#22 – Our Aquarium ScrewUps

AND WHAT WE LEARNED FROM THEM!

4 years ago
Transcript
Speaker A:

Hey, guys, just want to let you know about Joe Shrimp shack. Joe Shrimp shack has a prestigious line of shrimp.

Speaker B:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

At Joe Shrimp shack.com. Pick them out. You know, get 515, 20. I made a mistake here. This is this is me learning. And this whole podcast you're gonna hear in a little bit is gonna be all our mistakes and what we learned. My mistake is I decided to mix my shrimp. Get a little bit of everything. Well, they don't really thrive as the colony. So pick your favorite and build upon them. Get a nice number, and these shrimp will breed. They will socialize. It's like a whole buzzing bee colony. So certainly go to joe's Shrimp shack.com, pick out your favorite bees.

Speaker B:

Do it right.

Speaker A:

Use promo code, aquarium guides for 10% at checkout. That's 10% off.

Speaker B:

10% off.

Speaker A:

No, we don't charge extra for promo codes. That's generally not how it's done.

Speaker B:

Oh, I think I was taking on Amazon. Then I paid extras.

Speaker A:

It's a fantastic place to get shrimp. Joe shrimp shack.com. He is in the metro of Minnesota, down closer to Minneapolis and Plymouth, Minnesota. Certainly. Check him out. Fantastic shrimp shipped to your door. And also our charity spotlight the Ohio Fish Rescue.

Speaker B:

Big rich.

Speaker A:

They have been busy this last couple of weeks.

Speaker B:

What have they been doing?

Speaker A:

They have purchased 220 foot tanks from the bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. They were on an episode of tanked.

Speaker C:

In the Right Way.

Speaker A:

They've hauled or are hauling? I got to keep up with this stuff, right?

Speaker B:

So my question is, they get this out of Las Vegas. Did they win them?

Speaker A:

They did not, but they got them for a heck of a steal.

Speaker B:

So they purchased them from the blasio?

Speaker A:

No, they purchased them from a third party because De blasio just got rid of them.

Speaker B:

Really?

Speaker A:

But you can go on his website. He's can go to his YouTube channel and find out more about it. All the help that they've had moving, it over, and they're just ecstatic to get these tanks. I mean, I keep picking on them that they're finally going to hit 100,000 gallons in their house, but we'll see what exactly happens. Go to Ohio fish Rescue on YouTube. Like subscribe. And above all else, buy a T shirt. Give them some love. Call them their numbers on the website Ohiofishrescue.com, and send them money. They're going to need it. Those were not cheap tanks.

Speaker B:

I would just send them some poker chips. Maybe they can double down.

Speaker A:

Double down. They already back from Vegas, though.

Speaker B:

They're back to Vegas. How come we don't get invited to Vegas? Oh, that's right.

Speaker A:

I don't think they were invited. They were just buy our tanks. Okay.

Speaker B:

I thought maybe they were high rollers or something.

Speaker A:

There's a future in this. We'll just have to go for, like, a fish expo or something.

Speaker B:

Sounds good.

Speaker A:

Let's kick that podcast.

Speaker B:

Go ahead.

Speaker A:

Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob tolson. Hello, Adam. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast. Today, I think I just got to do a bunch of censoring. So today we are talking about our greatest mistakes of all time. Like, that has to do with the fish hoppy, of course, because we can talk about, you know, people's eggs, wolves all the time, but we're talking about fishes as a fish podcast. Jimmy, got to calm down.

Speaker B:

I know one of my first biggest mistakes was when I introduced myself to you at the grocery store.

Speaker A:

It was your fault. You saw a guy buying ten lots.

Speaker B:

Of gallons of ro.

Speaker A:

You could have just been like, he's just buying the plastic for some reason. He's making a collection in his yard.

Speaker B:

I should have just kept on walking. And I'd have this night free, wouldn't I?

Speaker A:

You would. But now it's all over and we're we're hosting to people. So I am Rob Zulson.

Speaker B:

I'm Jim colby.

Speaker C:

And I'm Adam ella shar.

Speaker A:

And we are the Aquarium Guys here to share our mistakes in this podcast. So let's put it this way. We're not going to just share our mistakes for the sake of, oh, we screwed up. We want you to learn from our screw ups and really explain what we learned. This is to benefit, but if this is your first podcast you're listening to, I highly recommend going back, listen to them all the way from the beginning. We have a long series of podcasts, even though the first one was a touch embarrassing, I listened to it here last week, and I had some choice words.

Speaker B:

It was a whole lot of talking about nothing.

Speaker A:

I said, like, Jimmy, I just want a nut. I think was the best single out of context line from the first podcast.

Speaker B:

And we're still on the air.

Speaker A:

We are. It's been a great ride and it's been growing, man. Has been tell our viewers.

Speaker B:

Tell our listeners, listeners.

Speaker A:

We're at well, I mean, we're about 15,000 listens in.

Speaker B:

Yeah. And we started this in September. It's now January and the dead of cold in the dead of winter in Minnesota. I'm depressed, to give you an idea.

Speaker A:

Right.

Speaker B:

I need a beer.

Speaker A:

Or do you need a beer on Christmas, we hit ten k. Right?

Speaker B:

Thanksgiving, and we hit five k. Right.

Speaker A:

So now it is January 14, and we're just about hitting fifteen k. Fifteen thousand.

Speaker B:

So I want to thank rob's mom 14,714 times.

Speaker A:

My mom has a lot of listening to do, but anyways, start at the beginning, work your way through and get to this podcast, because this is not to discourage new aquarists. We all have issues, but we love our hobbies. Very rewarding, no matter what good or bad happens. So don't take this as we're trying to be negative about the hobby. We love fish, and we're not going to change our mistakes. Have only strengthened our hobby.

Speaker B:

The number one reason we started this podcast is we want to encourage the younger listeners, especially to get into the hobby and lose all your money. Because that's the American way, right?

Speaker A:

That way kids and adults don't have enough money for more shelters, drugs, stuff like that. Drugs, drugs.

Speaker B:

There's always enough money for drugs you don't have.

Speaker A:

If you say so. Is that the baby powder in your face?

Speaker B:

No, that's powdered donuts.

Speaker A:

A little sniff right there and powdered donuts.

Speaker B:

No.

Speaker A:

Got to stay away from the diabetes.

Speaker B:

Stay away from the diabetes.

Speaker A:

Now worry about your cholesterol. You got to eat some cheerios. What are you out of breath? Calm down.

Speaker B:

Wow.

Speaker A:

All right, guys, so we got a couple of emails. Jimmy, I think you have the first email.

Speaker B:

I have an email, but I got a frog in my throat.

Speaker A:

Okay, you swallow that. And guys, the aquariumgyspodcast.com. At the bottom of the website, you'll find our contact information. You can send us an email. You can call us and leave a voice message that we will happily play over the air. Or you can go right on our discord messages directly. So these are emails that we try to read occasionally. Pick. We pick and choose some of them. So go ahead and hit me with yours, Jimmy.

Speaker B:

All right, I am ready to go. This email is from first name only.

Speaker A:

First name only. We can try. They've given us their contact information. It should be just normal, but for their identity, I'm going to call them peyton Manning.

Speaker C:

I hate peyton Manning.

Speaker A:

Oh, come on now. Calm down.

Speaker B:

Calm down, everybody. And so I got this great email, and I think it was sent to directly me because it's so flattering, very flattering.

Speaker A:

Read it, please.

Speaker B:

Don't want to read it. All right, here we go. This is hi, aquarium guys, crew. My name is peyton and I lived have been a small town St. James, Minnesota. I'm 16 in just a few days and I've been fish breeding for almost a year now. I have to start by saying that I absolutely love your podcast and you guys that put it on you really make it a fun podcast to listen to. It's a highlight of my week. Each time you post a new podcast, my favorite episode is the one of breeding angel fish. It's been a dream of mine lately to start breeding angel fish. And now that is finally starting to come true. And I know it's a lot to ask, but I'm sure many of us would very much appreciate if you would consider are putting up two videos per week. Two videos per week.

Speaker A:

We get this a lot. I don't send you all of these emails.

Speaker B:

Am I getting paid extra for this?

Speaker A:

Well, that's the idea, right? They want us to do two podcasts. He should have put podcasts.

Speaker B:

But he's 16 years.

Speaker A:

We have full time jobs if we can get enough in our tip jar and maybe more sponsors, we could maybe do two videos every now and again.

Speaker B:

I mean, I got to skip my night of dancing and down at the club.

Speaker A:

I mean, we just did that two videos once for the Irish because we thought it was the mob that sent it to us.

Speaker B:

Yeah, we were scared of that one.

Speaker A:

We'll respect the Irish.

Speaker B:

All right, I'm going to run the rest of it. I know it's a lot to add. Adam, thanks for joining us. Adam, where you been? I know it's a lot to ask, but please do consider it. Both you and corey from Aquarium coop have inspired me to start my own YouTube channel. It's called Brown aquatics, and it would mean the world to me if I would check it out and consider subscribing. So everybody out there, write it down. Brown aquatics. Check it out. And now down to my question. I need to know your opinion. I have everything set up to start breeding angel fish, but I'm not sure what kind to get. I'm debating between double blacks and Platinum Blues. Platinum Blues are a beautiful, pure silver fish with squiggles of blue reflection to give it that blue color. And I assume you know what double blacks are. I need to know. Number one, what do you think think is a cooler or better looking? I think I'm better looking.

Speaker A:

All right, so we have two questions here. Essentially, which one should he and which one do you think is better looking? So let's start with the better looking. What do you think, Jimmy? What?

Speaker B:

I think I'm the best looking of the three of us.

Speaker A:

Well, I mean, I would easily imagine your face, and an aquarium just won't suffocate.

Speaker B:

I am the coolest. There's no doubt about that. That I am.

Speaker A:

They don't have obese angel fish. I'm sorry.

Speaker B:

Shut up. God.

Speaker A:

A or B? Come on now, let's start off the.

Speaker B:

New year by punching everybody in the throat.

Speaker A:

Poor peyton. He doesn't get a question answered.

Speaker B:

We're going to answer it. And he goes, also number two, what do you think would sell better down here in southern Minnesota? I'm looking forward to hearing back from you and can't wait to listen to more future podcasts. ps. Would love to listen to a squeal. What? To a squeal of angles. What does that mean?

Speaker A:

No more drunk creating your phone.

