This is Jim. Jim is doing well, very well indeed. That's because not long ago, with just a web search, jim realized he could have something better in his life. And what did he get? Why, a big boost of confidence, a little more self esteem, and a larger shrimp at home. To learn more about bigger shrimp, go to joe's Shrimp shack.com and use promo code Aquarium Guide to check out for 15% stuff your entire order. Joe Shrimp shack, the fast, reliable way for natural shrimp enhancement. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob golson. Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Today, again, super excited. We're always excited. When are we not excited, Jimmy?

The last time I was not excited was the day after we all got together at my house and I had the tequila virus. I was not excited then.

So we'll get into that. But before we go too far, here we have Les He's, one of the founders of cobalt aquatics, here to be the guest of this podcast. How are you doing today, sir?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

We appreciate you coming on. And again, today's subject, we're going to go over fish food and nutrition. With some of your expertise, we can.

Talk about fish food and however deep you want to go.

Well, thanks again. And I'm your host, Rob Z olsen.

I'm Jim colby.

What?

And I'm Adam. That comcast Internet. You got to love it. So, before we kick anything off, we we got, you know, news and announcements, but, you know, Adam turned 65 today.

65 and a half.

65 and a half. So happy birthday.

Happy birthday, Adam. Hey, Adam. How was your weekend?

It was pretty good.

Did you drive home safely last night?

Well, yeah. That was a super long drive last night.

Yeah. That was your fun having Mother's Day dinner over at rob's mom's house?

Yeah. Why weren't you there, Rob?

Yeah. Didn't you come over?

That's the one person I would assume to automatically have COVID. Come on now.

Your mom.

Absolutely.

She looked fine to me when I was over there. She makes a hell of a brisket, I'll tell you that.

Brisket.

It's a delicious chocolate cake.

Stay away from my mom's meat. gosh. All right, guys, so we got a couple of questions this week. One was kind of a follow up question. Got a question about one of my coy. I lost west last week. This is from furman, by the way. The biggest one is ten to twelve inches. Never really acclimated well. Lasted all week at the bottom of the pond without moving. Tried to net him. It simply swim away. Eyes are really swollen. Some scales seem to be popping out on the side. Any tips on what to do? So anytime that you're seeing, like, eyes go and you're seeing that almost like fuzziness, and your skills swell up, I'm immediately going number one. toxins in the tank fungus. It's probably just all around ammonia, caked water, or at least he's been in it somewhere where he's infected himself. antibiotics such as not as diphromias. And what's the other antibiotic that you get for like, sinus infections? Humans take penicillin. cephalaxin. There you go.

Cephalaxin.

Cephalexin.

I believe that's a big word.

I know you can get it from your veterinarian. Otherwise just antifungal medication. But the best thing to do in those situations, in my opinion, is salt. You can never go wrong with just starting some salt.

I wish I had it now. Once upon a time I used to buy from a particular goldfish company over in the North Carolina area. They sent me a sheet one time and like nine out of eleven diseases are not cured, but they're helped by salt. And I wish I'd have kept that. I cannot find that anymore. And they've gone out of business since then, but they've sent that out. And every time I bring in goldfish, I always hit them with salt and I hit them with a little bit of copper just so they don't come down with ick after being transported.

So is this fish a pond? Fish?

It is a koi. That's ten to twelve inches. They're seeing the eyes.

Is it in a pond?

He has it in what he calls his indoor pond. So I'm assuming it's something about eight to 6ft according to this time of year.

This time of year is weather changes. You can see a lot of aeromonus infections with koi sometimes, and you'll see it sometimes the ice swell, you'll see it right behind like the forehead of the fish. It'll look like bloody regions and the scales will kind of pop out and almost always, like I said, as the temperature changes, aeromotus can be a big thing. Salt is a great thing. And then another good thing to just kind of knock the infection back is potassium permanganate bath.

There you go.

But you don't really normally want to treat the entire pond. You want to try to get them and put them in a bucket or something. Hit them real hard with potassium permanganate for like five minutes. Do that a couple of times a week if you can. And if it is aramona saddle, knock it down pretty quick.

Perfect. We're also saving a bunch of questions so you can go to our Discord Aquariumgeistpodcast Combat. On the website you'll find the link for Discord. Discord is our actually what we're doing, the podcast on it does voice and video chat, but it also has text channels where we answer questions live. So if you want something answered abruptly or you need some expertise, we have a community in there 24 hours a day, thanks to our international fans, and they will answer a question on the spot. And we're also gathering questions for a new segment we're going to call Dr. Fish. We're getting an expert from seacrest farms. They're head expert of fish health and diseases, and they're going to come on a regular basis here. We don't know exactly what that will look like, but we want to save a bunch of those questions to answer with an actual fish doctor.

So you're just going to wait until somebody's fish are dead before we talk to a doctor?

No.

You're a jerks.

We got discord for that to answer quickly, but we got to save some of these.

I got something real quick, too that I wanted to share from Amazon us, our friends over at amazonis magazine that they just released. I just got this today, and this is an email we got from them. And it's kind of exciting news because we've had with everything going on with the coronavirus and stuff, it's just been negative, negative, negative.

But there's some positive, please.

Yeah, some positive. Here. Here's something from amazon's magazine. If you've got an email, you've already read it. It says, brazil's fish exports are opening up since without great fanfare, brazilian authorities published a new directive rule on April 17, 2020, that established norms and criteria and standards for the sustainable use of fishes from continents and esther and waters for aquarium hobby use. The updated rules are expected to fundamentally change aquarium fish exports from Brazil going forward and are anticipated to greatly expand the diversity of species legally available to aquarium hobbyists around the globe. And they're going to do an entire episode, I think. It's coming up in the July august in June. It's going to come out early, they said, and they're going to talk about this at length. So good news for those people who love those Brazilian fish. There's going to be more available, and it sounds like the Brazilian government now is kind of taking the regulatory finger off the button.

Number one, everybody's suffering from lack of exports due to the, you know, the COVID infections. But number two, I mean, the last probably ten months, project piaba has been really pushing. They've been putting a lot more videos. Now they've documented whole on Amazon rain cycles and thousands of fish naturally just being stuck in puddles and drying up. So they've identified more species than they've originally mapped. So these two put together for the perfect trifecta of us and the hobby going to be benefiting off of more fish and hopefully a better way.

Yeah. And then hopefully after this, COVID will be able to bring fish in. Rob and I had a conversation the other day. Our local big box stores are telling their customers that you can't get betas because there's a beta shortage.

That is malarkey. There is just as many betas there used to be. COVID does not kill betas. So they're there.

It's just that I did kill the people that take care of it.

Yeah, it's the pet cos and the pet smarts that had to make a business decision and said, we're not taking any more livestock. They need to be flexible enough to make a decision if they need to temporarily close the store in case of an infection and not having to worry about live animals being at their establishments to take care of. But it's just easier to tell a customer that, oh, there's a shortage.

Yeah, there's no shortage. There's a shortage of airplanes right now. Tomorrow I got to drive 200 miles to go get my fish, which normally come into within 40 miles of our house because they're not doing any transfers anymore, meaning they will only direct ship to one airport. So you have to go to the airport near sue to pick up your fish. Last week, two weeks ago, I had 14 countries I could pick from for my trans shipper. This week I've only had seven. And China is no longer available, and I don't know if my wholesaler shut that down or not. I used to get some nice discus from China, but I'm trying some discounts from a different country. This week. We'll see how they come in. But tomorrow morning I get to go to Minneapolis and pick up stuff. So there's no shortage. It's just a shortage of airplanes. Right now, the airplanes that are in the air are all flying people and luggage. And if you know anything about the airlines with the fish being sent in, the fish are usually the bottom thing that they want to carry right now. They don't want to carry any perishables. They don't want to carry any flowers or fish. They carry only human remains and luggage right now, from what I'm being told.

And even human remains are being held. I mean, just because they easily wave, it's not a necessity.

Yeah. For those of you who aren't familiar with the airlines carrying human remains, I was told that seven out of every ten airplanes have a dead body, an HR human remains in the bottom of the airplane. You know, like when your grandfather grandmother would happen to be in Arizona vacationing or maybe there for the winter, and they pass away, then they are shipped home. It's about a $400 bill to ship them home. But that has a priority. They don't want them sitting there very long. And so that's the priority of the airlines right now, is just passengers, passenger, luggage and hrs. So right now, we're kind of being looked down upon, trying to bring in fish, things like that.

Got to pick your priorities when you're down there. You got to say hi to Joe.

I will. I think we're going to swing by Joe Shrimp shack and give him heck.

So a couple of weeks ago, we went down for a rescue. It's actually being filmed. We're putting it on the YouTube for Ohio fish rescue's. YouTube channel. And when we were down there, we had to stop at joe's place to get heat packs. He ordered those in for us. So we can do the rescue because we're boxing up thousands of cichlids. You'll see it on the Ohio Fish rescue's YouTube channel. But we got there and I decided to leave him a little present. In tradition of aquarium guy's debauchery, I took that very same adult toy, Jimmy, that was in your tank. I saw that and left it in one of joe's tanks and he was very appreciative. He feels honored that he's one of the aquarium guys now and he discovered it in about 15 minutes after me leaving. So he's very observing.

My wife said, is that the same one? I said, I'm pretty sure you darn.

