, there's a little blurb on CNN where somebody had come out with something like that, and the government shut them down immediately. So that saved me a lot of money not having to develop that. But I thought it was a great idea. And we already had our whole spiel for the drunk on the go. We thought that would be wonderful.

Already down to the PR campaign steps.

Yeah, we start with that and then we'll develop it later.

I want to be in your brain someday.

You know, nobody needs to be there.

The topic of the day, right, is jars and bowls. Now, really, the moment you see clip art online or something reference or people talking about, I want to get a fish bowl immediately, the actual aquarist at home, you can feel angst in their spine build up, like they begin to quiver and like, no, you can't put a goldfish in a bowl. That's the first thing to think of. So because of that, a lot of aquarius just take jars, bowls, and other containers aside and focus on fish in anything larger than three gallons. Even when we talked about having betas, which easily can survive in a one gallon container, when we talked about in, the podcast immediately got lit up feedback about people lost for encouraging that. We were explaining what a professional recommended, and we were in quite detail on that podcast. But what we want to do is I've been learning more and more about how actual diehard aquarists handle jars, and it's not for a big community tank or having species that are outgrowing the environment. And I figured this is a chance to use our platform to educate the mis educated on jars, bowls, and other containers in the hobby. And I think the biggest one that's really coming to spotlight is salt water having reef jars and like, a couple of gallon aquarium or a couple of gallon jar. And I know no one that's more prevalent than this than Matt peterson. I know a lot of people do it. I've connected with a lot of people. But you seem to have at least it down. You're talking about redundancies. You're definitely an advanced chorus, so I asked you to come on to talk more about on the podcast. And we'll start with the salt water side, since that seems to be the coming of popularity. So, Matt, number one, introduce us. What do you have and what's your experience in doing these jars or bowls?

It started as an article or really a cover feature idea for coral. We ran it in January, February of 2018. The issue was micro reefs. So I came to James Lawrence, who's the publisher of Coral, and said, there are people doing this vase reef kind of thing. I think it's really interesting. I think we should showcase it, I think we should talk about it. And he kind of said, no way, not until maybe a proof of concept. So I set up a proof of concept, if you will, and set up a two gallon vase roof here in my home. But my experience, I would not consider myself an expert on this whatsoever. I've set up one. I owe most of my methodology to Mary arroyo, and she has been highlighted repeatedly with the maritza Vase Reef. I worked with Mary to come up with a feature length article, Step by Step How to Do It. We also talked with Felicia mccauley, who is another regular contributor. She had been keeping some vase reefs in different sizes. We had Brandon Mason contribute to this issue, and he had been keeping vase reefs and little jar reefs for probably a decade. By this point, it's not really a new thing. I'm certainly not the first to do it, and I owe most of what I did to Mary. She was the one who said, here's how I've kept my reef for six years. Here's the methodologies, here's the thought behind it, and it's really simple, but it all stems back to that Jan Feb 2018 coral issue, where I said, this is different, I want to showcase it. James said to me, do it first, prove it works, then we'll do it. And so here we are, showcase.

Now it's getting traction and it's all downhill from there. So to pick on your jar, how did you start again? You've gotten some expertise from other people. I think the first question people go is the size, what container are you looking for? You said the word vase, so I'm assuming that gives a lot of interpretation or freedom to what you want. To set this up, what would you be looking for?

Pretty much I went to michael's and started looking at all their glassware. Pretty much I was looking for the biggest glassware I could find in a shape that I thought made sense. And so I ended up with mine is an apothecary jar. So it has a glass lid. It's kind of narrow at the base, and as it comes up, it comes out, it comes round, then it rapidly comes in towards the top, comes back out, has a glass lid. But I've seen a lot of people use the Anchor Hawking jars. They even have custom ready built Led lights that fit two gallon acre anchor Hawking jar.

What is an anchor hawking jar?

You can go to any Walmart or Target. It's a jar meant primarily for food storage, I would assume it's a two gallon glass jar and has a glass lid.

It reminds me of going into the old time candy stores and they have those giant thrill thick glass, which is a thick lid in a rubber seal.

Yes, and I've seen a lot of people use those. Any glass vessel, really. You could do it in a glass fishbowl. No reason you couldn't pretty much any glass. That's the premise. There's little to this, it's the jar. And beyond that, my equipment consists of a cobalt slim profile heater. I picked that because it was a high quality heater with a narrow profile. I could hide it in a two gallon jar. There's an air feed that I have coming up from the basement and the air circulation down there, that's where I get my air from. But you might need an air pump.

So I'm assuming you say your basement, you must have like a pvc pipe system and you just have running yeah, it would be. Normally if someone is doing this without that, they just use any air rater, nothing special.

Air pump? Yeah, it's just one that has some. And then the other important thing that is required for this is the light. We're really dependent on having good light. So Mary turned me on to the tuna blue par 38 light. So it's an Led power 38 form factor. I want to say I'm using the twelve watt. I think there's a 25 watt and a twelve watt, but it's the right color spectrum for coral growth. And the only other piece of equipment that I didn't already mention is that I have a fenix heater controller. And the reason I have the heater controller is I live in duluth, Minnesota. This vase is literally facing the front entryway to our house. You open up that front door, cold air is hitting that vase. So I have the heater controller to give me better control than the built in thermostat you would find on most heaters.

And what was the brand of that? One more time.

Fenix. F-I-N-N-E-X. Phoenix. So it's the Phoenix heater controller with the cobalt slim profile. I think they call it a neitherm or something like that. But those two things together. The heater controller is the primary temperature control and the heater's actual built in thermostat is the backup in case the heater controller fails.

So the heat controller controller do it better.

It's a $30 thermostat. Its sole purpose is to be accurate within half a degree. Whereas most aquarium heaters, their accuracy is a degree, degree and a half. I use that as the primary control. The thermostat on the heater is set like a degree higher. So if things get out of control, the heater will shut itself off. So ordinarily the heater is always stuck in an on position and the controller is doing the actual controlling.

It also keeps your hands out of the jar.

You don't have to go into the vase much at all. I should mention I have a Two Little fishies NanoMag for scraping the glass. And that just is always in there.

Just lives in there.

I don't know. The little ones, I've seen a couple of people have them. I've never purchased them. They look like, I don't know, like square jelly beans that they put in these little nano tanks to scrape them. I'm assuming it's the same concept.

Yeah, it's very small. A NanoMag from Two Little Fishing has a flat almost like a velcro piece and a flat magnet on the outside. It's a really bigger magnet and a handle. It's a round circular disc kind of thing that gets into any little space. Has a very low profile inside the base reef. It works really well.

So just to go over a couple of pieces of the hardware here, you said the tuna blue spectrum, and that looks just to be like a bulb that you would put into anything of watt. It's an individual bulb and it has looks to be like 15 different leds connected to it that, again, control the individual spectrum. So it's nothing huge or obstructive to a jar. It looks like it's form fitting and something that would actually match a top of any container, however big or small.

Well, it's a par 38, so it's like a spotlight. It's built to go into a regular mogul screw in style base, like any household light fixture. I actually have mine using some ikea lamp cord that hangs down from the ceiling and I have a shade around it. It looks really nice in the house, but you could use it with a big desk lamp as long as you can screw up all bin. There you go.

Now, I'm assuming you have this on some sort of scheduler so it only goes X amount of time because it's coral. You got to be sure.

Yeah, just a regular old timer, nothing fancy.

Got you even have on the Amazon website. Because again, I'm looking at these parts as you're telling us this and in the description, how they have those Amazon previews. They have a beautiful coral jar sitting there as an example.

