It certainly is a big bag. It's a very big bag. Big squishy bag. It's a very big squishy bag.

Where'S the shrimp?

Some shrimp places send all sack and no shrimp. Where is the shrimp? At joe's Shrimp shack, we sell chola, what we modestly call average size, and you can save 15% on your order by going to Joe Shrimp.com and using promo code aquarium Guys at checkout.

Where'S the damn shrimp?

At Joe Shrimp shack, you get more shrimp and less sack.

Where'S the shrimp and the children?

Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob olson. Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Today we have a special guest, Ken. I'm going to try this last name Wingertur. I think he said it was German. I hopefully I pronounced it correctly. He is a blogger, writer for a lot of different columns and owner of his own online store, hydrospace store. Ken, how are you doing tonight?

Excellent. Good to be here.

So Ken happens to be an expert on cold water marine tanks, which I don't do. A lot of saltwater. I've done some, but not enough to be like, you know, I should try the goldfish variety of the expensive tank market.

I think he's just going to Red Lobster and pick one out, right? That's the most closest I'm going to get to doing cold water.

So clearly we need a lot of instruction. And Ken, we're happy to have you on. And he's just a thing or three. So I am your host, Rob olsen.

Hey, I'm Jim colby. And somewhere out there is Adam Elmachar.

Adam muted himself.

He muted himself.

He doesn't know how to use his computer.

My kids are fighting in the background.

You should just punch him in a throat.

Well, he stole their candy.

See, that's dad tax. That's not stealing.

That's dad tax. It's not stealing. It's taxation. The government does it all the time.

Where'S the representation?

Their father. That's all the representation they need.

That's right.

Sounds like communism. anywho, before we dive into the topic that I frankly don't know a ton about, I've done some homework to try to prep for the podcast.

Well, that'd be nice to not hear anything from you all day.

You better speak up, Jimmy. That's all I'm saying.

I know nothing. You know that.

You've been to Red Lobster.

I'm going to rattle lobster. So I guess I'm an expert.

I'm glad we got you on, Ken, but before we dive into the topic, we have a couple of reviews, questions, and we even have a voicemail to go over.

A voicemail, right.

So let's start with the good things, right? Let's go through reviews. So five star awesome podcast. Got back to the hobby. Kept African cyclist for 20 years. Now full blown into planted tanks. The podcast is informative and entertaining. Keep Adam as a regular on the show. This is the only podcast I've listened to to the entire show. Awesome podcast, guys. So that was actually submitted by Adam. We've done details.

That was from one of adam's kids. Keep Adam on the show. Little does he know that he's going to take over this podcast. So we could have a couple of weeks off, right?

He's just going to solo it while we go to I don't know, we Dairy go to the dell.

Everything is closed around here. We go to Dairy Queens about it.

Everything'S closed. So clearly Adams fanless grows.

That was two people, right?

That's more than I expected.

You're up to two people, though. Your mom and your wife. That's fantastic.

Whoever this was. And the person that thinks he's hot.

We know who that is.

We know who that is. So next one is love it. Absolutely addicted, the podcast. Love listening to these while at work. It's weird. I actually feel like we're all friends and I've listened to guys so much. And yes, we are friends. This is submitted from Great Britain.

Really? From over the pond.

Over the pond. The pond.

I like that. Thanks for listening over there in Great Britain. And call me. I want to know what happened to.

Jeffrey epstein last one. Love the podcast. Entertaining and interesting. Looking forward to listening to the rest of the episodes. Keep up the great work, guys, in Australia. So I think that we've made the circulation on the planet. We can get to questions.

Wow.

Unless you want voicemail.

Is it bad, good or ugly?

All right, so we got this voicemail. It's rather low. So turn up your speaker for this. But it's rather low.

Like our ratings.

Like our ratings. But, yeah, here it is. I don't know if you caught that, but Jimmy likes to leave voicemails for me. And that was just him going singing and then calling me a dumbass.

Yeah, well, we did the podcast back on brackish Fish, and we're talking about scat. So I did a little scatting for everybody, and even my son said that was pretty funny. And he's usually a harsh critic.

Jim was probably also sober when he called you a dumbass.

Might have. You don't know.

You know, the truth comes out when you've been drinking. So that was a note that we.

Clearly need more voicemails. If Jimmy is leaving the voicemail for us, you need to do it to go to Aquariumgistpodcast.com and go on the website. We have a telephone number. You can text it or you can leave us a voicemail. We'd much rather have a voicemail because it is a podcast and your voice matters to us.

Or can't you take nude photos and send them?

I mean, you could no, I don't want that.

Yeah, but the first person will do that will be your mom.

So I got another text message this week.

Did you?

From a listener. Says, hey, guys, love the show. Caught up on every episode. Hoping you can help me with a very new problem. Started a 35 gallon plant to take before lockdown of the feeder guppies endlers.

Clarify that.