Right it's the same one. I mean, I told him that he has to pass on the baton, the torch the baton to someone else he needs to prank. So hopefully that particular adult toy will pass hands going forward, tank to tank. So back on track to the real news, shall we? We also have another message from Harry. Harry says, hey, guys. First off, love the podcast before I found you guys, or listen to maybe one, two podcasts ever. Now I'm caught up and look for a new podcast every week because of you guys and your Amazonist episode. I subscribed and reached out to them and got them to ship me the entire collection from 2012 to now. Whether it's true or not, I'm giving you guys props for convincing me to make them back order issues so much easier to purchase. There's a question now for each of us, so I'm going to be selfish and take mine first. So, question for rob's. What's the best recipe for a community aquarium for average sizes of 125, 75 or a 40 breeder? Recipes for excessive things to avoid. Pretty sure you have a 125 community, so I am going to pick on the 125 because like you said, that's what I have. Any type of community tank. People always like, I want one big fish and a bunch of small. I think that's the biggest a mistake you can make. I see so many people that want to put a 40 breeder and have I'll take have a angel and the neon tetris. Well, it's not that they can't go together, but they have to have the right environment. We've learned from a lot of our guests that they can go together, but there has to be fast moving water so they have places to get away from the big fish. In communities, I always stick with all relatively the same size fish. That way there's no mistake. There's no probability factor or risk of one getting whacked somewhere. I have 125 gallon planted and it is essentially filled to the top to bottom with nano fish. I love that type of community. It's safer and I find it more rewarding because fish of the same size interact and dither with each other regardless of different species. So that's my biggest thing. No matter the size 40 to 120. If you're having a big community, try to find life size fish. All right, next one is for Jimmy.

What's that?

What is the best way to build a buyer seller relationship for shrimp with a local fish store? There's a handful of specialty shops in my area, central Ohio, where I like to supply shrimp to, but don't want to swap shrimp for store credit all the time. I should go store credit to chase for dollars. I'm currently building a rack system for ten gallon tanks to breed neos in and would like to make a rack system for cardinias. And eventually, based on my success selling other neo's. What do you recommend, Jimmy?

Well, I tell you what. When I first started over 30 years ago, when my whole thing started out with somebody wanting guppies and same thing, they wanted to trade guppies for a tank or anything like that. But what you need to do is develop that relationship with somebody that you want to hang your hat on and be an associate with them and be their backup. What I like to do is when I sell my shrimp, we raise quite a few shrimp, and when I do my shrimp and they usually buy 50 to 100 lot, I like to give them a volume discount so they can make money. And I also always give them a couple of extra, and I don't argue with them if they say we lost three or four because you've already given them extra three or four.

Think of it as the baker's dozen mentality, is what I think about. If you're a donut shop, you're going to put that extra donut in there in case you forgot to put the sprinkles on one of them.

Them, yeah, because I've been buying stuff from overseas for years and years, and when I get my bag of shrimp, when I bring in my breeders, there are 150. There's never 150 in there. There's always 125, there's always 128. But you take them with six or ten bags of those, all of a sudden you've got a $200 bill that you're missing right there. And I called up my people that I buy from and say, I want some credits on this. I don't want my customers calling and asking me for credit because I short changed them. And a lot of times, too, I also throw in a few babies, and by throwing in a few babies, my stores that sell the shrimp are doing it in barebottom tanks, so these babies are very easily seen, and that's what people want. They always go, I'll take the babies, and they'll pay full price for babies, too. But I normally like to try to give them all the same exact size and then throw in like five or six babies with a couple of extra and stuff. So I think just by developing a relationship with them and they know they can depend on you, and that you can supply when they call.

And then also knowing what the prices they're getting. I mean, you can't possibly know all the lists and product you get, but you can get an average of what shrimp are being wholesaled for. You have to remember, you're competing with their shipped in lists. The only difference is you're not paying shipping. So try to match or compare. And then if you're already starting with, yeah, I'll trade for credit, well, they're going to try to abuse that. It's not because they're cheap. It's because that's their bottom line. They make money at the store. That's their bread. So they're going to try to find ways to make their business the most cost efficient, especially when one disease can wipe out their entire stock. They got to make the most profit they can on it. So always start the relationship out while trying to know wholesale prices and start the relationship of, yes, I'm here to sell in bulk.

But the other thing that you should always point out to them, you know what? Here's my price. I'm here to give you credit if something goes wrong. But also, there's no box charge, there's no shipping charge, there's no heat pack charge, there's no cold pack charge, there's no bagging charge. This is my price. And I know every time you bring in from other places that they charge you for all this stuff, and then they'll go, oh, this guy's been around for a while. He knows he's talking about and tell.

Them that you advertise that they're local. They love people that say, oh, these are locally bred, and tell them that you should have enough to source them for xtime. And they'll easily just keep that tank dedicated to you.

Oh, we're in low.

Bring some over tomorrow. Got it.

And then be prepared for that phone call saying, I just sold out of my my shrimp and it's Saturday morning. Can you get me some here in the next hour or two so I can sell this afternoon? Because Saturday is a big, big day at the pet store.

You'll always be more valuable than anybody that can ship.

There you go.

All right, Adam, your question. Are you ready, buddy?

Yes.

Can we get an episode dedicated to owning and operating a pet store? The dudes don't good, bad, or running a shop like seahorses and pennies. dude struggles with location, local competition, sourcing, etc. Where do I donate to get Adams spliced into the podcast for this episode? He paid his dues to be a legit member. He deserves his own episode at this point.

There you go.

Come on, Adam. What do you have to say? You're going to do it? Peer pressure. Peer pressure. Peer pressure.

Yeah, I can do one.

Perfect. So we'll get that scheduled up and hear more ways to lose money on buying dog food and internet, because clearly that was a great little conversation.

There the one thing that Adam really had going for him with his pet store is that he was located next to a McDonald's in his town. And if you want to pay attention where traffic is, if you could be next to a fast food restaurant like that, like Adam used to be, he used to have a lot of people that would just straggle on over because they see the pet stores are sitting in the drive through at McDonald. McDonald spends a tremendous amount of money checking out their locations. You very seldom see a McDonald's that's closed because they do their due diligence and they know where they're putting a McDonald's just because they do all their homework first. So if you can be near a fast food restaurant such as a McDonald's or an rb and stuff that has a lot of traffic, that would be really good for everyone.

That way when they ask for a filet of fish they can go see fish. You know what I mean?

There you go.

All right, so that does it for questions. We have more but we need to spread these out and frankly we only have so much time for episode. But if you guys got questions we'd love to hear it. Accordingpodcast.com bottom the website you can call in, leave us a voicemail that's happened a couple of times before emails like we've been getting or on our discord. You can message us directly. Appreciate it guys. And Les, we won't keep you holding any further. Are you ready to dive into the world of fish nutrition?

No kombucha. I'm ready.

No kombucha.

Yeah, whatever.

Excellent. So first of all we got to talk about you. You have a fascinating background. So besides being one of the founders of cobalt, what actually got you into the fish hobby and where's your career taking you so far?

Well, I was born into the hobby so my dad actually kept wild discus back in the had a our family had a 29 gallon show tank with three or four discus, wild discus and had them for a long time until I was about seven or eight years old. And the first thing I did was one of the greatest moves of any fish guy could ever do is I thought those wild discus that were years old in the aquarium and doing completely awesome, I said these are boring. And I traded them into my local pet barn for a red Oscar.

But why?

And that's when you were put up for adoption.

It's all over at that point that Oscar lived the rest of my time at home and all the way a few years into college. So he was a good 1718 years old before he finally passed away. But that was my first move as an aquarius was, hey, dad, these discus are boring that you've had for years in the tank. Let's trade them in for an Oscar.

And ever since he's regretted that and had nothing but discus in his life ever since.

Exactly. From there when I got into college, I got the bug and I have aquatic biodegrade from uc Santa Barbara. And I went from one my first marine tank in the dorms to some point I had like 30 tanks in my apartments in college and worked at local fish stores. And after I graduated I did some consulting for coral propagation lab at uc Santa Barbara for a while and then I ran into Dr. Tim from marineland days or Dr. tim's aquatics now at a trade show when I was managing a fish store. And I walked into the marineland booth and he was looking for a biologist and I was looking for a job. And lucky enough I got hired into marineland as a research biologist and I worked under doctor Tim researching nitrifying bacteria and anything else that we felt like at the time.

A little bit of freedom back then.

Yeah, it was a privately owned company, so it was whatever the owner, Bob sherman, wanted to do. And I was the designated fish geek for the company. So I was responsible for all the display aquariums all over the company and all the executive offices. And I had pretty much carte blanche to do anything I wanted to as long as they were cool. And Bob, the owner, was definitely an educated fish guy and he wanted the latest and greatest. So if you remember, the precox rainbows came out. When they first came out, they were only males and they were extremely hard to get. seagrass farms you mentioned you're going to have them on, they were one of the first people to have them available them in eckwell. And I called them up, I'm like, oh, I just saw these in magazine because it really wasn't the internet back then and I got to get them. I got them for the low, low price of $50 a piece for 24 as many as they would ship.

And when was this?

God, it was 97, maybe $98 in there. The dollar actually meant something, $50 a piece at like whatever wholesale level I was buying at the time. I did that for about eight years and I'm pretty hyper if you haven't figured out yet, but you will shortly. And research is fun, but it's also very slow and I needed to get moving and doing something a little more active. And about that time Bob sold the company and to an investment firm and they created a marketing group. And I jumped ship from R and D to the dark side of marketing and found my home and the marketing side of development and never looked back. So I spent another roughly ten years at marineland United petro with tetra perfecto Instant Ocean Jungle Labs, all the companies that they acquired and merged with over the years, and managed pretty much every aspect of the business at one point or another. At the end, I was the director of marketing and development for the consumables and Equipment Groups, which managed Instant Ocean Salt, tetra Foods, marineland penguin filters, tetra whispers, everything with a corridor that could be mixed, squirted or fed into aquarium and absolutely loved it. But it became a job, not a passion anymore. And my license plate is Fish Geek, and it's Fish Geek for a reason. I decided that the corporate life was no longer where I wanted to be. Myself, randy parham and Viral serati, my two other partners, we decided in April of 2011 to leave and pursue our Fish Geek passion and start our own company, that we could do things the right way. And so nine years later, here we are talking to you.

