You know, people often ask me, what makes Joe Shrimpshack so special? Normally, I just flagged those emails for deletion, pretend I didn't see them. But here is the answer. At joe's Shrimp shack. We're a different breed. Our day starts at 11:00 a.m. On the interstate with a guided yoga session offered by the highway patrol. And after the hangover fades, just a short uber trip to the shop. We raise our non gmo small batch hollow wood right here in America, which is then painstakingly measured to accurately match joe's rock hard physique. Our livestock is hair grass fed from the finest selection of tissue cultures and supplemented with a proprietary blend of liquid minerals sourced directly from our own body sweat. Most of our competitors quickly end the relationship with their shrimp when they ship them out feeling confused and unwanted. We safeguard against this by playing 80s power ballads, securing them against future heartbreak. You may think this all sounds unnecessary, but once we've ensured the highest quality shrimp and dry goods from our pastures to your personal aquarium, we'll tell you what's necessary. So fuck you, Joe Shrimpshack.com. It's not a restaurant. Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast with your host, Jim colby and Rob dolsen. What do you mean, people? The library smell like burnt hair. Jimmy. Oh, the podcast guys. Welcome to the aquarium, guys. Podcast. I am your host, Rob Zulson.

I'm Jim colby, the one who's not tarted, and I'm at him on the.

Chart, and I'm pretty sure I'm more sober than both of them.

So for those that don't know, Jim just got back, literally just got back from his long vacation in an indisclosed location in a campground by himself. quarantining. Clearly, he filled his van with tequila.

Tequila. I don't know.

What was it?

Rum was a problem. tequila also a problem. Beer was a problem.

I mean, this isn't normal. You're smiling and your eyes are glossy. Normally it's one of the two.

Oh, no. We had a good time. We went on vacation and spent a lot of money that we didn't have. And now I'm going to do this podcast so I can be rolling in the money.

Just rolling.

Just rolling in the money.

I'm a financial advisor, but you need to find something better.

I know, I just want to point that out.

Well guys, this week we are happy to have Alex from the secret history of living in your aquarium YouTube channel. Certainly. Check it out. Fantastic. YouTube channels have been going a while. It's a library of information. Alex, how are you tonight, buddy?

I'm doing great, thanks again.

Especially short notice. It's really difficult for us as a podcast, trying to pre curate content and doing scheduling. We do a podcast every week and trying to schedule podcasts with people that are very tight schedules, content creators, doctors, or people that have doctorates. Very difficult and cancellations are inevitable. So we appreciate you your time, sir.

It's probably better that you asked me the day of, because I was like, I can't come up with an excuse that quick. I better go on.

Wonderful.

That's how I found my wife.

Can't find an excuse to say no. No, I didn't know you got proposed to.

I did. My wife says to me, we should move up the wedding. I go, Why? She goes, I really want your health insurance. That is a true story. So if you ever get to meet her, ask her how her health insurance is.

Yeah, the United States has an overwhelming divorce rate because of our health insurance.

My wife is in the healthcare profession. My ex wife was in healthcare profession, and they've got the crappiest health insurance. Just recently, jen had some surgery. I know we've talked about this before. Our bill came to $38,000, and I paid $1,100 out of pocket. So pretty happy with that.

No wonder you're almost pretty good. It's not even the booze.

No, I was just happy about that. And so about 1094 more payments, it'll all be mine. I'm sending them a dollar a day.

Just like the pygmies in Africa.

Well, I'm thinking, why should I pay it off right away? I mean, I could, but if I don't pay it off right away, maybe they'll repossess her. So if I'm having a bad day.

They could just take her.

It'D be fun for me anyway.

No, fingers crossed.

Yeah, fingers crossed. 90 days until the sheriff kicks in the door.

Well, this week again, we have a lot more questions that were sent in, and we even have a voicemail. Those are getting more common now. But before we do, we have a question in discord. We are again doing this live for the community. So if you want to listen in live, the only way to get it live is going to according to Podcast.com on the bottom of the website, we have the link for discord. Come join the debauchery and fun. barf wants to know, how are those scrotum frogs doing? I worry they'd be getting shaved with all this heat wave coming through.

Adam, that's where you go. Your scrotum frogs are fine.

Wonderful. We need a status update on those stats. Stats?

They're growing and reproducing very well.

Well, you had a vasectomy. What happened? You had a vicectomy, right?

That's different.

Father of four.

Definitely not talking about him.

Thank you, Jesus, for doing that.

All right, here's a voicemail from one of our dedicated listeners. Here we go.

Hey, everyone. Especially Bob.

Adam.

Jim.

Got to remember Jim, Adam, we got the best name.

Just wanted to give you guys absolutely love podcast, and I'm an exterminator, and.

Actually, the granules that I use for.

The yard kills malaysian trumpet snails. Just thought I'd let you guys know. Also, could you guys do a podcast on black ghost knifefish? I have one in a 150 gallon aquarium. I'd like to know more about them. And if you can breathe. Thank you guys so much. Love you guys so much. I feel like I'm right there with you.

Well, that's because you are. You are a miracle of voicemail. That is correct.

Man, that was nice.

Also, I've never been called Bob before. It feels weird.

Bob.

I'm officially old.

I know. But at least he remembered me at the very end after he went through 14 names. ngm.

Ngim.

But Adam came up several times.

Right, Adam? No one can forget Adam.

No. Yeah. I wonder if that poison is water soluble.

It's poison, so I'm not going to use it. But at least now we know that there is something on the planet that can kill a trumpet snail all the way.

I read in between the lines. I know you guys didn't catch it. I read in between the lines.

Did you?

Freaking trumpet snails are now out in people's lawns crawling around.

There you go.

That's what that is.

Killing them. And nobody understands that. freaking trumpet snails. Fuck you people. I'm sorry. I'm going to get a lot of hate mail now because some people love trumpet sales, love their snail.

If the film company that had Harvey weinstein's assets wants something to do now, they can make a horror film on snails killing people now.

That's right.

You can take that one for free. But as far as knife fish breeding, I can't say that I know people that breed them. I know that they are breeding in certain areas where they've been invasive, such as Florida. knifefish are now becoming more of an invasive issue, and people are intentionally game fishing them because they're becoming more and more popular. But how about you, Alex? Do you know much about the breeding details of ghost knives?

As far as I know, most people need to use hormones currently to successfully get them to do it. I think they need a pretty hardy temperature change compared to most fish. So it's like a seasonal thing. So you have to either be patient and wait that cycle or you're going to be employing some human growth hormone. I know that that sounds weird because they're fish, but apparently human growth hormone also works on fish.

So it sounds like a lot like my first marriage is seasonal and you have to just kind of wait for.

The seasonal wait for it.

If not next year, wait for that blue pill. That's great. No, that's not the problem.

That's a growth one, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I thought I've heard that they've been breeding them. They've bred him in Florida. I did hear with hormones, but I thought Germany had some people breeding them. Oh, probably those Germans.

Germans do everything.

They can make good beer and they can breed.

Germans do everything in the hobby. Before we go too much, because we have Alex on, of course, this podcast is going to be about modern history of the aquarium. So we'll talk about germans here in a bit because there's a lot of details. I'm assuming Alex is just soaked up for us, but the next one is a text message that we have opened an email. I lied. Hello? It's probably been answered, been answered before, but I have a ten gallon tank and a 20 gallon tank. My wife wants a guppy tank and wants to breed them all. Which tank tanks should I use? Thanks for the help. So I already took the opportunity moment to email this one back and I said guppies will breed in a cup. So if you're looking for the appropriate spot, as long as they're breathing in water, they're touching each other, they're wiggling, there's going to be that happening, there's nothing you can do about it. So I think the better question is what's the right tanks for multiplying guppies? Well, I think having a separate grow out tank number one is the best. Having just something aside for babies that you can feed multiple times a day, you get them to grow out and then having the rest of the adults in a bigger tank, say like a 40 gallon is a nice size to keep a bunch.

What I'd like to do is I like to take and put the females, when they're real close to giving birth, in an empty tank and I like to put them in a net of some sort. People give me crap, but I use those pop up hampers and you can get different sizes of those little pop up hampers, but you put the female in there and when the babies are born, they'll swim out away from the female. And if you do take a small light and put away from the female, for some reason, baby guppies are attracted to the light, kind of like mosquitoes are to the yard light outside. And that way when she's done giving birth, you can just take her and pop her out into the regular tank, give her a little time to recover. But then you've already got your 30 or 60 little guppies in that tank and you're not chasing all these babies around with a net trying to pick them up. Meanwhile, as you're trying to catch them, then the goddamn males and females will see them darting and will go after them and eat them also. So I like putting the females just before they give birth. And if you've just got a few females, you can keep track. It's normally between 30 to 40 days, depending on the temperature how long it takes for them to give birth.

Now I take those because they have those mesh. Was it baby baskets that put you put in a tank? Yes, I take the material off of it and then just put that cut pop up hamper material over it. And that works as well for smaller tanks because you don't put a whole pop up hamper in a small tank that's not going to work for you.

I didn't get my last point. He wants to get a 300 gallon tank.

Oh, well, there's your last point. Get yourself a rubber made tote and make sure it's a cattle trough for a size. Exact.

And then that was what we call a good start. I had 7300 gallon tubs downstairs in my warehouse and we used to have lots of babies.

I thought that was for your legal.

One was a hot tub. I will say that one was a hot tub and one we kept beer in.

What's the thing they do in Minnesota? It's not brewing. It makes mead. What fermenting?

Oh, moonshine basically.

But for Minnesota. It's mead. It's all wheat based and shit.

And then they fermented honey based.

Wheat honey. It's like a whole thing. Yeah, mainly for us, the scandinavians up here. But that's pretty popular to doing those things. So again, one tub for guppies, one tub for jacuzzi, and the last tub for your meat. There's your beginner's basement.

Beginner starter. Starter basement starter kit.

So Alex, what's your secrets? We know that you have a bunch of guppies.