And fancy guppies.

Are they feeling suicidal because there's such a disappointment?

Both of them together, right?

That was the first thing I caught. Is he's mixing them now? In a month?

Four.

I can already tell I'm going to have a real issue soon. I've added some blue eye rainbow fish trying to compete, but they aren't a match forces insatiable guppies. So I'm assuming he's meeting for food. Like the guppies are like ravaging the food before the blue eyes.

Get it?

No one wants these endlers and I can't do anything with the tank right now. How do I keep my tank sustainable? Thanks for the advice. So I had to ask. You seem to elude what's actually happening. I just assumed it was the food. So getting into more information. You said the blue eyes are skittisher on the guppies and guppies are waterhogs endlers. Don't stop breeding. It's just going to be unsustainable soon. So it comes down to overcrowded, is what I found out. I thought it was food, it's being overcrowded. And I told them that they'll eat their own young. You won't have to worry too much. There's plenty of predators in that tank. If they have babies, don't keep trying to scoop them. You can just let them get eaten. That depends on you. Otherwise, have an outlet for these endless to go to shops will just take them in as feeder guppies. So find your outlet or see if you can even sell them to certain friends. I know Facebook kind of bans live pet sales, but there are definitely plenty of places where you can have an outlet of selling it that isn't on Facebook. Find that outlet, contact your store. If not, let them eat their own young. That is kind of the nature of the tank. But if it's too crowded in the 36 gallon, maybe set up a bigger tank because that's always everyone's solution, right, Jimmy?

I would buy two more tanks and maybe buy some cichlips and then you'd have an endless supply of food for them with the ENDLER guppies or your evil. Or we could just give adam's phone number live over the air and then people could just send their ENDLER guppies to Adam 867539.

No, I don't need cross bread guppy. Garbage ones. Why don't you just read them with the dojos?

No, my dojos eat a steady diet of candy stolen from adam's children. All right, well, that's what we got for questions, guys. If you want to participate in questions, you can join us live on discord. According guyspodcast.com, we have plenty of people in the chat. And just to read the question hey, robson, Jim. Moving to 45 gallon tanks and 120 gallon tank. All my fish from New York to Tennessee next week weekend. Say a prayer for my fish. You guys look good in there. Love the new video feed.

He must have a really great video.

They're looking at me, not you.

Yeah, because you take up the entire screen.

No, he's losing weight. He's taking less. He's about two thirds of the screen now.

Wait, was that a compliment? Because I only like fat shaming.

Well, I still fat shamed you, but I was giving you a compliment on losing at least £5.

How much weight lost?

So I think I started like 375, and now I'm like 340. Wow.

Good job.

Good job.

Congratulations, small child. You lost.

And tell everybody that your leg got cut off and that's why I lost the weight.

It got chopped right off.

That's right.

Well, we have again gone over questions, guys. You got more questions? Certainly. Let us know in the live chat. According to Pocast.com Bottom, the website, you'll find the link to our discord and you can join these. We try to do it Monday at about 07:00 p.m central time. So you come join us. But let's get into our deep dive topic because I'm still confused why Jimmy just had lobster as the research topic.

I know nothing about the subject, Ken.

Thanks again for coming on the podcast. You got to help us, man. So, number one, we always ask what got you into the hobby?

That goes back a long way. I grew up in North Dakota. Right.

I grew up west of wapon or toured up by milner, North Dakota. That's where I grew up. overton over by Wapton? Yeah.

Wow. Okay.

Yeah.

I grew up on Standing Rock. Okay, I know exactly where you are from selfridge area. A little farm that dad grew up on and my grandpa grew up on, and my great grandpa founded anyway, not a place. It's really active in the aquarium industry, especially at that time, or active in human life. Right. Yeah. So it was like a big deal to get to go up to kmart, right?

Yes, it was.

In the meanwhile, I got in a book for my grammar or something like that, that had like all this marine life and it blew my mind. Growing up on the prairie, it seemed so exotic and all that. So I wanted a fishbowl. And one of my first memories, actually, is coming back from kmart clutching a bag with goldfish in the back. Then you could just playing with it in the back of the station wagon or whatever on the highway. I got flushed accidentally along with my walrus Man action figure. My mom flushed it looking back, maybe died and she was protecting me from the pain of that loss. But I was told it was an accident. It could have been. I'm sure walrus Man was an accident, but walrus Man got replaced. The fish did not. It was until I was like twelve. I finally got my aquarium, my first aquarium for my birthday. Ten gallon. And that was inspired by a friend of mine who had, like, a little five gallon tank, whatever, with, like, guppies. And his dad was breeding them with, like, the old steel frame. Those are really old school tanks. The metaframes, just the idea of breeding fish, and I thought that was so neat. So I got this aquarium for my birthday. And, yeah, like I said, growing up North Dakota, nothing to do. It was something especially over the winters to think around with. Kind of became a thing when I was young, all the way through high school.