So. I've always been curious. On cobalt, I purchased heaters. That's how I got into using cobalt and then some of your fish food in the past. I actually still use a lot of your shrimp pellets. I think they're by far some of the best shrimp pellets on the market. And what really puts you guys on the map, because everybody just kind of knows cobalt now, at least that I talked to what was like the first.

Product, brute force marketing, breaking finger. Yeah, especially vera and I, we love Fish geeks, we love fish, we love going to conferences, we love going to clubs. This is our passion and has been forever. So we spent years, and I'm doing this right now with you guys anytime, anybody who wants me to come to a club and talk about fish, nutrition, equipment, filter media, you name it, whatever you want. I have about ten talks I can do. I'm on a plane and are driving or whatever needs to take to come out and talk to Fishkies, tell them what we are, who are about showing the passion that we have for the business. And we try to put all that passion and knowledge into the products we make. And that's really how we got the name out there. But as far as like, first products, the product that we founded the company around is actually our mj Power Heads. That was the original maxi Jet. And part of my job at marineland was or United Pet Group at that point was managing an equipment business and the powers that be didn't want to buy from the Italian supplier anymore and they wanted to move it to China. I disagreed with that, but I was forced to do it because I didn't have a choice. They told me I had to do that, so my team moved it. I jumped on a plane and flew to Italy on a vacation and said, hey, what if, what if, what if? And he said, that's great. And so a few weeks months later, don't remember the exact time frame, but we quit, started cobalt, and that was our very first product right along that side there. I've been involved with. The marineland bio blend fish foods. If you're old enough to remember those fantastic formulas. Worked on the R and D side of it for a while with Dr. Tim, and then that was the first product launch that I had along with biospyra as a marketer. So I put together that whole program from start to finish and had a lot of experience with that. And then merging with tetra learned a ton about nutrition, and whatnot realized there was a lot of opportunities in nutrition for the North American market that people weren't really exploiting because a lot of these foods are not made in the Us. They're made offshore. And I'm not saying like Asia or whatnot tetras made in Germany. It's a fine formula, but they make so much food and they make it for the world that they try to make the maximum efficiency. So they have an overall good formula, but it's not tailored to the laws of any one country. It's a generic formula they can export everywhere. So here, if we're not really worried about export and we want to focus on the good old Us of A and we source our foods in the Us of A and do all our formulations and everything here, we can really tailor a formula directly to the benefit of the hobbyists here that nobody else can, because we're willing to take a little more risk with it because we're new and we also exploit the local regulations that other people can't use to our advantage. So like probiotics, for instance, are really, really hard to export and import into the in and out of the EU. So tetra will have almost a next to impossible time unless something dramatic changes, which with the COVID situation happening now, biohazard, biosecurity are at the highest levels right now, so I don't see that changing anytime soon. But we do have that ability. So the foods ended. We started off thinking we were going to be an equipment company that sold food and we ended up being a food company that sells equipment.

Definitely, that's the transition. I mean, even when you hit cobalt on Amazon, food is the first thing that pops up. Even though that power had is very popular, even when you said the mj powerhead. I'm seeing people in discord because right now we're doing this live on discord. So we have a bunch of fans listening in live, if you can come.

Thanks for that. You told me it wasn't going to be live, but then it's live, not.

Recorded live, so don't worry.

It doesn't bother me.

No, I even saw people shaking their head like, yeah, the power heads, like, they've definitely had good experiences with them.

So they're fantastic. They're the number one selling power head and actually pump in the world. Between the sales in North America and then the sister brands, which is aquarium systems in Europe and also aquarium systems in Japan. In Japan, they've been selling for 30 years or something. The design is just as good as it was then. Nobody has ever been able to replicate it. Even when we redid them when I was with Marineland, we made them in China. They weren't nearly as good. Even with all the more advanced technology that we have available as far as engineering design, they just missed a lot of the little intricacies that the italians are great at.

And so when you were at that first job and they said, we're going to go to China, I mean, I just saw you roll your eyes, and I was kind of doing the same thing. Is it just that their quality is just not as good? Like you just said. What other things are he's got to.

Choose his words carefully here.

You put him in a corner. No, because there's certain things. The goal of that project was to cut costs, okay, and find a new supplier. So by going to China in that project specifically, they weren't necessarily looking to make the best product possible. They were looking to replicate the product at a cheap cost and increase their margins. So are there quality concerns with Chinese suppliers? Absolutely there are. But are there reputable Chinese suppliers? Absolutely. But you have to be very specific when you go offshore to Asia about what product you want, how you want it made. And you have to put the time in on the fractory floor during the development and the pilot stages to make sure that the product performs and is assembled the way you want it. And it's not like you can just walk set it and forget it. You have to come back on a regular basis to those factories and double check and make sure that they're not changing anything, because everybody's goal is to make money. And if they think that they can change out whatever plastic to a different, cheaper plastic and it's the same color, so you won't know the difference. But they don't realize that there's a ul specification for the vo rating on that plastic that you have to worry about, and they change it, and you don't catch it right away, and something happens and the plastic catches fire and whatever else is a manufacturer, you're liable for that. You have to be diligent in your process with Chinese manufacturers especially to make sure that you're keeping them honest. And that's the part for the price of doing business there. Are there cheap manufacturers and low quality manufacturers? Absolutely. Can you manufacture in China? Well, at a high level, absolutely. But it's very time consuming, and you.

Got to be very diligent with it, very hands on.

Hey, if you're a company looking to cut costs, I mean, I'm just assuming any factory, wherever it's at, they're looking to cut costs as well. Just got to keep up with it.

Well, every company is worried about penny profit. I mean, you could talk about margins and stuff. I've been in business a long time and you could take home 30% margin, but to take home penny profit, you put pennies in the bank. You don't put margins in the bank. And there's a lot of, we like.

To say dollars in the bank instead of pennies.

Yeah, well, that's because they're high roller, man baller.

Well, getting down to food, so we got a couple of intro questions to start this off because we cater to experts and novice alike and a lot of the times is what food and why do I feed my food? So you have flake, you have freeze drive food, you have pellets. What are the stuff that you've had background with and why are those being used in the industry?

And frozen. You left out frozen.

Oh, definitely frozen. I see. You got blood worms and the whole.

Array here and you didn't mention live food either.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, so you got live food, you got freeze dried, you got frozen, you have flakes, you got pellets. There are some even slurries that you can feed anyway. Let's just say take this from a novice point of view. There are a lot of different things that you can feed fish, and unlike dogs, and maybe cats to some extent, but dogs, you really want to get a good quality diet and leave them on that diet. Because if you bury the food from time to time regularly, it will upset their stomach and you end up with digestive issues or secondary bowel movement issues where they get the runs or whatever else. But fish are not that way. A variety in the diet and a broad nutritional base is a really good thing. The best way and the easiest way to get that big variety of nutritional base in them is a quality all around prepared food. And there's really two ways of doing that and that's either flake or pellet. Now, if you're talking to an advanced hobbyist or an aquaculture person, they're going to say the best way to feed for sure is pellet. Because it's a condensed form, you can feed. It's very simple to feed and you don't have to put a lot of effort into feeding the fish. But the problem for a lot of hobbyists is because it's so condensed and it's so potent that you can really easily overfeed your aquarium using a pellet if you don't understand how much nutrition is packed in each one of those pellets. Now, flake food has in general, all the same level of nutrition. And I'm saying that in general, I'm taking the 80 20 rule there right now until we get further into it. But the flake food has a great nutritional profile that you can easily feed to your fish tank. But because of its form factor, it's going to show when you put a little too much in, it's going to look like a lot too much really quickly. Where a pellet won't. So from a beginner standpoint, starting off with the quality flake is going to set you up for success a lot easier and reduce the amount of drama and potential pitfalls from overfeeding that you might have with other forms. Of food because it's so much more visual and tangible when you put it in your finger rather than a pellet, where you can just pour the whole jar in before you even realize what happened. Does that answer your question?

You hit the nail on the head. We get that question a lot is like why would I start with pellets? Why would I start with flakes? And that really paints out at least the beginning array of it. Now as far as some ingredients, what are the most common ingredients of some of the pellets or flake food that you'd see?

The most common ingredient in fish food is fish meal. In most of your foods that's going to be one of your top few ingredients. When you look at an ingredient panel on the back of a can of food or a back of pellet bag, you'll see the ingredients listed starting off at the top with say, fish meal or salmon meal or something and then all the way down to the bottom. And in our case, most of the time it's natural color or natural fermentation. Products with our probiotics depends on the formula. That might be the last ingredient, but they're listed in the highest concentration by weight to the lowest concentration by weight of the amount of each one of those in a batch of the food. So your most common ingredients are always your first two. And again, fish meal is by far and away the most popular ingredient to use in there.

Now can you explain to us what is fish meal?

Is?

It just ground up fish?

That's the biggest question we get because you see in the back of the label it shows salmon meal, we get at least a profile of what the protein is most just as fish meal. They're like, what am I really feeding my fish? And you don't get that warm fuzzy feeling of like, oh, it's beef on the back of a container pedigree.