Speaker B:

No, I'm just read it. Would love to listen to a squeal on angles. Or maybe a sequel. A sequel?

Speaker A:

Sequel. That's how you pronounce out those letters.

Speaker B:

You kids and you're abbreviating. He's written down squeals.

Speaker A:

Poor payton. A sequel is probably coming up in the near future. We got it. We have so many more fish to do.

Speaker B:

And then he wants a podcast on grammys and Rams. This guy's demanding.

Speaker A:

My God, I should just not send you more emails.

Speaker B:

Is he a Nazi? Me? Why am I working for this guy?

Speaker A:

No, but he needs to know which is your favorite?

Speaker B:

My favorite?

Speaker A:

Of those two angels.

Speaker B:

Of those two angels. I'm seeing a lot of a lot of the blues out there right now for sale. The one thing you don't ever see is good double dark blacks.

Speaker C:

I was going to say the same thing. Blacks are a good one.

Speaker B:

Yeah, because the blacks you can demand a little bit higher price with the blacks. In a normal pet store, blacks sell very well with the platinum blues, you need the correct lighting in order to sell it. And then you have to have those people that really are looking for that.

Speaker A:

And if he's in the Minneapolis area right. So I remember he said St. James.

Speaker B:

St. James area.

Speaker A:

Right. So let's just say that he's trying to sell in the Minneapolis area. Right?

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker A:

So they have an immense aquarium community of mong and the monk.

Speaker B:

People just love the black.

Speaker A:

They love everything as deep as black as possible.

Speaker B:

They love the black bettas they love the black angels. And they really know what they like. And they will pay top dollar for it. So absolutely.

Speaker A:

But always check with your pet store because you have to find the source and ask what they want. We can say what we can guess, but without knowing the pet store, that's the best place to start.

Speaker B:

And the other thing I'll say, too, with the blacks, the blacks are not as prolific as the blues or silvers just for the fact that blacks have been so in bred over the years that they just don't produce the same amount. And so that's why they demand a little bit higher price. Because rather than getting 300, maybe you're only getting 150 to a spawn. So you can you can get a better price for them. And the darker the better. And especially if you can start out with double dark blacks, I would just take a double dark black standard and double dark long fin and cross them. And you'll get a little bit of both. And that will also diversify what you're trying to sell.

Speaker A:

There you go. So I have another email. This is from a listener named Taylor. I'm not going to read the whole thing because it's wait longer than that one, but they're just saying that we did a great podcast. Listen to episode 21st, which I'd like to apologize for. It story time.

Speaker B:

Don't start at story time. Don't start at story don't start at story time. You don't deserve story time until you've gone through all night. Right.

Speaker A:

You have to earn storytelling.

Speaker B:

You have to earn storytime.

Speaker A:

Come on now.

Speaker B:

That's a lot of work.

Speaker A:

That's like the first impression is not the story time, please. And they also wanted to let me know in the rest of the email.

Speaker B:

How much you suck no.

Speaker A:

On how there actually still is phone booths. Jimmy sent us pictures. Pictures of a phone booth. Right. Apparently they are still used in other countries, and they've even been updated with credit card swipers and all kinds of goodies. This was specifically talking about Japan and in Germany, Rob actually just showed me.

Speaker B:

A picture of a phone booth. I'm pretty sure it's a bus stop. I'm just saying, man, is that great. People actually listen to us. Yeah.

Speaker A:

And put up with your terrible jokes.

Speaker B:

I know. I wish I had $100. Let's see if anybody sends me $100 next week.

Speaker A:

You need to look carefully inside. That doesn't even look like a phone.

Speaker B:

Looks like an atm in there, right?

Speaker A:

That's what it looks like. It's just built to take your money. We need to get in the phone booth game.

Speaker B:

Jimmy sounds like an ex wife of mine. There we go. A lot of bitterness tonight. I'm sorry.

Speaker A:

No more beers. We talked about this last episode.

Speaker B:

No, I'm not drinking tonight.

Speaker A:

All right, let's get to the meat of the podcast. Right? We read some listeners. goodies. Who wants to start? Like, we didn't draw straws or nothing.

Speaker B:

Adam, start. He's so quiet tonight.

Speaker A:

Yeah. Adam. Adam, what is one of your biggest mistakes you'd like to teach the class.

Speaker C:

About and how they can learn using aquarium heaters?

Speaker A:

Sounds like wait, don't stick them up your rear. All right? That's something they do in another country. How did you misuse aquarium heater, sir?

Speaker C:

I had purchased some discus when I had my pet store that were the size of a small tea saucer for, like I picked up, like, 15 or 20 of them.

Speaker B:

For all you people who have been drinking tea this week, you just angered.

Speaker A:

All of our British listeners and our Irish ones.

Speaker B:

They're drinking beer.

Speaker A:

Yeah, they're all on the beer.

Speaker C:

So they were five, six inches across. I picked up, like, 15 discounts for $100, and I put them in my tank. And I noticed one morning that this.

Speaker A:

Must have been in the discus at any size for $100. That's Robert.

Speaker C:

No, the guy was moving because they closed the mines up there.

Speaker B:

The mines.

Speaker A:

You only get these conversations in Minnesota by the duluth Iron Range.

Speaker B:

Oh, the Iron Range.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker C:

The Iron Range. So they had let him go. So he was like, I need to get rid of my fish. Here $100. You'll take care of them.

Speaker A:

Okay.

Speaker B:

Wow. So thanks for giving him gas money out of town, I guess.

Speaker C:

Pretty much. And I put them in the tank, and I noticed they were good for, like, the first two weeks. Everything was going great. I'm like, oh, good, I'm going to pair them up. I'm going to breed them. Yes, me. And I noticed that they were acting funny.

Speaker A:

How were they acting?

Speaker C:

Well, they were, like, huddled towards the bottom, and they weren't normally when I walk up, if you've ever had discus discus get really friendly with people and they will come to the top of the tank. They want to see you. But they weren't acting right. And I also had a pair of L 46 True Zebra plea goes at the time.

Speaker B:

Did you put them on the same tank?

Speaker C:

Yes, they were all in the same tank. So that's lesson number two. Don't put nice fish with nice all of your nice fish in the same tank.

Speaker A:

So you didn't even do quarantine protocol. What a noob?

Speaker C:

Yeah, basically.

Speaker B:

And today I had too many tanks.

Speaker A:

But that's not I feel like there's a metaphor of eggs in a basket or something, but I don't know.

Speaker B:

I'm thinking for the stupid guy of the week, we could give it to.

Speaker A:

Never mind that's in the 90s. This was a long time ago.

Speaker C:

This is in there.

Speaker A:

I don't even talk about the stupid things I've done this week. We'll get to that soon.

Speaker B:

Yeah. So you've got all your expensive fish in one tank?

Speaker C:

Yes. And I leave because I'm like, well, I'm going to go hang out with my friends. And I didn't think twice. I knew something was wrong just by looking at them. But I'm like I'm running behind it. It was the first time I'd head off in a while. Well, I'm going to go see my friends and I come home and everything is lying on the bottom, dead in a door nail or twitching. Whatever wasn't dead was just twitching.

Speaker B:

And why was that?

Speaker C:

The heater had short circuited and electrocuted every fish in my tank. Because when I lifted up my tank or the lid to put my hand in the water, because I looked in, the water was cold. I got electrocuted.

Speaker A:

So did you break it or how did this happen?

Speaker C:

As far as I can tell, there was a little crack in it somewhere. Maybe the discus batted it around or something because they were pretty good sized discus playing discus. They knocked it around and it just got a little crack in it and electrocuted everything in my tank.

Speaker B:

So you discovered this by putting your fingers in the tank? Pretty much. And that because I got I got.

Speaker C:

Zapped and I was like, what the hell? And then I looked and I unplugged the heater and I unplugged my canister filter, thinking that was it. And then I pulled out the heater because the temperature was off. It was way down. It was like really, really low.

Speaker B:

It doesn't matter when they're dead.

Speaker C:

Yeah, it doesn't matter when they're dead. But it was like super low. It wasn't the like 82, 84 that I had it at.

Speaker A:

Yeah, everything was dead.

Speaker B:

What did you learn about this?

Speaker C:

Don't use glass aquarium heaters. Heat the room, not the damn tank.

Speaker A:

Or if you do have to use aquarium heaters, titanium.

Speaker C:

Titanium grounding probe.

Speaker B:

Yes.

Speaker A:

You can find these in.

Speaker C:

I recommend that for everybody.

Speaker A:

You are the one that clued me on this, Adam. And you can find these on Amazon. They're pretty decent price. Again, it just plugs into the ground unit of any outlet. Make sure that you're not plugging into a strip cord with no ground, otherwise there's no point in even using it. It has to go into the wall outlet with that bottom ground plug. The ground plug is the circular one on the bottom, not the flat ones that are the two prongs. The bottom circular one, the ground. That's important.

Speaker B:

Is that why they called the ground?

Speaker A:

Because it's closer to the ground? So there is a famous fish tuber named joey right. That we all know and love, and he, a long time ago, had these wonderful stingray. His heaters went out on him and if he would have had this titanium unit, it would have prevented it. But there's really no way to predict and I never even knew that these things existed. But learn from this mistake that number one, inspect your heater. Number two, if you can, try not to use glass. And number three, have a backup plan.

Speaker C:

Yeah. Number four, don't be at a fish guy. Don't tell Jim and then ask him for some more L 46 and then have him call you two days later laughing at you. Because they went on embargo that went on site.

Speaker A:

He was it that one?

Speaker B:

It was that. It was that, yeah. Was that month?

Speaker C:

It was, yeah.

Speaker B:

And the price went from this to a million dollars.

Speaker A:

Oh yeah. Overnight they were skyrocketed so I could.

Speaker C:

Get him for like $20. And then they went from like $20 wholesale to like $1,000.

Speaker A:

They're butter. butters.

Speaker B:

Not quite that much, but about eighty dollars to one hundred dollars at that time.

Speaker C:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

According to some of the records when I looked this up when it happened, they went all the way up to $500 a piece for sure. That I know of.

Speaker B:

Right. I mean, when they were talking at that time, there was really nobody breeding them in the area.

Speaker A:

Supply and demand.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker C:

Oh, I loved my zebra clique glass.

Speaker B:

Speaking of supply and demand, real quick, you told me something interesting last week about Betas rob's.