Now I have to go look.

It's a wonderful look, for sure. But no, you're getting that full blue.

Now.

Is there any controls on that or is it just full spectrum on and off.

It's very basic. Full spectrum on and off, nothing else.

You're making this too hard, rob's.

Way too hard. I'm just making sure.

Get yourself empty out your cookie jar. Get the crumbs out.

Get the crumbs out.

Get the crumbs out. Run it through the dishwasher once or twice.

That's literally all it is. And it's $25 on Amazon and I think free shipping still. Oh, there's only one left though. Someone's got to shop fast.

Hopefully they'll reorder by then.

Oh no, there's more. But yeah, I'm looking now, I can see my purchase history. I'm using a twelve watt, it's nothing, twelve watts of light and it runs the whole Vase Reef. And it's been three years now and I haven't needed to replace it. I think one of the apprehensions of talking about doing these little salt water tanks is there's not a lot of equipment to buy. They're not expensive. So from an industry standpoint, maybe not the best thing to promote for everyone to be making money. But I look at the base reef. For me it's extremely low maintenance. We haven't talked about that yet, but the maintenance is basically feed it once a week, scrape the algae 4 hours later, do a water change and you just do 100%. So on my Vase Reef, the actual volume of water is about 1.25 gallons. The rest of it is displaced by the live rock and the coral. So it's a once a week 1.25 gallon water change. I just take that from the mixing downstairs, drain it, and I actually use extra. I kind of rinse the reef. So I drain it down all the way to the bottom, pour in about a half a gallon, it stirs up all the detritus, suck out all the water again and then fill it and I'm done. And then there's no dosing. No worrying about the water chemistry because no dosing.

No dosing you have to do the.

First time to get out.

Just use your regular old salt mix that works for you. I was running it on reef crystals for years and I switched to the Doctor, Foster and Smith. Salt is what I'm using right now.

I'm not going to lie to you. I'm getting more inspired. I came in this podcasting, we're going to learn about it not for me, right? And now I'm getting like, come on, this is too easy. I need to flex that some salt, you know what I mean?

No, no, that's it. That's it. Nothing else. I mean, as long as you can mix up saltwater. Some people I felicia was using the natural salt water. That's another route to go. It's more expensive.

That's the big, right?

I have an rodi unit. I have a 50 gallon brute that I mix in. I have the pump and the heater and all that stuff for all the other salt water tanks. So someone who's already doing salt water. I like the Vase Reef because it's like a little bit of a place for safekeeping of your most precious corals. Take little frags, put them in there. If your main tank crashes, you might have your backup frag sitting over in your Vase Reef. But the flip side, if you want a really. Simple way to get into salt. You can probably do a good Vase reef for $200. And if you're going to your local store to just get their salt water, or if you're buying the pre bottled natural salt water, you don't even have to mix salt water.

Easy peasy.

So just to repeat that, how much money for this? Just all set up and done.

Maybe 200 maybe. I think I used my michael's, the apothecary HR was like $40 or something, and then I had a 40% off coupon, so that was 24. The heater is maybe 50, the controllers maybe 30. The light bulb is 25. Right now you need an air pump, you're done. The magnet is twelve. And then figure a little bit of live sand. I have like two or three inches, four inches of salt sand at the bottom. I just had that lying around. I use real reef, the real reef rock. I just took a couple of pieces I had sitting in the tank. And then coral wise, you guys will appreciate this. I just emailed Dave over at North Star and said, hey, I'm starting this project with my shipment of fish. Hey, can you just grab like twelve really hardy corals? I need him for this project. He sent me a good selection of coral. It was really simple and what a.

Wonderful thing to have just sitting on your desk. If you have in your office, you can put this in your office. You can put this in the entryway. You could put it on a shelf behind your office. I mean, how cool is this? When somebody walks in your office to see something like that and they'll go, is that real or is that just something fake?

Yeah, I want one of those big jars you were describing before and then have it all nice, the blue set up, everything done. And then have just like a label thing. Not cookies.

Not cookies, right.

And they keep in the kitchen.

Yeah, right.

Wow. So let's go with the contents. Now, you talked about having live sand or is there a special you talked about special brands. Is there anything else that you can use or is it just basically sand?

Recommended I use caribbe CG pink the bag stand. I mean, the bag of that stands 2020, $5. That's £20 of sand. So you can almost just beg or borrow a couple of cups of sand from another reef keeper and you're good. The rock, like I said, I had real reef live rock already sitting around, so I just picked a couple of pieces out. But you can go to any fish store and pick out any kind of live rock you want. Or start with dry rock, if that's your preference. And then the important thing is there's no fish. I did try fish a couple of times and they just need to be fed a lot. So I had a couple of gobies that did well for a long time. And I was feeding ocean nutrition. They have a really cool product. It's a very small glass jar of newly hatched brine shrimp. It's shelf stable until you open it and you keep it in the fridge. And so I was feeding that in. I could see if you were raising copa pods, hatching brine shrimp. Routinely feeding the fish in the base reef like this with a couple of really small nanogobies would be fine because the corals would eat it too. But when I was feeding things like pellets, I wasn't feeding them frequently enough. I had some shrimp in there for a while. They did pretty well. But the bigger modal life getting by on a once a week feeding was a little bit much, so I was feeding more frequently. But again, every time, every week you just do that 100% water change. The salinity has to match, the temperature has to match, the PH probably is going to match anyways. You're just hitting a reset button on that reef. As long as you're using a good salt, you got good quality water going in from the start, it's going to be good for a week and you just throwing it out and put in fresh and that's it.

And that's what you recommend without having.

Fish, it's such a small space that the most you're going to put in is one or two tiny gobies. And then you have to worry about how you're going to feed them.

Right?

Most people aren't bothering, most people aren't doing them with fish. They're just coral. And that's really the focus.

So without coral, you still want to do a water change once a week.

Without fish, you're still going to do a water change once a week without fish.

I apologize.

Fish or no fish, 100% once a week. A lot of people do 50. A lot of people only do a 50% water change matching up temperature and salinity, which really isn't that hard. You just do the whole shebang and it's a reset every time. And so you're not going to have to dose calcium. The base rates that I'm keeping has been up since sometime in the summer of 2017. So we're going on almost three years now. In that time, I had a postalophora come from about a one inch frag to basically filling the entire top of the reef. Had baby postaloporas. It was spawning in the base reef, had it killing off corals as it was growing over them. I mean, it's postalopora. It's not a terribly difficult coral, but all the calcium and alkalinity that that coral was taking up was just from those water changes. I'll be honest, there was a time where I just said, I wonder how long I can go without water changes. And I probably didn't touch it for three months. It's totally fine. All I had to do is top off with rodi not encouraging anyone to do that. I just did it to see what would happen. But it also bears mentioning that it is a really small environment and things can go bad really quickly. And so what ended up happening about a month and a half ago had my trocus snails start spawning and within a day it just crashed out the reef. I was like, okay, they spawn. There's a bunch of snail sperm and eggs and whatever. I'm a fish breeder. I was just going to let it ride and see what happened and maybe I'd get some baby snails. I thought that would be cool. But what ended up happening is it polluted the tank really badly. And so the postalopora died. It was all RT ending and just collapsed. And then I did a couple of series of really big water changes, but it was enough of a stress on the tank that all the SPS coral in the tank died. But all my lps and all my Zoanthat polyps and the little microinomis that I have, all the lps, like I said, the Duncan, the candy can corals, those all lived through the ghanaia poor lived. So I just lost my SPS as a result. But going back to what we talked about earlier, the neck on that jar is so small, I can't just go in and pull out the dead coral skeleton. I'm going to have to hack it apart and pull it out. It's going to be a bit of a project. Whereas if I had one of those anchor hawking, same diameter, top to bottom, I could just lift out the rock, break off the coral, put it back in. It's going to be a little more work. But if that's the worst mishap I've had in three years for the amount of work I put into it, I think it's a solid window.