Well there's actually a I'm sorry, I just bang my mind. There is an organization or actually an association called afco, american association of Feed Control officials that regulate how we have to label and list ingredients. So your fish meal, you can either call it fish meal if you maybe don't know the actual source of the meal, or if it's a blended meal with different proteins, different fish that are part of it, or if you know you have a single animal source and you want to call it out, like we do with salmon meal. You can call out that thing. Not even a genus. But that type of fish. But they really shy away from getting too specific on things because that's what afco wants to do. So when you talk about fish meal, by afco regulation fish meal has to be the majority of the fish bones and flesh. If it's less than that, if it's only like say it's a type of salmon that gets filled and the fillets are used for a human feed and they end up with the bare bone skeleton that is called normally fish soluble's meal or fish parts meal. And so there is a definite definition for what makes up fish meal. And if it's just called fish meal, it has to be a certain percentage of the whole fish that is then ground up and cooked down to a meal.

I guess that really does clarify for me because you see the chicken documentary they just had for like super size me too. And all natural means nothing, no hormones where they weren't adding them in the first place and then you see the ingredients list that they put on a lot of packages and even for humans that is you just assume that fish food can't be but that really does spell it out clearly. I appreciate that.

Yeah, actually fish food or falls into the pet category is way more regulated as far as ingredients than human food.

Seriously?

Wow.

Oh, my God. It's insane. Like you can go into any freaking mom and pop crazy drug store or natural store and you can buy god knows what to inject into your baby as far as probiotics or whatever herbal supplement you can dream of. But thanks to Peter Michael vick and god knows every other animal rights activist down there, any type of pet food is so heavily regulated. I pity the fool whoever does what I did nine years ago and tried to get into it and manage not only the formulations but the government agencies. Because that association of Fee Control Officials is not a federal body. It's a national association that puts out a guideline book that is exactly that. A guideline book that goes out to the feet. Control officials at every state and they read, interpret and enforce at the state level. So we have to be registered in every state that we sell food in and our labels are subject to every one of those states interpretation of those guidelines. So it is next to impossible to create a pet label 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 100th time without having somebody irritated with you at some state.

That scares the living crap out of me right now.

We're located right now here in Minnesota. We are literally six blocks away from nutra Source dog food. Our small little community is where it's made and stuff and just the god awful smell that comes out of that place on certain days is just incredible. But that place cranks out so much dog food and semis come and go. We're in a small community and we have several different manufacturers of people food and dog food and things like that, but I never realized that dog food had that much regulation.

And fish food, yeah, we fall into the same it's called farm and feed. So we fall into the farm and feed thing, but there's a farm side and then there's a pet side, and they all kind of fall under the same guidebook. In general, it's really difficult. It's not an easy thing to do. But back to your original question about fish meal and the most common ingredients. All of those terms in there, all the way to we can't say vitamin C. We have to say lscobal two polyphosphate or whatever it is. We have to say that not vitamin C because that's regulated on how exactly it has to be spelled out ingredients.

When you were talking earlier and stuff about fish meal and stuff, in my mind, I don't know, for those listeners who ever watch Saturday Night Live, back when it first started Bassomatic with Dan ackroyd, and he's thrown in that full bass in that blender and then they're drinking that stuff. The best bath I've had all day. Check that out on YouTube, you kids. The bath.

Bath. That's a classic.

I've even seen that one. Be proud of me, Jimmy.

Yeah.

So another question that we get continually is expiration of fish food. No, fish food expiration. How do you guys plan fish food expiration? Especially now we know that there's a ton of regulation that we didn't know about. And what is a shelf life? Should I be rotating my fish food regardless of having expiration dates?

Absolutely.

Every so often, you know, you have to well, I know, but he's going to tell me how often.

Absolutely.

See, so that's it, man.

Not how often, not why.

Well, for instance, Cobalt, our expiration date is two years. And the reason that it's two years is for something that we actually don't even claim on our label specifically is our vitamin C activity. So the lscorbal, poly, blah, blah, blah. I can't remember the whole term off out of my head now that I'm on the spot. But our vitamin C degrades, vitamins in general degrade pretty quickly. And vitamin C specifically is very suspect to temperature and light. So the second you crack open that can, the vitamin C starts degrading. And we use the 70% rule and that we want 70% of our vitamin C activity at the time of manufacturer to be viable. And after it falls below 70%, then we consider that expired. So for us, that is really where we target is because that vitamin C degrades a lot faster than anything else. Now other people, depending on how they control their preservation, we do not put any preservatives into our food. We control our shelf life by controlling the moisture content. We keep our foods really dry and that keeps the bacterial and fungus growth down in the formulas. So we really don't worry about that too much. Now, if you as a hobbyist, have you're in your basement and you got 400 fish tanks and you're opening up a ten pound box of food and you're not sealing it and it's open to that human environment, you better be using that box of food really quick, because it's going to foul. And that's not going to be on us because of the moisture level. But if you long as you keep it sealed, you can continue to use our food until it falls apart. Just note that after two years, the vitamin C level is going to be a little bit lower than what we want to have our food perform. But does it ever go bad? Unless it's fungus or bacteria and it's rotting, then you can go ahead and feed it. It just is going to have some vitamin deficiencies.

Robin and I are one of these guys that buy the five pound box or ten pound box and stuff. I was told to keep my extra in the freezer. Would you suggest keeping the extra in the freezer, taking out a month's worth and putting the rest in the freezer, or is that going to absorb more.

Moisture in the freezer? You can definitely put stuff in the freezer. I would not recommend that for cobalt foods because we have probiotic bacteria and they don't like to be frozen.

Okay, that's good.

Go ahead and put it in the refrigerator, keep it above 40 degrees, and you'll be fine, and it will definitely extend your shelf life. But just make sure you push out as much air as you can when if you got your bag squish it down and rubber band it or ever put back in the fridge, you'll be fine. Okay, but freezing it, as long as it doesn't have probiotics in it, it'll extend it even further. But you don't get all the air out of it in the freezer, you can end up with freezer burn. Do you get a little longer life? Yes. But there's a potential freezer burn that you wouldn't have in the refrigerator. And if you're feeding probiotic enhanced food, you really want to keep it not out of the freezer. Because when it freezes, if there is any moisture in the food, the moisture can create little ice crystals that will pierce the cell wall of the bacteria I'm sorry, the cell membrane of the bacteria and kill the bacteria.

See, I'm just hearing that Adam is already buying a beer and fish food cooler. Now, just for him on the side.

That'S going to be a definite.

So we got a question here from one of the audience members that's been listening in, and they're taking this as a perspective of trying to find pick a fish food off the shelf. So if I'm looking for a fish food, is there ingredients that you see on other competitors and we won't mention names that may be harmful or they need to look out for these are for the people that we don't do for our own food. And read the ingredients on the back.

Yeah, people pay more like I said, people pay way more attention to fish food than they do their own food. You'll go buy a bag of ramen and eat bag of ramen with all the sodium intake on it, not even blink an eye. But if we have too much sodium in the fish food, people are going to freak out. So yes, there's a definite disparity between people's nutritional value from themselves versus their pets. To answer that question, in general, I wouldn't say that there are harmful ingredients in fish foods, but there are better formulations. And one of the ways you can kind of quickly determine if the formula is good or bad or what you want to target is know what animals you want to feed. If you're feeding mainly carnivorous fish, you want to see a relatively high protein level and you want to see a lot of animal proteins up in the top sections of the ingredient list. But that doesn't mean you don't want also vegetable protein because carnivorous, fish get the gut content of those carnivores, which are mostly normally herbivores, and so they're getting the vegetable protein. So you don't want just a complete animal protein diet. And the mix between animal and protein and plant protein, that's one of our trade secrets at Cobalt is blending that to get the best performance in foods. But when you look at that, you look at the ingredients, you look at the kind of, the mix of the ingredients, and then you want to go up to the ga, the guaranteed analysis section and look at the protein and fat ratio next to the fiber. And you should see in a general tropical formula, somewhere in the mid to high 40s protein, double digits, ten to 1214 in the fat. And you should see a relatively low crude fiber number somewhere in the three to 5% range. And if you see a high fiber number in there and then you go and you look at the ingredient and you see some of the carbohydrates way above the animal proteins, then you know you have maybe a formula that's got some more filler in it rather than nutrition. And so if you see low protein, high binder like wheat flour, wheat middlings or something like that, that's kind of what you want to stay away from. Because fish can digest all sorts of proteins, but they really don't utilize carbohydrates very much. As manufacturers, we have to put carbohydrates into the formula as a binder. When I do my full nutrition talks to clubs and whatnot I talk about have you ever made a chocolate chip cookies and the protein, your butter and your fats, sugars, and whatnot ratio to flour? You know that you have to put a lot of flour in there compared to your eggs and your butter and your sugar. So your carbohydrate level is really high and that brings all your proteins and fats together and gives a vehicle that you can actually cook and feed to yourself, or in this case, fish. And making flake foods or Pellets isn't much different than making chocolate chip cookies. So if you have an upside down ratio of flour to proteins and fats, you see that you have a low fat and a low protein level and a relatively high fiber level. You know that you're maybe getting cheated for your dollar because they're using these binders to kind of fill the fish up, but they really end up just pooping them out and you end up with a lot more waste in the aquarium than you really need.

We talk a lot on this show about ash content. And what is ash content?

We don't talk about ash content because there is none. Going back to our original discussion a few minutes ago about asco, American Association of Fee Control Officers does not recognize ash as a required element on a fish food label. Now, the flip side of that is every lab that you send your food to gives you an ash content result. But what does that truly mean? Really doesn't mean much. And because afco understands that it's kind of a double edged sword as far as what does it really mean, they do not require it to be on the label. So there are some companies out there that started reporting ash content because it came on the lab test. They got, they don't really understand what it means and they don't really understand the impact. In most cases, the ash content really just has to do with the number of bones basically in the fish that ends up as non digestible in the fish field. But wheat medals and some of that stuff can affect that ash number as well. But in general, don't pay attention to the ash number. It's a confusing result in a lab test that really doesn't have much value unless you understand the complete supply chain and raw component sourcing of everything in the fish food. Yeah.