Oh, yeah. My secret is I don't tell anyone when like an ENDLER gets into the wrong tank because people get really mad about that. But no dare you mix the feeder guppies. Yeah, I know. It's like they're so pure virginal. Their lines are so no, my truth is I plant the heck out of my tanks and if they're a guppy with large fins, I won't worry about doing anything different because they're slow. But if they are a wild type or something that's pretty sleek, then I will end up usually separating with the females when they're really swollen and I'll put them into like a five gallon. Let them have their babies. They might eat a few that night. It's kind of a reward. And then I'll just toss them back into the home tank. And then you got the baby guppies that you can feed and clean out all the extra urea and whatever else is going to be in there from feeding them three or four times a day.

I got to say, Adam and I and Jim have this long term joke going back to the original episodes of the podcast where we make fun of guppies, calling them feeder guppies.

No endlers. Oh, excuse me. We don't make fun of guppies because guppies are cool.

So the moment you said that you mix an ENDLER with something else by accident, I was just sitting here giggling because I'm watching adam's asshole pucker.

He lighted up like it was Christmas endlers.

It was pretty great. Don't worry, I already softened him up with the previous question. Before everyone came in. I asked him, what's your opinion on hybrids?

Do they have hybrids? You know what's sickening? The other day I was looking at one of my list and they sell all these different kinds of inler guppies. They're not cheap. And here's the thing. They're packed 500, but they want a buck 75 a piece. So 500 times a dollar, 75 for one bag of inler guppies. I'm thinking, why don't you just go to the casino and just put $1,000 down on black and be done a lot faster?

So I'm just checking here. We've had a handful of text messages sent to our number, and if you want to message us for questions, leave a voicemail or send an email. Our contact info is on our website. Aquariumgistpodcast.com in the bottom. Again, just more people demanding more pictures of jim's Fish room that we have to ignore because Jimmy is not nice to his fan.

What if I get thrown in jail? I'll take selfies. that'd be kind of fun for everybody.

For some reason, one of my text messages won't load here. That is rather unfortunate.

Yeah, I wish we had an It guy that worked here, right?

It's almost like you suck got deleted.

Literally.

We had such a nice review from someone, I even put, thank you so much for the kind words. It means a lot to us. And the former text message literally got deleted. I don't know how I got you.

Your mom deleted it again.

It hates me, clearly. All right, last check here. Give me one moment. This is the miracle of this. I think we're good to go, other than we have one old voicemail that we forgot to play a while ago. I called this gentleman during the week because apparently we missed notifications. This was end of June.

You suck.

I do suck.

You're a horrible person of June.

I called him personally. We had a big chit chat, and he actually stopped listening to the podcast around episode nine. So now he's back into it. Thanks for the phone call.

Really?

Right. So here's his review.

Hey. This is corey from Texas. I just want to say I'm only on episode three of the podcast, but.

I really love it.

I already was thinking about getting an aquaponics, making an aquaponic system kind of from scratch and just sort of rigging it all together. I don't know if you'll have made an episode on anything like that of trying to make a system or an aquarium as self sustaining as possible, but I do want to thank you guys for it's hilarious.

It's very informative.

I've learned so much from this podcast. Thank you guys so much. And for shouting out for the Ohio Fish Rescue. That's amazing.

He was from Colorado. Texas.

Texas.

Colorado.

I feel like you need to really lay off after a week of booze.

Some water, doing Aquaponics. What's? He growing.

Special.

Thanks for finally showing up. My God.

That's what we need to do. We need to have Alex back on and then talk about some people in California that have pot aquaponics with aquarium fish. Right?

Where did you get stooped off?

Oh, I did it in college. Yeah.

See, there you go.

Yeah. Pot.

Aquaponics. It's a new podcast waiting to happen.

Yeah.

Aquapotics. Aquapotics.

There you go. Here we go. We got your T shirt made.

Awesome tilapia work best.

Well, thanks again, cory from Texas, because.

Tilapia crap like clydesdales.

That's right. Yeah.

Well, that was a nice thing that you ignored since June. Right now. That's almost September.

Well, you still have yet to bring that email from episode nine.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

Probably the same guy.

It is the same guy.

That's why we have them. People, contact us on the Aquarium guy's website.

Yes. If you guys have any questions, comments, or concerns, please send it to us and we will either listen to it, play it live, or ignore it, forward.

It to the HR department.

That's right.

Well, let's dive directly into our topic and get a little bit more information about you, Alex. So, number one, welcome. And number two, what got you into the hobby, sir? We asked this to everybody.

Okay, so straightforward. I guess it was I went to one of those carnivals when I was like, five years old, and it was like, throw pennies into the bowls of fish and you get to win a goldfish, whichever one you clocked in the head with a penny. I did that successfully to a few, like, right off the bat. And I took home a couple parents, made me give away a couple, but I kept one named elvis that lived until I was like, I don't know, way over it. But like four or five years it lived in a goldfish bowl, like the way that most beta keepers would think. You're like Buffalo Bill or something for keeping them that way.

But, yeah, we won't tell. Other than this podcast I'm definitely going to be airing right there. Jimmy, your theorem works that places like Walmart and fairs with the coin flip thing actually bring people into the hobby the bad way, but they bring them in nonetheless.

They do.

And I'll tell this live, I used to sell the local carnivals that would come around here.

You what?

The guy would call me and say, I need 1000 goldfish. And I'd go, Got cash? And he goes, yeah. I go I'll be by there on Thursday when they open. And I would drive by, hand a box of goldfish, and he'd hand me some cash and I would go buy some twinkies.

And then he'd sit there crying at night because he feels so bad about it.

No, I did not. Cash is king, people.

Jimmy, we're going to get so much shit mail now because of you.

This is long before I cared about fish. It wasn't that long ago. There are so many people that these are common goldfish, so as far as I'm concerned, they're just bait.

Actually.

It's easy.

I'm sorry.

Well, don't use them as bait. That's insensitive. And Jimmy is drunk.

No, I'm not drunk yet.

Hung over. It's different.

All right.

So, Alex, sorry about the derailment.

Well, he's the one that started it. He's the one clonkin fish on the head with a penny. His name was elvis because he sat there with Hunka hunka, hunka hunka burning love.

Thanks. Now I have the melted copper. So you've been doing youtubing for how long now?

It's coming up on four years now.

So what made you decide that? I need to share my knowledge and hobby with the world.

Pure narcissism.

God, I love this guy.

I know. He's got Justin bieber here, too. I just love it.

He's baby, baby. Come on. There you go.

He flipped at the one time. I just went afterwards.

In the hobby, I started with a goldfish. Then I went by the age of ten or so, I started getting into guppies. And then the Internet kind of came out and I was able to get these purple metallic snakeskin, guppies, when they were brand new. And I got them from Thailand, and I sold them in the Us. Via ebay, when it was brand new. And I was making like $60 a pair at like, whatever, twelve or 14 or however old I was by the time that was going on. But I was really amazed by them. And I liked the genetics of fish, so I kept fish for that reason. Then through high school, I discovered herbal remedies and kind of forgot about the fish for a little while. By the time college came back, I forgot about a lot of things.

Yeah, you take remedies, you forget about a lot.

That's right.

I don't know.

And by the time I got to college age, I guess at the end of high school, I had, like, one tank left, but they were kind of like my dark secret. Like it was like my cross dressing or something. I've got guppies in my closet. Nobody will. No, I promise. I'm a stoner. I promise.

When did you come out of the closet with your guppies?

Yeah. Well, by the time I went to college. And I decided I had two years of college done when I got to college, because I had kind of, basically, dropped out of high school and done this college program. So I had two years of college credits. So basically I looked at it as I had four years and two of them to mess around. So I ended up double majoring, but I had to take Biology and Ocean what was it? Marine biology, also as a prerequisite. And that got me into a project working on the genetics of guppies again. And so by that time, aquascaping had started to become popular and I realized you could keep actual plants with your fish, which I didn't realize. I mean, it just didn't occur to me all through the stuff was that.

Because all your plants were not in the tank?

Yeah, they were just sucking up all the ammonia and nitrogen, you know? Yeah, exactly. I didn't know you could put underwater plants in the tank.

And you learned this in college?

Oh, yeah, of course.

Money well spent.

Money well spent. Yes.

I just love your theory about you've already got two years of college, but I'm still going to go four years, so I got two years just to screw around.

Yeah, well, I figured that I probably need it at that rate. I was going at the time. But actually it worked out. I got an anthropology degree, which requires geology, biology, anatomy. So it kind of gave me a really nice overview of a lot of the physical sciences. And then I got a history and anthropology dual degree, too, so kind of covered a lot of ground, and I have never used any of it professionally. So I've been a tattoo artist until tonight. Right.

This is off of your career.

I'm getting a check for my college tuition tonight. Right. From you guys, right?

Yeah, we'll send it. Go stand by the mailbox. Just stand there and waiting for you? That's right.

That's about what I paid.

Yeah, that's how I get paid for this podcast, too. Rob, tell me, go stand down by your mailbox. And then after I get kind of sleepy, he drives by and doors me as he drives by and laughs.

So why the title? Secret History? Living in Your Aquarium. I feel like that in and of itself, tells a story that you wanted to impress that gives you kind of a separate niche. So what was the idea behind not just sharing your hobby, but specifically naming it Secret History?

Well, the first part was that I wanted a name that was so long that no one would ever find the channel. Yeah, I think it was because I'm in Washington State, I'm in Seattle, and I don't imbibe like I used to, but I used to kind of have this point of view where I'd stare at the fish tank, and I'd think, whoa, it's like a whole universe in there. And then as I sobered up over the next decade, I got older, and I started thinking, well, where did the gravel that's like, clown bar. Where did that come from in my tank? Is that from China? Where did the air pump get made? Where did those fish get bred? Who first bred those fish? Why don't I use an underground filter like I did 20 years ago? Kind of all these things came to mind, and I wanted to find the origins of them. So basically the idea when I started was that it was going to be a diary, and I'd pick one item in the aquarium each episode and explore following it back to the origins of the essence that it was needed for in the hobby. But then it kind of got derailed a little bit just by my own interests and doing Species spotlights and tank updates and interviews with other people and things like that. So I kind of peppered that in because it was what people seemed to be interested in. Also, I do have some fans from when the channel started that really do just want the driest history where I read through the patents of the first linear piston air filter stuff and trace it back to the first one.