You cannot complain. And that goes with any tank. For small tank, the bigger it is, the more it can take for any biological thing to happen. If you know fresh water, if you have a fish crap out in a 75 gallon versus a ten, the ten gallons, the whole tank is gone versus the 75, you didn't even notice it died just having that forgiveness. So if you have creatures in a jar, even, however snails just beware that anything can make a biological hazard. You just got to be aware of what's in your jar, clearly.

And I'm not the first person who's had something spawn in a reef tank and watch it crash. It happens. I didn't react quickly enough. I figured, oh, it's running. everything's fine. The coral will eat the gametes that are floating around. It'll be fine. No, it was a bad, just simple bad judgment call. I should have just drained it on the spot, filled it with fresh water. I probably would have been fine. So, lesson learned.

What do you recommend for coral species in these jar environments? Are there some risks of species. You wouldn't recommend over others?

No, I would say try anything. Why not?

Why not? I'm assuming some of those get pretty large.

Well, I mean, any of the corals can get really large, but that's a different problem.

If we're going to worry, we're not.

Talking about filling a jar with a bap fish. It's a coral. You can hack it down, you can keep it pruned, whatever you want to do. One of the most interesting things, I haven't done it yet, but with this vase we talk about the nps corals, the non photosynthetic corals that you have to feed on a regular basis. And the biggest problem with keeping those tanks at a large scale is the nutrients that build up. You've got the 75 gallon tank and you're feeding it really heavily all the time and you just get nitrates and phosphates you can't handle. But in a vasery, if you're doing 100% water change every week, you're just hitting that reset button. So I would say if someone wants to keep nps corals, whether we're talking to Astrayas or some of the gorgonians that need regular feeding, a base reef might be the perfect environment to do that because you can feed it really heavily and then just drain it and fill it back up. A gallon of salt doesn't cost that much. A gallon's worth of salt water is not an expensive thing. You wouldn't do that on a 75 gallon tank. You wouldn't do even a 55. You wouldn't do 100% water change every week, that would be really expensive. But a two gallon vase reef, you're not even going to feel it. So that's where I want to go. If I do another vase reef, then you don't need the light. You can use whatever light you want. You don't need that. So that's a natural extension for the vasery, for me.

Do you have any certain tools that you like to use? I would assume you'd have some long tweezers and some different tools. Do you have a dremel that works underwater? Anything like that?

No, don't need it.

I don't need anything like that.

No. I have long forceps that I use for other things. I think I've used them maybe once. It's just not that big a deal. You want to set it up and let it grow and keep your hands out as much as you can. You have to deal with problems as they show up fairly quickly. So the biggest thing would be don't put the frag plugs in with the coral when you're setting up the aquascape, break off the frags, freshly mount them so you're not bringing any pests. Do your dips on your coral because if you bring in something like red bugs or some sort of flatworms or any pests, it's a very tiny container, things are going to go bad very quickly. So that's just another good husband's re choices. Don't be clean from the get go.

So you mentioned about frag plugs. I've seen on a couple of these jars when you research jars and even like on the picture, on the Amazon picture that I had is they have magnetic frag plug mounts. Is that using these jars?

No, I put everything just on the live rock. But certainly other people will put them on these little magnet fragmounts because then you can move the coral on the glass and you get more real estate because you're using the glass as another place to mount a coral. So I didn't in mind, but you're right, other people have.

So another one would be coming from a real, noob question. You have the airline running in is it just running off of just a stone that's just placed somewhere? Or do you actually put that through some sort of tubing to make sure it gets the correct flow? How do you place the airline in there? Just in the base?

So I actually drilled through the lid. I used a small tile drill for drilling ceramic tile. I used that to drill two quarter inch holes in the glass lid. I figured if I break the lid, no big deal, if I break the vase, I'd be more upset about it. So I drilled the lid and then I have a gang valve to control the flow. It's regular air tube, airline tubing, flexible, going up. And then inside I have rigid I have that quarter inch rigid airline tube and I use that because I tried mounting it with suction cups and tried mounting it in place. It ended up it would always come off the glass. It didn't work well, so the rigid tube just kind of goes in and you don't really notice it. It goes down in the back behind all the live rock and so.

It'S.

A course well, there's no airstone. They don't need an airstone. The main reason for that air feed is to get you water circulation, gas exchange, of course, too, but it's for the water circulation. We don't have a little MP ten in this tiny van or even a power head. It's just that air feed is providing the water circulation so you can crank it up and really get things moving in that vase reef, just like you would in any reef tank. And since it has that lid, you don't have really problematic evaporation. You don't have a lot of salt creep at all. I took an airline and cut it lengthwise and then fed that around the rim of the vase as kind of an extra seal, whereas something like the anchor hawking have that plastic seal. But I ran that just as an extra level. And then the only thing I haven't done every once in a while, anyone who's running an air feed in salt water has experienced that it will clog clog up with salt. And so what I've done what I should do, I have two holes, I should be running two feeds and I haven't done that yet. I have a paper clip on standby. If I notice the flow is slowed down or stop, run over, pull out the rigid tube and jam that paper clip in to break up the salt. But other than that, that's been my biggest kind of AHA moment. That's the one point of failure is that the air feed will clog up with salt. So having maybe two air feeds, a little bit of redundancy there would be good, but that's it really simple.

I used to have the same problem when I was hatching Brian Shrimp and I'd use that rigid airline which is probably twelve or 18 inches long, and I would shove it in, but same thing, after about 24 hours in the hatch jar, it would start clogging up and you wouldn't get much airline. I took a very tiny little drill and I drilled three or four holes in different locations on the thing. So eventually when it clogged at one place, it would release from another place and it did help me get a better hatch rate and stuff. But yeah, same thing. I had a paper clip on hand. I'm sitting there cleaning this thing every day and just drives me insane.

Well, this happens once in a blue moon. I don't know if I'm running more air through or whatnot, but it's very rare that it happens. But having two would solve it. And it's a gang valve. I could run another one. I have another whole drilled I should just run to if that's my biggest lesson out of three years with this thing is hey, run another airline. That's how simple it is.

Perfect.

So I think the things to note other than this seems to be really easy to get into if you're not into done salt water in the past. For those that are listening, that are thinking this is the great way to get into doing a saltwater tank that's cost effective and getting your feet wet is any saltwater aquarium with coral, the biggest thing is water flow. That's why this airline is so important in these big tanks, especially when we talk to Sean creamer, he has a 2000 gallon reef tank. His biggest problem having such a large tank is the amount of power, head and circulation. He's got to continually move these things to get flow and he'll never get the flow 100% right in that large of a tank. So in a jar, when you're feeding coral and how they get nutrients, they can't move around, so they need the nutrients to pass by them. So when you're getting this water flow in there, one airline with nothing on it is plenty enough to circulate a gallon or two. It's enough to get that around. So that's why the redundancy is there and he's so concerned. It's not because they're going to lose oxygen in 6 hours. He's not worried about that it's because they're not feeding, they're not getting the nutrients. And it's much more critical in a salt water unit to have that water flow happen.

So earlier you're talking about having these small little pieces of coral and live sand, live rock. We were talking just a little bit ago about how inexpensive this is to get set up, but I think you probably go to your local pet store and get little tiny pieces of live rock because they're throwing that crap away anyway.