The only reason that was brought up is because they've had people on the fish boards on our discord talk about how ash content and this even happened with my cats, how they got urinary tract infections on the regular brought to the vet. And they give me low ash content, food, some special stuff I have to purchase and that they supposedly go through and make sure that there's not a lot of that content and they make.

A lot of money.

They make a lot of money.

And my cats are cats and dogs are different. Remember that cats are definitely carnivorous, right? They're not going out unless it's catnip. They're not going out much in the spinach in your backyard. They're eating their predator. So their content of vegetable fiber and whatnot that also can include in that ash number. That's why I don't like to talk about it, because it's confusing and it depends on your ingredient profile, what will affect that. But in the cats instance, if they're using a lot of vegetable binders, you can end up with a relatively high ash content from that, and that affects the cat. But it's not necessarily the ash content, it's the ingredients that are creating that ash content that is the issue.

So what about with going back to the carbohydrate versus protein discussion? What about with cold water fish such as koi goldfish? Do you still want that same ratio.

Or no, they're different, so each formula is different. And especially like in the case of goldfish or carp, there is tritivore. So you go to a good goldfish food. We have a pretty high protein percentage because we want the goldfish to grow a little faster. They won't grow as fast on a pure trident style diet, so we put in a higher protein level in the most. But there are differences in that, especially in carbs. They have a completely different digestive system. They break things down a lot differently. Their gut is a lot simpler, they don't have a lot of digestive time. So you have to really balance your ingredients there well to make sure they're not pooping a lot. And if you're feeding a really carb heavy detritivore style diet to a goldfish, that's when you end up with those foot long turds hanging out of their butt. And if they're eating a more balanced diet, that's a lot more digestible. They will grow faster and they won't have those giant turds.

You just said that. The giant footlong turd.

Quick story.

When my kids were little, six, eight years old and stuff, I had some large ARANDAS up as a show tank, and one of them was always having the foot long turd. And my son, who was probably six of the time, goes, look at the tinsel hanging out of that goldfish. He thought it was tinsel. Tinsel.

That's awesome.

Yeah. butt tinsel.

Butt tinsel. I got to start using that one.

There you go.

By the way, turd is a technical term. Is it a big, very technical tonight? No.

Last week we talked about falling off the turd wagon, which is a whole other conversation.

That's on the same road as the tequila hangover. tequila virus.

Tequila virus, yeah.

It happened since we're on a tangent. Just to paint that question, when they came up here, dabby and scrapped the editor, they came up here and spent a couple of days before the rescue. We went over to your place, had fun. We still got some embarrassing photos to post on Discord.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We should do lots of photos. Put it on Facebook and stuff, and then my wife will come over and punch in the throat.

Absolutely. And get the T shirt.

Yeah.

Can I watch that video?

Not on live. Not on live.

Stream.

But yeah, if you hear those references is because Jimmy doesn't remember a lot. Towards the end, at least I remember.

Yeah, I remember it was ugly.

We're still pitching in, so if you'd like to donate to jimmy's carpet fund, it needs a good scrubbing.

Yeah, nobody got sick, but everybody was dancing and spilling.

Absolutely.

I guess that was me. I'm a bad dancer and I'm a good spiller.

So to continue on the food question.

Train, I got a quick question, please. So I hear over and over about how spirulina is so important to every fish food. Do you have that same concept about spirulina being in everything? That's the one thing that's always missing, or what do you guys feel about spirulina?

Spirulina is definitely a good ingredient. It's triple threat and it has immune stimulant antioxidant, and it's also a color enhancer to some extent. So it's a great ingredient, but it's not something that we put in every food because not every fish likes it. It's a very it's not a very palatable ingredient. Fish don't find it very tasty in general. So when you put it in there, for instance, growing up, I used the I hated zucchini growing up. I wouldn't need it, but my family grew giant zucchinis are in our garden. Well, my mom would make stuffed zucchini with ground beef mess in the middle of it, and I would 10% spinach to 90% of the ground beef stuff and stomach that zucchini. That's the same kind of thing that we have to do with spirulina. So you have to be very careful with the total amount you put in there to make sure they keep the palatability and attractiveness of the food up, but they still get the dietary or positives that spirulina brings to it. And so we don't include it in every formula, but we definitely have spirulina enhanced diets. We have two different ones that are just based off of spiralina, our normal spiralina, flakes and pellets. And we also have an ultra. Our normal one is at 14%, our higher one is at 21%. And the higher one we had to increase the tuna oil basically in it. And a couple of other ingredients that we use as appetite stimulants that we found have worked really well to boost up the attractiveness and basically be the ground beef for the stuffed zucchini in the food to make sure that we keep that attractiveness and the palatability up. So when the food hits the water, they still want to eat it and eat it aggressively. Is it a good ingredient? Absolutely, it's a great ingredient. It doesn't need to be every food. I would say it does not belong in every food. But is it a good thing to add to an overall diet? If you're mixing it in, there's no harm in it at all, and it probably has to positive.

Well, one of the craziest things I've seen is alfalfa pellets and to me that doesn't make any sense. Do you have any frame or reason why people will be selling alfalfa pellets to your fish? I've never seen any fish out in the field eating alfalfa.

Well, it goes along like, say, our algae grazers that we have, we have zucchini, watercress, celery in there. As long as it's a protein source and then it tracks fish and it's digestible to them, it doesn't really matter what it is, as long as it has the attractive value and the overall nutritional profile. So alfalfa is a great nutritional source in general. So if you're mixing alfalfa pellets with other things that fish find attractive and you can get them to eat it, then there is nutritional value there and it's going to be a lot cheaper than other things. Now, that being said, I don't include alfalfa and really anything that we do because I don't think it's very necessarily an appropriate ingredient because you have to mask it with so much other stuff to build up the palatability and the flavor that it's just not worth it. But if you find a budget pellet that your fish can eat, it certainly can be a supplemental source to specifically like to try to force her before her vivorous dominated fish. A carnivorous fish wouldn't get a lot of value out of it.

Okay, I was just wondering, I thought to myself, is there something that I'm totally missing here, that people are talking about these alfalfa pellets online and stuff? I thought it was kind of crazy.

Yeah, the only thing I see used with commonly is shrimp. Shrimp food. Use it quite a bit.

Yeah. And shrimps are detritivores. So that makes big perfect sense. yep.

Gobble it up. But you know, there are, when I.

Talk in general, like your, your question there, I'm talking kind of the 80 20 rule where there's 80% of the fish are this, there's always 20%. That is completely different answer. But in general, when we're talking general nutrition theory, I'm going to answer for the bigger part of the pie. And then if we want to dissect it down in, we can get as granular as you want.

Think of it like a community tank. The majority is going to have that protein heavy, low carbohydrate diet, but you're going to have that placo that's going to want to wafer or eat off a zucchini that you put in the tank. There's always going to be a specialized diet.

You mentioned shrimp pellets. I have tried, and I'm not exaggerating, I've tried maybe nine or ten different shrimp pellets. And my shrimp either love them, hate them, or ignore them.

The shrimp food market is just filled with garbage right now.

Let's back up and talk about shrimp pellets in general first. So those of us who are older in the hobby, shrimp pellets used to be shrimp pellets. And that was a food that came from the aquaculture industry that was fed to shrimp. In the last four or five years, shrimp pellets became food to feed shrimp. So you have to be very careful when you say shrimp pellets into old school people and 90% of fish food manufacturers, you're talking about the original cheap protein diets that came out of the shrimp aquaculture industry.

Yeah. We're meaning that to feed cardinal neocardenia.

Shrimp, that's shrimp food, not shrimp pellets.

We now have a definition clarity right there. I got schooled.

Yeah, that's one of the things that I struggle. Like you mentioned, you use our shrimp pellets. Our shrimp pellets are exactly that. They're an old school formula that was fed to aquaculture shrimps, and it has all sorts of nasties in it that people would really bag on the guy. Oscarfish.com, years ago, used to rip on cobalt foods because of our shrimp pellets. And right on the label, we say that it's a great secondary source of protein for your fish. And as a great part of an all around complete diet, we say that on the label because it's a supplemental food. It's not designed to be a primary food for anything other than aquacultured shrimp. So people think a lot of times that shrimp pellets should are made of shrimp. And I always say, well, is dog food made of dogs? No, but with the new Neocardinia fancy shrimp, that's a whole other world that has nothing to do with these aquaculture foods from years past.

No, not at all. Okay, so going on the shrimp pellets.

Versus shrimp food, I want to know about shrimp food. I don't know why you guys got confused on that. That shrimp food is what I meant.

So to talk about shrimp food right now, because again, since, what's, it the middle 90s? Early 90s.

Yeah.

And when shrimp has kicked off. So it's a very young hobby so far, and only in the last decade and a half of people really been getting into decorative shrimp as a real big booming hobby. So right now, we're seeing all different types of manufacturers pop up making shrimp food for Neocardenia and cardinal shrimp.

And I've bought many kinds of shrimp food that suck big time. Everybody's got these. I got some that smells like peppermint. I got some that smells like I.

Thought that was just me.

No, I got something that smells like ass.

That's the ravi food.

Yeah, I'll gobble it down.

What's the most important thing in shrimp food?

