#63 – Bad Scaping Ideas

FEAT. TCT COMMUNITY

3 years ago
Transcript
Speaker A:

So I sit down on my computer, my podcast studio, to record the ad for Joe Shrimshack.com like I do every week. And next to me right in the studio is a 75 gallon aquarium with a pair of siamese algae eaters. And they're not known to breed in captivity, but here they are breeding. So I unfortunately have a deadline of getting this advertisement out, but I must not interrupt what's going on.

Speaker B:

The magic in my tank.

Speaker A:

So please go to Joe shrimp shack.com, use promo code Aquarium Guys at checkout for 15% off your ad and put in the notes when you purchase anything in the store for 15% off that.

Speaker B:

SAE or siamese algae eaters do breed in captivity.

Speaker A:

Joe Shrimpshack.com. I hope it gets you in the mood. One last thing before I let you go. Don't forget that we have the last week of J Four and flowerhorns competition left running. Go to the link on the website, sign up for your free champion flowerhorn or going to pick someone out of the pool. And also reflower and cobalt aquatics got together and they're doing an aquascaping competition. Certainly go to the link there to sign up for great prizes for reflower and cobalt aquatics products. You can also use promo code Aquarium Guys at J Four, cobalt aquatics and reflower stores for percentages off.

Speaker B:

Certainly go check them out.

Speaker A:

Let's quietly kick that podcast.

Speaker B:

Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolson. Hey, guys, welcome to the podcast. This week, we're in one of those positions where if you're a content creator and you try to do something with a schedule, especially when you have a community that you want to watch things live, you can't keep moving things back. But unfortunately, our guest was unable to join us because his PR guy didn't really get to connect with the CEO who was the guest and tell him that he needed his computer.

Speaker C:

That would be important.

Speaker B:

That's important. So this is part of the day to day doings of a content creator. So Jimmy decided to crack open a couple of extra beers and we decided to reach into our silly cabinets of ideas and die for a podcast. Now we have some friends that we reach out to because again, our community for the Aquarium Guys podcast, we have a discord. That's where our fan page is. It's where you can ask questions, get help. It's a big community. Come join it. Go to aquariumgyspodcast.com. Bottom the website. You can find the link.

Speaker C:

It's also an escort service.

Speaker B:

Yeah, you can escort yourself some fish in the marketplace energy.

Speaker C:

Oh, that wasn't where I was going.

Speaker B:

Damn. So certainly join up. But we have some friends in another discord and they call themselves the Community Tank and they have a lot of fun. It's essentially a bunch of longtime fish keepers trying to help and make a community bonding around fish like any other good community. I have a fondness in my heart for these people because along with fish, they also have a great sense of humor. Sometimes a bit of too much sense of humor. If you guys want to know more, certainly go to the communitytank.com and you'll find they have a podcast they do every once in a while. And it's literally a bunch of fish friends talking about the hobby together. Certainly check it out. But I'll introduce their leader, Oscar. How are you doing, buddy?

Speaker D:

Hey, Rob. Great to be here. Long time listener, first time jest, happy.

Speaker B:

To have you on, man.

Speaker C:

This is the first time with us. Oh, no, we'll go gentle.

Speaker B:

Don't worry. I heard there's tct lube that you can use.

Speaker C:

Here you go.

Speaker D:

We'll send a bottle to your studio. compliments of guests.

Speaker B:

Compliments of the guys.

Speaker D:

I brought with me, my good mate May. May works with the CIA. He does science and stuff. He's a great dude. Used to work at a fish store. Ask him about a dwarf shrimp. May's Spiritual is the world famous owner of the trash tope. It's a tank with trash in it. I don't know what else you could want. Then underscore used to work at a fish or he does work at a fish store. He does crazy swamp topes and weird plant set ups. And then there's me.

Speaker B:

So if I could get just voice recognition. Spiritual, thanks for coming.

Speaker E:

Thank you for having me.

Speaker B:

May, thanks again for joining the debauchery, sir.

Speaker F:

I appreciate the opportunity.

Speaker B:

Mr. underscore, it's always a pleasure.

Speaker G:

Good to be here.

Speaker B:

I almost lost him on that one, but he's here, I swear it. What we wanted to talk about this week is funny. What we call topes. Now, that word is based off of biotope. biotope is a recreation of some sort of environment that normally means a natural environment, but we won't want to talk about is some funny decor. Now, us, as long term hobbyists, we try to get the fundamentals down to new people, so this isn't necessarily for the new listeners. Although you're going to hear some hilarious stories on silly things we've done to our aquarium that you should or should not do. So take none of this episode's advice to heart besides the first section, which we're going to answer your questions like we do every week. Jimmy cool.

Speaker C:

I'm excited. I've got news. Do you have news?

Speaker B:

Well, first, where are you? I'm your host, Rob souls.

Speaker C:

I'm Jim colby.

Speaker H:

And I'm Adam Ellis.

Speaker F:

Shire.

Speaker C:

You got jello in your underwear again. What's the damn funny over there?

Speaker H:

I'm listed into you.

Speaker C:

Oh, God.

Speaker B:

Jello in the underwear.

Speaker C:

Oh, have you ever done that? I suggest that you warm it up a little bit before you put it in your underwear. But I'd like to put jello in my underwear when I go to work. It just makes things so much more fun at work.

Speaker B:

I just feel like that brings you a lot closer to your favorite comedian, bill cosby.

Speaker C:

We're not going to go there.

Speaker H:

Jim, your roofies.

Speaker B:

Jim'S talking about jello.

Speaker H:

Unless you roofied the jello, robs, you.

Speaker C:

Could roof the jello.

Speaker B:

You really never know. This week, we got a couple of hard questions.

Speaker C:

Can we forward them to somebody who might know that?

Speaker B:

Honestly, though, a couple of these are detailed, and this is a question that we've been trying to dodge the bullet on, but honestly, we're the aquarium guys, and we don't let any questions slip our way of controversy.

Speaker C:

So let me read it. Why are you two jerks so fat?

Speaker B:

All right, so that one, it was well, for this gentleman's identity, we're going to call him just by his first name, andre. But if you would like would you like to read this one, jimmy? Normally I read them.

Speaker C:

Is it andre the giant?

Speaker B:

Andre the good looking man?

Speaker C:

Oh, maybe he goes, hey, guys, first of all, thanks for the show. As a new reefer, I've been learning a lot from all of you. So, unfortunately, one month ago, I had an odinium. What?

Speaker B:

What is that?

Speaker C:

Odinian.

Speaker B:

I had to look it up. It's a parasite for marine tanks.

Speaker C:

I had a parasite for marine tanks called odium red on my nano reef tank that killed five of my six fishes. I'm new to the hobby, so when I started treating my fish with copper, then my lfs went, it was too late to save them. Went, went, went. I don't know.

Speaker B:

Wait, wait.

Speaker H:

Why did the his local fish store gave him copper for a nano reef? That guy's a fluke, an idiot fluke. Not the the owner of the store.

Speaker B:

Well, I don't know if it was a reef. We don't know the circumstances. It could have been a new guy. We don't know. But let's just give the benefit of the doubt here.

Speaker C:

It's a nano reef tank. I did everything right since buying a hospital tank to the medication, and I was heartbroken. Then I decided I would buy my own medicine so this never happens again, and I can strike as quick as possible when I see a white spot. I was speaking on the phone with a guy from an online fish store in portugal that had a coral that I loved and asked him, hey, do you have any medicine that really effective against odium and parasites? And he said to me, yeah, I got this one ick shield from new life spectrum that's super effective. It's having a big demand nowadays because of the coronavirus, something that has some active principles of the medicine that fights malaria and other viruses. The one that trump and balana, it's the one that trump took to cure himself. So I've been selling it like crazy in the USA. So have you guys heard anything about this? It's true.

Speaker B:

Okay, so to give you more background on this, the odm. I'm not a marine expert by any measure, but I've heard of this.

Speaker C:

But you are meth addict.

Speaker B:

They call it gold dust or pepper dust. In your view as a meth addict? Yeah, you would be, trust me, fattest methods of all time. But anyways, this odium, they call it gold dust or pepper spot it's to my knowledge, and again, I'm not the expert on this, similar to kind of like an IC where you see it develop on the outside of the fish.

Speaker C:

This is for marine fish.

Speaker B:

And again, it's treated the same way as any other parasitic treatments using traditional things like methyl and blue copper, shit like that. Right. So that's why he's saying that this IC shield works so well. Now, I did try to look up the information on this product for New Life Spectrum iq shield powder bath solution that he was putting up. And of course, like any other medication out there with their own proprietary recipe, there's not a whole lot listed that I can confirm as ingredients. However, the medication that they're talking about being this quote unquote medication they're using to treat the coronavirus, and that was talked about by Trump and others, is chloroquine. Chloroquine is an immunosuppressive drug used to treat and prevent malaria in third world countries that has quite a bit of effect and mainly used for those purposes, but in the aquarium world is used as an anti parasitic.

Speaker C:

So we do not recommend people using fish medicine. If you have malaria, I would suggest you either go to the doctor or go buy some beer. One of the two.

Speaker H:

I would recommend the doctor.

Speaker B:

The idea with this is in the early stages of culvid when they're trying to test things and they still have no idea what's going on. They were using a mixture of chloroquine, certain antibiotics such as your common Z pack that they treat for sinus infections, and they would try to blast it, hopefully using the immunosuppressive abilities of the drug, to try to treat extreme COVID patients. Now, is this still happening? I'm not a doctor. Contact them. I know that all manufacturers using chloroquine were basically stopped in the United States because they needed to reserve the drug for doctor purposes. Now, as a fish expert, like Jimmy said, never take fish medication. I'm one person that grew up really poor. My mother decided as a child to feed me fish medication and I was lucky that you did enough brain damage.

Speaker C:

And that explains a lot while you're being breastfed as a cow. Right, and the cow kicked me in the head.

Speaker B:

And the cow kicked me in the head.

Speaker C:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

The reason being is not because they use different drugs than other places. veterinarians use some of the same drugs that some humans need to take, but if it's made for veterinarian purposes, it is not quality controlled to near the same thing as a human. So you might be getting bad drugs, dirty drugs, who knows what else, because it's not intended for human consumption.

Speaker C:

The consistency is not there. I mean, you could have a 200 milligram versus a 250 versus a three.

Speaker B:

And easily kill you in some circumstances.

Speaker C:

Correct.

Speaker B:

And remember, maybe it was in the 80s. I'm believing the scandal of how they had to put seals on tylenol bottles. What I think it was in the 80s.

Speaker C:

Yes, I lived through that.

Speaker B:

You should know this better than I.

Speaker C:

I live through that.

Speaker B:

Somebody took on the shelf just at a local pharmacy, they got tylenol. There was no seal, as there is today, on these bottles. It would open it up, someone would put something terrible inside of it, and then they'd sell the tylenol ribrofen to the public. It was essentially a way to put anthrax and terrible shit in bottles.