They're only selling big pieces. They're not doing jar worthy.

No. And you probably can get yourself some small pieces of coral and purchase for next to nothing, really. I mean, a lot of these places are more than happy to help you out if you tell them what you're doing.

Well, they're more happy if you're buying stuff in their store. Of course.

Yeah.

My cobalt.

That's right, cobalt heater.

Get your heater there, see if they can get you the controller. I mean, you go and walk in with your equipment list and say, here's what I need. What do you have that will work? I want to be honest. I wouldn't necessarily say this is a beginner's way into salt because of how quickly stuff can go wrong. And you don't know what you're looking for. You don't know what bubble algae is, you don't know what cyanobacteria is. You don't know what the problems are yet. So I would do it as your first, only if you have, like, a good buddy or you're really willing to watch it all die or crash and realize that's okay.

I think it's a gamble, man. You got $200 to your name. Like I could burn. That.

Very true. So I like thinking about it as it's very low maintenance. The amount of time it takes to do that water change is minimal. The Led is going to be good for another two years before I really have to worry about replacing it. My bulk cost is going to be $25. I should just go buy it now just so I have it. But it is a small volume of water. Things can go bad very fast in that small volume of water. That's really the downside. But we're talking about coral frags. You got a buddy who's got a reef tank. He's already making frags. Hey, give me a piece of that. Start there.

There you go. Offer to help watch his coral tank when he's gone for the weekend and help yourself. See, I'm always here trying to save a buck. I just spend $500 on freaking freight. I got to get money somewhere.

You're all on a cheap ass.

Yeah, I think the thing I went to macda, I want to say it was 2018 when we had just released this. Maybe it was before that, but either way, went to macda and I got a piece of bubble gum digitata, and having a tiny little piece of really high end coral, putting it in this reef tank. I knew the tank was doing well, and it was going to do fine, and I got to watch it grow. You pay more attention because it's such a small thing. You really have to pick and choose what you're going to put in it, because ten coral frags you're done. There's no real estate. You could probably get away with even five, just five kinds of coral that you really like, because that's it. And if you want more time to set up another tank or at least another vase and go from there. But I also, like I mentioned it earlier when we were talking, I like the ability to safeguard a really important coral by taking one of your first frags and putting it in your vase reef that sits somewhere else in your house. Or we trade insurance frags between hobbyists all the time. Like, hey, I got this really cool thing. My buddy gets the first piece of it, because if mine dies, I'm going to get it back to him. Well, you don't need a buddy, just you need a base reef.

You can be even more COVID friendly. I don't need to talk to people or see people. I'm just going to have a backup brief.

Yeah, or back up 75 tanks down in the basement like Matt does.

So other than the stuff we've covered, again, redundancy for airlines in case they get clogged, check them off. And the size of a jar, specifically the size of mouth. If you want to pull out a grown frag, know that either, one, you're going to have to sacrifice and cut it into frags, or two, have a nice wide mouth. What are some of the other quick tips that you'd recommend or mistakes? It sounds way too easy.

The one thing I was thinking of really quick is Matt said he went over to Michael to buy his vase, to buy a good quality jar or good vase that has good clarity to it, because there's a lot of stuff out there that doesn't have clarity at all. It's just like looking through fogged windows and stuff. So I think that to spend the money on the jar is probably the most important thing to do when you first start out, is get the right size mouth on it, get the clarity as best you can, and figure out how you're going to do it before you even go out and spend the money on it.

Well, you raise a good point, because you don't just want to order your jar off the Internet. You want to go and look at every jar. Because I guarantee you there are jars that have big imperfections in them. They're not perfect. They're not an aquarium. There's going to be imperfections in the glass no matter what you purchase, and the curvature of the glass is going to distort how things look. You have to buy into the I realize it's not perfect, and you have to be willing to go to your Target, go to your Walmart, go to your michaels, find that one that you like the best, and use that, because yeah, some of them are really crappy.

Oh, absolutely. My ex wife used to like to go to hobby Lobby, and there is such a huge difference in different things of glassware, and the price reflects that also. So, I mean, you can buy yourself a huge jar for $30, or you can buy yourself a small one for $100, but the clarity, the craftsmanship is second to none. If it's from Italy or somewhere cool like that.

Yeah, I spent $24 on mine, and I'm happy with it.

Well, guys, if you have more questions about the saltwater jars or anything you hear in the podcast today, certainly go to aquariumgyspodcast.com on the bottom of the website. You can email us, text message us, leave us a voicemail. You can go on. Our discord, which is our chat client, is actually where we're doing the podcast live now, if you want to join live, we try to do this Monday at 07:00 P.m., so hopefully we'll see you on to join us, and we appreciate all your support for the podcast.

Yeah, and we try to start about 07:00 P.m. Central Time, which means about 08:00, because it usually takes us about 45 minutes to get going. So if you don't get home till 730 at night, still tune in behind us, because we probably haven't even gotten going yet.

Got to cut the drinks, and jimmy's got to put pants back on now that we have a camera going.

Oh, shoot. Yeah.

Next part. I want to put a disclaimer here before we start. Freshwater, because salt water that's getting popularity, you post it in the magazine. It's been getting some traffic for a little bit now.

Right.

Freshwater still has an extremely bad rap, and I just assume that if Matt was trying to put an article up on starting your freshwater one gallon jar, there might be some livid people talking in the magazine. What we want to do is learn from everybody in the hobby, regardless if you agree with them or not, keep your opinions. They're valid. You've made your opinions probably not based off of just an assumption. You'll probably learn some fun new methods. So take this like you take or should take comedy. Don't get offended. Listen to some of the opinions that we have to offer here, and hopefully you'll enjoy what you hear. Dan, buddy, we appreciate you coming on and being so brave to take this head on with us.

I'm backing up Dan this whole way.

Okay. I got my house insured.

That's right.

We won't give all your address, so you get toilet paper. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's a good thing that I really don't care what other people think, as long as you don't get discouraged by your shortcomings.

Right.

Second disclaimer is that any time we talk about fish in a jar because we're inevitably going to be talking about that as an aquarius, I have to repeat this as a chorus. We want the best for our fish, and we're trying to simulate natural environments for the best care and culture of our fish. So when we talk about a fish in a one gallon jar, that may not be the best. It may be a short term place or some other ecosystem. Don't judge. Just care and listen in. So let's deep dive in the subject. Now, dan, where are you located? Do not give me your address.

You already have it.

He's in a van down by the river.

He's in a van?

That's right.

If you say, I feel guilty on this, you're divulging the information.

No, I live in sunny Southern California, just a stone's throw away from the beach, which is ironic because I have never set up a saltwater tank. I have all of the ingredients right here.

See? I even set up a saltwater tank, but I'm not even close to an ocean, so shame on you. You have to get on that. So don't worry. You'll talk to Matt after the podcast. He'll get you a jar.

Don't worry. I got one of jimmy's old pickle jars.

It's probably stained blue, too, from methane. Blue?

Oh, you bet.

You angel fish eggs. Yeah, right.

Number one, what got you started in jars and how many jars do you have?

Let's see what got me started.

He's coating.

Let's see, probably about a dozen right now. Anything from half a liter to few gallons what got me into jars? It's always good to have a quarantine tank or a grow up tank or a birthing tank, but it's a little difficult to go out and get yourself a brand new aquarium just for that or even find the space for one. You pass by a couple of nice bowls in the 99 cent store and one thing leads to another.

When did you get started doing these yard?

It's been a couple of years now.

So what's the longest running jar that you have that's been continually going or that you have friends that have done?