I was one of those dry listeners.

Still are still looking for it.

There's really some great content. However you're hard on yourself. You're not that dry.

No, not really.

It is great content, certainly. Check it out. But again, tonight's topic, we want to get more into modern aquaria. And when we talk about the modern history of aquarium, the modern era of aquarium, people think, well, world war two, you were even mentioning this before we started the podcast. People started using air travel, fish could fly on airplanes. bingo. There's where modern aquaria started. But that's really not the case. So what I asked you coming on is to try to walk us through a timeline again where we honestly believe it began, and then walk us through the transition of how we got to now. Because most people that get in the hobby, even if you've been in there a while, you're definitely going to not know everything that came out beforehand. I've been in the hobby my whole life, and this information is very hard to come up with unless you're reading patents and going through dry material. So please walk us through where really the modern era of aquaria got started.

Yeah, really. The first modern aquarium, I guess the first foray into it was wealthy professors and trust fund kids, dukes, lords, things like that. A lot of them had come to America. People like robber barons and just like really wealthy families of maybe the son of someone who owned a giant railroad company or something would have all this extra money. And that's really when people first saw these private collections in New York and Chicago, they had some early aquariums in Paris and London and Berlin, and those were kind of the five places where the public was first exposed to it. It all got put on hold because of the civil war and because it was just so expensive to have an aquarium that only these rich people could have it. And it stayed that way until the 1870s, at which time in Maryland and delaware, goldfish and paradise fish as well as betta's became really popular. And so in in the americas, they got them mostly from Germany, surprisingly, even though it's closer to get to the new world from this hemisphere. But we basically followed Europe's lead. There was a big expo in 1856 that really introduced subtropical and tropical fish for the first time, but it was kind of a giant failure in that most of fish died by the third day, but at least the. People on the first day were impressed enough for that to echo through the next 50 years. And by the turn of the century, around 1900, there'd been a couple of really key changes in technology that allowed people to keep goldfish and other fish that were seen more as totally tropical than these subtropical fish that have been kept for a long time. Many people kept fish in these big Victorian ornate aquariums that people have probably seen pictures of, but that's not what most people could afford. Those things are more expensive than a car at the time. So what we're talking about later is actually most people would buy a box and they'd put a sheet of glass in it at home on their own and only on one side would you have that. And basically a lot of people would have pumps that they pump by hand. And it was the invention of a can in Ohio. In Columbus, Ohio, a guy named muller invented it was an old dairy can and he put an air pump, a heater and basically he didn't know it, but a sponge that was he thought it was for evaporating off heat. But it worked as a biological filter and that was the gold standard until the 1930s.

He did that by mistake.

He did it by mistake. Yeah.

Is it design out there that we can find publish somewhere?

Yes. Actually the place I first came across it because it's called the German Fish Shipping Can. To me, I was like, It's German. So I looked all over for a German patent trying to use Google Translate or friends that spoke German. Well, it was made in Ohio and the guy immigrated his family in the 17 hundreds from Germany. So that's the only reason it was nicknamed the German Fish can. But I mean, there's this book called Toy Fish. I know most people can't see, but in the book Toy Fish, there's actually a picture of the thing and they have some cutaways and pat.

You got to hold that up again.

Yeah.

We're going to have people on the discord clip this for you. So hold it up a little further. Up higher. Yeah, it's close enough. Just about there. There you go. For all people listening, it's literally just a hand drawing of a melt can with a Specialized.

Yeah, and it's got aeration, but it actually was a pump for a bicycle tire and they would use that and they'd pump air into it. And when you traveled on a steamship back then, because most people couldn't afford planes even in the when small aircraft did exist, world War One really changed the technology. But most people still traveled by ship or railroad. And so they would actually fit an entire railroad car, usually at the behest of some rich person in San Francisco or Santa Barbara or La. They would actually put an entire railroad car with two or three helpers that would ride with the fish and pump those things 24/7 for three to five days until they got to the other coast. And so the first angel fish successfully made it to San Francisco from the East Coast in 1917. And the guy paid an equivalent of $1,700 today for each fish as a baby, and he shipped over 103 made it, and he didn't breed them until 1921. So this guy just spent so much money over and over again trying to do it. But he established, by paying and losing a lot of money, he established about 40 key species on the West Coast, and it was his funding that also helped fund them in Chicago, New York, and Ohio, which were the main places. Philadelphia being another place in the Us. Where these species were coming. But they realized in the meantime that the coolest fish to them at the time, like angel fish or knife fish or saltwater fish, weren't going to be easy. So in the meantime, they were at a mad scramble to kind of find things like sword tails, guppies platties, mollies, and they really got into breeding those and putting them in pawns so that normal people could buy them.

Jimmy, you're not alone here. Sounds like when this other guy got started, I mean, it's the same time right there. He spent about as much as you did.

That's right, he did spend a lot. So, $1,700. Was that for all the fish?

No, that's a fish.

Do you have his number? Is he still alive?

Yeah, I got some swampland in Florida that I'd like to sell him.

You know what's interesting, Alex, is that I saw that when you held up the book of that milk can and stuff, and the top has got holes in it and stuff, my goldfish company offered about two or three years ago, and I'm still kicking myself because I didn't buy them. They had some old milk cans like that that used to bring goldfish on the railroad cars. And what they did at that time is they would put ice up in there. And so as the ice dripped down and the train rocked back and forth, that actually oxygenated the water and kept the goldfish alive. And they just sold those cans, which are so nostalgic and cool. I saw pictures of them and they sold them for like 30, $40 a piece. It was just cheap.

They actually predate those because they were just used with the ice. There you go.

Yeah, those are the ice cans that you're talking about. Actually, that big chamber up top, that's how they do it. And that other pieces, like a radiator type thing that they aerate the cool water in, and then it would get pumped back into the lower part.

Yeah, it was incredible. I just wish I would have bought one. dang it.

$30. Not well spent.

No.

Instead you got jager.

Yes.

How could you?

Jager is good.

So again, that puts the beginning of the modern era of aquarium. At what date, again, was that can invented?

Well, that can was invented roughly in the 1879, but it didn't really get mass introduced until the 1890s. I'd say the 1890s is when they could first try to ship, but really that first angel fish marks. So 1917, I would say, is a great year because world war I is coming to an end. People have traveled all over the American empire, so to speak, the Philippines, Cuba, all these territories that America had their hands in hawaii, and they wanted to bring back some of the cool fish and animals they'd seen. So this really sparked the exotic pet and fish trade quite a bit. Even though the war was in Europe, we had troops all over the world, and we moved cargo and lots of equipment all the way around through the pacific and all the way across the Atlantic. And they were also exposed to museums and things that were ahead of America. As far as aquaria goes, germany has always been kind of leading the way in Europe with with France neck and neck.

So now let's take a stamp then. If someone wanted to in, say, 1917, 1920, you know, after we first started spending a ton of money, you were a millionaire at the time, or what was equivalent to a millionaire and you wanted to spend and buy an aquarium, what were the ways of keeping them? Was it still the victorian era of aquariums where they had cast iron pedestal tanks? We had a gentleman on our podcast before that restored one and got it going quite well. That's his hobby. But was that all that was limited to them at the time? What do they have?

Well, I would say by 1924, sears and roebuck started offering the first fish pump, and it said it could be used in fountains or in ponds and fountains, or it could be used in a fish tank. And at the time it was seen as the hobby of collecting your local fish more so, like, you'd go to the lake or the salt water and you'd bring things back and put them in a wooden box with a piece of glass. And there were simple instructions you'd send away and pay like a nickel for about how to build these aquariums at home. There's one book called a boys guide to modern living that was like a boy scout companion guide. And it actually has some pretty cool illustrations from the 19 teens about different setups you could make. A lot of them didn't have any glass at all. It was really the glass that was expensive. But things like guppies, beta fish and so forth fishbowls had been around for a number of years at that point. The industrial revolution had made those much more affordable. Just like you could get a bottle of coca cola, you could get a machine blown glass bowl for simple fish. It's for the complex community tank that we think of today. It really wasn't until the late 20s, early 30s, that was democratized to a level that somebody who was an adult could afford that hobby. I mean, with a job, if you had a decent paying job, it was within the realm of affordable. It went from being $1,700 for an angel fish in San Francisco in 1917 to about $9 in 1926, and by 1930, they were going for about $6. So converted today, it's still fairly expensive. It's like $100 a fish or something, 150 of fish. But that's not out of the realm of what people spend on the hobby today for a highly desired fish.

Definitely not in the realm of possibility. So around that, you said late 1920s, 1930s. Is that the beginning of what we traditionally call meta frame is a brand, but I always considered that the metaphram is the bottom slate tank with the four rectangular sides. That's really how when that started, or was there an area in between?

It was a little later than that. There were early versions of a lot of these things, but like I said, it was all innovation within the hobby, pretty much. There was not a dedicated aquarium, goldfish, or community tropical fish company until these clubs began to pop up around the country. But a lot of things were made they'd literally call like a pig iron foundry. And they'd give them the specifications locally, and they'd say, can you build me a frame? And then they'd go to a window company and say, can you put glass in it? So the point at which you could order in a crate like a ready made aquarium, really, the 1930s is when that became possible, and it kind of had that art deco aesthetic with the MetaFrame tanks and things like that. And really by the late thirty s, the one that you'd probably think of today was solidified. They existed, though, as early as the 20s, but they weren't as mass popularity.

I stole from Jimmy a metaphrame tank, not because he was crying about it, but because I just happened to want to recreate this early era aquarium. And this particular metaphrame had a hood, and they're so hard to find. With hoods, you can find metaphrames broken at garage sales, whatever else, because the seals were terrible. But this one has a plug in, and on the light there's a patent pending with a number. So I looked up the pending mark, and it got finalized in the late 30s. So this one predates that by some significant time. Wow. Define that. Because my knowledge, the late forty s at earliest, definitely fifty s and sixty s were a metaphram era at least. I keep using that brand. That's a brand in my mind. It's a style of tank with aluminum sides and a slate bottom. And when you're heating these, you were using buns and burners at one point in time, which they made a practicality for these slate bottoms. When do we see heaters change?