Speaker A:

What did I tell you?

Speaker B:

That they glow in the dark now.

Speaker A:

Yes.

Speaker B:

Tell us. I have not heard this yet. I've not researched it, I've not looked yet. But tell us what you heard, what you saw.

Speaker A:

So we're going to go on this tangent here. This is outside of the screw ups, right? The GlowFish phenomenon. Right. And we can have an episode on glowish in the future. But the GlowFish phenomenon essentially was out of some university in the pursuit of trying to find cancer treatments and cures. So the university discovered that they could use this idea to color fish. And that's really, really where this came from, is in a laboratory. So they make these laboratory fish out of the common fish that we have. So when they're trying to cross DNA. They're going to find fish that are cheap. They're not going to go for expensive fish when they're in the university laboratory, they're going to find the closest stuff. So zebra, danos, white skirt, tetras. Those are the first ones to really get hit.

Speaker B:

And those were 29. $0.39 wholesale.

Speaker A:

Try $0.10.

Speaker B:

All right. I mean, you start buying in any quantity, they're they're cheap as heck, so you probably wouldn't you're probably not going to get a glow. L 46. L 44. Zebra Daniel.

Speaker A:

What it so take.

Speaker B:

Take.

Speaker A:

Yeah, you know, a little common sense. You're taking a cheap to worthless fish that still looks okay in aquarium, giving it color and charging 8910 $11 for it.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker A:

It's 101. So now that they have the technology out and the patents owned by a certain company that they're just going to follow down the tree to see what next, fish they could add to the glow line. We've seen leaks of glow angel fish, but even right now, they have glow sharks that are made from rainbow sharks. There's actually a couple of different sharks. They use glow barbs that are used from tiger barbs, and they're just running down the tree. So the ones that we'll see is people take the same procedure overseas where patents aren't held and held up, and they'll do this to other fish. So we see leaks of angel fish. We'll see leaks of all different types. And we finally have now seen the first leaks of betas being glow fish. They literally look like they're rubber. It's crazy. Their fins are completely clear with that haze of glow. It's on our Facebook page. Aquarium guy's facebook group. You can find it on Facebook. It has a little video of them swimming. I want to say it's sad, but it's inevitable. It's not necessarily harming the fish. It's done in the laboratory. They're not taking a fish bleaching it, dying it, tattooing it. They're not harming the fish. But it is made in the laboratory. It's not, quote unquote, natural, but it's not harming the creator. So I'm not really against it, but it's not my favorite fish. If I want a beta, there's a pile of beautiful colors out there without having to make it glow underneath a black light.

Speaker B:

Yes. Those people out there that are on the fence love them, like them, leave them. They're here, and there's not much we can do about it.

Speaker A:

There's rumors that this end of February, they're going to hit the market. I don't think it'll be that quick. I think that's just rumors. We've yet to see angel fish hit the market, and that has been talked about for the last two years.

Speaker B:

So they've been available overseas, right?

Speaker A:

Overseas. You can get them, but not in the United States. Why do they always have change is coming?

Speaker C:

Why do they always start with green? Is that like, the most available or something?

Speaker A:

It's the easiest prominent color to get right away. Is that green or green? Yellow. The reds, when they first do it, can fade or not take. So if they can get green done, they'll work their way to the harder colors.

Speaker B:

Yeah, there was a while back when one of my suppliers had Gold Zebra daniels on sale for next to nothing. When I mean nothing, I mean, like, four cents a piece. And I'm going, because normally Gold daniels are 35 piece for wholesale. And I go, Why are they so cheap? When I found out from them that they're the culls from GlowFish? That didn't take.

Speaker A:

So when a GlowFish breeds, it does breed more or less true that you will get GlowFish from GlowFish, but eventually, after a couple of batches, the glow stops happening in the genes. The genes don't hold, so eventually the colors will just dissipate and they'll just breed normal fish again. So these white skirt tetras daniels, even barbs we're seeing prices go lower on is because they're just not necessarily culls, but how they treat them as culls. If they don't have glow, they get sold as normal.

Speaker B:

Right. And the thing is, they're a trademark fish. So these companies that have done it and I know who it is, they have spent literally millions of dollars on these fish. And that's why they're expensive, because they're trying to get their money back. And they have to get each one certified. We've talked about before, they get the red one certified, and they have to go through the usda to get the green one certified. It's just ongoing and more paperwork for each and every color.

Speaker A:

So, yeah, there's like, what, six colors? Seven colors that they have now. Yeah, now times that by each species of fish, you're talking daniels, this type of maybe a bigger Daniel white skirt tetra barbs. And then you go down the list, they have to do, what, seven patents for each type of fish?

Speaker B:

Yeah, it's a lot of money, a lot of paperwork, and a lot of work.

Speaker A:

So you'll see them eventually, but fyi, they're coming ahead. That was a big tangent. I'm going to do the next one.

Speaker B:

You go ahead because I feel like.

Speaker A:

You need to make fun of me.

Speaker B:

Well, that's what I do. That's why I'm here.

Speaker A:

I'm going to get this one out of the way because I know you people are making fun of me. Since we started this podcast, finally, I'll address the story of how the catfish ate my marijuana.

Speaker B:

That's funny. And expensive. Really expensive.

Speaker A:

All right. I had a cry in the mirror.

Speaker B:

How'S your blood pressure, dude?

Speaker A:

It's good. I've been eating cheerios.

Speaker B:

I wish you guys were here in the studio to see the veins in his forehead and the little sweatbeed coming down. This is so much fun for me.

Speaker A:

You could just see it pulsing.

Speaker B:

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A:

So I had quite a large aquarium at the time, and I had an amazing. Set up with a black ari. Now, it is the non Asian variety. Asian arijuanas are illegal. United States of America. But trying to get an arijuana that has color down from South America or even Australia is pretty difficult. So I pulled in some favors. I talked to some people, and I got in with getting a beautiful black arrowana. Now, these black arrawas, the silver body cells just like a silver arrowwana, but it has this deep, smoky color and orange stripes in the back. I spent an amount of money that I'm not willing to say out loud how much? And go talk about it about $600, wasn't it? This is therapy.

Speaker B:

$600.

Speaker A:

This is therapy. No baby steps in therapy, right?

Speaker B:

I am not your therapist, dude. How much was it?

Speaker A:

I'm not telling you.

Speaker B:

Tell them. $600.

Speaker A:

It was more than that.

Speaker B:

I know. I'm just trying to suck it out of you.

Speaker A:

You just want to suck it out of me. It ain't going to happen anyways. It wasn't just money. It was favors I had to get to get this fish right. So I finally got this fish in and it was very difficult because it was quite small. It was a little ways past the egg yolk. So when you get Arijuanas, you can purchase Arijuana's wholesale and we'll just talk about silver arrowanos. To give you an example, you can get wholesale if you have a wholesale license from certain distributors. If you buy in a bag of quantity, you can get a bunch of Arijuanas for $35, right? Wholesale. So when you see them in stores, you'll see a marked up. You have to tax tax the the cost of shipping, which is immense on some of these things because, remember, a single box from Ups is $90. So you'll see these things marked up for $120 in a pet store. But when you get them in that small, they literally are just hatched. They are free swimming. And they have this giant egg yolk hanging from yolksack hanging from the bottom of the arijuana. It's a very delicate time, and mostly arrangements will die if not completely pampered. So essentially what you have to do is if they bump the egg sac death. If they get scared, jerk, tear the egg sac death. It's literally an organ hanging below them and you'll kill them for any reason.

Speaker B:

And it takes several weeks for it to absorb up into the body. That's their nourishment and that's their food until they can start eating.

Speaker A:

So when you get this Arijana in, what you want to do is put it into a silk net basket. You can buy these breeding baskets and just leave them alone. dim the lights until the egg sat goes away. Don't scare them, don't walk by the tank, don't breathe. And just let them hover in this basket alone, away from everything, until the eggs that goes away. And then you have to start weaning them onto live crickets because they will not hit anything at that small unless it moves. So either you have to move it or you have to put something in that's moving. So I have to buy these big bag of crickets stinky suckers that I have to keep in a container. And I'm trying to wean this thing off because it's past the egg sac point. When I got it in and it wasn't wasn't really eating that good. It was pretty thin. So I'm doing this whole cricket thing, babying it. Then I try to do it manually and I finally got it on River krill. And you can buy this River krill and giant containers. And now I have it trained. I have to throw the river crawl at the water to make a splash or they won't go after it. Now it finally knows the River krill's food, and it's a whole process of getting adapted with your arijuana. I finally got to the perfect place where it's eating like a monster. Then I decide to get a stingray with it because I had this all planned. One thing quarantined at a time, right? So I wanted one stingray and I wanted one arijana tank and call it good for my big tank.

Speaker B:

And what kind of stingray did you get, Rob?

Speaker A:

Called them some favors. I got myself a blonde pearl stingray, freshwater stingray.

Speaker B:

That sounds cheap as heck.

Speaker A:

That was not cheap.

Speaker B:

I think I just heard a story from Adam. When you take all your expensive fish and you put it in one tank.

Speaker A:

Let'S just say that you'll the reason I could get these fish is I sold my house and moved into a new house. And I had some of the assets that I had to pay off a bunch of medical bills. And we had assets we put away for a new mower because we had a lawn now that we had to mow and a couple of fixes from the home. And I got a rebate back from it and that's what I was going to use for fish. tanasa and I both wanted fish. She wanted a stingray. I wanted marijuana. That's where it was. We both wanted it. So we saved our pennies. We're going to treat ourselves and that's what we got in. So I get the stingray in. I have the arijuana. The stingray decides that he's going to choke on food and die. There's nothing I can do. It was a happy, healthy fish. Just decided that it was going to be a retard and choke on food.

Speaker B:

No, I think she tells tell the people what you're feeding. Or are you feeding the stingray the stingray?

Speaker A:

I was feeding a mix of chopped shrimp. When I say chopped shrimp, it was literally whole raw shrimp you get from the grocery store that I had to d shell on my own. So I would chop it up in pieces and put it in the bottom and eat. And I would also supplement with tupaflex worms, the cubes that I would put either in the sand or on the glass. And it decided to choke on a piece of shrimp. It wasn't too big. It just got kind of coghied in its mouth and I could see it choke. Now, when you see a stingray choke, you see that lovely barb and then you think of Steve irwin, but then know that it has toxins or venom on the back of the tail. So I never put my hand in the aquarium knowing this. Even though the likelihood of you getting stung is extremely low. We've seen joey and everybody else. I'm not that faithful of a man and I know that I'm going to reach down and try to rip something out of his mouth. It's probably going to sting me. So I'm looking at it knowing that I'm in Minnesota. I heard these stories about Adam getting stung by fish, which is hilarious. Don't want to die.