Honestly, the longest one I have going, it's maybe about a gallon, and it's been running for close to a year. No water changes, no light, no filter, no heater, nothing.

So it's a gallon. Is it open top? When I say this, I know you've given me a tour before. Mason jars. What containers do you use?

Do you have water in these jars? I'm just assuming it's like a jar full of cookies or something.

Paint us a picture with words.

Okay, so they're basically just kind of hodgepodge jars. Build them with substrate from your other tanks, scraps plants. Throw in a few guppies or shrimp that you don't necessarily want to call but still want to hang the tank.

What kind of jars do you gravitate to? Is there something specific?

For example, your simple spherical shape bowl or one liter cylinders always look nice.

So like a vase open top, like Matt was offering.

Yeah. As wide of a mouth as you can get on a jar certainly helps.

So explain this to one of your setups that you have. What's the substrate? What kind of plants?

Reclaimed dirt. I think it's ultimate control soil. Old tank, old plants, floating plants, stuff that gets trimmed. It just goes in the bowl. And if it grows, it grows if it decomposes.

So you're recommending these jars, and I'm just trying to walk through the process to try to get grasp for this is that these are symbiotic to your aquarium, meaning that you're using stuff that's already been cycled tested or started to grow. You're taking scrap trimmings from an aquarium. You're not just putting starting a jar fresh and putting gravel in there from a bag, cycling the jar out first. You're taking it from a tank that's been already pre existing and proven correct.

Correct. It just kind of takes out a whole bunch of variables that you're already going to have enough things to worry about, maintaining a small body of water and water. You don't need to throw anything else up in the mix.

Now, with your livestock that you have in these tanks, do you add livestock, or once you get to a point where you've got three or four fish in there, you just leave it alone and start another jar.

Well, better yet, start with the process of how he starts the jar. So he puts the stuff in there. Do you wait a period? Because again, it's already pre cycled product. Do you wait for the plants to show growth? Or being algae, is there a homework for this, right?

Yeah, you're going to want to start it up and kind of treat it as a planted tank first and foremost. And as it proves itself, either growing healthy algae or seeing good plant growth, then you might want to consider adding livestock in. But obvious choices. You don't want to go and throw a ball of shark in your one gallon bowl, or it's going to be a nightmare.

So I'm trying to walk our novice guests through this that are considering themselves, number one, calling you crazy. And two, maybe they want to set up the jar themselves. So from this pre set up jar, how long do you give it before you think it's safe for fish? You just look for signs, or do you give it like a two week time frame?

You're constantly looking at them, so you get a feel for when they're ready for livestock. But everything pretty much happens in two weeks. As far as plants growth cycle, if it's not started in two weeks, then you could be doing something wrong. Get it going and watch it take off. Like Matt said, once you get it set up, you really just don't want to touch it. It's the best thing you can do.

So, again, I'm going to walk through the whole setting up a jar. You get the container, you get the gravel, you put in the plants. What lighting do you use?

Well, a lot of these are in a room with a window. They don't necessarily get direct sunlight, but they do get ambient sunlight. Honestly, I do not like them. Whatever comes in through the window is their lighting schedule.

So you get a lot more forgive comparative to the salt water as far as you don't need necessarily need spectrum. You're getting enough light from a well lit room, and you're putting these are you putting them close to the window? I know you're in California. I'm always worried about freezing, so I don't even place where I close the windows.

Indirect, just kind of off in the corners, not necessarily where they're going to see sunlight directly on the glass, but the sun hopefully keeps a pretty consistent lighting schedule, and that helps things along.

Do you have any that you use automated lighting as far as, like, artificial lighting on or is this pretty much exclusively done from lit rooms?

Honestly, there is absolutely no tech on any of these bowls. No lighting, no filters, no nothing.

Yeah.

If you thought the salt water bowls were low maintenance, this is even more simple.

So since you don't have the direct lighting on it, do you have any problems with LG in the bowls?

No.

Okay, that's interesting because when I grew up, I grew up in rural North Dakota in a little town that had 52 people, and my mom I'm so sorry. No, it was a great I had a great childhood. I got nothing to cry about. Man. My mom had a 15 gallon guppy tank, and she had I'm not exaggerating 40 or 50 bulls with baby guppies at all time. And she would change the water once a week. There's no area, there's no problems with LG. There was no gravel. She fed the cut out of these things, and then she would just take them to the local pet store and she would trade it for food, or she would trade it for, you know, equipment or, you know, new heater or something like that. But I was so amazed. Even when I went off to college and I'd come home, my mom had these beautiful there's three windows, and they had these glass shelves across the windows, an old house built in 90, 98, and there was five glass shelves per window. So there's 15 different glass shelves with bowls like you're talking about, and she might have a piece of a knackers in there, and she would just take and throw these baby guppies in there, and they'd be all different sizes depending on how long the ball has been sitting there. And she would not give me any variation whatsoever. Of course, the guppies, so they went pretty well. And she had no problems other than the one time we had a jet go over the house and a sonic boom lit off. If you've ever been under the aircraft, when a sonic boom happens, it shakes the house. And one of the shelves cracked, a glass shelves cracked and took down two or three of the shelves of the bowl. So she had maybe eight or nine bowls on the floor broken, which was a tragedy, but still, she made it really look simple, and she cranked out guppies like you wouldn't believe. And I just really missed those days of simplicity when you could just do something like that and nobody really looked down on their nose at you.

So before we go too deep into this, I just like to point out the history of where the aquariums came from. We've been doing a gathering a lot of information on history of modern aquarium. And if you look up and you can look up some of these videos online, they have now reproduced, like, the 1950s videos in living color. Like, that was a gig for me, by the way. Yeah.

Nobody'S laughing.

No one's laughing.

No, not even a little bit.

So they have these examples, and they don't have real hard filtration. They're all just hard planted tanks. They're slate bottoms. The heaters are just coming out as a new thing. So this is how we used to do aquariums and got away from them with modern filtration. So having a hard planted tank with indoor lighting somewhere positioned off a window, this is how it's done. And now getting back to it with jars, it's just keeping its own complete ecosystem. So in spite of this, I've been trying to save up. I have that 1930s slate bottom tank, and I want to do the same thing. Like a whole jar premise.

Where did you get that?

Right? I stole that from you.

You stole that from my basement? Yeah, I've had it there. And you took it one night?

Just took it out?

Took it away. For me, that aquarium that Rob had with the slate bottom was the first aquarium that I ever saw like, that my grandmother had. And what she had was zebra Daniels. And she had great success breeding zebra daniels in her tank. And I remember as a child going over there, and my grandmother gave me two or three little baby zebra daniels to take home and kill. So it was a lot of fun for me at that age. But I like going back to simplicity. We still got Matt on. And Matt, do you remember when you could go back in the day and you can look on the ranger Rick magazines or the different magazines, and you could buy dwarf seahorses and live sea monkeys and stuff?

Yes, I do remember that.

And anyway, I was just doing some research. The other night, and I actually was able to pull some of that old advertising off of it was some sort of outdoor magazine.

Boys Life. Yeah, boys Life is where you always.

Respect.

You got the Boys Life magazine, and you got your dwarf seahorses, and it's interesting. A side note is that they're actually really well suited to small tank culture. If you put dwarf seahorses in a big tank, they get lost. They can't find their food. They have to be kept in a peco tank. I want to go on a tangent here for just a second and ask Dan a question, if I may. I'm curious to hear some examples of what are in these jars that you have. What are these little microcosms like? I want to hear something about that.