The 1920s is really when America got a handle on electricity. I mean, you can cite rich people all the way back to the 1890s with electricity and so forth, but really, when we understood what was going on, we had the coil heaters that would go under your substrate in your aquarium. They had those heaters in aquariums as early as the 1920s. There's all sorts of patents from the early 20s that never were practically produced. But if you look for patents, the ideas were there 2030 years ahead of when the consumer products were. And so very dedicated people could make these things. But for the most part, there was a lag time between when these fish club newsletters would write of some rich guy or some very dedicated person set up using the newest technology, and people would copy that. But there was a real lag time before that was anything as a consumer market. America just wasn't like it is today, where you would package any great idea as quick as you could in any field of technology or hobby. Today, it's very quick turnaround time. We stamp things out in plastic, molds and things and get five iterations of them quickly within a half a decade. But there was a little bit of lag time there, and the hobby had to show that it would have standing power for years to come before I think people really like GE and things thought about actually building pumps or motors to power these things specifically for the hobby. And that happened by the late 20s, early 30s. There were decent components of heaters pumps, lights, everything we have today, almost. It's pretty amazing what you could find if you had the money or lived in one of the big east coast cities at the time.

So they definitely was kind of started out as a rich man hobby and then took a few years before it kind of caught on and nobody really wanted to put the money into it, not knowing if there would be actually large demand to mass produce these things.

Totally. Totally. Yeah. And I mean, I think you could see the same thing even today in, like, aquascaping or rimless, low iron tanks or whatever the newer trend is. You could even say the same thing about glow fish like them or hate them. It took some eccentric million or billionaire to toy around to create those things, and now you can see them at every pet go petsmart. So I think the hobby is led by eccentrics and rich people in a way. Many hobbies are once the proof of concept works. A lot of people say, hey, that's actually pretty cool, and we go through these trends, I mean, all throughout keeping fish. A lot of people think of the modern era as post world war II and that's because there were so many consumers able to buy things and so many children. That was the first time that the hobby was really seen as a children's hobby. Outside of if you wanted to go catch some minnows and put them in a bucket for the afternoon, the hobby was an adult hobby. And it's really World War II, the baby boomers being born, that Democratized. That from being a newsletter for scholarly gentlemen of universities and social clubs to, you know, in the turn of the century and the being kind of like whammo brand fish tank with frisbees and slinkies and stuff like that. Kind of being akin to your goldfish tank or your guppies in the well.

I mean, we have a lot of different marketing to blame, so right. You said coming out of World War One was when the queen started picking up and the metaphrames, apparently, according to some of the information I have found, technically started around the 1920s where mattel got into the game and essentially wanted to turn fish into a toy. They saw the novelty of people enjoying it, it being an attraction for kids. And that's where we had dollars push behind and try to finalize something by the 30s. So moving forward, trying to see really when this kicked off, I always like to point out that sea monkeys did it. Jimmy. Jimmy, you made a face.

I ordered sea monkeys when I was a kid. Back in the day, every comic book, any type of, like archie and the archie comic books and stuff, you could order live sea monkeys, or else you get the eggs to hatch them. You can get live sea horses. You could buy a little incubator, and they'd send you the incubator and four quail eggs or whatever. And that was kind of my introduction as a kid growing up in North Dakota, I was probably about 1213 years old, and my mom said, yeah, we can order some Sea monkeys. And we sat there and watched these things in amazement, not realizing they're just brine shrimp. But that was how my mom and I got into it. My grandmother had metaphrane aquarium. She used to raise zebra fish.

Great Daniel.

That was my first fish, zebrafish. She gave me some in a ball glass court jar I took home, and I bought a fish bowl and kept zebra fish for a while. Then my mom and I started raising guppies. And what's funny is that we had, I'm guessing probably 50, 60 large two gallon bowls full of guppies. And back then, they would breed like you would not believe, and we never lost any. Right now, the guppies that you buy at your local store and whatnot genetically are pretty weak, from what I can see. And I've sold thousands of guppies over the years, but we used to raise just tons and tons, and my mom would just trade them to the pet store to get a new heater or she would give them away to other people. And that's how a lot of other people got into the hobby in our area.

Well, you know, it's interesting you say that, because guppies and most live bearers really did not require heaters. Honestly, back then they had strong enough genetics. If you think about it, if a fish swims 10ft down in the water, how cold is that water? You guys have jumped in a lake before. Even in a warm location, it can change 30 degrees, 20 degrees. And so, you know, a lot of these fish are subtropic that we think of as tropical and so sword tails. Betas daniels a lot of the things that we keep in heated tanks today, as long as they're not getting under 55, 50 degrees, which most houses tend to stay above in the modern era after electrical and coal heating, they're actually okay and so before the lines were bred. So specifically for looks. I mean, fish are pretty resilient when they come out of the wild unless they're a very niche biotope type of fish. So we've actually had to kind of re engineer getting more oxygen into the water or getting more nutrients into the food and things like that as we've kind of screwed up the biology of the fish not caring about oh, should we care about how they the guppies metabolize? betacarotene no, we don't care. Just make them more blue. Well, they're supposed to have some orange showing and that means the orange is what attracts in guppies and handlers the females because in their wild habitat it shows that they had access to the most food resources and the most bugs that had fallen into the water and things like these subtle cues we're having to relearn, but we kind of tossed that aside to breed ornate versions of all the fish that we think of today.

Yeah, I think genetically that people are finally going back to getting wild fish and putting wild fish cross breeding with their favorite fish. Right now we've had Steve ricky on this program. He talks about the wild angel fish. Now he's doing programs with the wild sword tails. Then Rob showed me another website where they're doing nothing but wild sword tails. And I was just blown away about how beautiful even these wild fish can be. And they're dropping 200 fry at a crack, where if you're hell bent on getting 35 babies out of a sword tail anymore, that you buy from your local petco and Pet smart. But when you buy these wild fish, you get that wild strain back into them, it quadruples the amount of babies you're getting out of there. So if you think about it, you can produce more babies with ten fish, a wild variety than you can with 50 fish of this, the local stuff from Petco by far. People just need to step back and just really if your thought was, I want to produce a bunch of fish and I want them vigorous and healthy, you need to get that wild strain back into them.

So we're going to question one of them.

I don't mean to cut you off there, but we want to get these in while they're still fresh. So how much of an effect on home of fishkeeping did the public aquariums have back then? And where these pumps from GE and other manufacturers, were they made for them first or was it made for specifically for home use?

So aquariums, the technology, the home. Okay, so people would go to these aquariums. Really? It was by the 1880s that these took off. The Shed Aquarium in Chicago was America's kind of crowning jewel. I don't know if I'm saying that right, shed or shed, but that's still open today. It had big panes of glass like you'd think of as a modern aquarium today. Whereas before a lot of aquariums had the old Victorian style stands in a big hall or a big open room. But the idea of building big enclosures like big tanks and you'd walk past a gallery or windows really, london and the Shed Aquarium in Chicago were the first to do that. And that didn't really lend itself to home aquarium as far as the physical parts go, like the pumps and things. But the concepts behind what they were learning, they needed to keep these fish alive, like aeration and heat and things like that. They were meticulously noted by these hobbyists and marine biologists, became an actual scientifically respected field of its own. And these people kept notes and were often a part of local aquarius clubs. That being said, kids could probably dream big, and I would say it's to the same extent that if a kid goes to the zoo, they may want an elephant but might end up getting a hamster a couple of weeks later. And if enough kids want hamsters, somebody's going to invent the hamster ball to sell soon. And so I think they both help each other in that respect, if that makes sense.

Well, totally, I agree. I've said before, and people hate me for it, but walmarts of the world introduce a lot of kids to fish and they probably don't do it the best or they don't do it at all anymore. But as a child, even when my kids were growing up and my kids are in their late twenty s now, we would take them over to Walmart and we always had to go look at the fish. And that was before I was really even wholesaling and whatnot. And I think just by as much as people hate zoos or hate circuses or whatnot, if you don't introduce this to young people, there's going to be no interest and there's going to be no conservation later on in life.

I agree. And I think betas and goldfish, they get a bad rap in some ways and some people adore them, but also other people think that they're just simple fish for kids kind of thing. But I mean, that statement simple fish for kids isn't a trivial statement. I mean, that keeps new people coming into the hobby that grows a fondness for fish and for keeping life alive in your care. It kind of kindles that spirit when you're young. And a lot of people come back to it when they're in their twenty s and thirty s, when they have some expendable income rather than it's hard when you're a teenager. So I'm always impressed when I see young teenagers that are really into the hobby. That's always impressive to me. I try to encourage them, but I think that our memories from when we're kids that is a big reason why the hobby has been able to sell expensive versions of the toys that were marketed to kids. Well, now they can sell a rimless tank to an adult who has that association with fish. They're willing to spend that extra money even though it's still an aesthetic change rather than a practical fishkeeping change.

Right. It gets to be about decor and being what's cool, what's the newest thing I can get that Rob doesn't have?

Right?

Yeah.

So getting back to the timeline and creating demand. So, again, we talked a little bit about the sea monkeys trend, and I just wanted to point that out and go back to that because we should talk a little bit about the story and why it affects it. There's this gentleman, herod, von Braunhunt, and please chime in wherever because I'm very gray on this story. He used to be a head of a toy company that seemed to be failing in the this guy is sitting there trying to figure out how to be an entrepreneur, and he is what I was about to be in the storyline, the American mail order inventor. Like everybody's heard about mail order stuff in comic books and other things. He literally invented this whole craze. So he came up with using simple brine shrimp and the sea monkey gimmick, packaging the eggs, putting the salt in, and then putting a or the third packet that happened to be nothing.