Speaker B:

Not die.

Speaker C:

So I didn't die.

Speaker A:

I decided just to let a choke and die. There's nothing I can do. I had a 24 inch tong. I could poke it. There's just nothing I can do. I had to sit there and watch my fish die. And then my lovely roommate decides to walk up to the tank while I'm basically in tears watching this thing die, trying to figure out how I'm going to tell my wife her immense amount of money. Extremely rare stingray died.

Speaker B:

How much was a stingray?

Speaker A:

No, Jimmy, we're not going there. Baby steps, right? Maybe they'll tell you in the future when I'm more comfortable with this.

Speaker C:

Here's my question. Why didn't you have like a tube from an intake tube and shove that on the tail at any time? That's what I always did with mine. I always had something to shove on the back of the tail so that I was never worried about that part.

Speaker A:

I was told to do that and just leave it on there while it grows up. But I'm like, why do I have it on there? I'm not going to be touching the stage stingray. So there's your fun fact for the day. If you want to wean a stingray into food and you're worried about the tail, put a glove on it, put a rubber band on it, whatever you want to do to try to protect yourself, but know that it's only a tiny tube protecting you.

Speaker B:

I'm just looking at you and just sheer stupidity.

Speaker A:

Anyways, my roommate comes up to the tank while I'm watching him die and it's like, what's happening? Why is he doing that? He's choking on food. And then he just sits there and looks for a minute. I think that's how you're going to go someday.

Speaker B:

With a ham sandwich.

Speaker A:

I immediately turned just blood red and I just didn't know what to say. I just wanted to throw F bombs, but I was crushed and angry all at the same time. It was diarrhea for the mind.

Speaker B:

Well, just so you know, I'm not going to do the heimlich maneuver on your stingray or on you.

Speaker A:

So let's put it this way. Maybe I could have put something on the tail. Maybe there's something I could have done. I don't think there was. In retrospect. Not a lot I could have done there.

Speaker B:

I would have just grabbed it and toss it on the floor and let it jump around.

Speaker A:

Not a lot I could have done there. It makes me mad. Now, what happened with the arjuana? Now he's arijuana is all alone. He's doing great. He's just one lone fish in a tank. Do I want two Arijuanas. Not really. I'm kind of happy with what I have, and maybe I can save my pennies in another three years, afford a stingray because they're crazy amounts of money.

Speaker B:

600.

Speaker A:

They're way more than $600.

Speaker C:

649, Jim.

Speaker A:

Way more than $600.

Speaker B:

I know what he paid for him, and I'm just trying to get him to spill.

Speaker A:

You're an asshole.

Speaker B:

Wow. Now we have to put an expletive, right?

Speaker A:

No, that is a fair statement. We're talking about your dairy air, and you are one.

Speaker B:

Wow, that hurt.

Speaker A:

So I have an arijuana in there. So I get this whole idea where I hear about this amazing tiger catfish that needs a home. Like, hey, I heard you do rescues. I'm like, yeah, I could take that one in. Normally you'll only take rescues that you would have a home for. I have this tank. I only have an arrangement in there. The arijuana by now, because, again, Arijuanas grow, like, two inches a month. They're insane. And I'm feeding more than that. So he's definitely got some inches on them. And this is a small tiger catfish. And I'm like, oh, he's looking at a home for this thing. So I took it in like a dumbass. And these tiger catfish, they're not that expensive. They're, what, $60 at most. That's retail. So I took it in, gave it a home. I found it. It's a hybrid. It's that tiger red tail catfish combination, right? Because they crossed for some reason, and he has an immense appetite. Oh, yeah.

Speaker B:

And what happened?

Speaker A:

He stares at you. He just sits in the bottom of the tank and stares at you?

Speaker B:

And what do you feed this thing?

Speaker A:

A pound of shrimp a day. Like, a whole pound. Like, measure it into a container, like.

Speaker B:

A 16 ounce cup container. I used to watch you feed them.

Speaker A:

Right. I'd weigh it. I weigh it. All right. And what he do is he I would set the shrimp frozen shrimp.

Speaker B:

And frozen shrimp is cheap. They're only, like, $9 a pound owned.

Speaker A:

Right? Because I had some from the stingray that died. I don't eat shrimp, so I just got all this frozen shrimp and a cup and a little thaw on the top and the catfish sees the cup and hits the top of the aquarium with the lid, trying to get to it. I'm like, well, fine, here, you want a frozen one? I throw a frozen one in, he eats it whole, frozen solid.

Speaker B:

Like, what, everybody got brain freeze like he did in the ice cream cone?

Speaker A:

No, he just kept eating them. So I dumped the whole cup in there frozen, and he eat them all frozen and it wouldn't be like, oh, I'm just going to, you know, slowly eat them for a while. Under 60 seconds. He had £1 of shrimp consumed in his stomach in 60 seconds.

Speaker B:

And people go swimming in rivers where these things were.

Speaker A:

It was incredible. I've snuffed something I've never seen before, like gulper, catfish style. So it was the first couple of days and I noticed that my arrangement stopped, like free swimming across the tank. And he kind of just sit in the corner. Next day I come up and now I see that his fins are all kind of ratty, not in the same condition. The next day, like, what's going on? So I'm like, well, maybe he's getting sick. So I test water parameters. I go upstairs and I come back down and here is my arowana, twice the size of a tiger catfish swallowed in his mouth. I have posted the picture once on discord. I don't I'm probably not going to do it again.

Speaker B:

It's disturbing.

Speaker A:

They have turned it into some memes.

Speaker B:

I know. And everybody thinks it's kind of fun because it happened to you and not them.

Speaker A:

It ate it and it's twice the size, whole. And I had to sit there just it's going to choke on it. So crushed again. I had to get in there. I had to manhandle and wrangle this catfish. And then I had to pull the carcass out of its mouth. And by the time I got it up, it spit the whole thing out.

Speaker B:

It was like a cartoon that you see where there's a big bag of bones, like a fish bones? Yeah.

Speaker A:

It's literally like just a skeleton dissolving it and just chowed it down that quickly. There went my two most expensive fish for a long while. Maybe ever. Definitely ever. No, the more I think about it, totally ever.

Speaker B:

Totally ever.

Speaker A:

Down the toilet for the next three.

Speaker B:

Months, they come over, I look at this empty tank and I go, what are you going to put in there? He goes nothing.

Speaker A:

So what I learned from this is that compatibility is more than just size when it comes to predatory fish. You think, is it going to harass it? You're need to ask, can it swallow it? Have you measured its full mouth? Do the inches in circumference match the other fish? Because they could probably stretch it another good couple of inches. So if it's catfish, know that catfish will attempt to swallow things that they can't normally eat. That was a big learning curve that I learned in the most terrible way, and that a pound of shrimp maybe isn't enough for a growing tiger fish. You should probably up your dose every single day.

Speaker B:

Every single day.

Speaker A:

So I had that until it grew. Was it two and a half feet?

Speaker B:

Yeah, it was big enough to ride.

Speaker A:

To, and we got it home, and that was that. It's out the door. But it was the size of busting my tank, and it found a home, and on its way, it went yeah.

Speaker B:

Going right on to from that story to one of my stories, which isn't half as cool, because it was only a two foot goldfish that Darren catfish ate. So my friend Robbie robbie and I are neighbors. We live just around the block from each other. And he comes one day with this albino channel catfish that we had gotten as a rescue, and he had taken it out of the tank. We didn't even know it was in the tank anymore. It was sitting in a cold, cold warehouse. And he brought it over to me.

Speaker A:

And if you want the full story, you can listen to some of our other podcasts. We talk about Charlie the catfish.

Speaker B:

He brings Charlie over, and he goes, I got no place for it. Here, Jimmy. Put it in your tank. And I'm like, God dang it, Robbie. I don't want this ugly thing.

Speaker A:

You have a tank rack. You have a tank that fits. I mean, it just makes sense.

Speaker B:

Yeah. And so when Adam closed up his store adam adam is one of my customers. And what year did you close up your store, Adam?

Speaker C:

2013.

Speaker B:

So in 2013, I have been being paid to babysit these goldfish from one of adam's customers, because when Adam oh, my coy customers. Yes.

Speaker A:

We don't name them. They have not given us permission.

Speaker B:

So this woman had me take these coy that Adam had been watching for her.

Speaker A:

So it was a random batch of shabunken goldfish, bigger goldfish. I think there was even a couple of fantile goldfish at one point. The phantom goldfish, I think, died of old age by this point. And then you had one pretty large it was like was it two plus two foot butterfly? White koi.

Speaker B:

Beautiful white koi. And during the summer, this woman would call me. She lived up in the Grand rapids area. And I would ship the fish to her. And then in the fall, I would go up and get these fish. And so I've been dealing with these fish for freaking seven years and kind of a part of the family. And Robbie forever has been trying to.

Speaker A:

I want those fish because I want that, at the time, had a big pond. I needed it.

Speaker B:

And I go, I can't give you these fish. They're a customer. She's paying me monthly to watch these things. So don't ask me why but we put the channel catfish, which was probably how big was he?

Speaker A:

It was just to let you know that you didn't do this until you owned them.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker A:

So towards the end, they had some issues and were unable to keep the fish and said, Would you take them?

Speaker B:

Yeah. Her husband passed away, and she goes, I can't take them anymore. We're going to get rid of our cabin where they had the pond and stuff.

Speaker A:

And Jimmy said, of course I will happily take them. You worry about you.

Speaker B:

And so I thought, you know what I'll do? I'll be a good guy. I'll give Robbie these fish next spring. It was in the fall of the year, and he brings me this Albino channel catfish who's probably only, what, nine inches long?

Speaker A:

Maybe less.

Speaker B:

Yeah, probably.

Speaker A:

Definitely less.

Speaker B:

Probably six, seven inches long. Eight inches long. And I put him in the tank, and in one night, he stripped every freaking fin off my two foot goldfish.

Speaker A:

You sent me pictures. It was like soup o scales. All you saw was just the water caked in scales.