Speaker C:

It's probably, you know, terrorism in its infancy, and I can't remember exactly what happened. We should look it up. But people would buy tylenol off the shelf in their grocery store. And what this person was doing, they would grab a they'd buy tylenol or grab it off the shelf, take it home, and put in poison.

Speaker B:

So here's the information, and people take.

Speaker C:

It home and die.

Speaker B:

In 1982, tylenol the the how the tylenol murders, they're they're actually have a name for this tylenol murders?

Speaker C:

Oh, yeah. There's a lot of them.

Speaker B:

So the morning of September 29, tragical medical mystery became a sore throat, runny nose on people. Twelve year old girl, suburb of Chicago, and they found out that they essentially laced the pills with some shit. So now, if you have bottles, they either have aluminum seals or plastic seals. And if the seal is broken, they cannot even sell it. FDA regulations state that that has to be sent back to the manufacturer for destruction for people's human safety. And that's just from people tampering with it. But also, if it's not sealed, moisture, fungus. There's a lot of stuff that can happen if you do not have sealed medication. So never take pet medication, because in most circumstances, and even if they do seal it, you don't know when it was sealed. And how it is unregulated for human consumption is a huge risk.

Speaker C:

And don't do it. The word tamper resistant never was around until after the tylenol murders. And those seals were put on there to stop people like this, that did this. Back in the eighties. I remember being quite young, but I do remember this happening. And a lot of people died, and a lot of people were freaked out about it. So kind of reminds me a little bit of that one Batman movie where everybody in gotham City was. Remember that?

Speaker B:

Poisoned by the water.

Speaker C:

Poisoned by the water. And they did. It was from the makeup or the deodorant, and it was pretty crazy.

Speaker B:

So to finish the email from this gentleman, have you guys ever heard of this? Is it true medication because medicine doctor fees. In the Us. We also have free medical assistance so people don't need to take stuff made for fish here. Good for you. We're jealous. We have debates on what we do for our medical stuff in the United States, but, yes, that's exactly what it was. The government was holding corroquin and medications like it in case there was a discovery during the emergence of COVID-19. So always hope you continue doing an amazing job and reach people everywhere. Stay safe. Well, thank you for that question. Not exactly the favorite question we like to ask or answer on the podcast, but we're not afraid to take things right on the head. We're going to be truthful, and we're not making any recommendations on how to treat anything besides fish diseases. And even then, consult your veterinarian.

Speaker C:

We did not stay at a Holiday Express last night, so we are not doctors.

Speaker D:

This is actually a little bit funny because just yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine who works in a lab that was working on some of these clinical trials involved with hydroxychloroquine. I'm in the ecology lab on the other side, and he does the actual science. And what he was saying about hydroxychloroquine is that it was generally recommended by a single doctor, zelenko, dr. zeb. zelenko was the name. And it started to be recognized as not particularly useful in COVID treatment once they started doing long term clinical trials. But because it was already accepted for use on malaria, it kind of got pushed really quickly, and it kind of became a bureaucratic nightmare. And we ended up having the president push it a little too quickly. And most of the recent studies are showing it's having very little effect on treating COVID. And more than that, actually, it's been linked with heart rhythm abnormalities. But those are very recent studies, and there hasn't been enough trial for us to suggest that that's a worry. But, yeah, that's what I know about oxychloroquin.

Speaker B:

Well, we appreciate that. So, next question we got in the hopper is from a prior fan message before called lj. lj says hello again. I have another question about clear aquarium sealant. When fishing, I often see nice drift wooden roots, but they're probably not aquarium safe. So I wonder if there's such a clear sealant or spray that I can spray the wood place in the tank, sure it would not rot inside. Thanks for all the entertainment, lj.

Speaker C:

I don't know of anything that you would want to do to these other than dry them out and put them in your tank, because all this driftwood that you find was in the lake at one time or out in the woods at one time. And I would just take if you want, if you find some nice driftwood and there's a lot of it out there, if you take that home and you dry that out in the sun, I think you'll have great success with it. A lot of driftwood. If it's been in the lake or the river for a long time, all the tannins will pretty much be out of it. But if you find a fresh piece and stuff, it may tannin up your tank really dark. But I don't see any problem. And I don't know why you'd want to try to seal it. Any type of chemical used to seal it, which I'm sure you can, will eventually leach into the water.

Speaker B:

Well, that end. I mean, think about taking just that piece of wood on itself with no oxygen and put it in a sealed thing. It's going to fester. It's going to become a toxin bomb for whenever you do seal and it cracks open and starts leaking, it's sealed goo. I don't know if you've ever taken like, liquid turd and put it in a jar and put it in the sun.

Speaker C:

What was that?

Speaker B:

You were taking like a liquid, just taking liquid crap. Put it in a jar, put it in the sun, it will make all different types of molds and goodies. So essentially, you're doing that with the log. It needs to breathe. It needs to oxidize and release all its toxins. Don't seal it. You're just creating a problem. The same with the sand. Like if you have some stuff that gets anaerobic in the sand, it can't release, and then eventually it creates a gas bubble. And when it releases, it's toxic to your tank.

Speaker C:

It just burps.

Speaker B:

You're doing that with the log, not kosher. Now, if you had something else that isn't naturally decaying, like a piece of wood or root and so you had something plastic that you wanted to put in and you wanted to be safe, which we're going to talk about a lot in this episode, plastic. We're going to talk about random objects that were never intended to put in an aquarium. What I'd recommend is, number one, check the type of plastic, see if it's children's safe and how it leaches in the water. There's a lot of different types of plastics out there and chemicals that they use. Generally, if it's children safe, it's probably half safe for your aquarium. And when I say children safe, like below age two and under, like fish are priced safe because they're going to put that stuff in their mouth, and that's how they rate those toys. Now, if you have something that's questionable, what I use for 3d printing is a silicone conform sealer. I get it on Amazon. It's a spray stuff. It's, I think, 100% silicone, and it sprays on. I'm actually looking at my Amazon purchases right now, and it sprays on really nice because when you 3d print an object, it has that rough edge still because it's layer upon layer of plastic. So when you're making, let's say, things that touch your skin like a personal toy, jimmy, you don't want that rubbing. You spray it with the coating.

Speaker C:

That's disturbing that you're making that type of stuff down in your basement.

Speaker H:

I'm still disturbed that he keeps jars of liquid shit around.

Speaker C:

I know. As a kid no, we don't want to know.

Speaker H:

No, I don't need to know anymore.

Speaker B:

Too bad. You're going to get it. As a kid, the amount of, like, weird ass science projects I would do.

Speaker H:

No, that's not a science project. That's like an episode of creepy, creepy.

Speaker C:

Hoarders where you store liquid shit in.

Speaker H:

A jar and watch it faster.

Speaker C:

You have to pee in a Mountain dew bottle and keeps it.

Speaker B:

Okay, here's the story. You're going to get this now I'm.

Speaker C:

Going to go to bed.

Speaker B:

So when I was a kid, I discovered that bread molds. And I thought the mold was cool looking. It's blue. It has fuzzy things. It's like a damn alien planet growing off the bread. And my mom threw it out. I'm like, what is that? It's mold. And, like, how does that happen? Well, there's moisture in it, and it sits in too long and it goes bad. Moisture sits too long. So then I would add moisture to about any natural object and put it in a jar outside. That would be like one jar at a time, mind you. So I grabbed leaf litter, see how long it takes to grow mold. There's a little water in there I grabbed with a tongue piece of dog crap. Put a little water in there, see what it molds. And every object I put in there made a different type of mold. I was fascinated. I had no idea what I was doing. But as a six or seven year old kid, that's just fascinating.

Speaker C:

I wonder what kind of mold this podcast would grow. I'm just wondering.

Speaker B:

Take your ipod, put a little water.

Speaker C:

In there, put it in the jar. Exactly.

Speaker B:

Maybe that's why I like it.

Speaker H:

That toxic slime mold that Robbie met with at Walmart.

Speaker B:

Yeah, I don't think I ever updated people with that mold. So was it story time? One, we talked about an orange moving slime fungus type stuff in the Walmart aquariums and found out it's after goldfish something. It's called dog vomit slime or dog vomit fungus. And it literally does move.

Speaker C:

That's the scientific name.

Speaker B:

That is the common name. You google it. Honestly. But yeah, we had confirmed we had some listeners message in Liberty giving me pictures and examples. Is it this one? I'm like, holy shit. It's literally that one. There are videos of it moving. Yeah, I wasn't going crazy. It went crazy after I digested the slime mold. Yeah, but anywho, that's all you got? Enough about me. Don't seal your driftwood roots and natural shit.

Speaker C:

That's beautiful.

Speaker B:

Unless is there any examples that tct has to offer?

Speaker D:

Well, the first thing I'd say is that if I ever come up and visit you guys, I can bring you slime mold because I have a ton of it.

Speaker B:

Oh, my God. Yes.

Speaker D:

I have enough for everyone.

Speaker B:

Put it in a jar and we'll hang out.

Speaker D:

Second, I definitely am 100% with you before. If I'm trying to add a piece of driftwood to my tank, I'll leave it to dry out in the sun for a little while and then I'll just add it. I'm not going to coat it in anything.

Speaker B:

We didn't tell them what to do. We just told them not to do. How dare us?

Speaker C:

I told him to put out in the sun and dry it.

Speaker B:

Well, I'm a fan. I go further. If the log is within reason and I can fit it in one of those giant pots, I'll boil the shit out of it.

Speaker C:

What about the microwave?

Speaker B:

I'm not a microwave man, but I have baked some wood that's like a fire hazard.

Speaker C:

I've had people put it in the oven if it's a small piece and try to roast it a little bit, but I think the sun is probably the safest, because at least your house won't burn down.

Speaker D:

Yeah, I've only done sun. I won't bake or boil a log. I'll do that sometimes with rocks. I'll bake rocks. It won't boil rocks. Don't boil rocks. But, yeah, I don't think you need to do anything fancier than that. Although I did know one guy who stuck it in a giant like, he filled a garbage can with water and then he just poured in bleach. And then he threw in all of his logs and he attempted to put that in an aquarium, but very poor idea. He didn't have anything in there. But the plants died. There was no fish in there, but straight up, the plants started dying after he did that.

Speaker C:

Yeah. If you pour bleach in a tank, normally most of the bleach after 24 hours will evaporate. You still have to do water changes and whatnot. But when you have something porous, like a log, you can pretty much guarantee that it's sucking up that bleach and it's just going to be pissing that out for the remainder of its life. But I heard you say something interesting and I know why. Tell people why you don't boil rocks.

Speaker D:

There can be air pockets inside of those rocks and they can go off like a grenade.

Speaker C:

Yes.

Speaker D:

I also knew a guy who did that, this British dude who said he was going to go boil rocks. And naturally, everyone I knew told him on the group chat, don't do that, don't do that, don't do that. He had closed the group chat and then an hour later, he said, I smashed a hole in my window because the rock exploded.

Speaker C:

Yeah. I'll tell you a quick story. We were 16, 1718 years old, down at the lake, and we were going to have a little campfire, so we grabbed a whole bunch of the bigger rocks that were out in the lake that had been soaking in water forever.