That's a really interesting story because at first his shrimp didn't live long at all. They lived like a week. And so he actually worked with a team of biologists to develop a hybrid shrimp that would last longer and that's eggs would last longer. They sourced it from a different shrimp. He started with some shrimp that were from a salt lake, but not the salt lakes in Utah. And he ended up using a species, I believe, that was derived and then hybridized with a salt lake in Canada and a salt lake in Utah. And they had a longer dormancy period. But the whole trick was that packet that you were talking about is kids didn't want to wait 24 hours. So you put the first packet in, and that is the eggs and the nutrition and everything to start growing, and you tell them you got to wait 24 hours before you put the eggs in. So the packet marked eggs was in fact the packet with nothing in it because the shrimp needed 24 to 36 hours to start hatching, so the kids thought there was nothing to look at and would leave the tank while they put the water conditioner in. And then they'd come back to add that second packet, which they expected to be eggs. And like it said in the ad, instant life was there when they looked at the tank because it had already been growing for 24 hours. So that was another little marketing trick. The guy was a mad genius at marketing.

And then the third pack was food, if I can remember correctly. Yeah, to make me go a little further. So that's incredible. I had no idea about that crazy marketing campaign. He'd sell it, and it was originally called instant life. I guess it originally sold for about forty nine cents. And he decided, well, how am I going to get these packets out to kids? And that was the genius part.

Of course.

He got the people to invent the gimmick of how to get kids instant gratification. Next is how do I get them to the kids in the first place? And at this time in the 50s is just when you're starting to see the golden age of comic book starting. So he was told that, no, we need to do traditional marketing and do radio ads, stuff like that. He decided to reject all of it and put every dollar of marketing he had to buy spaces which were stupid cheap at the time in comic books, because comic books had no one took them seriously at the time, no one thought kids were very marketable.

Clearly.

Now, I grew up in an age where kids are not only marketable, they're more marketable than an adult. YouTube even prioritizes children, seemingly. They say that they're not advertising to children, but prioritizes children content over it. And I mean, we have the generations of nickelodeon and cartoon network filling their slots with toy ads, so nothing new for me. But this was not an era of marketing to kids. So he put all this cheap advertising in comic books, and that's what really invented the mail order craze. People would get the kid in the mail, they would tell their mom, I want this. They'd send in the little postcard they pull out of the magazine, ship it in, and sure enough, they have sea monkeys two weeks later. Two weeks later, right.

Because the postal service steal mail.

I mean, they're probably still delivered with horses for all I know.

Yeah, the local postal service still delivers little baby chicks every spring out here in the northland of Minnesota. So incredibly, the postal service was our. First introduction into mass merchandising, basically.

So it wasn't until like the early 60s that actually got branded sea monkeys and the craze really started ramping up. But that left kids with the idea of, man, it's fun to have something living that I can watch and help grow and modify and really spark the interest and the follow through. mattel owned company like metaframe was to really follow through with less gimmick product and have them move on to fish. And in my opinion, from all the research I've done, I didn't grow up during that time. That's what really kicked it off. Now, is there something else that you see that really spun up the craze? I really credit the majority to see monkeys.

I think, honestly, World War II had a big American imperialism. Honestly has this underwriting tone, and same with European, like, colonialism of Africa, of South America and more so America in South America. But going back, it really did set the stage, and I think that was key because that primes the parents also to think, oh, it's cool to have these exotic life forms, or that maybe at least the parents had the concept of having a pet fish or it was a more advanced hobby. You have to get the 40 year old adult or 30 year old adult to buy the ten year old kid the sea monkeys or the pet fish. And so I think it was important that we had the groundwork of kind of this world traveling and all the technology that was there for kind of richer people or a more in depth hobby. But because there really was a craze, first in the Victorian era, then again in the 20s, again after World War II. World War II kind of put a dent in things. But then after World War II, germany couldn't do a lot of manufacturing of any war stuff, so Japan and Germany both start manufacturing quite a bit of aquarium stuff, as well as scooters and mopeds and all sorts of different stuff in Italy and Japan. But they had to retool. And one of the things they did and they became known, too, along with mattel and other places, was these kind of pastimes and hobbies and one thing that I wanted to interject in that we don't think about in the west. But the Soviet Union was a whole inspiration to China and to the Communist world of the So. Even before the Us baby boom era, communists knew that young men were going to get together and possibly plot to overthrow them. So in places like the Czech Republic, Ukraine, hungary, yugoslavia, former yugoslavia, they would set up fish clubs, and it kept young men busy, and they actually would set targets like, hey, you guys should try to breed German rams or rams bolivian rams, breed us a blue version. And these clubs became a big activity for young men specifically, and later women, too. But beyond that they got into aquaponics for food during harsh times in the Soviet Union of tilapia and some of the bigger cichlids that they could eat. And I'm not saying that was the story all across the board, but today the third biggest seller of tropical fish is the Czech Republic. And people might wonder, what Czech Republic like this middle of Europe country, and it goes Singapore or Japan, and then the Czech Republic basically. And it's just kind of an oddball one to think about, but it was because of these fish clubs set up as early as the late forty s, and they wanted people not to rise up, and so they kept them busy and they literally spied on them at these meetings. And in these big apartment towers, the cement ones that you probably think of from the late fifty s and sixty s, the communist block towers in the basement, they'd have either a farm program or a fish program. And that's where we got a lot of really cool strains of like Turkish Blue Angels and some of the cool things that we have. And they literally had been separate from the 40s when they were collected in World War II era all the way until the 1990s. And today even we start to see these strains that America had never seen. So I think it's important to realize that the world was keeping fish and not just American kids. So other timelines kind of all converge by the time of the Internet and mass media and cable TV and things like that, too.

You know, Rob has just pulled up the Sea Monkey ad from back in the day. And blow that up for me, Rob, because I want to read something really quick.

I got to pull up. There's two versions here.

There we go.

This is the one we can see, by the way.

You know that the guy who started the company was you should look it up. He was a crazy rabid, and he was a member of Jews. Yeah, he claimed to be Jewish, or he was Jewish, and then he also paid dues to the kkk and then what's his name, the guy who runs the new Nazi party. But in any case, he was an odd guy with a double life, but he was a very smart guy. But if you want to look into that story, it turns pretty dark when you start digging.

It's a crazy deal. He even changed his name to Add vaughn in there to sound more German so he could step away from his Jewish ancestry.

He was just keeping everybody at bay, the way it sounds. Yeah, but the one thing I found really interesting, I'm reading this off this ad that Rob pulled up. It said with every Sea Monkey kit, you'll include these valuable supplies. Get your Sea Monkey growth food, feeding spoon, and sea plasma. Sea plasma? I'm assuming that salt. I'm guessing sea plasma a magnificently, fully illustrated owner's manual of Sea Monkeys. So you get an owner's manual with your Sea Monkeys, so in case your Sea Monkeys stall out, you know how to get them going, feeding and reading and training, how to train your Sea Monkey. This guy was brilliant.

Well, you know, they weren't selling as well, so he hired a former comic book illustrator. At first, they looked like brine shrimp when he sold them. And kids don't want to play with bugs. I mean, maybe they do, but their parents don't want to buy them. And so he hired this imaginative I think the guy had something to do with the smurfs later on, actually. But he illustrated the Sea Monkeys idea that there were these monkeys that lived under the sea, and he drew, like, a family of them. It was really a psychological marketing campaign, and the whole book was, like, kind of to mirror the comic books that they were sold in and also to kind of attach the kids psychologically to these little specs. But including the castle underwater, that was this plastic molded castle. That was another change that doubled his sales. So he kept giving them more anthropomorphic characteristics as time went on. So, yeah, you're totally right on all the little things he did to addict kids.

It's a famous comic book illustrator, Joe Orlando. He used to be the vice president of DC Comics himself and illustrated many famous comics of history, even starting, I think, the Super Friends and other more popular ones.

That's incredible how these guys got started out doing odd little jobs that just turned into a mass fortune for them down the road. Now on the Sea Monkey, did you get the castle with it? I don't remember getting a castle.

I got a clear container that had, like, a really crappy etched castle into some plastic. But, I mean, the whole thing was, like, oval if you looked at it from the top. And then a clear plastic in the center and then dark, and it came in, like, every color of the rainbow, plastic topper and bottom. And then that had fake scenery molded into it. That was the quote unquote castle. And the top had little notches, like a castle. That was probably the deluxe package. Jim, you didn't get that one.

I was from North Dakota, and we were so broke that even our bologna didn't have a first name.

You're going to stick with that joke for a while?

I love that joke. Yeah. What's interesting is I know out there, there's some listener that has a collection of these castles. If they came in all these different colors, I wonder if this is a collectible type item that people would have 100%. Yeah. That's incredible. Running down memory lane here for me, wearing lots of Sea Monkeys. Do you guys ever remember the Mexican jumping bean?

I got those in the dollar store.

Yes.

I didn't think they were real. And then she's like, no, here, hold it. And then she put it in my hand and the thing would jump in my hand.

Yes, our local store sold them and they weren't selling at all because they have to, I think. What is it? It's a little worm in a nut, right?

Yeah. It kind of looks like a beam, but it's more like a nut. And there's a worm inside of it. And when it touches your hand and your hand sits on it long enough, it warms up. It warms up and then it moves.

Yeah. So our local store had gotten these in. They saw them at a trade show somewhere and the little trick they showed is they took it like a 60 watt light bulb and shined on this thing. So it was right on the counter when you're checking out. And after about an hour of the light shining on these little tiny bright yellow boxes with the nut in there, it was just pandemonium. Every one of these things were bouncing and making noise. And as kids, we would buy them and we would put them somewhere in the classroom. And you'd be in the classroom and you hear pop and the teacher is just going to be looking around because that was back in the day where nobody really talked in school because the teacher was speaking. If you spoke up and smarted off and you would just get whacked in the head with a ruler. But I really love going down memory lane with all this stuff. But I think you guys should do some Mexican jumping bees regardless.

I think they're illegal because aren't they a plant pest now?

Really?

Yeah.

Qualified as a plant pest.

The usda won't let you have them in. harold, the guy who did the sea monkey thing, he also sold a knolls as chameleons in the mail order catalog. He also invented X ray specs. And after sea monkeys, he wanted to make more money. He was donating so much money to the American Nazi Party, honestly and trying to live a life with his wife, which is just craziness. But he invented this product. One of his last products was the invisible goldfish. And it was a little aquarium made out of plastic with nothing in it. And on the box it said, Guaranteed to stay invisible. And it came with a comic book for kids about this invisible goldfish and it's life and to feed it. And the stuff you fed it was just something that dissolved in water. But it was like the pet rock almost. So he was behind a bunch of these little animal things. He also sold hermit crabs and turtles with painted shells, too. Yeah. Peter would have loved him. Don't even get me started on PETA. PETA.