Speaker B:

He chewed up that fish so bad, he went like he was eating corn on the cob. And he didn't kill the fish, but he did die about two, three days later. But the catfish grew exponentially once again after he ate half a goddamn two.

Speaker A:

Foot koi scales or protein in their diet.

Speaker B:

And I could have just cried because I had this fish for years and years and years, and I just felt so bad. And robbie's over here, chuckling, right now.

Speaker A:

I mean, it's only fair.

Speaker B:

Yeah. And I still have this godding channel catfish.

Speaker A:

It stares at us, right, every time we go in your fish room.

Speaker B:

And when I go to my fish room, here's the rule we have with it. You're only going to eat what dies today. So if nobody dies, you're not getting fed. Then Robbie comes Overfields bad and feeds and pellets.

Speaker A:

While we're on the podcast, if somebody wants an Albino channel catfish that wants to have a demon catfish of their own, we will happily ship them to whoever, right?

Speaker B:

I'm going to put them in a dry envelope because he ain't going to die.

Speaker A:

You pay postage, we'll ship it. All right. It's yours, Charlie. The catfish is yours. As long as it goes to a good home. Know that he is a demon.

Speaker B:

I think I should just mail it to Rich late at night.

Speaker A:

So what do we learn from this? We learned that, number one, catfish are not to be trusted.

Speaker B:

No.

Speaker A:

Number two, it does not mean just because you have a two and a half, two foot creature that a six inch creature won't screw it up.

Speaker B:

Right?

Speaker A:

Three, that even though it's a breed that shouldn't do it. Every fish is a different attitude and different just like we were different people. Every person is capable of something different.

Speaker B:

There's bullies in every crowd.

Speaker A:

There's bullies in every crowd. So you will find an ENDLER that may try to beat up a red tail shark. Who Knows?

Speaker B:

Endlers Suck.

Speaker A:

Handlers Suck.

Speaker B:

No, they don't.

Speaker C:

Wait, did you have an ENDLER try to pick a fight with that big red tail?

Speaker A:

I don't even want to talk to you right now.

Speaker C:

What Happened?

Speaker A:

I have your batch of endlers. They have procreated. The original females have died from that up and died because they're just a crap strain of fish.

Speaker C:

Crap strain of fish.

Speaker A:

I have, like, 35 endlers all over the tank. And how can I put this? They're trying to dither with my white clouds, so they're annoying the crap out of them to follow them all across the tank. It's not harassment. They just think that they're schooling together because all they've grown up with are these white clouds. So they're dipshit. Fish, I think is a fair statement there.

Speaker B:

That hurts. That hurts.

Speaker A:

My particular strain of endlers are dipshits. There you go.

Speaker B:

Where did you get those from?

Speaker A:

You know where I go.

Speaker B:

You got them from Adam. I Know. That's the best part anyways.

Speaker A:

Yeah. So don't trust Catfish.

Speaker B:

No.

Speaker A:

Every fish is different. And don't just trust them because they're size.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker A:

They'll still eat scales.

Speaker B:

Eat everything.

Speaker A:

Right.

Speaker B:

What else you got, Adam?

Speaker C:

Let's see here.

Speaker B:

Well, come on. You got something looking at this paper you don't know?

Speaker A:

What about the dog food?

Speaker B:

What about the dog food?

Speaker C:

Dog Food.

Speaker B:

Tell us about your pet store.

Speaker C:

Okay, here's the best thing. If you want to own a pet store, don't.

Speaker B:

The best thing about owning a pet store is don't.

Speaker C:

Don't Bother.

Speaker A:

See, this is the top of discouragement I was talking about. We're not trying to discourage you people. He just did it the wrong way. I tell you how he did it.

Speaker B:

I would be a good marriage counselor. No.

Speaker C:

There's different ways you could do it, but that's a whole different business.

Speaker B:

All right.

Speaker A:

Let's focus on the main thing. I think you're talking about dog food.

Speaker C:

Okay, so when I first bought the pet store because I had bought my pet store an existing person, they had dog food. They had turned that store into a dog food store. And there is no money in dog food. All dog food comes from four separate places. There's like, two or three makers of dog food and they just put it in different bags. What people don't realize is when they see a bag of dog food at Pet go Pet Smart, your local pet store. The dog food costs 98% of the is of the price of what you see. So when I was selling dog food, the dog food was, like, $40 a bag. In early 2000s, it really would make $5 of profit at most.

Speaker A:

That's pretty good.

Speaker B:

So you're spending $45 in inventory and retailing it for $50 because there would.

Speaker C:

Be prices on it.

Speaker A:

It was pre priced.

Speaker B:

Pre priced?

Speaker C:

Yeah, it was pre priced, usually.

Speaker B:

And so out of the goodness of their heart, they allowed you to make $5 on a bag of dog food, which cost you $45.

Speaker C:

Yes. And then what else happens is that so you do that. Then when we had there was a problem because one of the dog food companies got sold to another, to Mars we're not going to say their name.

Speaker A:

The candy company.

Speaker B:

The candy company. Mars Candy? Yeah.

Speaker C:

Mars dog food, actually. Mars the candy company. They actually own, like, I want to say, two or three different dog food companies, maybe four.

Speaker B:

That explains when my own Henry Bar sucks. Now.

Speaker C:

They don't put the chocolate in the dog food, of course, but a lot of the waste, the byproduct from your different foods gets put in the dog food as a filler, and it's a cheap filler, and that's how they make more money. That's not saying that they didn't have a few brands of really good, high quality dog food, but usually you could tell once they bought a brand, the brand went downhill pretty quickly unless it was like their chosen special brand.

Speaker B:

We saw that a lot, where they come up with a quality product and they drive it right into the ground.

Speaker C:

And then they go and they focus. So the problem with dog food is that pet stores build up these dog food brands and then they go, well, we want to go mass because they think that they'll be able to do much better if they go mass market to petco petsmart. Your stores like lnm, Fleet Supply, your different like, menards, that type of thing.

Speaker B:

Right. They can go rather than deal with private pet stores and they go into a mass market and have a heck of a lot more customers.

Speaker A:

So let's talk about the economics of food. Right. Someone makes like, let's pick on tyson because they've always been picked on for beating up chickens. So if tyson makes chicken nuggets and they put them in a bag, put them in the freezer section and you have chicken nuggets for your kids that eventually they have to keep a quality standard, not only for the regulatory health reasons, which there's some in the dog food as well, but for flavor. If you have a gross chicken nugget, your kid's going to complain to you and you're no longer buying tyson. If your dog is eating crap food, it's your dog. I mean, he's either going to eat it or you're not going to feed him. And he'll just wait for the bowl. He can't tell you it tastes like crap and you pick out something different. So when they have this brand that works, dogs eat it. They're trying to find ways to cut the corners, cut the costs, and maybe they'll burn more corn into it. Maybe they'll put other ingredients that aren't protein or find ways just to complete chicken feathers. Yeah. Lower the quantity, lower the cost of creation without having to do anything drastic.

Speaker B:

Right. So Adam would have 200 bags of dog food in a store and have about what, how much? $8,000 tied up in inventory?

Speaker C:

Oh, it was more well, let's see when I had it, because I'd get in eight or nine pallets, so I'd have sometimes $10,000 worth of dog food tied up.

Speaker B:

And out of that $10,000, you'd probably make, what, $100 at most? Yeah, of course I'm selling a fish. I'm going, Adam, you're much better off buying a pair of guppies for a buck 25 and selling it for 399, because you're making about the same amount of money. You don't have any money tied up. And so that's just a great learning curve there. Where $5 out of $50, that's not much. It's kind of hard to keep the lights on.

Speaker A:

And also take this into, like, fish food. If you're trying to sell that's one thing where you buy a bunch and you have low margins, don't get such quantity in. But then also, if you get large quantity, you have to worry about expiration dates. And I'm assuming that if you're only making that much money, a couple bags, all your profits gone that you didn't sell, they expired. The same goes for fish food. I see so many people, even individuals such as, like myself, that don't have a big fish store, that just have their own personal collection, and they want to buy food in bulk. You got to make sure that when you buy food, you're looking at the expiration date. And some of these don't even have expiration dates, so you need to write down your own when it comes in. You taught me this, Jimmy. Grab a marker, write on your food. That when you got it in, and after a year, pitch it.

Speaker B:

Yeah, I happened to see that the other day, too. Again, we've talked about this. I was watching somebody, I can't remember what his name, really cool YouTube guy, had put on his YouTube channel things that he likes to do. At the first of the year, he goes through all his fish food, and if it's nine months to a year old, he goes, nutritional value has gone away in this stuff. It's just kind of dissolved. So just your best thing to do is just pitch it and start over. So take a magic marker right on your food, right on your dog food, and make sure that that stuff gets fed up before the expiration date, because food values will go down. Sure, the dog food won't go rotten, most likely, but the nutritional value and that sort of thing is going to go in the crapper.

Speaker C:

It's just bad.

Speaker B:

But I mean, what a great way to tie up all your money into one thing? Yeah, you got $10,000 in dog food, but you sell it all and you make a few hundred. Bucks. And you can make that off of one tank of feeder goldfish, you know, if you do it right.

Speaker C:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

So one of the things, like we talk about fish compatibility, my catfish ate my arguana. There's a lot of other interesting types of compatibility that you think common sense would help you describe. So I wanted to purchase blind cave tetris. This was years ago, early in my aquarium experience. I thought it was the coolest thing. What there's? Blind fish. So for those that don't know, caves in Mexico that are freshwater caves, have a species of tetra that have gone completely blind and are opaque pink and have no color. They are living in caves completely devoid of light and have other enhanced senses instead. So this is a breed called blind cave tetris. No eyeballs whatsoever. They have eye sockets where there used to be eyes. So they literally look like some cool, pink, opaque skeleton fish. Super, super cool. Lost my mind like a fish nerd. I am like, I got to have them. So I did my homework, tried to see compatibility. No one talked about compatibility that I could find, and I didn't have immense access to the website. I looked through fish books. They talked about them. Never talked about anything aggression. So I thought, well, I have these really high end rare guppies, right? Long giant tails. Shouldn't be a problem.

Speaker B:

Beginning to see a pattern.