Well, you got to realize what these guys are eating in the wild. What do they eat when they came out of the rivers of Indonesia, Thailand, or wherever they're from? That is a biofilm. So they're not really normally eating things floating around. They're eating stuff that's embedded in the biofilm. So having a really good kind of mature tank with a lot of bacterial growth and things that are harvested bacteria they're growing in a film are going to be a really good starter for that. So the foods that have some sort of proteins that mimic that are what you really want to have in your shrimp diet, and you'll have a much better, and I'm sure you guys know this, if you're keeping them, they don't do very well in a new tank. They need a mature tank. No, because the food that you're feeding them is almost a supplement to what they're feeding on, which is growing in the tank naturally, which is that biofilm 100%.

So the only thing that we have luck with, just so people are listening, because we're going to get questions after this about shrimp food, not shrimp pellets, is we have luck with stuff that breaks down instantly that you put in the tank and just after a minute it's already broken up and spread in the tank.

Just like biofilm, it's going right into and getting stuck in that biofilm. So in a biofilm, the bacteria excrete something that's called EPS, extra preliminary substance. And it's basically the goo. If you have a penguin bio wheel, for instance, that's the easiest place to see this stuff. When what wheels rotating, you get that brown slime. Your wheel stops rotating after a while because it's all brown and yucky looking. That brown is the biofilm and it's really sticky. Most of the things that grow in the biofilm are called an obligate epiphyte, which means they want to grow in a film on something. And once those films start to get established, there's a bacteria that are forming the original film based, which are typically a lot of times you're nitrifying autotrophs, which are your ammonia eating bacteria and your nitrite bacteria, they're called aobs. And nobs in the literature, ammonia oxidizing bacteria, nitrite bacteria, those would form the base film. Then once in that film, then other things come in and start feeding on them. They feed on the film, they create their own extra little film, and they build these little thick colonies and that is what the shrimp are feeding on a lot of times in the wild. So if you have a food that disintegrates really quick, it gets embedded into that film that they're feeding on. And they're either then directly feeding on those particles that are in the film, or other bacteria breaking those down and growing faster because of that, and they're eating those bacteria. That food is almost a bacterial feed, more so than a direct shrimp food. Now, that isn't necessarily that there aren't good foods out there. Now, there's been a lot of understanding over the last, I'd say five or six years. I think you're very generous in saying the hobby is ten to 15 years old. I would say it's ten to 15 year olds globally, but here in the Us. Oh, no, not here at five or six years old. Yeah, I remember seeing him the first time in interzoo about ten years ago, which is a big show in Germany. Every other year, and when they first popped up, we didn't really know anything. Good source of information. And God probably the leading expert is complete goofball, very similar to Chris biggs. And those guys is the shrimp king. Great guy. Makes good products, understands shrimp probably better than anybody. So if you're looking I don't want to endorse anybody, but I am if you're looking for something that somebody that's been in it from the ground up, that would be a good place to start. He may not be the best food out there, but they've done their due diligence and have really put the effort into making the best they can.

That's actually the food we're using that falls apart so quickly from that direct shrimp king stuff and definitely done the homework. We have a friend in our local area, Joe tyson. He's got a shrimp shack, and they work they work hand in hand. They definitely do.

But Joe yeah, I've bought some of the others. I've done a lot of shrimp king, which I like. What I don't like about Shrimp King is I can't get anything in larger containers.

How big of a package do you need?

Well, I'm feeding 50 tanks, man. I need a bigger package. But I've tried some of this other stuff that I've bought of shrimp food from other people.

It looks like you've ever been to perkins and ordered an order, and they come with those, like, tortilla strips in the basket with the MOT sticks. That's kind of what it looks like.

Vegetables.

Rob awful, but yeah, I've had stuff where the shrimp will come, tear it apart and go, this sucks, and just walk away and just leaves a big pile of goo on the floor and they don't touch it. My best thing I've had is actually been the shrimp king, but I've been just looking for whatever is the best stuff for my shrimp so I can get maximum growth quickly as possible because I want them out the door.

The biggest thing is make sure it's a pretty mature tank with a good, healthy biofilm and then supplement feed, because that's really what you're doing with those guys, you're supplement feeding them.

Yeah, it's once every twice a week.

I'd say I do mine twice a day.

Yeah, but you're farming there, aren't you there, Jim Bob?

Yeah. So before we go, I've been into Taiwan a couple of times, and one of the trips we went, we spent a whole day touring the taiwanese shrimp farms, and I toured micro farms that are literally the size of my guest bedroom office here that have the super high end koi shrimp that look exactly the same to me as the super cheap ones because I don't appreciate the color variances and sorry, that's just me. I can't see it. But they're $1,000 a piece or whatever, and they are feeding in small tanks. They're feeding regularly. And then we go to the farms and they have 50 foot long by ten ft wide that are under canopied sunlight that are growing algae and biofilms and they never feed them and they're growing millions of them. So, again, it just depends on your exact system. And for a micro farmer that's farming in a basement or indoors, you're going to have to supplement it with food if you're going to natural sunlight and then open that, you don't need to.

Here's jimmy's secret, right? So he has his in a basement where he farms his shrimp. And what he does is just to make sure because he only has a small window, right? So he just goes down there, he takes off his pants and then his white glowing legs produce enough sunlight to sustain the shrimp for at least a day.

That's not my legs.

Well, before we go too far, you mentioned before your sinking pellets, what I call before the shrimp pellets. And that's really my big favorite that cobalt has. So it shocked me that you got some crap about that. I have never used those sinking pellets as a primary source. It's only been, say, treats for coriodoras or bottom feeders because it sinks so fast, they break down perfectly. So I just always assume that that's how people were feeding them. And it's just crazy that people were heckling you because, oh, it's not a primary food. If people are using it as a primary food, no matter what the sinking pellet is, it would really shock me, especially those old school strimp style pellets, as you put it.

And we're very clear about it on our package, exactly what it is. The reason we launched it was because at the time, even though it doesn't fit with our kind of overall nutritional platform, with kind of high technology, really advanced formulation, a bunch of the major companies nine years ago that we were competing against in the fish food category. For whatever reason, they got bought by another company or whatever, decided that that wasn't a business they wanted to be in anymore, and they started dropping it. And so we recognized an opportunity to bring just a gold standard of cheap fish food back to the marketplace that was disappearing really quickly nine years ago. And that's why we have it. And as far as our formulation, it's nothing that we formulated special is straight out of the aquaculture industry.

So, moving on to the other questions that we have, again, it's been a great conversation, but we're getting low on time, so I'll try to chop a couple up here is people try to make their own food, fish food at home.

Why?

Number one, is there a safe way to do it? And if so, what are the things you need to look out for as far as ingredient choices? Because you see all these how to videos online saying here's the recipes. You pick a protein and go and.

Use a blender, bassematic, basaltic, that's great pass, right? Well, being a fish food manufacturer, I'm going to step up on my soapbox and say, no, thank you.

Hell, no, we won't go.

Thank you. Now stepping back to being a fish geek and somebody that grew up tinkering. And that's the reason that I am where I am, is because I tinkered with everything and anything and tried to build a better fish tank mousetrap you know, since I was eight years old, I was always experimenting and trying to do stuff and come up with a better way. And there's nothing wrong with trying to make your own food, except that it's not that easy. It's effort. And no matter what you read on a forum, I guarantee you they don't have a degree in aquatic biology, have formulated a whole line of foods for Cobalt marineland and worked for tetra for 28 years of my career, and done nothing but dedicate myself to understanding the hobby, the food nutrition requirements of fish, and develop formulas specifically around that. And it's really not that expensive, and you're not going to save that much by making your own. So from a fish geek standpoint, I'm not saying that to be negative about trying to do it. You're going to really struggle to make something that is as good as what's commercially available, even on the low end of stuff. Even if you want to pick whatever low end food you want to name, odds are it's going to be nutritionally more sound than what you make in your kitchen. But if you want to go that route, do as much investigation and research as you can online and whatnot, and there's nothing wrong with it. It's just a lot more effort than it's really worth, I think.

Who in the world has saved money making their fish homemade like their fish food homemade? blows my mind.

I feed my Oscar chocolate chip cookies.

It's cheaper for me to go to McDonald's than make a sandwich at home.

That's correct.

I mean, it's definitely that way with fish food, for sure. There's no way in my mind you.

Got to go out. If you go look at our ingredient list on any one of our formulas, the ingredient list is 20 lines long. And the reason it's there is because we've done a ton of research and development on the vitamin contents that needed. We understand what amino acid profiles of the different proteins we are we're putting in there. We're also looking at the fatty acid complex because freshwater fish are really adaptable at the fatty acid they can use, but marine fish aren't. And that's really the big difference between marine fish and freshwater fish food, is the fatty acid complex that we have to include into it. If you really want to go down that path and get a PhD or a master's level in fish, nutrition have got it. Or just go buy some food, give it a go.

I have to ask this next question because we're going to get anytime we're going to plan to do a nutrition episode, it's going to be these, I don't know, very new early aquarist calling us. And is peas really a miracle cure for fish that are having digestive issues?

Peas, yes.

Even when I'm on Big Richest dream, people continue, like, don't you just feed peas?

And what are you doing on goldfish side of stuff? I've had some incredible results when I'm having some bloat issues, especially with higher end, say, ranch shoes, especially. I've had incredible results with using Dholt bees. So I would take frozen peas, take the holes off of them and feed just the split halves and do that for two, three weeks. And that's their own the only thing they're getting. It can definitely be something on a herbivore, goldfish, koi, carp kind of situation. It can definitely clean them out. I've had good results with that. Now, is that for everybody? It's a lot of work. You got to sit there. I was getting paid to do that. I was making whatever, an hour to sit there. And Dhault peas individually. Now, do you want to go for do that on your own if you got time to spare? Sure.