Well, there's the garbage bowl in the corner that I installed into my lamp. It's got the dressidia, the leftover duckweed, Amazon frogbit, mostly any male endlers that I'm calling for color go in there. Shrimp, small things, you really want to keep them almost waste neutral. Don't go putting a big old corridor in there, because, of course, it's just going to root everything up and basically kill itself. I have some that are just as simple as sand and locally collected hair algae with shrimp, and they do not get fed or lit or heated. And locally collected hair algae?

Yeah.

You go down to the creek and you just stick your hand in the water and stick your hand in your pocket.

But I'm grossed out early right now.

Yeah.

If anybody wants them, I'm selling it on aqua bid that you got for free.

I love it. How much would some of that hair LG be?

I got a bundle deal going on. If you order 100 Malaysian trumpet snails, I'll give you a good price on that.

Do you really have that many Malaysian trumpet snails?

Don't we all?

No, you've got more than that. Everybody that says they got 100 got a million businesses booming, business abooming.

Well, okay. So doesn't the algae hair explode in the jar? Isn't that normal? Like, if I see algae hair, suddenly the next day is covering my whole tank? Is it just self maintained by the shrimp?

I think the shrimp kind of picket clean of anything that floats in on the air. And it's kind of hard to get a gauge of how big the clumps are, but I could swear they're about the same size as when I put them in there three months ago.

What does the shrimp pick out of there? Like pocket lint from when you put the LG in your pocket?

Yeah, pocket lint, a few sneezes here and there. Just whatever proteins available.

An old dimension.

Pennies from.

Matt. Matt looks troubled.

I've seen you help a bunch of people online with these that were doing them before, and they were nervous about talking about them, like, oh, no, we have a resident jar guy in discord and you started giving them recommendations, and I saw some of them. They didn't have enough plants. You recommended definitely more plants. Put that closer to the sunshine, make sure to do top off a little higher. You're giving all these different recommendations, and I'm seeing that people are doing this with mainly you said endlers, but they're not really doing these with Betas so often that I'm seeing because there's a lack of heat. Do you have trouble with certain species over others?

Here in California, the climate is pretty forgiving, so it stays really consistent here. I could imagine anything with destructive eating habits. You probably don't want anything that's going to root up plants, root up substrate as far as low oxygen environments. If you don't have as many plants as you like, or your lighting schedule is a little crazy, there are plenty of fish out there that have labyrinth organs, much like Beta do, where they don't really rely on high oxygenation in the water. They can just kind of skim it from the surface.

So your favorite speech are definitely endlers, but what are some of the others that you'd recommend for someone wanting to start some of these if they're going to be doing fish at all? Because these jars, like you said, shrimp or just snails with the plants.

Oh, yeah, shrimps, snails. You could do Daphne cultures in them. All sorts of small copa pods, any kind of nano fish, really. Sorry. Not pygmy corridoras. You may even get away with a Beta if the bowl is large enough. I think just a lot of it comes down to the necessary care that you need to give it. You can't just make it a side thought.

So what is the necessary care that you're speaking of?

Just don't touch it.

Necessary care of nothing necessary care of.

Not once you get something established. I think that's why these became so popular with the non aquarist, as opposed to the more knowledgeable aquarist where you don't know how to care for your fish. You don't go to the store and buy fish food. You don't buy a heater or a light. You just kind of leave it off to its own devices. And Mother Nature can be really forgiving just as long as you don't interrupt it. And we as aquarius, we always want to get in there, get our hands dirty, trim plants, smooth things around, add fish, take fish out, and it never really has time to settle and do what it wants because we're always screwing with it.

Well, a lot of the beauty of having it, like the small fresh water that you have is that you can go for a week and you really don't have to worry about it. I mean, you don't have to worry about anything other than maybe a heater going out or something like that.

No heater, remember?

Yeah, but I mean, Matt has a heater in his Marine tank, right? You have to worry stuff about that. But for the most part, you can walk away, come back, and it should be as is, as when you left. And for that, I think the simplicity of that is just fantastic.

Oh, no. I was going to say if my heater light goes out, we have much bigger problems at hand.

Being so cold in California, right? screwed you.

Hell is freezing over.

We got Mad he's up in duluth, he's even colder than us. And we get above 70 degrees and we're all going to retire and die because it's so damn hot here. So I can't even imagine how sad your Christmas is when it's only 75 degrees up there.

In California, we don't get snow.

There's some places, but we'll mail you lots. Sweet. It may come as water.

So just to answer some of these questions and recommendations on people doing betas, we are the aquarium guys. Podcast are not recommending that you put a beta in a small jar and keep it unheated. Betas love heat. If you see one sitting at Walmart, unhappy and unmoving, it's because they're cold. They're sitting in a very low temperature environment in an air conditioned retail store. There's not a lot of water. They're not moving, they're not happy. So how we're seeing a lot of these jars done online, if you're doing a jar, is they're doing it in larger jars, like you mentioned before, the anchor jars, they'll get two, three gallon jars. They'll scaven with a ton of plants. And even in colder areas like California is very forgiving, you will probably have it 76 degrees in a jar, especially closer to off angle from a window. In Minnesota, we're not going to have that same luxury. Our houses in the wintertime, for us stay 68. It's going to be 60 degrees flat for these fish. We don't recommend it. And they're using heat pads to put on the bottom of the jar to keep the jars at. That 74 degrees to 76 degrees that betas are completely healthy at. So be very aware of the species you're using. Now, my question is, with scarlet battles, I've seen a lot of information online because I try to do as much as this jar information as possible. And when I did, I found a bunch of banned reddit posts and forums that gave a lot of people off.

The black web, would you?

And used a lot of how do we say harsh words. So it's very difficult to find. But I'm seeing that some of the common breeds, like you said, endlers also scarlet battles. And the scarlet battles, because they're so finicky eaters, are done with brine shrimp. Do you have any background or testing of that particular creature in a jar?

Not the scarlet battles particularly, but one of the other important things about when you set up a jar, it's not just about the climate. You want to also maintain an ecosystem in there. Your snails, your copa pots and those, once they reach a balance that you're not infringing on, you really don't have to feed the fish maybe once a week of that more for your enjoyment than their nutritional needs.

That's because of some species you have. What are they feeding on in these jars?

Whatever they can get. Small copepods, daphne, worms, algae, any microorganisms.

That are in growing, anything available.

Go to the local lake restroom, get the hair, algae, it comes with the daphne and copepods. And now you have a whole system.

Have you ever taken any small things, like out of the creek, like a little stickleback middle or something, and trade?

It's funny you ask. I did snag out a few of the gambusia that the local vector control will put in bodies of water for mosquito control? Yeah, and I still have them. I'm looking at a cloud of them right now in my 55 and they're hardy. I don't think I've lost a single one.

Now, what copper pods do you commonly use? Because I know before you show me your whole aquariums and you're one of the how do I put this without being offensive freaks that like to have scuds in your tank.

I don't mind them as much, I hear all sorts of things about them. They eat this and they eat that and they do this and they do that. They just bumble about and do their own thing and they're just fish food. That's about it.

You're live.

Matt, what questions you got? I love your face. If you guys could see a podcast. Matt is just smiling ear to ear, like taking this all in.

Matt'S going, this is my jar I had when I was seven years old, when I was a kid, oh, we're.

Going to burn this place down.