Speaker A:

Here what's going to happen. You put the blind cave tetris in. They're blind. They're not going to chase a fish. No, they're blind. So I got myself a nice big school of blind cave tetris. I quarantine them in a separate tank like a good boy, because I've learned this by now on other mistakes. Quarantine them. They're eating perfectly. And I didn't put two and two together. When I put flake food on the top of the tank, they immediately like, you put chum in, the water went off, right? And they swam in all different directions. But eventually the smell of the food brought them like a homing beacon directly to it. They ate, chomped it down like piranhas. It was beautiful. I'm like, oh, awesome. These fish are going to do great. They're healthy, they're eating, they're quarantined. And I put them in my tank. I put them in my tank and sat there and watched. It's a big tank, lot of plastic weeds, a lot of stuff in the way. And I watched the acclimate. They acclimated just fine. They left everything alone. Everything was good until that evening. I went back in the tank. I put food in the top, and before the scent could hit their nose, they just had a hint of it. They started going all directions, and they got the vibrations from the guppy's tails. They could sense that because they have heightened sense of awareness, remember? So they're feeling the vibrations in the tank. And instead of homing in on the flake because that takes a minute for them to find because they have to home in on the scent. They instead went for the closest thing that made vibrations in the tank and ripped apart every fin that I had in any other fish. And of course, all I had in the tank was long fin fish. So it was a bloodbath. And do you think for a minute, me grabbing a net and trying to scoop these things, throwing them back into the quarantine tank would stop them? No, they're blind. They don't see me. They're not going to see me trying to scoop in the tank going left, right, no, stop eating them. They're not stopping for nothing, man. They're going for them. And by the time I got the school of tetras out, every guppy was obliterated.

Speaker B:

Can you imagine how much damage they would have done if they had Seeing Eye dogfish?

Speaker A:

What?

Speaker B:

Think about it.

Speaker A:

Seeing eye dogfish.

Speaker B:

They're blind, I guess. So they had Seeing Eye dogfish. They could even do more damage.

Speaker A:

Just have like a Ray Charles fish looking there, like helping another fish around, some weird bitter cape of fish.

Speaker B:

It was like a stevie Wonder thing.

Speaker C:

Now, see, wait a minute here. I thought that you knew that blind cave fish, they sense things with their lateral.

Speaker A:

I do now that before I didn't have a lot on the internet. Young and dumb talked about this was years ago.

Speaker B:

Young and dumb, it's in books.

Speaker A:

I was hell, I was 14.

Speaker B:

Young and dumb.

Speaker A:

I was poor, man. All the books I had was what the stuff my grandma gave me. And they were all written in the 40s.

Speaker B:

Poor, young and dumb.

Speaker C:

Oh, I suppose they really didn't have them in the 40s, did they?

Speaker A:

They knew they existed, they had them topic, but they didn't have people's experiences written in the book. And all I was going off, it was my grandmother's note saying, yeah, this was a good one, or her problems that she wrote in the book with her pen. You still got the book. I should have went back in there with pencil and just wrote in, don't get these fish. Now. Since then I've had blind cave catchers in many scenarios, and they only hit long fin fish. If you have them with other short fin fish, they're not a problem. But for some reason, the fluttering in the water when you feed them is enough to make them think it's a bug or something and they'll just rip them to shred. So if you have a long thin Beta, if you have some skirt angels, or if you have some long fin guppies gone. So I had a bunch of guppies just laying around the tanks, stubs, no fins, just stubs, stubs. And I had to watch these guppies die and suffer with stubs. I think I had two guppies out of the whole tank that lived.

Speaker B:

So I think we should name this podcast things that we've killed.

Speaker A:

Things that we've killed.

Speaker B:

Things that we've killed.

Speaker A:

This whole episode here is just proof that we're comfortable. Maybe not comfortable. We will talk about our mistakes. So many fish tubers broadcasters out there, content creators, they're afraid to talk about their mistakes because it makes them look bad or people look down on them. We're all human. We all make mistakes. And we're all in this practice together. No one has this lockdown. I'm telling you, there's only a small handful of people in the world that have their one species. They're good at lockdown. Everybody learns. And every day they learn. We have steve ricky's been on this for 40 plus years for the angels. That's his breed. He's still learning every day.

Speaker B:

Yeah. And like I've told you once, I've told you 100 times on his podcast, paul norton, tapa Bay Fisheries, gave me the best advice ever. He says it's so much easier to learn by other people's mistakes. It's a lot cheaper. And so to get somebody else's input in something is so great. I mean, I can't even explain it to you enough how much it is to listen to other people. Don't really need to jump in with both feet without getting all the information. Gather the information first, think about it overnight, plan it, then again, talk to some more people. I'm going to tell you a quick story about something that Ty and I were doing. We had ty on ty tall truth, my buddy from United Aquarium.

Speaker A:

He was in the last episode. Episode 21.

Speaker B:

Episode 21. He also is the right hand man for Mr. Sean kramer, who had the 2000 gallon reef tank.

Speaker A:

Episode 20.

Speaker B:

Yes. And anyway, here's something Ty and I were doing. At one time, his wife and him owned a pet store above me. I was in a basement with my wholesale operation, had about 5600 tanks down there. They were upstairs above me with a wholesale retail. And one day, we decided that we were going to build a new system and we were going to put a sump in for about 90 tanks. So this is now a building that we are renting. We don't own this building. He's renting it, I'm renting it. And we are about to ask for.

Speaker A:

Forgiveness instead of permission.

Speaker B:

Exactly. We're, we're, we're thinking we're going to put all these tanks together. We had literally, it was 110 gallon tanks all plumbed together, and we wanted to put this big sump in. And only at this point, only at this point, after we've got all the tanks tied together, have we discovered that they're too low for the sump. And how are we going to put a sump here? Because we have these things on the floor, and we are literally, literally sitting there scratching our heads, talking about getting a jack hammer. We've actually got sledgehammers. And we're going to start punching a hole in the floor of the basement because we thought the only way we're going to do this, we're going to put the sump, we're going to dig it into the lower trench. And I'm not kidding you, we are literally moments away from cracking cement and probably getting ourselves kicked out of there. My 16 year old son at the time comes over and goes, what are you guys doing? And we explain to him, well, we're going to knock a hole in the floor about 3ft, and we're going to put the sump down down there. And he goes, Won't that be hard to work on the sump if it's down there? And won't it be cold in the ground?

Speaker A:

And we're a 16 year old son's, like, yeah, you guys are real dim right now, right?

Speaker B:

Anyway, we go, well, yeah, we're going to do this. We're men. We're going to take sledgehammers and break stuff. And he goes, Explain to me how this works. And so we're going, Aaron, you don't understand.

Speaker A:

It's going to be great.

Speaker B:

It's going to be excellent. And so anyway, he goes, no, explain this to me, dad. Well, okay, we need all the water to go into the sump so we can circulate it back up. And he looks at us and goes, well, why don't you guys just put cement blocks underneath the racks of the tank and elevate them up in the air, since you've got three foot of head space up above you? We're going, what? And so we literally, for $8, drove out to menards, bought eight cement blocks, put them underneath the racks. We elevated the racks ten inches, and.

Speaker A:

The light bulb went off.

Speaker B:

And the light bulb went off, and we were able to put our sump on the floor, and we had it done in literally like, 3 hours.

Speaker A:

So it wasn't a mistake. It was a mistake that you were saved from.

Speaker B:

It was a mistake that almost happened.

Speaker A:

So when a person doesn't know fish that's 16 years old, so get other.

Speaker B:

People'S perspectives on stuff. Don't think just because your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, that they don't know what you're doing. I mean, if you're producing a system, you're making the system. Get other people's advice on it. Don't jump into it head first, because it's just going to end up costing you money and time.

Speaker A:

So you got to put on your suspenders and you got to measure twice, cut once.

Speaker B:

That's right. This is coming from the guy that I called stubs because you cut your fingers off last week.

Speaker A:

I measured once and I cut twice.

Speaker B:

Cut twice.

Speaker A:

Full fingers, both fingers. Both fingers, down to the bone.

Speaker B:

Professor dumas.

Speaker A:

Oh, excuse me. That's Dr. dumas.

Speaker B:

Dr. dumbass.

Speaker A:

All right, Adam, what you got?

Speaker B:

Yeah, go ahead, professor pecker Wood oh.

Speaker A:

This is getting an explicit tag.

Speaker B:

I guess it has to.

Speaker A:

What you got, Adam?

Speaker C:

Well, I'm trying to think here.

Speaker A:

I got one.

Speaker B:

You know what he's trying to think right here. We're going to put the theme from jeopardy. You're so slow.

Speaker A:

Come on, man.

Speaker C:

Well, I'm just trying to think of all the different things that I've done that are fish related, that are I'm.

Speaker A:

Be telling you I'm going next. Here's what's going to happen. You can get next round. So I'm going to tell you a story. I was proud of this. So half of this is pride. Others learning curve. I bought a small house, my first house, right. I moved into perram, Minnesota. My first house. I was so proud. I was 21. Jimmy bought my first house at 21. Yes. Bought my collar. So I bought a cheap house. Really wasn't cheap for iras. So like 102,000, you know, it was really small. It's like 44 foot wide lot. I didn't really even have to mow. I basically got out my, you know, shears that I had in the house and just clipped my lawn like a, like sheep would.

Speaker B:

Oh, you're talking about your first house.

Speaker A:

My first house, right?

Speaker B:

Oh yeah.

Speaker A:

That thing was 1400 sqft. It was wonderful. Starter home. I love it to death. And the back again, this is like redneck suburb, Minnesota, right? So 44 foot wide. That means I had just enough of the house and a very, very narrow driveway with the garage in the back behind the house because it was not wide enough to have a house and garage in the same width. So you drive down this very narrow driveway all the way behind my house to get into the garage. So I had two flower beds sitting next to this very small little patio deck I had. I saw the flower bed and it looked like it was cut into the cement. There was the driveway. There was a small sidewalk going to my deck. And then the flower bed went underneath the deck to where the old stairs were against the foundation of the home. So I decided, hey, that's a nice big flower bed. I hate dealing with weeds, plants and crap. Why don't I just dig that up and put a pond in? Light bulbs went off. I started doing design work, measure twice, cut once.

Speaker B:

He spent about a half an hour deciding this, by the way.