Speaker B:

Oh, no.

Speaker C:

And, yeah, we started having grenades go off about 10:00 after about 100 beers, and people were diving behind trees. Man, it was a lot of fun. Even a small rock really hurts when it's hot and it hits alongside the head.

Speaker B:

Wait, is that like the campfire was davy and you're the drunk goliath, yeah.

Speaker C:

That'S exactly why I am the way I am. I took one along the head. You took one along the head?

Speaker B:

Wow. Well, don't use wet rocks for your campfire, everyone.

Speaker C:

So there you go. You learned one good thing tonight on the quarry Guys podcast.

Speaker B:

All right, let's do the last question. We got Peter the sunfish guy.

Speaker C:

I love Peter.

Speaker B:

Peter, you are now an in house favorite. Thank you for that last story. But he said, just listen to one of the latest episodes at work. Heard something about tumors on weather loaches. Have you had dried or crushed coral in your tank? Because this can cause tumors on them. This is, from my experience, Peter the sunfish guy. So I spoke about one of my oldest penis fish, the dojo loach, the weather loach. And this one was stunted, and it had a side bulge on the side of its body. Many years.

Speaker C:

Just happy to see me clearly.

Speaker B:

It was side bulge. Bulge, not symmetrical in the center. Jimmy, I think it was a tumor. I haven't had anything but sand. And, yes, people say that they can swallow sand, but weather loaches in their natural environments, and for years that have kept them sift sand very well. In fact, they purposely bury themselves in sand. They dig through it very, very well. They sift it with their gills. So it would be very surprising if they swallowed the sand. I haven't had nothing but sand with that particular location. I've had it. I'm very convinced it's a tumor. But even if it was, I have to treat it the same way. If it's something he ate or a tumor is that I really can't do anything for him and just give him the best life possible. In situations where you see him and you're a breeder, that's the definition of something that should be cold so people don't have to struggle and be wary of the hobby. They can have a fish that's not dealing with that. But I was a rescue. He was at least halfway grown by the time I got him. And rest in peace, my wee little penis.

Speaker H:

Not his actual penis, right? Yes, I've seen his actual one in years.

Speaker C:

Point Adam.

Speaker B:

Point Adam.

Speaker C:

So that's all the questions we got today.

Speaker B:

We got others, but I feel like we should talk with our guests.

Speaker C:

I have one thing, please. You always ask if you have something. I've got some bad news, and I've got some good news, and I've got some even worse news.

Speaker B:

Well, hit me with all of it.

Speaker C:

Well, we made fun of murder. Hornets.

Speaker B:

Yes, that was a fun thing to.

Speaker C:

Make, just because it's fun to say Murder Hornets.

Speaker B:

Well, just for those who are listening, in case you're as clueless as I was, apparently there was some sort of hybrid africanized honeybee bullshit that was starting to cross.

Speaker H:

Murder Hornets come from Asia.

Speaker B:

Asia? Was it Asia? I thought it was like honeybees cross with Asian bees.

Speaker C:

No, that's a movie separate. That's the movie you saw. Regardless. So Murder Hornets are a two inch hornet that are not in the United States until just recently. They kill between 50 people on average each in China and Japan. So Murder Hornets are a thing, but what they murder what they're really known for, other than murdering a few people, 50 people per year in these countries, they will go in and decapitate all the bees, honey bees in a hive.

Speaker B:

Oh, I thought you were going to say that. They kill Jerry seinfeld's career bee movie.

Speaker C:

Oh, that's funny. So anyway, the bad news is they found Murder Hornets now in Washington State. Okay? But here's the good news. They captured a couple of them. They are about two inches long. They've got big scissors on the front of their where their mouth is, and they actually go in and they cut all the heads off honeybees. And we need the honeybees around to pollinate everything. So it's very important we have honeybees. So they're trying to track down these Murder Hornets. Bad news. We have murder. Hornets. Good news is they caught two of them, and they put a little radio frequency antenna on them, and they traced them back to their nest, and they found the nest on private property in Washington State.

Speaker B:

I feel like this whole thing is like this plot to a movie, like we're going to get like Lake placid, but the bee version.

Speaker C:

No, this is just actual facts. I'm telling you. I want you to know about Murder Hornets.

Speaker B:

You don't have I'm on board.

Speaker C:

And so they find these murder hornets in Washington State. They track them to a tree, and they went in there and they got permission from the owner of the property, me. And he said, yeah, go in there and get them out of there. And so they're in this hollow tree. And so what they did is they waited a couple of days, and they wrapped the tree in plastic at night when they were inside there. And then they hooked up a giant shop vac, and they got 200 and some Murder Hornets out of there.

Speaker B:

That's got the heebie jeebies. Thank you.

Speaker C:

That's the good news. Now with the even worse news, when they looked in the shop back, there were seven keebler elves.

Speaker B:

Ernie, damn it, you got me.

Speaker C:

No, it's true.

Speaker B:

You all duff.

Speaker C:

No, it's true. All the keeper elves are dead. And so now there's going to be a shortage of your fudge striped cookies rob. And so you're probably going to die.

Speaker B:

Not the fuck.

Speaker D:

I have a fun fact on that.

Speaker B:

No, please.

Speaker D:

I'll never get invited back if the podcast host dies the day I come on, right?

Speaker C:

I'll figure out how to run this thing off.

Speaker D:

So the bees that are being attacked by the asiatic Hornets, they're not defenseless. So a lot of the time those hornets, they'll actually scout out with one or two hornets that will go inside of the nest. And then when they find like, large groups of honeybees, they'll eat a few. Then they'll come back and they'll alert the rest of their hive. Then they'll send a large hive towards that beehive to eat everything. But when those first few scouts come in, a lot of the time the honeybees will surround. A few honeybees are going to be killed already by the hornet. And then the remaining honeybees will create a ball around the hornets and they'll vibrate their flight muscles as fast as they can. And this will produce a ton of heat. So they can produce up to 47 degrees celsius. Sorry, I don't know my American temperatures. The heat will be so extreme that it'll roast and kill the hornets. And the bees, they can tolerate a higher temperature, so most of them will survive the attack. And the giant hornet will be completely roasted.

Speaker B:

It's 117 degrees fahrenheit.

Speaker C:

Yeah, that's absolutely true. I read that too. Did you see the part about the keebler el being dead?

Speaker B:

It is actually here on CBS News. And murder hornets destroyed in Washington State as they searched for more nest. October 26, 2020 I am partly right.

Speaker C:

That's all I had for you. Good news, bad news, worse news.

Speaker D:

I do not know if the honeybees will roast kepler elves. I do not have the data on that.

Speaker C:

Well, it totally made sense to me once I started thinking about it. Is that why are the keeper elves sharing a tree with honeybees or whatever? And I would imagine they're just probably getting all the honey and sweetening up those cookies. I don't know. Hard to say.

Speaker B:

That's a strong one for sure.

Speaker D:

So they're probably a pest then. They'll probably be roasted.

Speaker G:

The problem that the American honeybees are having is that they don't have that roasting defense that's only bees in Asia.

Speaker C:

Really?

Speaker H:

Yeah, that's my understood is that the Japanese and the asiatic bees have that defense.

Speaker C:

Incredible. You guys are full of information. Now one of you knew that the keebler elves are dead.

Speaker B:

Hey, I just googled it as right here. Thousands of dead bees found in colony along with dead keebler elves. So you're only full of shit, Jimmy. Don't worry.

Speaker C:

I tried.

Speaker B:

Well, let's get to our topic at hand again, guys. We do these things on mondays at 07:00 P.m. Central. If the stars align and we don't have guests cancel on us. But even so, we have occasional backups. So come join us according to you guyspodcast.com, we even have this live on twitch. So if you want to see our fat faces, come join in for the debauchery. But let's start the topic, and let's just do, like, a quick round. So I'll just keep picking a couple of names. We ask every one of our guests to join why they got into the hobby. So, Oscar, why are you doing fish at this age? Come on, now.

Speaker D:

So growing up, I didn't have a lot of friends and only the fish. No, I'm kidding.

Speaker B:

I thought, you're going to have a lot of friends. You put shit to molden jars.

Speaker C:

Didn't have any money.

Speaker D:

From a very young age, I just loved fish. I mean, I started out as dinosaurs, and at some point you realize they're all dead. And being a paleontologist is just boring.

Speaker C:

They're hard to keep. You take a lot of room.

Speaker D:

Once I learned for that, I was naturally looking for another type of animal that I could become obsessed with. And fish just had so much variation that I was hooked. So from there, I started to keep smaller tanks, and then I started to major in a lot of physiology and evolutionary biology focused in fish and insects. Now I'm a PhD student in that, and the whole time I've been getting as many aquariums as I could. And I love my fish.

Speaker B:

Excellent. You just got stuck in the hobby and no wet stuff in jars. Who's next? A spiritual. What you got?

Speaker E:

Well, they're kind of funny. They just kind of swim around. And I was like, you know, I think I want some of those. It's not a very deep story. There's really nothing more to it than that.

Speaker B:

It was a magical moment where you're in petco and you had an epiphany, you shit your pants and had to have a beta.

Speaker E:

I just got some tetris. I was like, These things are pretty fun. And then, you know, they all died. But we've made strides since then.

Speaker B:

Well, for those that don't know, we've talked about a couple of episodes actually got brought to light by Spiritual. We've talked about it a couple of times in the podcast. And you are responsible for uncovering that whole maui sweetwater story.

Speaker E:

That is like, my magnum opus of finding stuff.

Speaker C:

I don't know.

Speaker B:

But yeah, I don't know even how.

Speaker E:

I stumbled across that, but it's interesting.

Speaker C:

I think we should start a kickstarter thingy where we save our beer cans and then buy a plane ticket for somebody to go over there and investigate this. Because I want to hear more about that because I'm still baffled.

Speaker B:

That's it. We'll send spiritual. He's in Canada somewhere.

Speaker E:

I might die, but it'll be worth it.

Speaker C:

You know what? I'm willing to make that risk. If you die, I'll deal with it. You get a free trip out of it, right? Yeah.

Speaker B:

So, underscored, how did you get in this hobby?

Speaker G:

Well, it kind of all started when I was really little. Family kept like betas and stuff, and they all died after a month or whatever. When I was like, ten, we decided that we were cursed and wouldn't keep any more fish because they all kept dying and we just couldn't figure out why. So I didn't keep anything for several years until I was in AP biology my junior year of high school. And my teacher had really ugly, poorly kept aquarium.

Speaker B:

The full inlers no, it was like.

Speaker G:

Ten gallon or so had like, angel fish and just whatever from Petco. The background was tinfoil for some reason. It had neon gravel and plastic plants and such.

Speaker B:

Tinfoil hats and aquariums.

Speaker G:

Yeah, it was really bad. And the teacher's whole thing was that he would buy a whole new batch of fish every year because they would all die by the end of the year.

Speaker C:

He must have bought Adams endless.

Speaker B:

That's what it was. So I got to say, we've had a lot of people answer this question and love it. First tinfoil. Didn't expect that one.