No, never been that time.

Yeah. Is it an end all, be all? I would say no. There's a lot easier ways of handling that. But is there time and a place for it? I would say yes, and I've done it and it's proved wonders. But when you do that, you'll end up with those big long turds and they're going to be pretty green, which.

You know tinsel turds.

Tinsel turd.

The thing that I've been seeing is people like, say it's a miracle cure for no matter what fish you'll hear about sharks, catfish, just feed them peas like, no, it's a carp thing. Come on. No, I appreciate that.

Definitely in koi and goldfish, it can be there, but it's a lot of effort.

I was excited when you said you have frozen food and I did not know you had frozen food. I go through a ton of frozen blood worms and I love it. When I used to raise my angel fish that somehow would trigger them to spawn, I'd feed them flake in the morning. In the evening, I'd feed them frozen blood worms. It got to the point where they wouldn't even lay eggs for me unless I gave them frozen bloodworms. What do you guys sell for frozen food and how do your customers get it?

We have pretty much everything from bloodworms brine shrimp to tropical medleys and everything in between. You can go onto our dealer locator list and find a local dealer that sells it. If you're in the Indiana Market, the Reef in Indianapolis, as well as Uncle Bills pet shops. I know they all carry a ton of it, and there's various retailers around the country that sell it. But the easiest way, depending on where you're at, is go to our dealer locator and hit up the local stores and see if they carry it. But it's available nationally at some level.

And where do you get that manufactured? Is that something that's more out of the states type of thing or is that any of that made here in the Us for frozen?

None of it is made in the Us. Sadly. There used to be two bloodworm companies that were in the Us that supplied either live or freeze guard bloodworms, but both of those have gone out of business and currently there are really no blood, especially since COVID hit, there are really no bloodworm sources that are viable producing anything of any volume except out of China. So most of your most frozen food companies and unless actually I think all of the frozen food and other companies are listening and I misspeak, I apologize, but as far as I'm aware, all the frozen foods that are available in the Us are produced somewhere in Asia. There are a couple that are in European manufacturers, but they're really expensive and I don't believe that they're available here in the Us.

Yeah, I used to buy a 56 pound of 56 pound box of frozen blood worms that came in small packs and stuff and I would import those from one of my fish suppliers and stuff and then their person dried up too. So I was just kind of curious of where this stuff was coming from.

Yes, culvert has definitely hit. You guys were talking about betas in your announcement. Is there a beta shortage? No. Well, there definitely is a bloodworm shortage. A bunch of the bloodworms companies have gone out of business in recent years and then COVID, a bunch of them. Not in China. The other countries that did still have viable sources, they're all not producing at all right now. So pretty much every blood worm that I'm aware of right now is only Chinese source. And you got to be very careful with bloodworms as far as allergies and sterilization. So anybody that has a quality frozen blood worm, they're triple sterilized and those arenated and there are a significant number of people that are allergic to them. So if you're first thinking about getting blood worms because of this, make sure you're wearing rubber gloves if and when you touch it. Because if you do get an allergic reaction and you're not used to having allergic reactions, you don't have any benadryl or epinephrine shots with you. You got to be careful of it.

Just like the water from all those international fish shipments there. Jimmy right, I've had that problems.

Yeah, I've brought in not that long ago, I brought in some stuff from overseas and I handled it and just the way I was grabbing the bags out, I had this rash on both of my inner forearms and my hands. And after talking to the doctor. I had it for three or four days and didn't go away. It actually kind of got worse there. Again. He said, do the benadryl thing and whatnot, but he felt that there was something because these bags, they catch the fish, 300 neons, and they throw it in a bag. And the bag sits there in the back of their cart and then it's put in a box. And everybody's handling these different boxes that many different things can come across in these shipments from overseas. So got to be careful.

I've done fish farms in the fish markets in Taiwan and China, and I've done them in the Us as well, down in Gibson area in Florida. And they're not much different between here and there, but they're on the other side of the world, a lot of these people. And there are different bacteria and whatnot that do get into there. And it's not like they're even in the Us. It's not like they're sterile by any means. No, they're growing these things. And a lot of times earth ponds, they're just dirt ponds, they're growing them, then they sand them out and they throw them into a holding tank or even a holding that for a day or two and then they're in a bag and off to you. So, yeah, definitely something you want to be careful of.

Yeah, there's so many chemicals used in the aqua culture, and if these bags are sitting next to some sort of medicine and that medicine gets on there, it's hard to say what you've got coming on these bags.

Would you recommend switching when you're feeding your fish, would you recommend switching to have three or four different at least two or three different types of food and then just alternating randomly because that's what for your private use for your community? What's your question? Either way, I mean, would you recommend having a variety of rotating your food, rotating the record? Bust chops, please. Bust them chops. Like I said early on, if you're talking about a dog or cat, consistency in the diet is really important and you don't want to switch foods up very much because you can mess with their digestive tract and give them the runs and whatnot. But fish are not like that. So what you want to have is a good quality base food, some sort of flaker pellet, depending on your expertise level or what you're comfortable with as your base food. And then on top of that, anything that you can supplement around that with live food or frozen food as treats or augmenting their diet just to keep them engaged. It's great. But have a good quality, solid base. Like if you're a community tank, feed tropical food, some sort of tropical flake food, ideally cobalt food to give myself a plug that'll give you a gorilla. Good solid nutritional base that will give you probiotics in there that are going to help augment the digestive. System and then go ahead and top off that with other flavors. If you want a color enhancer that's higher in acid sampan or you want to add more spirulina to the diet because you have say, molly's or something else in their patties or something that are more algae eaters and you want to augment it, then great. Or if you want to treat them with live blood worms, frozen blood worms or even brine shrimp or something like that just to keep things exciting, not only for the fish, for you do that, but make sure that you have a good solid base food that is say 70% or 80% of their diet. And then I did have another question.

About the pro bugs versus amateur bugs. What are you talking about?

No, they have a line of food called probs. And actually, believe it or not, I've seen it on a few of my reptile pages. One of the guys was tong feeding the scorpions to his leopard geckos and everybody was astonished because they didn't know that you could get this. Could you just explain a little bit about it because it was really interesting to see it and to see something that's been bred in captivity for as long go kind of crazy over that, over a scorpion that it hasn't been seen in decades. You know what I mean? Captive bread. Well, there's instincts in those lizards, all animals. But even if they're not wild, they're going to just know it because that's where they come from originally, their parents or grandparents or even however many generations back in the wild. But Probuggs is a company that are friends of ours through the koi industry. Actually in the koi industry are friends of ours from the African cyclist world way back in the 80s. So over the years, all of a sudden we ran into this guy from Malaysia who's got this very interesting product and he wants help bringing it to the Us. And we partnered with them. And what they are is they're threshold basically killed and preserved through ozone bath and a quick flash boil and ozone bath and then a 32nd other dry and then into a vacuum pack. So they're basically the nutrition and quality of a live insect, but vacuum packed and they have up to a two year shelf life. They are sitting just in a pack ready to go. And there's like ten flavors from crickets. I'm sorry, crickets grasshoppers.

I'm on the website right now. I'm seeing centipedes, roaches, all kinds of crazy. Even like the big scorpions I'm seeing in bags like that's crazy.

The scorpions and centipedes, there's a bunch of different ones. They're primarily designed for reptiles. But the scorpions and centipedes specifically in anywhere other than the Us. Are a highly sought after food for the Asian dragons. So they're Asian marijuanas, especially the reds and golds. The venom in the scorpions and centipedes is said to have a very high color enhancing for red colors. Now, with the COVID situation, if you want those scorpions and centipedes, get them now. Because what we have in stock right now, maybe all we're going to get for a while because people eat bats in China and cause this whole thing is one of the theories. And part of that retaliation is a lot of these exotic farmed animals like scorpions and centipedes are being put on hold at the time being and we have a bunch now, but once the supply goes out, we're not necessarily sure we are going to be able to get a bunch.

Yeah, I'm looking on here as well. But the prices are not as bad as I thought they would be for doing an entire live creature. Like for instance, it shows here in the pack. I don't know if this is accurate. You're getting like three whole scorpions. I'm trying to remember like pet prices on that, even wholesale was pretty expensive to get a live scorpion. So you're getting like three scorpions in the bag, it says, from $10. So that's crazy to me for at least that feature.

Yeah, they're not that expensive. They're pretty priced. If you go look at the meal worms or the grasshoppers always say crickets because everybody has crickets. We don't. You have crickets because they're not as nutritionally viable as the grasshoppers. Grasshoppers have a much better nutritional profile and they preserve better than the cricket. But if you look at that, they're pretty comparable in price. And if you live, say, the Southeast and you have animals that like to eat dubious roaches, live dubious cultures are illegal to have in the Southeast because they can live there. So the only way to legally get dubious roaches right now in a lot of the Us is through the Probunks program and they're a fantastic food as well. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

I apologize. Is this just start. How new is this?

It's really new. We ran into them, I think it's been about a year and a half ago now at aquarama in China, and then last June is when we launched it in the Us. So they're less than a year old.

Real fresh. Real fresh. The last question.

Interesting facility, too. I got to go to Chengsa, it's where their main facility is a year ago before all this happened. And they wanted a round eye to do the video. So I'm the video host as we walk through their production facility and all these animals or these bugs are grown in an indoor facility that they're specifically grown for this product line. So it's pretty fascinating.

Can you imagine be like, hey honey, I'm home. How was your day with bugs? Shop and make me a sandwich.