I did. You mentioned using it as a hatching tank. My first beta, or guppies, I took a gravit female and put her in a jar to watch her give birth when I was like, I don't know, seven. I'm being reminded so much of things. Rob, you said it earlier, we've gotten away from this, but like 6th grade biology. I remember they had these small, almost like a critter keeper, little plastic tanks that they would set up for everyone in the class. We had daphnia I want to say the name escapes me, but hornworth. Hornworth and very odd plotties. So these little small, very odd, and Daphne and Hornworth and it just sat there in the classroom for, I don't know, four months or so, and it just did its thing. And as students, we observed it and then the highlight was if you were good and you asked nicely, you could take it home with you when summer break came. So that was exciting. But no, I'm just being reminded of so many things that we used to do, the way tanks used to be kept that we've gotten away from in favor of technology.

Yeah, it's cool, it's simple and it's beautiful. It takes you right back to your childhood. I can see Matt smiling as we're talking and stuff. We talked earlier about ordering dwarf seahorses and sea monkeys and stuff. It just takes you back to your childhood and how beautiful, just watching the stuff in your tank just swim around and just like you're not there, like you're underwater and you're watching this all unfold in front of your eyes. And I think it's just a beautiful thing. And I think that's a lot of people missed out on their childhood. If you didn't grow up in a rural area and bring home a bucket full of turtles with minnows and stuff that you missed out on life.

It's funny you guys mentioned ordering out of the back of Boys Life magazine. I think we bred Anoli's for quite a few years that were sold in the back pages as chameleons, if you guys remember that.

Absolutely. If you look at the boys Life, they sold baby chickens, baby ducks, little incubators with eggs. I just revisited this on the internet the other night and stuff and I sat there and my wife goes, what are you looking at? I go, I just think this stuff was incredibly cool when I was growing up and stuff. And I remember my mom ordered me sea monkeys and for those of you who aren't familiar with sea monkeys, you should buy some because they're fantastic.

Well, since you guys are going down nostalgia lane just to paint a little recap, we talked about the history where modern aquariums were 1953 run, but the real big rap came from goldfish in a bowl. everybody's heard that a horrible term, gold fishing above early was it like 900 Ad. They're trying to record it and they have all this why are you looking.

At me like I would remember this?

Because I'm older. Because I know that you've read some of the same books that I have. They have recordings of in China than taking native carp species goldfish, putting them in bulls temporarily. And these were not long term bulls. Some, even if they were water, would change 100% every day with some of their natural cricks and streams because again, they didn't have faucets, they didn't have chlorine. Everything was from the natural world. It was just completely continually changed every day and it was a different world. And those bowls held up all the way through to the Victorian era. We have in the 1718 hundreds we have these decorative, ornate bowls and they really carried on with a bad rap ever since because people want to start I'm going to buy a bullet for Walmart. I'm going to put a goldfish in it. It's the cheapest fish you can get for fifty cents at the time at Walmart they no longer offer them anymore and that's how they get started, which is wrong it's an education thing. Those goldfish grow 810 inches, they crap like monsters, and you're going to have a dead fish in a few days. So that has burnt the bridge. And of course, this whole betas are inhumane to keep in small containers. They're cold. Betas may not be the perfect species for this, but there are species that do work. Small, one inch or less than one inch, endlers, scarlet, baddest. All different types of species are no fish at all. Just have shrimp or just snails and have a beautiful planted tank. And talking to some of these people in discord that have been doing this, and this is where it really intrigues me. There are jars that they've talked about for eight to ten years without touching them, and all they do is top them off completely. blows my mind. Like we're talking about how easy and brainless the salt water conversation was, but you're still doing once a week with 100% water change, you still have it here, you still got a bubbler. This is a kept ecosystem where if you even try to add food in some of these scenarios, you'll kill the ecosystem with bacteria. Like you gave that mention of the hair algae with shrimp. I'm assuming if you try to put food in there, you're going to destroy what's already set up because they're eating detritus. detritus happens naturally in the jar and you're adding extra food that may not be consumed in a timely manner. There's no filter. There's nothing to handle that extra bio load that you're introducing into a jar. So to me, this whole concept may be foreign, but beautiful nonetheless.

And we've talked too about back in the 18 hundreds when they had these goldfish bowls, it was a centerpiece of your garden. They would have these bowls displayed proudly in the middle of their garden and people would come from all around to see your goldfish in a bowl. And back then it was beautiful and it was very prideful. People are very proud of that. And then now we fast forward to all these years with goldfish. We talk about feeders and whatnot, and I've talked about on this podcast before where I still kick myself, where I buy a lot of my goldfish from ozark Goldfish in the Carolina shout out. And just wonderful people here. A couple of years ago, they had the old milk containers like you would see on a farm. And when they used to transport these goldfish on railroad cars, which means trains, they would put a block of ice on top of the milk barrel and it actually had holes drilled in it. So as the train would click clocking down the road, the ice would melt and it would trickle down into there. And that's how the fish got oxygen as it went to the wolvers and the five and dimes and the Ben franklins of the world back in the early 50s, things can be very simple and yet effective. So I just love the simplicity and the effectiveness of all this. Takes me back down in memory lane.

So, Dan, what's your smallest jar that you have and what's your largest smallest?

It's probably somewhere around, I'm going to guess maybe half a liter.

Is it a Mason jar? Like a big Mason jar?

No, these are just down at the 99 cent store. You get them, people use them for setting out displays, vases for flowers. Just go into your 99 cent store locally and just see what they have for glassware.

So I have more questions now.

More questions.

We have some listeners that message me, and they're asking about ecosphere. There are these gimmicks, in my opinion, of closed system aquatic ecosphere where they have it's essentially a completely sealed glass bowl. There's no lid or anything. They've put maybe a stick, maybe a pinch of hair algae in there. And they might have one or two shrimp in this perfectly sealed ball, glass ball. And the idea with it is you put it close to the window, it grows algae in. The shrimp live, they exist, but they're getting absolutely no freshwater. It's, in my opinion, a little bit torture some. This is not that. This is you're adding fresh water to it. You have a lot more control. They grow out. You can swap your fish when they get to a certain size, your shrimp, your snails. And it's not just sealing them off for forever. Having to do more, surviving off little algae is created in the tank. It's not that at all. What is the longest you've had shrimp in there? Do they breed in the jars? I know we're going to get questions on that as well.

A few of the females are just getting to the point where they're saddled, so I'll have to keep you guys updated on that. But they're coloring up pretty nice. These were all colorless coals from the nearby shrimp tank.

Rob'S got this pulled up on the Internet and bought this this sealed spear. This was a huge deal 15 years ago at the trade show in Orlando, Florida. I was at the trade show. They had just come out with these, and they were sealed, 100% sealed. And they actually had some of them had little nano fish and some had.

Little never seen them with fish. That's crazy.

Yeah. And they had all kinds of different sizes and different colors of this glass. And then they had little stands for them, too. And it was all the rage and everybody thought was really cool at that show. And then we went the following year to the show and that didn't see them again. So there was one year that it was a big rage. And I don't know what company came out with it and stuff, but like robson, there's a little bit of a stick in there with some algae, like a pancha algae. It's weird. And anyway, the whole thing was that it's sealed and you didn't do anything with it other than look at it. But yeah, it was quite the rage here for one year.

I just find that inhumane because you can't swap it. There's no grow out. They're guaranteed to stay in there. There's not even outside oxygen. You have to just get it just from the plant. But let's say that it was cloudy for a week. Maybe they didn't get enough food and they're half starving in the little bowl. There's just no control of those field units. And I'm really not trying to condone that.

I'll just say if you have a little shrimp that dies in there, you can't get it out, you can't take it out. So that's probably why it was only there for one year. But it sure had everybody's interest at that time. People were just standing in line to look at that stuff.

Yeah, those are great concepts, but I can't say I've ever seen many of the sealed ecosystems with livestock in them flourish.