Speaker C:

I actually would take tinfoil and paint it blue and crumbled up a little bit, put it on the back when I was young. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I grew up in North Dakota. You can just suck it. Okay.

Speaker B:

Did it make it look like a beer can? Is that what you're trying to go.

Speaker C:

It was just pretty yeah. On some blue tin foil. I want people to do this. I feel like yours is your assignment.

Speaker B:

You're one of the people that put up bud Light neon signs in their front yard.

Speaker C:

I've got one down on my bar right now, called it.

Speaker B:

But you have homework.

Speaker C:

I want people to try this. Take tin foil and throw some spray paint back. Tinfoil. Don't put the damn tin foil in your tank, but tape it to the back and see how cool it looks. It looks cool.

Speaker B:

Not to give that a try. May. How do you say that name?

Speaker F:

May.

Speaker B:

So what's your story? How did you get the hobby?

Speaker F:

My story kind of happens in three parts. It kind of started with a fish tank, and it turns out hamsters need a landing or else they just drown after a while because they've been for about 30 or 40 minutes, and then they fatigue and I didn't know this, so went back to Petco and beta was cheaper than a landing. So when I was younger, I was like starting off in the Navy. I was going on my first appointment and one of my buddies got stationed in Hawaii, and there's some kind of ban on importing animals or something over there. And I was on a warship that was going to be stopping in Hawaii, so I kind of smuggled the fish. This is all theoretical and never actually happened.

Speaker C:

Yeah, no, it was a fresh right.

Speaker F:

Like literally on the side of a ship the size of an aircraft barrier, lowering a bucket into the water to try and scoop some up and then warm it up and do water changes and that kind of stuff to bring him his fish from San Diego to Hawaii. So that kind of like percolated the idea. And then I came back and beforehand he had brought me to a store that was local and I got back from my deployment. And it's funny, there's somebody in the keeps popping in and out here you might see him pop in a funk. He worked at a local pet store. And I would go in because the traffic down here is so terrible, going southbound until about 07:00. And I'd get off work at four. So I would go chill at this pet store for about 3 hours or so, just or like somewhere nearby until I, you know, didn't take me two and a half hours to drive 10 miles. And the guy that's in this channel now, if you see me showing all his algae, he would let me clean the tanks and I say, let me he would exploit me by having clean tanks.

Speaker C:

But eventually human trafficking, I think is.

Speaker F:

What it's all the scraps of coral and stuff that accumulated underneath all the display tanks. I would bag them up and take them home and just start dumping them into a tank. And I ended up just making this 240 gallon cluster frick of just in pieces of who knows what muck and coral and pests and whatever. It ended up being 130 gallon tank with a 240 gallon sump that was an entire fuge all the way across the length of an eight foot length that pumped it all back up into the 130 and from there just stayed in the hobby.

Speaker B:

See Jimmy, there's another guy that likes to do petri dishes. Mine just was jars with mold. His was a little bit more modern and expensive.

Speaker H:

Yours was jars of literal liquid shit.

Speaker B:

It wasn't just shit, it was bread. It was vegetables. It was dead animals, like a dead bird that would hit the window.

Speaker C:

You're a fine example of why some animals eat their young. You just look at you and go, I wish you'd quit running the microwave with a door open, you dumbass man.

Speaker B:

So feisty. All right, since now we got introductions done and a shout out to funk.

Speaker C:

Did we get everybody?

Speaker B:

I believe we got did we miss someone?

Speaker C:

We got everybody.

Speaker B:

Okay, so let's get to the topic now and it's going to be like a little round robin session we're going to do here for those that are beginners, listen to the podcast we're about to talk about is this is not for you. We're just going to talk about stupid shit that we have done in our aquariums, what we like to call funny topes or trash topes. There's going to be a lot of conversations, just things that are not intended, because a biotope generally would be like putting plants, logs, decor, trying to mirror something in the Amazon or Africa or Australia. This is just what we've done for silliness. So to give the first story spiritual, I know that you are a fan of the Trash tope. Can you explain to listeners what a trash tape is?

Speaker E:

So the Trash Tope or the under the bridge biotope, as I also called it, was the utterly stupid idea I had. Basically, I sat down, I was looking at this tank I had, and it's just kind of a mess tank, just the manacris and stuff. And I'm like, what can I do with this tank? And I was like, oh, I know, I'm just going to chuck a bunch of random garbage into it so it looks like a polluted waterway. And that's a great idea. It wasn't, but I can show it to you now.

Speaker C:

Actually, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Speaker E:

Well, I can't move the freaking webcam any closer, but now it is.

Speaker C:

But the tank and bring it closer.

Speaker B:

If you guys want to actually listen, we'll have links in the chat, and I believe you did a YouTube video on creating your Trash tote.

Speaker E:

I did make a video on that, and it's prime. I put some glass jars in there just to be cute. And I've left those in there because it's a glass, it's not going to leach anything, so it's been fine. But the original model, which included let's see, it included a soda can, some plastic forks and knives, a yogurt lid and a ziploc bag. That version no longer exists, but it doesn't have the same feel to it. But it's still a little bit there.

Speaker B:

The idea of the Trash tope is you're trying to emulate pollution for comedy's sake. So when someone goes to your tank and they're expecting, oh, what do you have in there? And they look and it looks like something like a pond or a lake bed that would just have a beer can sitting there or something else. I like how you carefully collected the correct specimens. So you did food grade utensils. You did aluminum cans, which do not seep or rust into the tank, like a lot of people would do with different objects. Everything you put in there was strategic to be aquarium safe. So the yogurt lids and jar, the aluminum can with no soda liquid in it, once rinsed and washed out, plastic forks, even the ziploc bag, which the risk there is if your fish go in it and get stuck.

Speaker C:

Did you leave any weed in it?

Speaker B:

Yeah, that would be a snoop Dog top dog. We should do the idea.

Speaker C:

Yeah, we should do that for the can.

Speaker E:

Because I knew if I opened the can from the top, some dumb sorts. Let me just back up for a second. Say the whole idea was because this tank is. I don't think you can see them, but it's just like generic, terrible, random live bearers. I was like, well, these fish are.

Speaker B:

Kind of handlers handlers.

Speaker C:

We hate them, too.

Speaker E:

There's mostly, like, sword tails, actually. How can I embrace this idea? I'm like, well, the fish are garbage, so let's make the tank garbage as well. But even the can, because I knew one of the dumb asses would swim through the lid. Like, if I had opened it, one of them would cut itself or something. So actually, I stabbed it through the bottom, drained all the liquid, and then buried it in the substrate. But I'm not sure when a bunch of fish started to die, I took out all the what I assumed to be offending, like, materials. Whether or not it was actually that or something unrelated that just happened to come at a bad time, I'm not really sure. But for now, we're back down to just some glass stuff, and all the fish are doing well. So that's where we're at now. But one day I'd like to bring it back with, like, leeches or something.

Speaker C:

Looks like a condom in the back there. Is that what that is?

Speaker B:

That's the ziploc bag?

Speaker C:

That's the ziploc bag. Okay.

Speaker B:

There you go. Good. Play at that. So some of the trash tapes that I've dealt with only been me. I mean, honestly, I've just done a couple for fun because I've had so many different tanks.

Speaker C:

You are twisted.

Speaker B:

And I haven't had any problems now a lot of these times, like, yogurt containers, the plastic forks, I've used these as tools in the tank. So, like, yogurt containers, I've used as a cut them to replace broken pieces on a filter as, like, floatery directions. Forks. I actually use plastic forks to essentially stick or skewer zucchini for placo's in the bottom of the tank since I can't get the stupid zucchini to sink those objects you've mentioned. I have not had any problems in the past. I know the tank that you're using is very small and subject to a lot of risk. Mine were a bit bigger than I've done in the past, but Jimmy just has that comedic accession with a beer can. So if you're ever to use a beer can, not only do I not really know if it seeps, but I know it's food safe and it doesn't rust, so it doesn't oxidize and put the chemicals in the water that you think of. But my concern, like you said, cover the hole. So if you're going to do it, you buried it. You made sure that fish can't get into it with the sharp edges. Me, I've actually just taken hot glue because I know that doesn't leach into the water. Certain glue gun, hot glue, and I just fill the hole so nothing can get in there either. That's smart.

Speaker E:

Well, yeah, I think one day I'd like to readdress it. The issue is, I really want an old boot in there. I just know it's a bad idea. So maybe I'll just do, like, random microfauna and some leeches to make it really nasty.

Speaker C:

We were just on vacation here about a month ago. We went down to South Dakota, to the reptile gardens. If anybody is not familiar with the Reptile Gardens, it is the largest reptile collection in the United States. And they've got just tons of stuff. And one thing that was interesting is they had a set up with tarantulas, and inside this big tarantula cage, they had old Western boots and cowboy hats and stuff. And these damn things have gone in there and made nests and stuff, and it looked really freaking cool. And so I totally get why you want to put an old boot in there, because I think it'd be kind.

Speaker B:

Of cool if you do an old boot, you almost have to cut the front part of the boot so it opens up like a little cave for play coke or something. But don't put boots in your aquarium if you're going to do it. Like recreate something with your 3d printer and then make sure it's aquarium safe.

Speaker C:

Or take one of the little treasure chests that chop fish's heads off and put it in there. That's cool.

Speaker B:

Yeah, Jimmy, tell the kids and all those.

Speaker C:

Those are excellent. If you guys remember those little treasure chests with a scuba diver that would pop up and close back in the day when I was young, which was a long time ago, the 50s had led one bite me. It wasn't the 50s, but anyway, it's probably the actually, those lids were pretty freaking heavy. And how they work is they blow air bubbles underneath the lid until the lid opens up, and then when it closes, it kind of comes down in a chopping sense, kind of like your ginsu knife. And I had a couple of beheaded guppies at times. So I highly suggest that if you want to be entertained or take bets on if the guppies are going to make it or not. Okay. I used to put brine shrimp pellets in there. I'm sorry, brine shrimp. I was young.

Speaker B:

You're evil.

Speaker C:

But brine shrimp pellets in the little thing, and they would just wait for it to open up, and they'd go in there and try to eat real quick.

Speaker B:

Just wap. That's what you do with those adlers, right?

Speaker C:

That's what I'm doing with you. Now, after we fat shamed you for so long, I'm just going now, put food out there and then take a shovel and whack you every time you grab it.

Speaker B:

Rob'S, why are you circumcised? Well, because Jimmy brought out his lead treasure chest, that's figurine from his aquarium.

Speaker H:

You eat through your penis.

Speaker C:

He breathes through his butthole like a turtle. We all know that.

Speaker B:

Well, this is spiraling out of control. Well, Oscar, what are some of the examples that you have for funny decor stories or different quote unquote fun topes?

Speaker D:

Well, I'm glad you asked, Rob.

Speaker C:

Hold on, everybody. Put your seatbelt on me crazy.

Speaker D:

So if you've ever seen my tanks, and I post them a lot, so you probably have, they emulate an environment. They're very traditional. They're not boring, but they're not particularly interesting. But right now I work at a lab, but before that, I worked at a little place called the Department of ichthyology. So I used to work at a museum, and I'd have to set up lots of different tanks for that museum. What's the nastiest fish you can imagine?