Speaker A:

Half an hour. But I did a ton of work preparing. So I got it all figured out. I'm going to dig 3ft down, I'm going to do it right where I'm at. And the one thing I screwed up on called gopher state. Doesn't matter if it's your flower bed next to your house. In fact, that's probably the worst place. The main line for my electricity happened to be right there. I was shoveling because I shoveled all this by hand with a buddy. I was shoveling and we're getting like 2ft down, just about 2ft down, a little hair close to it. And just as I'm just about to put the shovel down, it's like, hey, I wonder where the electrical line is at. And as I'm motioning down, I froze. I look down, I move my foot. There's the main line of the house I was just about to kill myself with.

Speaker B:

That would have been fun.

Speaker A:

It's live. The cord was right there, so I only did two and a half feet. And then what I did is I had electrical insulation put around the line. I put a tarp over it so that if the pond ever leaked, it was safe to get on it because it rains on the electrical line anyway. So I was all safe. Well, in kosher, but I was like, one shovel strike away from being a dead man.

Speaker B:

Are you trying to convince me, or are you trying to convince your insurance company that you're safe?

Speaker A:

They don't even know. I put a pond in my backyard. The insurance guy is like, oh, we're here to assess your house. And I'm like, Get off my property in the back of my house. He couldn't see it from the front, so yeah, it was pretty great.

Speaker C:

Anyways, you know what you needed? A titanium grounding probe, right?

Speaker A:

So lesson one, go for state anytime you use a shovel, no matter where it's at. Number two, I finally got this pond in, and it was beautiful. I laid a liner in. I had shelving for plants in the water. I had coin it. I love this pond to death. It was great. And I had a method to do water changes. I'm in a city. City doesn't know I have the pond. I don't know if there's a city ordinance against water features. So what I do is I just grab a garden hose and deattach my pump and plug it into the garden hose and just pump all my water into the street.

Speaker B:

I don't know if that's legal.

Speaker A:

In the city of perm, they did not care. The police officer stopped by twice because we're right next to we're across the street from a Catholic school. So the police were there at 03:00 chitchatting with him. It's like he saw me do the water. He came over, looked at the fish. No one cares.

Speaker B:

No one cares.

Speaker A:

Not in perm, Minnesota. So I just dump it out the street. It's got to go drain a drain at my house. Same drain.

Speaker B:

Yeah. You're not paying for that, right?

Speaker A:

I'm not paying for that. So I already paid for the water. I'm just going to drain it in the same whole vicinity. So I pump it out to the lawn. So what you do is when you pump it out to anywhere and you're done doing whatever you want, number one, take the hose out of the pond, right? That's step one.

Speaker B:

What happens?

Speaker A:

And two, if you're going to take the hose somewhere, make sure to get the water out. So I left the water in, and I screwed up, and the hose dropped into the pond. So the next morning I had a very small few inches of water left because it automatically, you know, because my pond is higher than the street, automatically siphoned all my water out. And I almost lost all my coin fish. So big mistake. Almost kill fish. But I got real lucky again. Make sure you check your hoses.

Speaker B:

And the highlight was 100% water change they spawned the next day. I wish that was a joke.

Speaker A:

But they did.

Speaker B:

I know that.

Speaker A:

I remember that they did spawn.

Speaker B:

So if you want your fish to spawn, make sure you give them a nice water change.

Speaker A:

Goldfish at least, that's for sure. Who's next? Adam, do you think some in that time?

Speaker C:

Well, I kind of did.

Speaker A:

Well, kind of.

Speaker B:

Tell us what happened, Adam. Do you fall off your stump or what?

Speaker A:

Adam didn't do his homework this week.

Speaker B:

Are you the one tricking this week homework?

Speaker C:

I just didn't do the right one.

Speaker B:

Oh, that's right. We decided it's the last minute to change podcast. That's kind of our fault.

Speaker A:

It is?

Speaker B:

Yes.

Speaker C:

So.

Speaker B:

This one time a band camp no, not the one time band camp.

Speaker A:

They get stuck in the trumpet.

Speaker B:

Yeah, it was a flute.

Speaker A:

And the flute, for instance, it was a tin whistle.

Speaker B:

This is going nowhere, man. No, it's not.

Speaker A:

Are we going to veto you again? So it's going to happen?

Speaker B:

No, I don't have anything. So you keep going.

Speaker A:

I got, I got like two more.

Speaker B:

Do you have two more?

Speaker A:

Should we finish off with that?

Speaker B:

Finished.

Speaker C:

I had one.

Speaker A:

Well, get it out.

Speaker C:

Trying to. So I was just starting with fish and I didn't do a lot of research because this was the early ninety s. And his laws didn't matter.

Speaker A:

He was listening to Barbie girl, distracted barbie girl. I'm a Barbie girl.

Speaker B:

Oh, God. It's been tested.

Speaker A:

Will you get your story out, please?

Speaker B:

Steepers.

Speaker C:

Okay. When I first started up again, my fish tanks, because I had fish tanks before, when I was younger, I just started throwing stuff together. I decided that I was going to get convict cichlids and put them in my community tank.

Speaker A:

I know it's going to happen.

Speaker B:

Yeah.

Speaker C:

Adam learned that day.

Speaker A:

And what happened, Adam?

Speaker B:

What did you learn?

Speaker C:

Well, I learned that even if you have convict cichlids, baby convex cichlids the size of, I don't know, a dime, they will kill everything in your tank.

Speaker B:

Isn't that fun?

Speaker C:

Yeah. Especially when you don't research anything and you try to put guppies and you think that you're going to have this nice, wonderful community tank and you're only like twelve or 13 and you throw stuff in the tank.

Speaker A:

What else did you learn about the convicts? iclude.

Speaker C:

Adam should have listened to the fish guy, Jim.

Speaker B:

And they breed like rabbits.

Speaker C:

They breed like rabbits and kill everything.

Speaker A:

Pickles. Mr. pickles learn this lesson as well.

Speaker B:

We haven't heard from Mr. pickles for Royal.

Speaker A:

Mr. pickles is living life. He's a busy man. He's a dill on a mission. But he decided that he's going to get himself some convict sicklets dill on a mission. Immediately, we started making rabbit jokes in discord. So come to find out, he got his convict circlips in. He did his homework. He didn't put them with other fish.

Speaker B:

Good boy.

Speaker A:

But he didn't do enough homework. He's like, well, what are you guys talking about? Well, apparently within the first 60 minutes, they already built an essence that are breeding right in front of him. 60 minutes. poof. There it was. And I'm like, oh, new record. I'm like, no, normally they do it under 30. Do a water change something.

Speaker B:

Yeah, quit quit staring at them. They'll do it faster now.

Speaker A:

If you want, like, one of the most rewarding, fun fish but have no idea how much they'll breed, get a convex cigarette. They they're a beautiful pattern. And they also have pink convicts, right?

Speaker B:

And they're fun, and they're great parents.

Speaker A:

If you feel like you can never breed a fish and not even a guppy convict, signs are for you.

Speaker B:

Yeah. Get yourself a Cool Whip bowl and fill it half full of dirt and the other half full of rocks and maybe put a teaspoon of water in.

Speaker A:

You need to do that. They'll do it in a bare Cool Whip bowl.

Speaker B:

I know. That's insane.

Speaker A:

Like, if they're out in some ditch somewhere and there's nothing there but a small puddle, they'll find a way.

Speaker B:

Yeah, they're great little fish. You're going to find out that it's very hard to get a pet store to take your 40 or 50 little convict cichlids because first of all, not a big call for them. I mean, there is some, but no.

Speaker C:

You know what you do with them? They make excellent Oscar food.

Speaker A:

Speaking of which, we decided to look up. What do you do with your cichlids? And what was the top form post that we found? Well, if you put a little butter and roll them in a nice bread batter, wow, you don't taste that bad.

Speaker B:

You people on discord, you need to get a life, I tell you.

Speaker A:

So if you guys like to join the fun on discord, again, according to Guys podcast.com, bottom of the website, there's a link. discord is an easy to use chat platform that we help each other with, even has voice options. That's actually where we record our podcasts on. Come join us. We are well over 100 users that are active in this community.

Speaker B:

Very active.

Speaker A:

Today alone, we had five, six members join. Get in here. It's a party continually, and we continue to make fun of Jimmy. Jimmy has unknown nicknames. He's called Arnold.

Speaker B:

And I thought it was because I was Arnold, a pig from Green Acres.

Speaker A:

Arnold schwarzenegger. Apparently they like your deep voice.

Speaker B:

It's not a tumor. I don't know what that's from kindergarten copy. What?

Speaker A:

I'm sorry. I only watch the good ones. Like turn it later.

Speaker B:

Was the good one kindergarten Cop?

Speaker A:

Commando, stuff like that?

Speaker B:

Yeah, commando.

Speaker C:

Well, hey, before I forget, why wouldn't you go with, like, crebenzas? Crebenzas are probably easier to breed or just as easy as convicts. And then they'll actually sell.

Speaker B:

Yeah, cremezas sell pretty well.

Speaker A:

I mean, they breed really well, but nothing comes close to breeding as prolific as a convict cyclist.

Speaker C:

No, you're right.

Speaker A:

Nothing.

Speaker B:

So, yeah.

Speaker A:

Do you have one more story, Jimmy?

Speaker B:

I don't have any more stories.

Speaker A:

Okay. I'm going to finish up with mine, then.

Speaker B:

I've not made any mistakes in my life. Unless you want to talk about my first marriage.

Speaker A:

I got two last ones, then.

Speaker B:

Did you know the name the cold front that's coming through here in Minnesota is 20 below? It's supposed to be around the 30 below. They named the cold front after my first wife because you know how they're naming, like, all the storms and stuff? Now they're naming cold fronts. I named this next one after my wife because it's cold.

Speaker A:

You seem so fond of her, and you taught I do. And now you give her a shout out.

Speaker B:

I'm giving her a shout out because this cold front I'm naming after her, it's going to be Cold Front gail because it's cold, it's bitter and it's in your face.

Speaker A:

So I have a question. When you're out blowing my driveway.

Speaker B:

Are.

Speaker A:

You going to think of her? Is that what was going to go.

Speaker B:

On when I was outside?

Speaker A:

This is all you, gail.

Speaker B:

When I was outside, snowball and the whole thing, I was thinking about my first it's my first marriage. Yeah.

Speaker A:

Okay, good.

Speaker B:

Bitter.

Speaker A:

So I have a bony pig with you, but we're going to go to something else.

Speaker B:

Go ahead. I got nothing.