So where does one get because we're going to have questions on people going to the creek. Where does one get these copa pods and daphne that you're looking for? And what's the do's and don'ts on that? Because I'm not going to be able to call up a friend with scuds and say, hey, can I get some of that scuds? He's going to laugh at me or say he doesn't have any.

You'd be surprised what you can find in your local stream. Just get down there and look. Nobody really takes a microscope to their plants, but they're there. Just don't leave them in your pocket too long.

Well, you got any more questions for them, Matt?

Yes and no. It just reminded me of a couple of things. We've been talking about betas a lot and I'm reminded of the fact that I have two really controversial articles that I've published with Amazon Us. One is shoebox Betas because when I was breeding betas, I was doing it in shoe boxes and that is this whole thing. And temperature wise, they were in my fish room on top of fish tanks. That was it. And then another thing. One of the most popular posts that we've put out on the Amazon Coral website is a look at the actual wild habitats of betas. And they really get a bum rap for people not really understanding that, yes, these fish really do live in confined spaces and small spaces their site attached. Especially a male that's tending a bubble nest. He doesn't leave that nest. So I think there's a fine line between this between the anthropomorphizing of a fish to say it must feel so cramped, or whatever. You look at a clownfish. They'd never leave their an enemy in the wild. They have the whole ocean, but they never leave their an enemy. I was breeding black Australia in a six gallon nano cube, which is a small reef tank by any standard. So I think there's this inherent idea that small is bad and it's just not true. It just requires you thinking through a little bit more to really think about the right fish, the right livestock, the right plants, the right set up. It's not for a beginner, in my opinion. But so much of what Dan has been talking about reminds me of things that I've done as a hobbyist that many of us have done as a hobbyist. And they're not wrong. They're not bad. If you're giving the proper care and your animals are healthy, then everyone's opinion kind of doesn't matter, in my opinion. You have to hold yourself accountable first. And then the other thing that we've been talking about, these jars. dan's been talking about these jars where we're doing nothing. And it reminds me of another article that I hadn't mentioned earlier, which was it's online. It's called when I say eptasia, you say pest. It was written by randy Donovitz of Reefs.com. So randy is a professor at pratt University in New York, and he runs the pratt Reef Club. And every year they literally take aptasia and enemies. The students come in, they bring a jar. It could be a pickle jar, leftover spaghetti jar. They get calerpa or some other macroalgae. They get an aptasia anatomy, a little piece of live rock, ketomorpha maybe. And that goes in the jar, and the students keep that. It requires no input, nothing. So that is the marine equivalent of dan's jar. In my world, we take this animal that's a pest, we try to kill it all the time. But you take it out of that scenario and retake where it's a problem and put it on its own, and it becomes this beautiful thing for people to be exposed to and have a connection with the ocean. Yeah, a lot of what Dan has been telling me has been really keying into other things that other people do, where our hobby comes from, why we do this in the first place. So really been enjoyable. Dan?

Yeah. I think past is kind of a relative term to certain hobbyists. But when people say to piggyback off of what you were talking about earlier, when people say bowls are too small, you got to ask yourself, too small for what? Just because a larger fish can't live in a small space doesn't mean that a small one can't. People have this notion that your fish is going to go out and explore the rivers and oceans of the world and, you know, some grand adventure in the wild, when in reality, it's probably going to spend most of its life, you know, in the shade of that one tree or rock or outcropping where hundreds of generations before it have. There are many species of bottom dwelling fish that live in the same recurring leaf litter, and they don't know the difference between this leaf and the next. I think it's a bit broader than what we think it is. It's more about helping it to lead a content life. If you were stuck in groundhog Day, you'd have a miserable outlook on life, but as long as it has a compatible environment, it has little need to search for something better.

Well, what that's a lot like a person when you first start out and you get married and and you have a child and you're in your 1st 600 square foot apartment and you have everything you need right there and you're happy. Seriously, you've watched too much dory because you know people that watch dory and and I'm going to go out and conquer the ocean and go all over the place. People are happy in a 600 square foot apartment with their wife and their kid. rob's laughing because I have a house. My wife and I own a house, too. That was 800. rob's just moved from a real similar house. That was 800. You and your wife are very happy there, and then you you moved on. So, I mean, everybody is different is what we're getting at. And, you know, small is not bad. Like Matt said, you got to tell.

Yourself, Jim.

That'S a T shirt my ex wife made.

Well played, sir.

You guys suck.

All right, before we leave, I do want to just leave the quick tutorial instruction. You're going to do a jar. We're going to get feedback on this, right? If you want to do a jar, number one, this is not for beginners. This is very difficult. You have to set up an ecosystem and you have to prove that it's running before you stop touching it and let it go hog wild forever. Clearly, we've learned that these jars can last quite a number of years if just topped off with water and done nothing else, too. So, number one, choose your substrate, whether it's gravel, gravel, sand mix, or sand, even maybe a little potting sold below. If you want to really do a real base for some hardy air plants, plant your tank, make sure the cycle is fully established. Make sure you have actual growing green algae and not just brown algae. And once that's all done, add your microorganisms, such as copepods, daphne, anything that you need to sustain the environment in the tank. And after you've done that, add the shrimp, add the snails, or if you choose to do your homework on the individual species that you like to add to your tank. Once that's done, monitor closely, make sure they're eating, make sure the microorganisms are still growing, and you will have yourself a wonderful jar that will last you years, if not decades. And last plug. Don't forget to go to amazon's Magazine subscribe get back issues. It's seriously the best fish magazine in the world.

And you've got, what, two weeks left? Matt, people can get in there.

So Amazon Us, we added digital back issues for 2015 and 2016. omega C and hakari sponsored those. So we expanded our back issue digital archive so every subscriber has access to those. That was one of the things we did when the lockdown started. And then on the coral side, the coral staff decided to open up digital access for Coral magazine, which is Reef Terrain Forest. They have opened up the entire digital archive. I don't have it in front of me right now, but it's like, I think it goes back to 2014 right now. Don't quote me on that. All you need is the email address stuck at home at Reef terrainforest.com and you have free access to read all of the coral magazines digitally through the end of May. So those are the two things that the two publications have done to kind of help ease the whole stuck at home thing while we're all sheltering in place, or whatever your preferred word is. So lots of back issues to read, lots of aquarium information available. I got to say, they're both the best aquarium publications out there. I work for both. I've been involved with both for a decade now, more than a decade with coral. So I really appreciate the readership, the support. We love hearing from our readers, and we came up with these ideas to give back a little bit. So, yeah, thanks very much.

All right, well, thanks, guys. Again, follow up to this. I know you're going to there's plenty of people in the discord that have actually been using these jars with and without fish. Again, it's very low quantity. We're going to get feedback in this. I can't wait to see it.

Yeahcast.com, send it all the robs. Don't send me nothing because I don't read nothing. So send it all the robs, and he'll send it forwarded to us, and then we'll make fun of you.

Well, I have to start a fresh and saltwater jar now.

Go ahead, do it. Yeah, I'm going to get a metal bucket and a ham's beer can. I want to make myself a Minnesota jar.

A Minnesota jar?

Yes, I am. And I'm going to put in some mud puppies, maybe some stickleback, maybe a big perch, couple of blue gel. Yeah, maybe a blue gel. Not a walleye, because they're delicious.

Don't take any of that advice. Jimmy had a well, thanks again for joining us, Dan.

And.

Thanks, Matt.

Not a problem.

Thank you.

Let's kick that outro. Thanks, guys, for listening to podcast, please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this.

I never knew that a Minnesota accent could be so sexy until I heard adam's voice.

Go frank yourself.

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