Speaker B:

Sea lamprey. Oh, waitlers. Are worse than sea lamprey.

Speaker D:

Well, Rob, I get it. Sea lamp praise.

Speaker B:

That or the what was it? The babbitt worm? bobbitt worm?

Speaker C:

The one that goes up your person?

Speaker B:

No, Andrew.

Speaker D:

No. We had a lamp tank. We basically had a parasitic animal display. So I had to set up the lamprey tank. And now they provide me with the tank because as a lowly employee there, they gave me the supplies and I just set them up. So they gave me basically a custom 200 gallon tall. And if you've ever let's tee time.

Speaker B:

Just for a minute for our listeners. So for those that don't know what a sea lamprey is, I suggest first finish your food. Don't eat while you Google this, but then take a moment, Google it, and you will find yourself the most horrible creature I can think of. It's literally an eel like tube creature that at the end of it has a diagonal circle mouth that is just filled with teeth. It almost looks like you'd expect the end of a grab oil from the tremors movie would be, or the opening on that like some Star Wars creature that's going to pull you into sand. It's a crazy creature that in the ocean, attaches to fish, and essentially just bites and sucks their fluids.

Speaker D:

So one thing about that is that it's not just the ocean. The ones we use were invasive in Lake Ontario, and basically the native lamp, prays, are about eight inches long. But these invasive Atlantic lampreys that got into the lake are up to 3ft long and they're terrible. The last time I went fishing in Lake Ontario, every single fish I pulled out had lamprey marks on it. And they basically have these big keratin teeth that they used to hold on to you. And they have this little disgusting tongue that they used to scrape away at you and just eat, drink blood and whatever else they can get off. They're terrible, horrible creatures. And they gave me a 200 gallon tall to put them in. The thing with that is that if you put a lamprey in aquarium, it's going to sit at the bottom. And this is a tall tank. So we ended up having a tank with nothing in it and about a foot of lamp rays on the bottom, a foot of non moving, disgusting lamp rays just wriggling around at the bottom and then like 3ft of just empty tank.

Speaker B:

If that was me, I wouldn't have put something on a hook. So you would inspire the lamp rays to go up suction cup to it and then feed off of whatever's there so they can see the length of these giant two penises.

Speaker D:

What we basically just did was we just throw in freshly dead or slightly thawed fish. Just mostly just fresh, fresh fish. We just throw in they'd rasp away and eat at it. A few of them died because I assumed they were getting outcompeted, but I know some people will add in chopped beef heart or bits of different cow parts. But we only did freshly slaughtered fish.

Speaker C:

Yeah, you don't want to teach me things to come up on land and start sucking on cows, that's for sure. I have a quick question for you. So you got this disgusting tank with these nasty fish in there. Did you guys ever go on after work, have a couple of beers and go, you know what? I'll give you $20 to put your junk in the water for just 10 seconds. Do you ever do that?

Speaker D:

Well, as much as I wanted to, most of the department was like 50 to 70 year old men who are super serious. And I'm just here like this 20 year old who is an alcoholic, and then we're just like.

Speaker C:

Right, you can tell us.

Speaker F:

What I'm getting from that is you did it on your own.

Speaker C:

That's right. I know you did it. I know you did it.

Speaker B:

How dare you do me?

Speaker D:

I did fool around with them a little bit.

Speaker C:

Okay, if you had a friend that worked there and he fooled around with it a little bit, what would you have done with lamprey? Because I wouldn't put my net in there, honestly.

Speaker B:

I'd stick it to my arm and see how bad it hurts.

Speaker D:

Well, when we were moving them in, we had to do it by hand. Right. And are you not going to try and juggle one around a little bit? Are you kidding me?

Speaker B:

Just hold it out like it's Jimmy on his birthday.

Speaker C:

It's my birthday.

Speaker D:

Have the curator walk by in his suit and be like, hey, catch. But no, I did not stick any sort of my genitals in there. I feel like as much as it would be a funny joke, I like being able to mate.

Speaker B:

Yeah, we feel you.

Speaker C:

Plus, explain that one to the doctor if they latches on for too long and you get like a little circular bite on it. How do you explain that to the doctor when you go and say, I need probably a shot of penicillin and maybe some oxycodone.

Speaker D:

You just tell them you have the strangest hickey.

Speaker B:

Yeah, that's right, I'm haunted. Number one, don't put lampreys in. Your tank. And if you do, definitely hold in front of you like his schlong. All right, next item up for business. Sign them up for business.

Speaker F:

Are we going to go past this lampert thing and nobody's going to mention like, antenna and the movie Teeth or anything like that?

Speaker C:

Oh, do that.

Speaker B:

No, I can't think about the movie Teeth.

Speaker F:

I just want to make sure that image was in everybody's head before we got on topic.

Speaker D:

Be sure to come to the aquarium guys discord where we're going to group watch Teeth.

Speaker B:

Yeah, no, let's not never say we did. So for those I'm not even going to tell you what it is because I don't feel like explaining this. Just Google teeth. Don't watch the movie. Terrible, terrible at night. So, next May, what do you got for us for crazy decor ideas? Different stuff you've done for taupes and tanks.

Speaker F:

Well, I haven't done a whole lot of them. I know I had been brought up on this one tank with a beer bottle in it for the longest time, and I always called the human encroachment beer bottle. Maybe like a van's bag, a multi storey hotel, whatever you can fit into the tank is good, but on the side of the house, I've got some theory tapes. I suppose an empty fish tank with some fish in it. That's a theory. taupe it could be anything, but I like the futuramas Atlanta tope, where you just put in new mills of coca cola every day, so maybe that's going to be long for people that are a little young. But the day tope, that's when you have a canister filter and you point it into the air instead, into the fish tank. The turbidity tope, which I think I've seen several times, if you're not familiar with tidy, it's basically just junk getting thrown up in the air, or rather in the wall in the fluid for this case. And that's when you see somebody who's put just too many filters and pumps on their tank, because flow is godliness. The barista. taupe also known as the starbucks tope. I like this one because it's not coffee. Most people will think it's coffee. It's more about having live mermaid and convincing twelve year olds to be addicted to cash less related to the fish tank, but you get the idea. brewery tope is one of my favorites. It's not really the fish tank itself. I know I'm going ten here. It's more of like a service. It's when you get a middle aged bearded man to come by and clean your tank and he smugly describes other tanks that may or may not be better than yours while he works on yours. And then my personal favorite, and I will always advocate for is the sciento, because it is the cyanobacteria produce more oxygen on the planet than any other thing has ever and it's the best cell, in my opinion. But that pretty much covers all my theory tops. For realtors.

Speaker B:

Oh, my God, that was brilliant. We need you like an aquarium. Stand up, baby.

Speaker C:

What he said about the starbucks, it took me back to last week where Rob says, hey, have you seen bert kirschner in this new thing called Cabin where he goes out into the woods and tries to find himself? He's got all these other comedians that join him and they gave each other coffee animals. That was the first thing that went to my head. He said starbucks.

Speaker B:

That is by far the starbucks tope.

Speaker F:

It's more about a live mermaid and getting a children addicted to drugs than it is about coffee.

Speaker C:

Okay, I feel good about that. How about the actual podcast brought to you by starbucks?

Speaker F:

Actual tops? People rag on all kinds of different if you want the SpongeBob tape, go for it. If you want the rock that's glued onto styrofoam so it floats, go for it. Earlier you spoke about the aluminum and missing out there. I believe that aluminum does have a high affinity for oxygen, so it oxidizes, but it's a weathering metal. So that outside letter sorry, that outside layer becomes a protective layer once it absorbs the oxygen.

Speaker B:

Right.

Speaker F:

So quick note on that one. For me, the fish tank is like whiskey. So if you're going to ask somebody, what is the best kind of whiskey, the answer will always be the whiskey you like and what's the best way to drink it, the way you like to drink it. And I feel the same way for the fish tank.

Speaker C:

Yeah.

Speaker F:

If you want it straight, if you want it on the rocks, whatever you want, that's the best way to do it. It's so subjective to penalize and attack somebody for how they like their tank to look. It seems like a waste of time to me. So my favorite taupe, whatever you want, man.

Speaker B:

Whatever you want.

Speaker C:

I like the spongebobbed. I really would like a SpongeBob.

Speaker B:

That's been popular, the theme tanks like Mario Brothers or Creek, creating a water level.

Speaker F:

I've considered this, but the shrimp ends up eating the crab. The crab ends up eating the sponge. And then just everything's dead in your system.

Speaker B:

And for some reason, there's a squirrel.

Speaker C:

That'S rotting on the top, an angry squirrel.

Speaker F:

Like I said in the very beginning, the hamster needs a land. Do not forget that.

Speaker C:

So, quick question about the hamster. Do you get your money back at petco or no.

Speaker F:

Have you ever tried to get a refund at petco? They just end up buying something else, right?

Speaker C:

They just trick you. And the thing is, it's hard if you ever tried this, have you ever tried to find a little lifejacket for a hamster? They're hard to find.

Speaker F:

No. They don't sell them. And then trying to walk in if your hamster had a heart attack, I get it. But if it's soaking wet, box that came in is dripping, trying to convince the person that your hamster drowned. They're not going to give you anything.

Speaker C:

That's why it's important to blow dry your dead hamster before you take it in.

Speaker F:

Absolutely. Life brought to you by the aquarium guys.

Speaker B:

There you go. Well, may I have been enlightened? I never thought about the theory totes, but damn it if that's not the best shit I've heard in a week.

Speaker C:

What he's done a Star Trek like the old 60s Star Trek and just had Doctor spock and everybody down in the bottom. That would be the best one. There something better, Rob?

Speaker B:

No, I can't think of anything better than spock other than that I want a mermaid now that serves coffee at starbucks.

Speaker F:

Well, with the Star Trek tope, the most important about that one is applying racial undertones to all of your fish and just keeping it so slow nobody notices until slurs mentioned that is true.

Speaker C:

Because it was the first interracial kiss ever on TV, was on Star Trek.

Speaker F:

You are absolutely right. And almost every race that came out of that, the design was to expose people to different cultures. So if you look at the clingoffs, very remnant of older tribal and nomadic Muslim cultures, that kind of stuff, and it applies throughout most of the characters within the show.

Speaker C:

And back then, it didn't offend anybody.

Speaker B:

Well, getting back on topic, we have.

Speaker C:

We had a topic.

Speaker B:

We have a topic. So, unscored, how about you? Fun topes decoration ideas. What have you done for fun?

Speaker G:

Well, I think probably my best is the beaker, which is about a gallon. I stole it from my high school back in senior year when I was in AP environmental Science, and I just threw some soil in the bottom with some twigs. And ever since, I've just been throwing plant scraps in there. Huge, thriving population of scuds. I used to have aquatic isopods in there. I thrown shrimp in there occasionally, but it's got, like, some thriving, thriving dwarf SAGITTARIUS that isn't planted at all. It's just floating in the stagnant water column, and it's growing like crazy.