Speaker A:

I had a customer yes. That came to me and said, hey, robs, these are some sweet fish. I want them. Okay. Have you researched them? Yeah, they're completely compatible with my tank. I want some hatchet fish, marble hatchet fish. I want these keep making you get them in. Yes, but you need to understand there's some no, I already did the research. I already did the research and they keep cutting me off in the sentence. I'm like, Fine, I'm not going to say a word. And I just got their fish. They decided to put these in with no lid at all. So I gave them the bag of float it. I was chitchatting with them. They crack over them like, you really need I got this. And they cut me off again.

Speaker B:

All right, you've been cut off before?

Speaker A:

I just sat around. They released the fish, and while they released it, they all jumped out in one forming school onto the living room floor.

Speaker B:

Whoa.

Speaker C:

I've never had that happen. I mean, I've had them jump, but not all out at the same damn oh, yes.

Speaker A:

They had some other fish, spook them in the tank when he just released them, and they just shot out like they're a flying fish. And they literally flew like a good 5ft out up in the air and let's say 7ft away from the aquarium. It was incredible. They were like Free willy.

Speaker B:

Yeah, Free willy.

Speaker A:

So more species profile. Do your homework. Hatchet fish need every square inch of the lid taped, covered in some form of way, otherwise we'll just suddenly not see them anymore. And they'll be little chips on your floor.

Speaker B:

Sword tails are another big jumper. Big jumper. Sword tails. When I was down to Florida, we went through a greenhouse, and there was one maybe 2300 gallon circular plastic tanks that were there, and they were covered with a tarp. Only two that were covered by a tarp. I said to Paul as we walking through, I said, Why do you keep the tarp on there? And he goes over and he goes with his fingers on the side of the tank, and it sounded like jiffy popcorn popping, hitting the top. It was full of sword tails. And he actually kept that one down about 2ft from the top. This 300 gallon tank, 2ft from the top, and these things would still jump out. So he had a tarp on there to keep them from jumping out. Because these fish are raised in ponds, and every time they're being chased by either a bird or a turtle, they jump to safety. They can jump out of the water and get ahead of whatever's chasing them. And it was just amazing when he just tapped the side of this pond, you hear just hitting the top of the tarps and stuff. So, yeah, sore tail is another big jumper. Make sure that that lids on tight and even back there where the heater is. How many times have you had that area where it's just two, three inches square and they somehow get out that door?

Speaker A:

It happens. The last one is a bone to pick with you, Jimmy.

Speaker B:

Yes.

Speaker A:

Pick away on our Tips, Tricks, and hacks episode. You mentioned about building your own sponge filter.

Speaker B:

Yes.

Speaker A:

And specifically cutting it out of your old grandpa's cadillac seats.

Speaker B:

That's what you said.

Speaker A:

Right. So you make these filters, and there's a complete square to recap. They are a one by one by one tile, right. From bathroom tile?

Speaker B:

They are.

Speaker A:

You put a square sponge on top of it, glued.

Speaker B:

They're a four inch tile, quarter inch.

Speaker A:

Quarter inch. Okay.

Speaker B:

Four inch square tile, quarter inch.

Speaker A:

There's a hole in the center. You put a pvc pipe that's cut. So you put your airline tubing in the pvc pipe, and that's how it sponge filtered. Correct. I had one of these for me, that was the greatest thing ever. Like a sponge filter you can make for $0.50.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker A:

How great. So in my warehouse, we were just setting up, we got a 300 gallon. VAT, one of a few, and I decided, well, I'm going to start with a sponge filter to get this thing cycled. So I grabbed the sponge filter that I've purchased from you and thought it was a great thing because I wanted it to have the design to build my own.

Speaker B:

It is a great thing.

Speaker A:

I put it in the tank thinking, oh, it's got a tile on it. It's weighted. That is not the case. The sponge filter decided to float its happy way to the top. 20 minutes or so after I leave, they squirt. And not only squirt, just the pvc pipe was aimed at an angle, squirt out, and flooded the entire warehouse.

Speaker B:

Was that great?

Speaker A:

It was so much fun. The next day, I get a call, I'm like, hey, man, there's water leaking outside of your warehouse. I'm like, what are you talking about? I jumped in the car, drove 90 through town just to get to the warehouse, jump in, everything's flooded. But thank goodness there's a floor drain. So most of the damage was kept inside. But still, I think the 300 gallon VAT was missing easy 100 gallons, yeah, all over the floor by that time.

Speaker B:

It's amazing how much a little air will drive water through a sponge. But, yeah, when you start to sponge filters, you definitely want to just put them in the tank for up to a week and keep squishing them down, don't even put air in them. And that's what I do when I make them. I'll spend probably a week getting them going. And I have one tank where I probably have, you know, 20 sponge filters going at all times. And so when you decide to start up a new tank, you already have a sponge filter that's already seeded, as they call it, with bacteria, and you just pop it in there and you're good to go. I did find out one thing on my sponge filter the other day, Rob, that I didn't tell you about. So one of my friends, Kim, who is an architect over in West fargo, North Dakota, shout out, shout out to Kim Stokes. Kim gives me a whole bunch of sore tails and patties, and he gave me a whole bunch of cooly loaches because they bred in his tank. And I went, Cool. I like, cooly loaches. So I took him home, kind of.

Speaker A:

I need to buy some cooley loaches.

Speaker B:

Yeah, how do you do that? How did he breed them?

Speaker C:

Yeah, because I did it, too. But I want to hear how he did.

Speaker A:

Well, he put on jim's Breeding playlist. Now, it's actually a publicized list on spotify. You can go to our discord to find the link. We are sharing it, and it has all of jim's favorite breeding.

Speaker B:

Yeah, he put on some super sexy music, but he had heavily planted tank with sand in it, and they did their jiggly jiggly in that tank, and he had all kinds of babies out there. And he goes, yeah, I don't know how or where they breed. He goes, but I got lots of them. So the other day I went over and the tank, right, he gave me a bunch of platties and swords and guppies, whole bunch of plants and these cooley loaches. And I threw them all in the same tank. And I thought, you know, later on I'm going to go through them and separate them and whatnot. And I had one sponge filter in there that the tube, the siphon tube had popped out of. So it's just a sponge filter sitting in there. It was all the the tank looked pretty dirty. So I grabbed the sponge filter, I went into my sink, and I popped out that sponge filter and just gave a little squirt to clean it out. I had about 25, 30 cooley loaches came out of the sponge filter, came shooting out into the sink, and I had all I could do to catch them all because they were trying to wiggle their way down to the sink. But I'm not kidding you. That little hole, that sponge filter is the size, probably of a pencil and four inches deep. And there's 25 or 30 cooly loaches in there, just jammed in there. That's where they were hiding. So, yeah, these things you think that you buy cooley loach, you put it in your tank, good luck, you're never going to see it again. Basically, poof poof, they're going until you.

Speaker A:

Clean your sponge filter.

Speaker B:

That's right.

Speaker A:

So anything else that we think we found? I think we got a good show going here.

Speaker B:

I think the whole thing is you just want to learn from other people's mistakes. It's a lot cheaper. It's a lot easier. There's a lot less crying in rob's house now.

Speaker C:

There is no, they're still crying.

Speaker A:

They're still crying.

Speaker B:

He's still crying about his how much was that fish?

Speaker A:

Bite me.

Speaker B:

Bite you?

Speaker A:

It was this many.

Speaker B:

Wow. I just got the double fingers, people. I wish you were here to see this, but which fingers were they? Yeah, they were the middle fingers.

Speaker A:

Come on now. All right, guys. Well, thanks again for listening to the podcast. Please subscribe to this by finding your favorite platform. We're on itunes, spotify, all of them. subscribing helps automatically download the podcast, helps our listens, tell a friend. And if you want to help, support the podcast so we can do more than one episode a week. You can go down to our tip jar. It's on the bottom of the show notes of the episode. We have one time donation or month to month donation, and support our sponsors. They support us.

Speaker B:

And please be good to your fellow fish keepers. Go out there, help people. Give them advice. Go on discord talk. I mean, there's a lot of crazy talk that goes on discord, but there's a lot of good things that happen. And if you can, help your fellow fish keeper, make them successful. And it makes us all successful. And that's the only reason we're here, is we want everybody to be successful in doing this.

Speaker A:

It's a super rewarding hobby. It's easy to get to discourage after you lose that first fish. My dad even has a Beta, and he lost one, and I'm done it's. Not for me. Well, no, it just happens. Here's what you do to fix it for next time. And if you have questions, call me. And now he loves his Beta. Talks to it every day. Who talks to a fish? My dad. And it's just a rewarding hobby. We all have to make mistakes, and that's part of the learning gap.

Speaker B:

But it's all good. And go on discord. Be kind to each other.

Speaker A:

Mr. pickle will help you out. He'll tell you how to get those plato's breeding right.

Speaker B:

I see. There's people that make fun of me from time to time. And I have thick skin, so that's fine. I will punch you all in the throat.

Speaker A:

Hashtag Diggery Do is trending over don't, and I hate you for it.

Speaker B:

Really? People want to hear the diggery do.

Speaker A:

We need more diggery.

Speaker B:

Do. We do. The other thing is, since my wife and I now own five guitars, I think I'm going to start guitar. I know two chords already.

Speaker A:

Two strings, you mean?

Speaker B:

No, two chords.

Speaker A:

Okay, good.

Speaker B:

I don't know how to tune the guitar yet, but I'm thinking maybe I'll get my son to help me. We'll come on here and we'll do some dueling banjo type stuff with the guitars.

Speaker A:

Heaven help us, Lord. All right, guys, let's kick that out. Joe.

Speaker C:

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

Speaker A:

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

Speaker B:

Can I listen to it in my tree house?

Speaker A:

In your tree house, in your fish room. Even alone at work.

Speaker B:

What about it? My man cave.

Speaker A:

Especially your man cave.

Speaker B:

Yeah.

Speaker A:

Only if adam's. There no with feeder guppy.

Speaker C:

No, they're an lurks.

Speaker B:

You imagine loving Frank? fucking mother Frank.

Speaker A:

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

Episode Notes

Shop shrimp at https://joesshrimpshack.com/ with promo code: "AQUARIUMGUYS" for 10% off your order!

We talk about Jim's Ex-wife, find out why Adam electrocutes himself, and talk about our mistakes while going over what we learned from them!

Please call us for questions at 218-214-9241 For questions for the show please email us at aquariumguyspodcast@gmail.com .

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Find out more at http://www.aquariumguyspodcast.com