No, it would be nice.

Our PETA beating stick will happen. So let's make sure we're going over the timeline because again, now we talked a little bit about how they're marketed this started the craze. People finally figured out having something in your home, an aquarium, even though it's small, having a plastic jar with a fake castle in it with some floating bugs clearly did the trick. But just to make sure we're having each element covered, we talked about the first pump. We talked about how the modern tank happens. We talked somewhat about electrical work, and the light really isn't a big mystery. Lights were created a long time before this. bulbs in a tank. It's not anything that we can say is really inventive. But other than that, what types of filtration? How did the filtration go? Because I know in the 60s we have the German matin filter. Yes, but we have a lot of steps that we're missing after the 1960s. So really, how do filter trends go? Because original tanks planted, and somehow we got away from that. And I'm not really sure why.

It was seen as one, like, part of an extravagance that wasn't needed for kids to keep. Oh, you want plants, too, and you want dirt and you want this messy thing. But I mean, really, what we know today is the Wallstead method allowed. You didn't actually even need a filter for a lot of fish if you had enough plants and good sunlight on it or highlight on it. As things went on, we had the underground filter was one of the first big ones that kind of allowed mass introduction of the fish tank. But there were also basically a lot of water changes needed for hobbyists and municipal water sources. Chlorine and fluoride and things like that were not added until later to, like, everyone's water like they are today.

When was later?

Because I even have a 1955 video stating of how you're supposed to leave water sit just to make sure there's no going through.

That would be chlorine. Big cities did use chlorine early on. I'm talking turn of the century early on. But if you lived out in North Dakota, you probably had a well.

Damn right.

Yeah. The thing that's interesting to me is now we're having to get back to realize, wait, some people probably have seen channels like Lucas brett's Channel. He has a bunch of aquariums that have no air in them, no airstone, no filtration, no light. They just get the ambient light in the room. They get the heat from the room, and they have plants and substrate. So it's pretty amazing. I mean, if you set up a biotope and you do water changes, fish can thrive. It's just a matter of keeping the temperature high enough for the species and getting them nutritious food. And so before all these pumps and aeration and stuff, that was just kind of known like that. You needed to have plants in there. If you look at the old illustrations of the Victorian era tanks, they had a bunch of plants and things and it was really kind of the sterile art deco era that they decided, let's get rid of that. Let's look futuristic, kind of, and just put some gravel in the bottom. And that's when you started coming up with late 30s, world war two. Like I said, put a hold on it, kind of for over a decade, the depression played a part in putting a hold on it, too. So the 30s were kind of a weird period where a ton of patents were formed, but not a ton of changes happen. So if you look at it in a timeline, it almost feels like you skip from the mid twenty s and the roaring 20s with all these electric pumps and motors and things, to all of a sudden you're almost in the post world war II years before it becomes something that that families can have in their home. And by the almost a third of households had some aquatic life form as a pet.

A third?

Yeah.

I never thought we reached that at any time in our history, but that's pretty aggressive.

Sea monkeys.

Sea monkeys, yeah.

Maybe they counted sea monkeys.

Maybe that's what it was. Well, so as far as that, then, when did air pumps come along? See, I first found an article, and I've been trying to date it, that the first air pump was circa 19 eight, right.

Let me show you a little picture so you guys can see it. This is from the 18. Hold on, let me see. 1853. That's a hand pump. So they knew that fish needed oxygenation early on. It was just a matter of getting the components to be small enough. And it's really 1924, like I said, that sears magazine, which every house would have at the time, even out in the middle of nowhere, you could send away for a little pump that was about six inches by five inches by five inches or so. And it was a little electric pump with a little belt on it. And it had a little billows attached to it, too. And so that same pump could also drive other mechanisms in your aquarium. So there were other attachments that you could make it like a power head for your water to turn, like a wave maker, and you could also have it pumping in and out water, and you could also have it creating heat with another attachment. So they did kind of have interesting patents, and it was by the late 20s that you really start seeing a lot of people copying other patents. And what you could do is there were special people that were in big cities. So the part we're kind of missing between the is that all these aquarium clubs around the country, they'd have fanatics, they'd have their whole house full of fish tanks, and these people would live in a big port city. San Francisco, seattle was another city that had quite a few, but philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, chicago not a port kind of a port city. It's on the great lakes. But they would go to a rubber factory to get the rubber for the belt, and so these people would put together kits. And so if you subscribe to a newsletter or a magazine for the hobby, that's kind of where you found stuff. But as that was going on, you could see big magazines like sears, and then later on, there was american goldfish supply magazine and catalog that a lot of people had. At one point, it had 3 million subscribers in the Us. Quarterly, and that was in the believe. And you could mail order parts for what we'd think of as today a community tank by that point in time.

I thought it was the when you said pumps starting in the 20s years, I thought it was water pumps, not air pumps. So that definitely clarifies.

They have patents for everything that you could think of. It's pretty amazing if you look through them. The other problem is that people got shocked. They got the hell shocked out of them a lot back then, especially with the meta frame tanks. So it would create a static charge. And actually houses burned down and stuff because of that static jumping from the water and the metal frame tanks to people putting their hand in there and things like that. People actually were killed by this way, too. So there was kind of a pushback to come up with, like you said, a safer kind of like we think of it today as the air pump, the air stone and a quiet thing, because those pumps back then were not quiet, they were loud.

And piston pumps still are loud today.

Yes.

Like your favorite one that I donated to you.

Yeah, rob's and I have an emergency goes back and forth between us.

His name is Charles.

Yeah. And the thing gets so hot, you can fry an egg on it, and it's loud enough where you can hear it next door, but it will pump enough air to put up a hot air balloon in about 15 seconds.

So we're looking for cheaper alternatives than some of the linear air pumps that you see traditionally used, like the elita was it gemco and all that gemco we found, like, these piston pumps are like, $35, man. Get it from wherever. And we got a massive bastard. And this thing, it sounds like you had to pull start it.

It's not like you have a harley Davidson running in your basement, actually, because.

Jimmy hates it so much. We had it in our fish room at one time that we had a special room in town, and I put google eyes on it for the next time he comes in the shop. He can see it. The google eyes melted onto the pump.

Runs a little hot, but it works great.

Definitely hot. So now it's our emergency all reliable when our living area pumps need to repair every decade or so.

Yeah, well, if you think about other technologies, it can help inform you about the aquarium because there's actually, like, conversion kits for vacuum cleaners of how to get air to move through water. People had all sorts of quirky manuals that they put out in fish magazines. And people probably don't know this unless they're of a certain age, and I'm right on the edge of that age. But the old fish magazines, like fish enthusiasts, fish hobbyists, things like that, they would have ads in the back just like the comic books used to, and you could get things like phone numbers or phone trees of people breeding a certain species that you wanted, and that's how you would source really niche species. But also you could send away for instructions or kind of oddball or designer level inventions, or maybe you'd call them like, artisanal versions of equipment for the hobby.

So going back then, talking about just the filters, when did the undergraduate filter craze start? Because I have underground filter documentation going pretty darn far. And when you go to, like, a lot of these really old, almost historic pet stores, they still use some of the original equipment that hasn't broken.

Yeah. Honestly, I don't want to be wrong and say it off the top of my head, but I haven't found the.

Information clearly, because I think so many people had some version of it. And it wasn't necessarily a patent branded thing. It was just something that everybody traditionally used.

Right. And so, I mean, if you go into oh, man, I'm trying to remember the exact name of it, but I think it's ocean aquarium in San Francisco. But they have an all Wallstead based store that's been there for like 40 years, and they don't even use any filtration other than biological in the tanks and oxygenation from the plants, which is kind of crazy, but they can only have a very limited amount of stock, is the kind of killer to that. People started figuring out quickly that you need to get rid of the ammonia, and they tried that also with chemicals pretty heavily. Instead of mechanical filters, they would add additives to the tank that would neutralize it. So it'd be like changing the water every few days and throwing a shot glass of ccm Prime into your tank every two days was another way that people kind of went about it, because it was really a mystery. Until, like I said, the 20s is really when that science all came in. Like, oh, this is how fish's gills work, and this is how they need this. And it's the ammonia that's killing them. They knew something was building up in the water. And you can always go back, it seems, like, in this hobby, and find some genius who knew 50 years before everyone else, but before the mainstream catches on, always takes some time. It's what it seems like.

But like I said, twenty s. Thirty s. Again with that as well.

The Internet was really slow back then, too, in the heard.

Worse than dial up. You guys were in like, smoke signals.

Smoke signals. And then we'd read it on the side of caves.

Smoke signals. And I don't think they even invented the middle finger back then, did they?

No, but they did today. How about that?

I looked it up the other day. I think it was like the 70s. There's like old videos of Mr. Rogers, like, flipping kids off because he was showing how fingers work on television, and he just shows just the two middle fingers. And back then it didn't mean anything.

Well, do you know where that came from? Just really quick?

Not a clue. I just heard. I thought it was the 70s.

No, it actually was from the 100 Years War in England and France. And the word, the F word comes from the word pluck. And it's to pluck a bow bowman. Used to English bowman and French bowman would be captured and they'd cut off these two fingers because that's how they pulled their bow back. And during that war, way back, hundreds of years ago, I think that was the 1516 hundreds. Yeah, 1500. Yeah, they'd cut their fingers off, and if they still had their fingers, they'd put them up in the air and show that they were still useful. Bowman to the other side, and it became pluck. You now that's the oldest mention of it, that they can find the handchester. But I don't know when it came back into vogue, but I just find that interesting. Whether that's true or not, that story exists from firsthand sources of that era.

So apparently I'm wrong that it was just more popularized in the 70s. It looks like 1928, right? With the aquarium conspiracy theory. Jimmy. The middle finger and aquarium became popular at the same time.

Wow.

Just saying. They knew it with size. Middle finger.