Speaker C:

I sent a picture.

Speaker G:

You can see all the roots and such.

Speaker B:

Oh, my God. It's literally like just a cup of sludge. You can see the plants liquid soil at this point.

Speaker G:

It used to be kind of clear.

Speaker B:

Have you ever put, like, long gone?

Speaker G:

I haven't done any water changes or anything like that in, like, two years now.

Speaker C:

What's that smell like?

Speaker B:

Nothing.

Speaker C:

It doesn't smell like ass.

Speaker B:

Really?

Speaker C:

No, it looks perfectly fine. Have you ever drink?

Speaker G:

The only time it smelled a little bit was I threw some mulberry leaves in it, and it did not like that. My room smelled like sewer for about a week.

Speaker C:

Rob'S does. He doesn't even have one of those.

Speaker B:

All right, so for this particular what we call the science sludgecape, you need to put some scuds in there. I think that would be the perfect addition to really make that beaker the perfect thing.

Speaker G:

Yeah, it's got a billion scuds in it.

Speaker B:

Oh, it does have scans.

Speaker C:

You weren't paying attention again.

Speaker B:

My ears must have popped.

Speaker C:

Wake up. Earlier, before we started this podcast, we're trying to decide what we wanted to name it, and I think it should be Confessions of Shit I Stole From High School. I think that's what it should be. There's a whole lot of confessions today about stuff that people have brought home.

Speaker B:

Now, going through these pictures again, you guys can enjoy the discord. There is plenty of pictures to see when we do these podcast. Life I see here, Spiritual, that you put one above, said that you had this in your fish tank. At this point. Can you explain the picture I'm looking at? swinging a miss. Looks like Spiritual had to go.

Speaker D:

If it helps, I can explain that back.

Speaker B:

There you go. Now he is. There he is. All right.

Speaker E:

I was gone, but I didn't hear anything he said.

Speaker B:

Oh, this picture I see here in discord.

Speaker D:

Explain Hampshire.

Speaker B:

Hampshire. Can you explain that to us and explain why no one should ever recreate this monstrosity? You're muted again, sir. No, you're not. I just can't hear you.

Speaker D:

He might be having connection difficulties.

Speaker C:

I'll tell you about a tank that a friend of mine did that he did out of laziness. Who he owned a pet store up in bemidji, Minnesota. Name is Mark. I'm not going to throw Mark sparby under the bus because he never anyway, so Mark was going to have a Beta sale, and I was his wholesaler. And he goes, bring me up 200 bedds in a cup. I said, okay. And so I take up 200 beds in a cup and he has a sale, sells 100 of them that first weekend and stuff. And anyway, if you ever had 100 extra bedtas laying around and you have to do changes of the water in all the cups, after a few weeks, it becomes to be a lot. So what he thought he would do, he ordered another 200 bedas, and he thought it'd be really cool if he put 200 beda cups inside of a 55 gallon tank with an aerator. And so these cups just kind of floated around with these beddas in there. So the betas were in a cup in an oxidated tank?

Speaker B:

What?

Speaker C:

Yes. Killed them all.

Speaker B:

Well, they can't okay, so here's what happened. Right, exactly.

Speaker C:

No, it was a great sale for me, but he killed 200 freaking beds.

Speaker B:

Right? Okay. But here's the dumb I got to explain the dumb, because we're going to get feedback on this dumb. So thank you.

Speaker C:

They can call you anytime, night or day.

Speaker B:

The dumb of this is that betas have a lung system, liver, right, that they breathe directly out of the surface of the water. That's why betas are put in cups, quote unquote, not that they should be, but it can be for extended periods of time, is because they absorb oxygen directly off of that water surface. So putting these in cups, which again, you'd think that there's water flow through the cup, they still have no way to get to oxygen.

Speaker C:

He had an airstone in there and it was bubbling and they were just kind of churning like rubber duckies at the station.

Speaker B:

And this is a pet store owner.

Speaker C:

It was beautiful for about a day.

Speaker B:

I'm just glad he'll never listen to the podcast because it's going to be nothing.

Speaker C:

But we will call him, we'll call him. He's a banker out in western North Dakota. If you're looking for him, I'm going.

Speaker B:

To say clearly he doesn't do a pet store anymore.

Speaker C:

No. And the thing is that it was just a quick idea to save water changes and stuff. It was not good.

Speaker B:

That is how we won the war, having better tanks. Better tanks. Oh, my God.

Speaker C:

Better tanks.

Speaker D:

On that note, Spiritual is back.

Speaker B:

Wonderful. Spiritual, can you explain this picture that we see in discord to us? Hello.

Speaker E:

So this is the work of Hampshire, a man who has been trying to do the single task of keeping hamsters underwater for the past, I think ten years.

Speaker B:

Wait, what?

Speaker E:

You heard me.

Speaker B:

This is a guy doing this. This isn't you?

Speaker E:

No, this is not me. I'm not that how do you spell this?

Speaker B:

Because I need to have more information. Hampshire.

Speaker E:

Hampshire, okay. Yeah. Now, the fish were there very temporarily, like I'm talking, he made a video where he added the fish and then the next day all the fish were gone. But yeah, he's been trying to make an underwater hamster habitat. He has been attacked by almost every animal, anyone who cares to put hamsters, basically. It's quite the ordeal that we've tried to get him on our podcast, but.

Speaker B:

Oh my God, I need to contact this guy.

Speaker E:

I would love to, just like I would love to help this guy successfully have fish in his Hampshire tank.

Speaker B:

This man. Okay, I'm reading this because this is a thing on reddit and they have a lot of like this is very well documented.

Speaker E:

Oh, yeah, he's been doing this for a long time.

Speaker B:

I'm looking at our deep into YouTube and this gentleman the only way I can put this, you know those giant sealed containers that you can buy and they come in different sizes and they're meant to waterproof things in like a boat or your rv for camping and whatnot. He essentially took these units and whatever sizes and sealed a hamster inside of these containers and put it in the bottom of his large aquarium. So what we do is aquarium fish and we're going to have, I swear to God, we're going to have this YouTube video linked in the show notes below so you can watch it. He literally has a hamster cage inside of an aquarium. And how he looks like he's transporting oxygen to the container is with an air pump, and it's pumping in fresh air into the hamsters dry sealed enclosure inside the aquarium.

Speaker C:

How does the air escape if you're pumping air in? Air has to come out. Correct?

Speaker B:

Okay, imagine you're watching Star Wars Episode One, and you get to the scene where they meet jar jar brinks. They swim down to the bottom of the ocean, and they have these air pocket domes where everybody lives in a city underneath, kind of like atlantis.

Speaker C:

Like SpongeBob.

Speaker B:

He's making a retarded garbage version of putting a hamster in the bottom of his aquarium.

Speaker C:

I think SpongeBob should sue him trying to steal their idea.

Speaker B:

I don't know if this is ethical inhumane.

Speaker E:

I will say the hamsters do not live fully underwater. They do not stay in there all the time. He will take them out. They have a larger enclosure. I'm not trying to defend them fully. There's some people who are convinced they are kept underwater fully, which doesn't even make sense logically, because hamsters.

Speaker B:

And the.

Speaker C:

Thing is, hamsters create so much ammonia that they would take themselves out pretty quick.

Speaker B:

This actually hurts my brain more than you can realize.

Speaker E:

He's been doing it for ten years.

Speaker H:

Somebody send me a picture of this.

Speaker B:

Oh, we're going to send you the YouTube video, bro. Oh, no. He's got updates. Announcement. I'm going on a trip to do cool underwater stuff.

Speaker E:

He's very active.

Speaker B:

Like, he goes a lot. He made himself a sealed relay system so they can go between containers.

Speaker C:

You can't breed them if you don't have them together.

Speaker B:

Okay. You know when I make those hamster enclosures with tubes that connect them all together and then make, like, a giant maze and city, he's trying to recreate that underneath his aquarium. So he's got, like, multiple containers underwater where his hamsters are dry inside these units with tubes in the middle.

Speaker C:

And this is upsetting people.

Speaker B:

I don't know if it's upsetting people, but my brain has exploded.

Speaker E:

It is definitely upsetting people.

Speaker C:

I can say that our government sent chimpanzees and dogs up into outer space. This is better than that, and this is much better.

Speaker B:

He's got about a 50% dislike ratio, so I think that's pretty bad for YouTube.

Speaker E:

Yeah, he's not really, like, sending prayers.

Speaker B:

And positive air pressure is the first comment. Oh, my God. Yeah, he has a whole blog on this. I need to find this person.

Speaker H:

I'm watching the video, and I listened to the first three words out of the guy's mouth, and he sounds like a serial killer.

Speaker C:

Does he like him on.

Speaker E:

I don't know where he falls on the spectrum, but he has openly stated that he is autistic.

Speaker H:

Okay, that explains a lot.

Speaker B:

Back from vacation footage coming soon.

Speaker E:

I don't know much about this, but apparently he's working on a larger the hamster habitats aren't that big. They're quite small. They're really small.

Speaker B:

I've seen people put hamsters in these same size enclosures outside of water, but it doesn't make it that greater.

Speaker E:

He's working on a project called the Mega hab, I believe. And I don't know how that's going or anything, but he does have plans for it, and I'm very excited to see how that turns out.

Speaker B:

It's amazing the detail of care. He's got water containers, special toys. He's got the whole universe underneath the aquarium for these things. I did not expect that tonight's podcast would go in this direction at all.

Speaker C:

Love or hate him, this guy will probably be the only person living after an apocalypse. You probably have a little place to live down on the bottom of the lake, and he'll be alive and the rest of us will all be dead.

Speaker B:

I swear to God, you expose me to new ship.

Speaker D:

I don't think he'll be the only person living, but I think he'll be the only person with hamsters living.

Speaker C:

Well, he still have something to eat.

Speaker E:

This man will pioneer like, oh, hey, we're out of space on land. This guy is just going to show up from the shadows. He's been like, we will go under the sea.

Speaker B:

Oh, my God.

Speaker C:

You know, hamsters breed quick, so you'll have constant food and they're like chicken.

Speaker B:

I'm looking at one of his older videos. He created a hamster life support relay system so that in case the power goes out, the hamster still gets a steady stream of oxygen from a backup pump. So if the pump ever fails, whether it's unplugged burns out or whatever else, his battery backup kicks in a new pump. Oh, my God. This is the craziest I've ever seen.

Speaker H:

These are dwarf hamsters. That makes more sense of what the hell is going I thought they were like teddy bear hamsters.

Speaker B:

These are dorms. These are tiny.

Speaker C:

Yeah, right.

Speaker H:

So these ones, they aren't probably going to have the ammonia problems that the teddy bears would. It doesn't make this in my opinion, it doesn't make it right. But it's interesting.

Speaker B:

We're just here talking about this. We are not the people trying to rate this crazy unmeasurable content.

Speaker C:

In my mind, those dwarf hamsters are a lot meaner than a regular hamster. Yeah, they're just little bastards.