Yes.

So one of the last questions I have for you is this new trend of vitamin supplements. Now we've seen juicing, the unintended deal that they do overseas for a lot of cichlids to brighten them up, at least temporarily, maybe for like four weeks until they get sold. That's not really what we're going after. We're going for vitamin supplements that we've seen with fish now, food, of course you have a complete array of nutrition and food, but what we're seeing now is people are using some vitamin supplements for medical treatments with fish. Fish dosing. If you're going to treat a tank, you're treating the water in the tank. And they're getting a very small amount of a high dose tank. And it's not necessarily the best way for a fish to ingest the medication. So what people are doing is they're purchasing and there's not like one king doing this. People are just ordering random products and hoping for the best. So it's risky, in my opinion, and actually dosing the pellets before they give them to them as sort of supplements for either color enhancement or what you've seen on YouTube. Trends now is like flower horn with different diseases that they're not able to treat. They're normally like dead to the water. They try to give these supplements right to the pellets to try to heal them. Have you been seeing that as a market trend or a risk for fish keepers?

I would say this is maybe a YouTube trend or whatever right now. Big time, yeah. But vitamins and vitamin supplements have been around as long as the hobby has been around. So this isn't anything new by any means. In fish, there are two types of vitamins that we're worried about. Water soluble and fat soluble. There's a total of eleven vitamin or vitamin like things that we worry about. Nine are definitely defined. Vitamins two are vitamin like they're basically a vitamin. They just don't have the specific title of vitamin. The fat solubles, we're talking your vitamin A, de and ks, and the water soluble, we're talking A, D and bs and cs. So those are the vitamin groups. Now if you're doing vitamin supplementation and you're dosing it into the water, hopefully you're smart enough to put water soluble vitamins into that. And there are a bunch of products outward, a bunch. There are a few products out there or have been out there that take advantage of that. The first one was a product that I launched with the bio blend program called bioguard. And that was the first one at the time that was really heavily dosed in the water soluble, specifically these and cs. Another product that's on the heels of that, that's available right now, is Dr. sims first defense, or fish defense. One of those fantastic product has got all that water soluble stuff that you want in there because what you're trying to do is get as much of those water soluble vitamins into the tank so that they're absorbed back, they're absorbed into the fish. What we talk about in vitamin absorption is osmosis or diffusion. The osmosis is diffusion for water, but diffusion where it's in a higher level concentration is always going to want to go to a lower concentration. So fish are constantly trying to battle keeping those vitamins in their body rather than escaping out the gills through their skin, because they'll lose a lot of these water soluble things through their gills and everyday respiration. So by putting them in higher concentrations into your tank, through dosing, your aquarium, they'll go right into the fish. But that's only the water soluble ones, the fat soluble ones. If you try to dose them into your tank, they're just going to be like olive oil in your pasta pot. They're going to go right up to the top, they're going to float. And if you have a surface skimmer, they're going to get skimmed off. They're not going to go into the fish. If you're doing fat soluble vitamins, you need to do a long term soak on your food. Really let them get into there so that they're kind of in the food so that when you feed them and they're floating around the water, they're so embedded in the food that a lot of it doesn't come off immediately because they're kind of in the food. So be careful and know what you're using and know what you're dosing. Now are there opportunities for higher level vitamins and fish food? Absolutely. That's one of the reasons. In our foods we have our blue flake because we recognize that most of the vitamin work that has been done on fish nutrition has been in wild type diets and aquaculture diets, not in fish that are in five panes of glass. So in our blue flakes, we have triple doses of vitamins and aminostimulants in those blue flakes. So if we have one X here, we got three X in that blue flake. Blue flakes are 20% of our blend. So overall you end up with about double what you would get in any other food. But we put the little marketing spin of putting it in the blue flake because who cares if it's got more vitamins. You got to have a little story behind it. But there is a nutritional reason for it. And in our case, when we do the fat soluble vitamins, they're part of the whole cooking process, so they're embedded into there and they're not going to come off quickly. But if you over soak them or you overfeed, eventually those fat solubles are going to come out of there and they're going to end up in a slick on your surface and your thing. So make sure you're doing a d's and c's in your soaps or directly into it as water solubles. They're going to go right into the fish. And early on in the question and answer, you guys were talking about salt. Salt along with water soluble vitamins is one of the best ways to knock fish out of that transition funk. The shimmer, say mollies or patties. When you first get them in rainbows as well. They get that shimmer and they're doing that little vibration. Salt them and dose them with water soluble vitamins really heavy and you'll see them rebound like butter.

You mentioned more about your blue flakes, right? I just want to go into that a little bit more because it's kind of like part of your marketing. The blue flakes are what you guys state. They contain the probiotics. That's correct.

No, the probiotics are in all the foods. The blue flakes have triple dose of vitamins.

Got you.

Immunosimulant. So the probiotics are in every bite. But every time they get a bite of the blue flake, it's like getting their flintstone vitamin for the day, like getting a chocolate chip cookie. One of our competitors when we first launched, it's no longer in the Us. They are still in Europe. But when we first launched, they called us the fruity pebbles fish food. And we're like, hell yeah, that's awesome. Because it was right along those lines. We are so excited with that. I was like, you're a victim of our marketing, but there's a marketing spin on how we put them in there. But they're there for a reason. Because higher levels of vitamins in a captive environment where they're not getting necessarily all the water changes needed. And if you're doing water changes, you're not necessarily introducing new vitamins into the system. Like, say a river might or lake has an endless supply, or the ocean and salt water. There's all stuff available all the time. When they're in that captive box. You need to be supplementing vitamins for sure, but a good quality food is going to give you that in general. Now, if you run into a problem or you're transitioning fish into your aquarium, salt and some water soluble vitamins is a great way to get them acclimated and get rid of that shimmer. I'm not going to lie to you, tim's. Fish defense is an easy way to do it.

I'm not going to lie to you. Next time I'm having a bowl of fruity pebbles, I'm going to just pull aside the blue ones for one big spoonful.

Oh, that's awesome.

Just for you. Well, you got koolaid, the cobalt koolaid. I love it. You had any more questions for him, Jim?

No, I'm just totally amazed by all the information that we get every time we have somebody on this podcast. I learned so much and it is just incredible. And I just want to take the time to say thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to help us out with this podcast. We started this podcast, like we've said many times before, in order to help people and to get them excited about getting excited about the hobby, because I feel like the hobby has kind of dried up over the last few years. I've been doing this for over 30 years. And bringing on someone like yourself, it just brings more excitement, and I am excited. I'm going to order myself some pretty tumbles.

No.

I'm going to get myself some scorpions there you go. And an arijuana before they disappear.

There you go.

Adam, you got anything for them?

No. Thank you. This was very informative. I took a bunch of notes.

You should listen to the podcast the.

Surface of Fish Nutrition tonight. I mean, I got a whole presentation that I've had on the side here just to make sure we're hitting key points. Maybe we hit half of it. I'd love to come back. If you guys want to talk more, we can certainly do that. Absolutely.

We got to talk about live foods as well. We didn't even really hit that.

That's my favorite. I love frozen food. I love live food. That's my favorite thing. And I think we should do a part two of this we're very soon.

Well, is there anything before we leave, though, that you feel that we direly need that we missed?

Mental health.

Mental health.

We hit some highlights. There's definitely stuff we could cover. We didn't talk about amino acids at all.

That's huge.

I briefly touched on fatty acid complexes, efas. And didn't really even talk about hoops and poop as much. So there's a whole discussion around fats that we can talk about if you want.

All right, here's what I'll propose.

There's a whole bunch of science behind it. And then there's also the just general questions of, what do I need to know? Because not everybody needs to know the science. It's fun to know, but what to look for in fish food?

So here's what I propose. We do a part two, right? But we do a part two where you lead, and then we finish with some questions.

We can definitely do as many parts as you want. I love talking fish, so there's nothing more I enjoy. So anytime I'll make myself available.

I appreciate that, Les. We really do. And for those that are listening, you can go to Cobalt Aquatics.com. They have their array of different products. Right now, they actually even have a close out products list on different foods and other pieces. Check it out. There are some incredible prices. There's actually some on there for I see some of your blue flakes on here. A pound for $23 shipped directly off your website. So get on there, guys. And if those that are listening want to save a little bit before they disappear, use promo code Cobalt bonus for 10%. There's a lot. And then also that newer company of the Pro Bugs. I'm just pulling up the link. So Probugsusa.com, if you do come onto.

Our website, be sure to sign up for our mailing list. One of the things that we've been trying to do as much as we can during this pandemic craziness is offer a lot of deals because we know people can't go shopping. We know our local fish stores, which is our lifeline as well. We're not trying to undercut them by any means, but getting things is difficult. And we've been doing as much as we can with our local dealer network and as well as direct to consumer promos to help everybody make sure they can do the best for their fish in their life during this pandemic. So sign up for our mailing list and check us out on Facebook. We try not to spam people on Facebook with a lot of ads. We've developed our Facebook community around the fish community, and we really pride on ourselves on our content. vera and I travel the world at least when we could, and we're showing fish farms and fish geeks from China to Taiwan to Germany to scandinavia, wherever we happen to be. We travel the world for fish. And we try to involve you, everybody, in those experiences. So get on there and check that out as well.

Perfect.

Is there any last minute details that I missed? Jimmy, you had something on your face. That's why I was asking.

Me.

No, I was asking this is more candy. More candy.

That's it.

We are making a new band. No candy for future.

No candy. No. I'm just excited about doing a part two, and I think we should do that very soon.

All right, well, thanks again, Les, and let's kick that out.

Trip not. No problem. Really good to be here.

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

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