Middle finger. That's my favorite fish. Just died right there.

It was thanks to the film speedy in 1928 that was helped to begin the repopulation of the middle finger.

You learn something every day on this podcast. It might not do any good in life, but at least you can bring it up and win a free beer somewhere.

That's probably why I know half of what I know from my channel was in college, we had a team, and I was the history and useless trivia guy. We had a sports guy and everything else. But we went to get free beer and free food, like gift, like dollars to the restaurant or bar. And we hit a different spot each night in our college town. So that may be paying dividends. Kind of bring it full circle.

Here's my question about alcohol, because in a previous podcast, we had a little mystery. Does alcohol work to remove ammonia and nitrates from a tank, and specifically vodka has been popularized in this conversation.

I don't know.

So apparently, I don't know if you've not heard that podcast, it's disturbing as hell. Actually.

We talked about diddling dolphins and there's a whole lot of dolphins do that to themselves.

Why you guys got to do that?

Well, you need to listen to the conspiracy theory podcast. That's all there is to it. But apparently the idea is that putting I'm trying to go through the notes here because it was in discord.

What's that?

We had the vivid discussion. It should be right here. So I'm not an expert, but if you put two mills a day, can cut nitrates and phosphates about one four. So I've only been doing 20% water changes once a month instead of once a week and don't have any scientific stats. But the old reefer told me to start doing it when I had a problem and it works for me. So we have officially confirmed that people are dosing their aquariums with vodka. I am not condoning the low amount, though.

I feel like that's like one for me, one for my 40 gal, and it's going to be fine.

It's basically you're taking a 40 a malt liquor and then pouring out one for your homies.

My daughter in law, when she cleans house, she uses vodka as spray throughout the house.

I don't want to say this as a stranger, but I think she has a problem there. Jamie.

I'm going to tell Ali when I see her.

How about this one?

What's that? It's carbon dosing.

How?

It was explained to me that it.

Feels feed feed feeds anaerobic bacteria.

Anaerobic bacteria which converts nitrates, completing the cycle. And any bacteria bloom gets cleared out by the skimmer. Interesting.

Yeah, it's a deal. So keep sending in more of that vodka related filtration suggestions because I need to know more. And until we figured it out, don't put one out for your homies in your tank. We're good.

I want somebody out there to get us a grant. Somebody out there has got their finger on the grant button. Get us a damn grant. Get me about twelve or 15 cases of free vodka. I'll supply the aquariums and the fish and we'll make millions.

All right. For those vodka companies out there, crystal Head Vodka. smearing off whoever you are. If you're a vodka company and you want to sponsor us to do some investigation for you, we will do the investigation.

Oh, man, if I knew that when I met Dan ackroyd a couple of years ago dan ackroyd has skull Head vodka. We went to an after party we saw the Blues Brothers perform on New Year's Eve, and afterwards they had a skull party, which we went and partook in. And I wish I'd known about it then because I would have brought it up.

Well, I think you should start your research. Probably with no tank water and 100% vodka just to be safe.

Yeah, start there, work back and see where the good dosing.

That's right.

And if you're really pouring one out for your homies into your fish tank, that Homies probably Jimmy hoffa because he's sleeping with the fishes.

Great, now we got the mob after us.

Also.

Teamsters are coming.

Be careful.

We're okay with this. Well, just to make sure, we got at least some filtrations pump creation tanks, how they got popularized. I think the only thing that we're missing is from like the 1950s, 60s up till now we have major innovations but they're easier to track. Led lights has been in the last 20 years. I really see the last ten years has been affordable. Before you hear about a couple of extremists zoos trying a couple of reef tanks, even some of the reef tanks now people are still leery of going over to leds because they don't believe it has the full spectrum. I mean, we're that recent. We have species such as the shrimp hobby that's only happened since 19 95, 94 era and that's been really hard to get information out on it's exploding hobby, but it's very coveted on best kept secrets. No one wants to tell how breeding works. Even generalized care is a massive misconception.

So what are some research on that actually?

What are some of the things from the that really upset because again, we had their staple bread and butter fish that we've mentioned really come into fluid in the what others have we've seen come.

So one major thing that has come most recently, so one thing that we've really seen is a lot of plecos and corridor. We've all the L numbers that's really been since the 70s that that's been popularized. Of course they were known, but they weren't known to the tune of 900 species or 1200 or whatever it's at now. So there's that, there's Corydra and the cw counts. Now there's websites that do that. But I was speaking specifically to also just the shrimp. What makes it so different, the shrimp part of the hobby now is that it was a concerted effort by breeders that were backed by investors. So like the cherry shrimp that we know today was actually launched in November of 2003, just in time for Christmas at petco as a whole in the Us. Like a polished version of the Neocaradina David I or zenga densis, whichever one you want to call it. And then later palmata, neocardadina palmata and Crystal shrimp and other things entered the Us via Taiwan, Singapore and Japan, hobbies and Germany, but they were actually introduced as a concerted effort. And in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, predominantly Chinese and Japanese investors, they literally will have 1000 tanks of shrimp in these areas where it's warm enough that they don't need to pay for the heat. And they just get a big linear pump for the tanks and they eat leaves basically with bacter ae on them. And they look for morphs. And they're always trying to get the next new thing. And they're actually patented essentially in the countries where they can do that. China doesn't really work that way. It's kind of whoever invents the thing first gets it as long as it's novel under their name. But in America, you can actually patent certain things or brands or ideas. And so they were all in a big hurry to market, to America, because, just like with technology, they don't see it as stealing from one another in China. They see it as kind of the whole society works together to rise, working off the backs of one another. But you have to bet that some inventors and companies are like we spent half a million dollars on that and they're pretty pissed off. But the shrimp hobby is actually one of those things that has been a very kind of sea monkeysque endeavor in a weird way they've really had to market it to get it to take hold in America. Germany had it in the 90s but America we had only a few kinds of fairy shrimp, ghost shrimp, saltwater shrimp we had but later the neocaradinas and the caradinas and the babalties are all kind of introductions by distributors on purpose, pretty intentionally.

Again, people had them before that date, but it was just the extremist breeders, and they mainly came out of selective breeding from I can never pronounce it. Hezasu suzuki is the guy that essentially started the morphs of crystal shrimp. And that's where people mark the beginning of this. And that's why late 90s is when the stuff started trickling out. And then again, the big marketing campaign hit, and that's not that fargo. But again, it's starting to explode. But information is still capped. But as far as other species, I like to point out the stuff that's disappeared since then. So 1960s now we have sighting species, we have stuff that you can't import, stuff that's completely left from the trade. Do you know of any species that used to be in the trade? They're now completely extinct.

Yeah, there's actually you could argue that endlers are completely extinct and guppies are completely extinct in the wild you could also say goodyads and things like that. There's like 40, 50 species. Maybe I'm wrong. There might even be like 100 species, but in the African lakes too as well, there's cyclid species that are either evolving so quickly that they've changed since the when they were popularized by nile perch. Yeah. Or they've been wiped out. Exactly. In the also, either from damning things or from hydroelectric projects or from introduction of Agricultural aquacultural fish. It's really ruined a lot of native fish. A really famous one for aquascapers would be the trigona stigma or the samsung's guy. So Thomfang Rasbora. That was completely extinct. They found it in creeks and streams around bangkok in the then it kind of went mia. Well, I think it was aquarium glazer had an import of rasbora esp, and one of the guys working happened to spot and know his fish really well, happened to spot a trio of one female and two males of thompson's E rasboras. And from those fish, he bred them back, and I have them now. They're common enough that they're getting back in. So it's cool that cities and cares if you want to. I mean, there's different names, but there's different groups and different organizations that are popularized in fish clubs in America and Europe that are really trying to bring back some of these things. But Mexico City and Central America is another bio region that was really hard hit by agricultural impact. Lake titicaca, as I'm sure you know of it's one that they've done farming on and kind of ruined. And then also Lake inlay is another amazing story because we weren't able to get into Myanmar or burma as it was known, but in 2006, things like cpds dwarfs, emerald dwarf rasboras, the orange, rummy nose rasbora, all sorts of fish have entered the hobby because we just didn't know that area. And today papua New Guinea and the Congo and the Central African Republic, as well as parts of the Amazon and orinoco Delta still have regions that we're finding new species in all the time.

I'm also trying to think of the other things that might have changed in the last half century of fish care, and I think the overall change of how fish are transported and treated have changed greatly. We've talked about on the podcast on some of our funeral episodes that people write us about continually, like we have a sucks episode talking about all the things wrong with the hobby, things we weren't supposed to talk about because we're broadcasting. And we mentioned that betas were shipped on napkins, paper towels. Paper towels, sure. We started out with this cool invention of melt can shipping things, but they were shipping on paper towels up till one time. Do you remember, Jimmy, when I first.

Got into it, they were just getting out of it. So 35 years ago, they're still shipping, I believe.

Not near long enough.

Yeah, but I remember when I first got my first shipment in and stuff, and they go, yeah, we got these new little bags. Now they come in. People are a lot happier with that. Like what?

Yeah, now there's breather bags. I don't know what year those were invented, but that's a pretty cool innovation in the hobby. Whatever year those came in, I remember that in the early two thousand s. Yeah, that and the little ammonia sensing squares that they put in and they used to just sedate the hell out of fish and just stick them in the blue water and call it good and pack them in asleep as many as you could.

So what are breather bags for? People that don't know.

So they are a permeable membrane that is a bag. It looks like a little plastic bag you put, like produce in in America in the supermarket. And basically, it lets a gas exchange happen between the water and the outside of the bag so that fish can get two. And other gases can come and go. So the CO2 can leave the bag and the o two can get back into the water in the bag. So one note on that is just when you toss them in your tank, if you ever get a mail order bag of fish and there's no air in it, and it's in a kind of soft to the touch satin bag, it's a breather bag, probably. And so you don't want to float it like normal necessarily. You need to leave some of that membrane exposed to the air in the room. Otherwise it can't exchange gas when it's underwater and it will build up at the CO2 in there.

Good to know.