Speaker E:

My favorite thing about this whole topic is that how I don't want to say a lot, but how a decent few people found out about this more recently was when serpent Design made his first ever terrarium and aquarium video. There's some comments that are like, this is not the first. The hamster guy was first.

Speaker B:

Oh, my God. You're right. I'm looking at the dates. This goes back all along.

Speaker E:

He's been doing it for a long time.

Speaker B:

He's still doing updates. There's updates as a three weeks ago, ham dad undersea adventure.

Speaker H:

Is he trying to breathe these underwater? Because now I'm not a little more.

Speaker B:

For over ten years.

Speaker C:

What else are you going to eat at them if you're under the water?

Speaker B:

I love his vlog library ham sub mach one. He attempted to do like an underwater ball where the hamster could move around walking in a ball. This is the craziest thing I've ever seen anyways. I don't think we're going to get more detailed content than that, but we'll make one more round. I think that adam, do you want to take a turn on some crazy stuff that you've seen? decorative tank or stuff you've done?

Speaker H:

No, I've never done anything that crazy at all. The hamster thing was the top of what I've seen.

Speaker B:

This is the best. We're not going to get better than this, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker H:

But is Jim behind you?

Speaker B:

I do have to he stepped behind. But we do have to actually answer a couple of comments here. We got one from Blue 21. He said, Is it okay if I use Reynolds wrap as the COVID on my ENDLER tank since they're not worth buying a normal cover for? And he's got a picture of Reynolds wrap on his endless tank.

Speaker C:

I wouldn't buy the expensive Reynolds wrap. I'd get the generic stuff because you don't want to waste a lot of money on that generic stuff.

Speaker B:

Just be careful on the Reynolds wrap. Don't let it get like, loose and fall into your aquarium. Catch a fish, or worse, get stuck in your filter or something, or get stuck on your heater. Just as a warning. All these different ideas we're telling you about, we're not telling you to do these. We're just explaining stories of either stupid stuff we've done when you're younger, super stuff more recently that we're not proud of, and more or less just telling you funny stories to show what fish keepers have done. As I'm looking at a beer can in my tank, you asshole.

Speaker C:

Jimmy well, just a little payback for the time I came home from vacation. I find a giant glass dildo. We can do a dildo in my tank, in my discus tank.

Speaker B:

If you've been listening to the aquarium guys podcast, we've alluded to this in the past. We have a thing between fish tank people. And what we do is when we go visit a friend, especially, we go like 6 hours. Going to visit Joe shrimp shack. I go to Ohio Fish Rescue. See those wonderful people? I'm going to bring a glass dildo with me. And what I do is because Rob.

Speaker C:

Has before, that doesn't it doesn't matter.

Speaker B:

If it's a fish store. It doesn't matter if it's a youtuber. Just any friend, I recommend going get your 100% pure glass dildo and put it in their tank and leave it as a momento. Because here's what they're going to do. They're going to take it, they're going to message you, why the hell did you do this? Or you're going to laugh together, and then that person you left the dildo behind with is going to take it, and he's going to prank a friend. So it's the dildo that never stops giving. So imagine it's like the world's shittiest baton Pass, but only between people that have aquariums.

Speaker C:

People used to buy this family that bought this pair of pants that was so ungodly big for everybody, and they kept giving it to each other for Christmas for 30 years. That's what you're going for, aren't you?

Speaker B:

Absolutely. So when we were not be sharing.

Speaker H:

A dildo with Rob or any it's brand new.

Speaker B:

All right? Don't be absurd here. This is a brand new, out of the box, fish only dildo. All right?

Speaker F:

Yeah. I would buy a dildo from any company that did have some type of quality assurance team.

Speaker B:

Rectal. thermometers on the label says, We've tested this. Do not use orally giving them money.

Speaker D:

Unless they've tested it at least once. I don't want to shout your product.

Speaker B:

Do that to your friends.

Speaker C:

I highly I have another question. Do you why would you take something glass and put that, let's say, in your person? And why would you use glass to me?

Speaker B:

I'm not going there. But I do recommend it for your aquarium. Okay. 100%. It looks great, especially the ones with the nice base pedestal. You just put it right in the sander gravel, and it just sticks up there proud and ready for everyone to see.

Speaker F:

It's one of those things where, since it's clear, they don't notice at first until it starts building that fine layer of algae. So you get, like, a transition from, hey, what is that? To full blown venus.

Speaker B:

Kind of. See, the ones I get are clear mostly, but then they have, like, one color swirl going all the way through the top to bottom.

Speaker C:

Yeah, he got my wife a purple one on it.

Speaker B:

Right? So what I do is I put it in there, and it's just clear enough where you're like, what is that? And you have to really zoom in. And once you get your face up to the tank, you have a moment of clarity, like, oh, no. Then it blows on you, and then your head explodes. You call rob's and blame him, because that's the only one you can obviously blame. So I went to Joe Shrimpshack, and he has a store now. He's he had a friend there, and the friend saw me put it in the tank. I'm like shh. And then I told the guy before people come in the store, if he doesn't notice it on his own, tell him the last thing we want is, like, a kid walking into the store be like, mommy, I want that decoration. So I left it there. 15 minutes later, sure enough, he found it, messaged me. We had a giggle, and now he's going to be passing the baton.

Speaker C:

Yes. And I have a feeling someday I'm going to find you dead with that stuck up your butt. And tire tracks from Joe driving away is going to kill you.

Speaker B:

We left one for Josh and Big Rich at Ohio Fish Rescue. That's a true story. We put it in one of their bigger tanks. Not the biggest tank, because I'm not going to swim down four or 5ft just to put a dildo in a tank. So I put it was a bigger tank. You could reach to the bottom, and it was there for quite a while. I think it was even got to like one or two YouTube videos because they forgot to pull it out. Yeah. So if you can find those videos, message us and we'll give you a free t shirt.

Speaker D:

If you send it to one of us, we can try to grow zoe's on it.

Speaker B:

Noted.

Speaker E:

I just had a sudden realization of if you want to see really bad aquariums sometimes with really stupid themes, what you do is you go on YouTube, right? You type in just fish tank. And then you set the filter to newest first, and you will find the most absurd, like, strange aquariums ever. There was one we found a tank made out of a guitar. My favorite of all time. It was a guy. I can't find it anymore and I'm so mad. The tank was the most absurd thing I've ever seen. It was super tall. It was gigantic. It had like a doll house in it. And yeah, as someone just said in the podcast Live chat, it had a humidity indicator on it. A humidity indicator on a fish tank.

Speaker B:

It's just water break it and make it forced to pull out.

Speaker E:

What was the humidity in the tank? What do you think? Take a lot.

Speaker C:

When I was in high school, my grandmother had an old TV that you'd see from 1955. And I gutted that thing a shop class when I was a sophomore in high school. And I made it into aquarium, and there was two knobs on it, and one turned on the light, and the other one increased airflow of the air. I just had a little control valve on there. And I had that thing for a long time. I had somebody offered me like $400 for it, and I sold it.

Speaker B:

You can make a lot of money doing those tanks. They're still very popular. So if you can find your old, what we call woody TV, where they could just come in like a wood cabinet, any of those old tvs that are literally worth nothing, you can put a tank inside and make yourself a really nice aquarium, and they'll go for a crazy amount of money. The most is I had a buddy, he took one of those giant wood frames, put a tank in it, and he sold it for $1,500. And that was just an easy drop tank set up. It was nice flush on the. Front. It wasn't even like bowed glass. It was just easy peasy.

Speaker C:

One of the cool things I saw recently, I was on YouTube just looking at tanks and stuff, and there is a garden in Japan, and they've taken all these different crazy tanks and put them in the garden. So you walk through the garden at night and these tanks are lit up with the most beautiful fish. But they had an old phone booth. And anyway, they completely sealed the phone booth and left the phone in there. And they had fish in there. It's just beautiful. I mean, it's a Japanese garden. These people have done extremely hard, hard work on this stuff. And it's absolutely beautiful. But it's just cool to see something out of the ordinary.

Speaker B:

Well, what I'd like to do in the aquarium Guys podcast is give you guys something that you can easily obtain for a fun idea. Now we can talk about spongebob. We talked about Mario bros. I've talked to some people that they do like legos or bionicles. Instead, what I like to recommend is something much simpler. And you might be able to offend your family with this for Thanksgiving or Christmas coming up. And what you got to do, go on amazon.com and just type in yourself. Was it crystal bluegravel or just blue gravel? You'll see that there's clearer stuff that you can use. And they have these in the five pound bags. And essentially it's either plastic or glass. The glass is much better. Be careful of some of the edges. And it looks like your entire bottom of your tank is just these little broken glass blue pieces, right? And then what you need to do is there was a mistake. Walmart decides that, hey, this cool show called Breaking Bad is really popular on amc. We should do a toy line of Breaking Bad. Now, for those of you who haven't listened to, Breaking Bad is a very critically acclaimed series that focuses on a science teacher getting cancer and having to try to make enough money creating meth for his family before he passes. It's a gripping show, definitely not for children. But the whole idea is science teacher makes meth and he makes blue meth. So Walmart decides, we want an action figure for children. They get all these action figures in and send them across. All of the walmart's parents riot across the United States. They immediately send all of the toys back. So now it's like their core audience. Exactly. All of these toy warehouses didn't know what to do with them, so they just peddle them to third parties. So you can still find Breaking Bad action figures on Amazon. And they have heisenberg Jesse, and they have them in their lab coats holding trays of meth or buckets of meth. So have yourself a crystal blue bottom, get yourself your favorite figurine and check the figurines, because now they've had remakes. So make sure that it's safe for children and that it's not going to leach paint or any other chemical from the toy into the tank. But that would be a hilarious tope I've seen people do, and you can do yourself.

Speaker C:

Even if these things leach into the tank. How about you just put the damn thing in that hamster cage where it's dry? I'm just saying.

Speaker B:

I mean, honestly, it created, like a side little cult thing. Now they have, like, funko pops that make you look like the characters from Breaking Bad. They got all kinds of crazy those.

Speaker C:

Are very popular funko pops.

Speaker H:

I just thought of why the parents at Walmart were pissed. Why they didn't want the kids to realize that they were doing math. That's for when they get older.

Speaker B:

Because that is correct.

Speaker C:

We did not do that. I don't know if you know, but you're probably all very excited that barbie Now has come out with an elton John barbie.

Speaker H:

Elton John before I believe in a rail barbie.

Speaker C:

Yeah. They make it elton John barbie Now. And this is an actual fact here, and I bought them a couple of years ago. barbie came out with double seven characters for barbie, and I owned the one that was called pussy galore, and I'm not making that up. You can go online and see them. So there's a seven barbie doll named pussy galore from the there's also one other one that's a little iffy, too. I can remember the name of it real quick, but octopussy.

Speaker B:

No, that was the one with the blue ring. octopus.

Speaker C:

Yeah. Look it up. They're still selling them on ebay and stuff. The last time I saw a pussy galore dollar, it was going for like, $95, and I actually bought one just because it was hilarious and Walmart was selling it. merry Christmas to gym.

Speaker H:

They have a video on here for you. Spiritual put it on here for you.

Speaker B:

What does that do? The golden cabbage? Yeah. So that's been a viral real for a long time.

Speaker H:

The golfing catch memories of your arijuana.

Speaker C:

Jesus.

Speaker B:

Now, the golfing Catfish Yourself is known for eating two to three times its size and fish. There's a popular video of a medium sized gulper catfish eating a koi that's clearly two and a half times its size.

Speaker D:

They'll swallow your fist.

Speaker E:

That's amazing.

Speaker C:

Do not be fisting with your fish.

Speaker B:

They're pretty incredible. Do you guys got any other last minute worthwhile notes for some of these crazy ideas?

Speaker C:

I love you. Says Worthwhile.

Speaker D:

I had one tank that might have been worse than the lamprey one.

Speaker C:

Let's see.

Speaker D:

The Department of Ichthology works cross with the Department of Entomology. bugs are disgusting. We all hate bugs. They're terrible. I cannot express how much I hate insects, but I had to set up a tank for, you know, those hobiders. You've probably seen them. They're in American lakes, ponds, forest inches long. They eat fish. They got these big, long claws and a long proboscis. They're these disgusting creatures.

Speaker B:

I've known them as called giant water bugs. We have a few of them in Minnesota, actually.

Speaker D:

Yeah. So I set up a tank for them. So it was why, imagine it looks.

Speaker B:

Like a giant cockroach with like demon fangs in the front.

Speaker D:

Yeah. The whole name of the display was Canadian River Creatures. So we had to do a bunch of Canadian river creatures and of course they leave me with the towbiters. So it was a 20 long and I put like four of these things in there and we were feeding them goldfish because that's what we were told to. Even though I feel like it's probably not a good for the insect, but I also don't care if they live or die.

Speaker C:

I thought you were going to say.

Speaker B:

Honestly, with these things, they catch minnows in their natural environment and that's what they're kind of hunting for or anything that they can grab that's small enough.

Speaker C:

I thought he was going to say they fed them toes.

Speaker B:

I used to catch these things as a kid.

Speaker D:

Yeah, there.

Speaker H:

Did you put them in your shit jars too, rob's?

Speaker B:

Yeah, on the sun? I did not. That would be humane.

Speaker D:

So this tank was very lightly planted. It was just some gravel and a few fake plants and stuff. Because all the kids are going to come and see it and you want to make sure they can see it. And they don't see just like some beautiful wellscape tank, they just want to see whatever's in it. So that meant when I had to clean it, every time I'd clean it, those towbiters would see me and those tow fighters will come for you. So I was cleaning the tank once and it's disgusting because they tear apart these goldfish and it's just gross and you don't want to have to clean that up. And so while I'm cleaning, one of my bosses and the curator of entomology and one of the museum directors was walking through because it was after closing hours. So they do a quick walk through to make sure nothing is out of place or anything. Right when they're behind me, one of them says hi to me. So I go over and say hi to them and then they're striking up a little conversation with me. While I'm doing that, one of those toebiters bites my hand and it hurt bad. And the first thing I yell as loud as like it should be noted I'm of Irish descent and sometimes the words we say when we're in pain are not good words. I very loudly said a word that rhymes with grunt.

Speaker B:

We've had a couple of British people on here. They like that word.

Speaker D:

Yeah, the director of the museum doesn't like that word I've learned, so I didn't get in trouble or anything. But it was probably one of the most embarrassing moments of my life that is the story of how your boy Oscar almost got fired because he made.

Speaker B:

A bug tope for work.

Speaker D:

Yeah, I got paid for this is the only good thing to come out of it.

Speaker B:

There's some crazy pictures in Chat. Even going further into that, like a toe biter killing a turtle.

Speaker H:

Yeah, poor little baby turtle.

Speaker B:

They're crazy things. And when they bite, it feels like a sting. It's not just they're biting, it's pretty sharp. Shit. I swell up from them real bad.

Speaker H:

Do they have venom?

Speaker B:

I don't know what they have, but I know I must be allergic to whatever's there because they give me like an egg wherever. They must have a venomous.

Speaker D:

I believe they have a venomous saliva that they inject in to kind of digest and then pull those innards out. But when they bite, they hurt. It hurts bad and it hurts for a while. They're super aggressive is the strange thing, because they'll go after the Chat. Someone posts a turtle, they'll go after turtles like mice, anything that they can get their hands on. So if you have a tank with them and you have your hand in there, they'll go for your hand without a shadow of a doubt. And they are fast. They are deceptively fast.

Speaker C:

And they're big.

Speaker B:

These are the things that the charis from skyrim is based on. Okay, well, I don't think we can get much more haunting than what we've talked about. Sea lampreys, toe bitters, my ex wife hamsters. So before we leave, I just want to remind you this was a fun episode. Do not take any of this advice to heart. Before you put any object in your tank, do research on what that material is made out of, whether what type of plastic, what chemicals are sprayed on it, what paint is in it, and do your homework before putting it in. If you want real advice, you could message us for these different examples. You got the guy that was sealing his wood. Don't do that. Do your homework before you put any object in the tank. And if you ever want to make a taupe, have fun, but also always look up for the fish's needs. As long as you're meeting their needs, you can certainly have some fun, creativity, and get into the hobby. But meet your fish's needs first and then have some fun.

Speaker C:

And if you have any interesting tanks out there already, go ahead and send us those pictures and we'll put them on our discord page and Facebook, and maybe even Rob will get a tattoo on his ass of that.

Speaker B:

We also have the cobalt and reflowers contest that we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, so certainly go in the show notes sign up. We're doing an aquascape contest, and cobalt and reflowers are giving away three separate prizes. Look at those. They're fantastic prizes and bundles and either fresh water or salt water. Both are accepted for the contest, but we're also doing a separate one aside that aquarium guys are doing at the same form for funniest tope that's safe for fish. If you have something like a hamster in the aquarium, we're going to disqualify you because that's cruelty. But if you have something that's safe for the fish that you have as a fun tope, send it in. We like comedy topes. We'll get you a prize for that.

Speaker C:

I don't know if we're going to disqualify for the hamsters.

Speaker B:

I'm disqualifying for the hamster. I'm not going to go there, but I'm definitely going to contact that guy.

Speaker C:

So if you have a mouse or a rat, go ahead and do that. But hamsters?

Speaker B:

No, none of the above.

Speaker H:

All right, just put them on co2.

Speaker C:

And introduce them to your friend. Mr. Snake.

Speaker B:

A big thank you to all members from tct. It was a pleasure having you.

Speaker C:

It was a lot of fun, guys.

Speaker B:

Thank you so much. I mean, even the theoretical topes, one of my favorite bits of all time. Thank you for that.

Speaker F:

Actually, can I steal 1 minute before we go?

Speaker C:

Absolutely, you can have all you want.

Speaker F:

So I have been chastised in the other servers specifically because apparently I do make topes and I just don't realize because I don't bother remembering anything, the maze tope. So I was building stuff out of acrylic for boredom and I built a system that was 4ft wide by eight inches front to back by 24 inches tall. And the idea was to just kind of put it against the wall and have a very vertical, very vertical system. And the acrylic I used wasn't tall enough or rather thick enough to support the weight of the water. Started Boeing. So I started panels inside of it and kind of gluing it all together. And what it ended up becoming is a three dimensional maze for the fish to swim to, to try to get to the top to get food. So that was my big one, is the Maze Hope, which ended up having cherry shrimp, a whole crap ton of endlers and a newt that we found dried up in the corner of a local fish store. And I ended up rehydrating it and it comes back to life. And that was the entire system.

Speaker C:

Was that the price?

Speaker F:

No, there was a scroll at the front. I forgot her name, but I always called her Jennifer. It wasn't her name, but that's what I called her. And she just goes like, hey, there's this thing. Do you want it? And I looked at it, it was just like this old dusty newt. And I was like, what is it? And she goes, I don't know. Then I put water on it and sure enough it starts moving again and scared me. So I put in the fish tank and it was an albino ribbed nute that lived in a maze up against my wall.

Speaker D:

You made a saw trap for adlers.

Speaker F:

Did I?

Speaker D:

I think you did.

Speaker B:

Well, saw trap. It's not killing them. It's just enriching their lives to try to find food, more ways to hunt them.

Speaker D:

Jameson never killed anyone.

Speaker F:

That's true.

Speaker D:

They hit every movie.

Speaker B:

Okay, very true. One more spin off of that. There's also a couple of other ideas for fish enrichment. And they have these we'll call it a tope. And what they do is they take like a random goldfish, a rancho goldfish, and they put them in this certain tank and they drop a plastic soccer ball in. And if goldfish move the soccer ball into either goal on either side, they get fed. So they're essentially training them to play soccer. And it's a crazy fun experience. There's no objects in the tank to cut them. It's completely safe how they have it set up. They made a custom tank for it. It's a nice large space, large soccer field. And they train their fish to play soccer. So, again, as long as your fish's needs are met and you're not putting newts with your endlers to get eaten, certainly have them find ways to enrich your fish, but do your homework.

Speaker C:

Have you ever seen.

Speaker F:

Users are vastly overestimating the abilities of a newt?

Speaker B:

They might be able to clip one, though. You never know. And there's also different types of nudes.

Speaker C:

This one is a rib nude for your pleasure. That's what he said. That is what I said. Have you ever been to a really bad fair? Not that there's any good fares, but we were at a fair one time, and they had a chicken that would tell you your future. And you put your quarter in, and then it would drop some corn or something in there, and then he would peck at the food, and then it would show your future up there like he was typing. And they can't type for shit, I'll tell you that much. chickens cannot type.

Speaker B:

So what you're saying is you did that and it said that you're going to be one day in the Aquarium podcast.

Speaker C:

No, here's what it said. It went like X, all these different jibber jabber stuff. And then at the end it popped up like a real thing. That was chicken language.

Speaker B:

Oh, they translated it.

Speaker C:

They translated it. And it says, you will grow very old and wise. Something like that. I saw that at stake here one time.

Speaker B:

All right, I'm cutting Jimmy off. Beer, guys. If you like the podcast, certainly go to Queenwestpodcast Combat, the website. You can find a way to support us. You can buy merch from our store. You can just support us directly through the link on the bottom. By donating one time monthly. Helps keeps the lights on. And above all else, always check out our sponsors. tct. Thank you for coming on. Go to the Courier excuse me, the community tank.com. Check out their podcast. Join their discord. They're fun people.

Speaker D:

On behalf of all of us, thank you for having us on. It's great talking to you guys.

Speaker B:

Huge fans of the podcast.

Speaker C:

It was fun to have you and be assured that we had you.

Speaker B:

Now off to Google more amateur adventures until next week. Thanks, guys, for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this. I never knew that a Minnesota accent.

Speaker G:

To be so sexy until I heard adam's voice.

Speaker C:

Go frank yourself. Don't you know that's my boy? Don't you know.

Episode Notes

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Our scheduled guest abandoned us at the last min, we instead talk about things you shouldn't do in your aquarium with the guys from TCT find them at http://www.thecommunitytank.com/

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