My personal favorite was the qr codes that they started shipping the fish with the salt water company that did that. Oh, yeah. And then they'd go on the tags and I would sell the crap out of those because people would just I'd be like, Scan it. And it would just tell them when they cut from the time that they caught the fish, it would go through every little thing of like the fish went here, the fish went here, the fish went here. At 8880. I treated it this day. And then they just buy it. And the fish would be like two or three times even what they should have been a normal price, but people would pay it because they could track everything and be like, yeah, that's fish. I think that's an awesome advent into the hobby because I've been down on my channel. I've talked to the people at Seagrest, the people at Imperial 5d, kind of all the big places that are I call the cartel of the aquarium hobby that kind of control most of the big import and then shipping to big stores and chains and local fish stores too. But they're working with things like Project piaba and other things like government organizations. In Brazil, there's another one called ibama with an eye, not Obama, but ibama, and it sets quotas on fisheries and things like that. Saltwater fishing was seeing a really hard time with reeves being destroyed with dynamite and electrocution and all sorts of really unsustainable harvesting practices. But really they're finding in the Amazon, in the orinoko Delta, and in the Bangladesh and Thai and Malaysian rivers that they have such a dry and wet season that the fish gets stuck in areas that would dry out anyways. So these fish breed in numbers that are massive. So when they collect them right after they've bred, it's a very sustainable way for local people to collect. freshwater at least has that advantage. But for other species, like plecos and things that can live a long time and take a while to reach maturity, relatively speaking, that's why you're seeing things like Brazil banning exports and things like that, and putting quotas on things.

Yeah, we had the president of Project piaba on and that was a fascinating tale for sure. And it's changed from in. The people are like, oh, we shouldn't get destroy habitats to catch wild fish, and really wasn't the case. And they've ensured that. And now we even have Brazil opening up to a white list instead of everything blacklisted, and it has to be on a separate list. So now we can get any fish unless it's on their list. It's going to open up a lot more species after this whole COVID thing goes over. But we certainly covered a lot of different topics. Do we miss anything in particular that you feel is necessary?

I think that the next step is kind of an important one and that's gimmicks will come and go in our hobby. Things like takashi six nine. No, just kidding. Takashi amano. His influence on the hobby is pretty important. And diane Walsted, who wrote a book, Walsted Method of Keeping Fish, basically, or Dirt at aquariums, both those things have really come back and they've found a way yet again to sell us $30 gravel for a kilo for $30 and dirt for $50 for £10 or whatever. But I think as these things come and go, it's just important to inform yourself on what's a new innovation versus looking back at what can you just DIY. I mean, this has always been a DIY hobby and a lot of the things we think we need to spend money on aren't. And you can really save yourself. The kits that you buy are notorious go to the dollar per gallon sale. You can buy yourself, spend the money on a cool fish and buy it from a responsibly sourced place and inform yourself on the history of what it takes to keep these fish successfully. With the internet, the information is so easy to access on Seriously fish or whatever, reef to rainforest, amazonia magazine or wherever you want to read it, but there's not really an excuse anymore to not learn what you want about the things you want to keep. And then I think the other thing that we should keep alive, and that COVID has really kept it's really shine a light on, is I had people paying me $10 for neon green tetras that I was breeding as nanofish in the community, because they're beautiful. And if they were a new species that no one had ever seen, people would pay crazy money for them. And sometimes we forget because things become common, the effort it takes to spawn a little nano fish, or the time it goes into things and conditioning water and things like that. But I think pet stores have been buying from breeders in the country a lot because it's been hard to supply the hobby since COVID happened. And I think it's an interesting learning time to really reestablish some of our breeding networks of hobbyists and reaching out to one another in the hobby on a human level of, hey Bob, what are you breeding today at your local club or hopping on here on the discord or on Facebook or wherever? But make those links and you'll learn a lot about saving money, about DIY. There's always someone getting out of the hobby for a while. It's got a bunch of tanks they're trying to get rid of and someone who wants a bunch of tanks. So I think it's just important. The human element in this hobby all along is really a key thing that has been there all along to keep ourselves informed, to keep the hobby responsible and also to keep it friendly and a community as we're able to reach across the globe, to really expand the community to a global one rather than just your town.

You know, it's interesting you said about the green neon that you were breeding and stuff. Adam and I have had this conversation a thousand times where people go out and produce, let's say, neons or hamsters or gerbils, and all of a sudden they quit because so many people are into it. And and so all of a sudden, you've got ten people in the area breeding hamsters, selling to the pet store, and then they all get out of it at the same time. And then there's a demand. I have not been able to get regular neon tetris for the last 90 days. And I talked to our friends at Cigarettes Farms and they said when COVID happened, a lot of the local farms down there just kind of not shut down, but they just maintained and didn't breed because they were so concerned they're not going to be able to sell anything. So right now I usually order just from Seekers Farms, 200, 400 neons every couple of weeks for my store and they have not had them and they told me they will not probably have them for another 30 to 45 days. And normally that's when we get our best fish in September, October, because all the fish are brought on bonds. Yeah, and right now I can't get flipping neons and I would pay money right now because I guess it's people screaming, you sell so many neons but now that you can't get them, everybody wants them and it's very frustrating when people get out of it.

I'm looking over at my tank of neons.

I may be a bit of a conspiracy theorist. I mean, not like flat earther type, but when COVID started on my channel, I told everyone in January, go get your fish supply. Start breeding. All the stuff that they import all the time, that's dirt cheap, because you're going to be able to sell it to your local stores. And I had so many people tell me off on my channel, but I want to tupe my own horn right now because I started breeding all the common fish. Everyone breeds angel fish, blue rams, German rams, whatever, and guppies and things like that. But it was the common fish that we don't farm in the Us. I looked at the list of top sellers and I've been breeding them since February. And literally that's paying my bills all summer long. So I think it's come back in the hobby. And a lot of other I'm not the only one. A lot of us talked about this when it was starting. Worst case scenario, everyone's worried about toilet paper and food and I'm like, what's going to happen to my neon tetras?

Yeah, and you're dead on. And just look at it. We are nowhere near done with this. Nowhere near done. It's never too late to get into it. I mean, seekers telling me 30 to 45 days. They've been telling me that for the last two months. I talked to my salesperson today. I said, hey, about Schmelta Airlines, are they going to bring them into my hometown? No, they're not even hauling they're not even hauling cats and dogs yet. And so the problem is, is that now we have to rely on from, like, cyrus Farms. We have to rely on ups. We're paying three times the freight and the fish are very limited. And cigar's Farms is also having the same problem with the stuff that's not grown here in the Us. But the imports, they're getting very few imports in, and when they are getting stuff in, it's three times the price for free. Because there's no competition out there right now. There's not a whole lot of airlines flying.

So consider your horn formally tutor. I even did the same thing as soon as I heard the states were closing, I went to a local pet store. I got a bunch of stuff I paid retail for and a bunch of people needed it and it just got from me. But of course I could slim down on my numbers a bit and yeah, definitely made a profit on that. That's just not emptying a store at retail price.

I think the other thing, people, just while we're on the topic, and then I'll shut up, but hurricanes, keep an eye on those. There aren't that many farms in Florida. Like, there used to be there used to be 700 family owned farms in the there's 186 registered. And that could just be a guy with a big fish room or that could be a 50 acre farm, but that's how many agricultural licenses there were last year in Florida. And when they get a big hurricane, if it hits that Tampa area, that lakeland Tampa area, they're in trouble. And it really does impact the hobby. The ponds can overflow, can spill out, can get contaminated or have predatory fish get into them. So, I mean, if that were to hit on top of since it's been a busy hurricane season, if that were to hit on top of all this other stuff, you might really double your money if you start breeding some of those things now, just throwing it out there. There are four stores.

I know everything.

Florida now, right?

Yeah. And right now, cigars Farms is located maybe two and a half to 4 miles away from the coast. And they're always worried about title surge and when the storms hit, a lot of their stuff is just metal framed buildings, not with the hard plastic on it. And they'll actually send everybody home, but they'll leave two or three people there just to try to keep things running. And of course, they have all their own generators and stuff. But they've told me many times that all we need is a title surge. Come up the road two, 3 miles inland and they're going to be screwed. And that will affect everybody because cyrus Farms being one of the largest producers and shippers, it's just going to be a trickle down effect. And so, god, we don't want anything to happen to them. But if it does, the guy that has a tank full of neons like yourself is going to be in a much better position.

Well, I think that was a great chance to hop on, but I'm going to cut things short. We're sitting at 2 hours already.

2 hours?

2 hours. I know. poof. It just disappears. But I think that going from the early age of having an aluminum tank with a slate bottom heating with a bunson burner, having maybe an air compressor that you have to oil every month to just having a planted tank with nothing in it at all. The seals on these original tanks we even forgot to mention were a compound mixture of flaxseed oil, lead oxide, and tar. I mean, we've come a long way in the aquarium hobby in just this half a century. But if you're looking to keep yourself a vintage do like me, find yourself an old metaphrame, find a way to reseal it. And fully planted tank, no heat, no pump, just plants a smile and get yourself some white Cloud mountain minus.

And where did you find your metaphrame tank?

Steal it from your buddy that you podcast with?

That's where he found it.

That's where you should get my base. gentlemen.

Well, I want to thank you guys for having me on. So it's been a pleasure.

Yeah, thank you for taking the time to do this. Not everybody is as brave as you, my little soldier.

And if you guys want to go and go deeper into this, we just covered modern aquarium, which is again, that 1917 ish mark to the current. Alex, you have a fantastic series that you've done on your YouTube channel showing how tanks got started. The original creator of the Tank. I think it's like a three two to three part series. Certainly check it out on your YouTube channel.

And what is that? What is his YouTube channel?

The link will be in the notes of the podcast. But is the secret history of living in your aquarium? Certainly check it out on YouTube. Like and subscribe. He's smiling. Even gave the fingers, which I think come from his college era. Hang loose, bro. Hang loose.

I gave him the double horns.

Well, thanks again, guys. Adam, you got any other notes?

Oh, I'm good.

All right, catch you next week, guys.

Thanks.

Take care.

You can put your pants back on. All right. Thanks, guys, for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this.

I never knew that a Minnesota accent 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.