And now it's a ransom passion project, keep me impoverished. So, Ken, what is your background? Because you have quite the long list. You're a blogger. You write for very popular websites. You write for other columnists. You have your own store list, some of your accomplishments for us and what you do in the aquarium industry.

I've done a lot, actually. Mostly working in lfs and other things kind of happened on the side, working in labs. I've done zebrafish. I worked five years at the zebrafish International Resource Center in eugene, Oregon, where I got my biology degree. That was the original zebrafish facility. As you probably know, it's like a model organism now. They're all over the world, these labs. But that was a cool place to do it because it was really experimental pond stuff in food, fish hatchery, stuff like that. I've always kind of been in the aquariums, and that's what got me into school. So I moved out west, went to the University of Oregon, got a degree in biology, moved on from there to the aquarium science program. Put on the coast to Newport, near the Oregon Coast Aquarium nearby, the halffield Marine Science Center place. But anyway, did a lot of stuff out there and then kind of went more full force into the industry, working in hatcheries, the mental fish hatcheries.

So where are some of the websites and blogs that you've written content for?

Advanced aquarist actually was when I started doing the cold water stuff. In fact, did like a three part for them, and they liked it, asked for more stuff, and then it just kind of went from there. And I just kept writing. But I've written a few dozen articles for them, so they were like my main thing for a long time. They folded more recently, and they're incorporated into reefs.com. I've written for reefs. I've written for Coral magazine, tropical Fish, hobbyist, pretty much everything, really. Done a lot of hoppy for blogs that companies run for their commercial websites and stuff like that. That's more of the stuff I don't like the commercial stuff. Perfect.

So how we met, just to give a little background is you actually added me on Facebook, and I just saw that our friends match. There are so many friends in the industry that you were friends with, so I literally started searching you, the background of you, because when I get a friend request I always try to do that as research people that are in the industry. And I found that you wrote a wonderful book called The Cold Water Marine Aquarium biography, ecology and husbandry. And that was back in 2016, and that's what led me to request having you on the show. So what was the, you know, inspiration behind, you know, I think we need a book for this.

I was already kind of into aquariums when I was a kid, and again, growing up in the middle of North Dakota, I didn't see the ocean until I was a teenager, even a glance. So by the time I got out of high school, I was itching to go do something where I could be on the ocean. So anyway, I started working up in siberia and Alaska on crab fishing. Crab fishing vessels, Jimmy called it.

So were you on the Deglies catch?

No, this this definitely precedes that show. This is a long time ago, like 1920. I turned 20 and 21 on that boat. But anyway, it was up in the Arctic. I saw a lot of weird stuff that I had never seen in the industry. Weird anemones, weird starfishes, things like that that would pop out on the deck and get made fun of all the time for poking at it in the moments we had to do stuff like that. But that was kind of burned in the back of my mind. Some of that stuff is really cool. I always wondered if you could keep it in an aquarium. But then when I moved out west to Oregon, I kind of started seeing some of that stuff again. A lot of the same species even run all the way up and down the West Coast from Northern California to Alaska. And I got an idea to maybe try to sell some of that stuff. So I got a license to harvest it, started a company called foreshores, and for a couple of years I was selling to the aquarium hobby into labs, mostly cold water invertebrates.

Is there a huge demand for that? Is there a lot of different places looking for those type of animals?

No, not at all. It's definitely like a niche thing. You kind of got to really want to really be interested in it. It's just not something you're going to go down to petco and a tank full of stuff with. It's kind of for the obvious that enjoy hunting down things or doing their own research, diying a lot of equipment, even really it was really small back then. I lasted a couple of years, went on to do other things. But then a couple of friends of mine called me one time and asked if what they thought of the idea of starting like a retailer, almost like a boutique sort of thing. It was like 2012, I think.

So not that long ago.

Well, relative to the industry. I mean, the online live animal sales thing really kind of picked up around then, I would think, especially specialty things. So they were kind of unsure about it, asked me what I thought and I said hell no, I wouldn't even try it again. And they went ahead and did it anyway. They became coldwater Marine aquatics and they had a really good work. They did fold at one point and have talked about starting up again. But the one thing they had going on around the time that they were running the business was a Facebook page. And even though the business is gone, the page keeps growing, getting a little more active over time. So that's kind of what came out of that. Now it's people from all over the world actually participate in that. It's kind of a hardcore niche actually, that people get really into it.

So normally when you do, like, I always try to compare the fresh to salt. When you do fresh, people assume that it's easier and it depends on the species. If you're not doing live corals, I would consider in lace, in my limited experience, that it's not necessarily anything more difficult. It's just it has its own caveats and it always is a little more expensive to do a water change freely just to walk over your tap and do a water change. On freshwater, there's no cost besides the water that you might pay for your city versus salt water. You have to actually do the salt and chemicals on top of it so there's more cost to it. But I never really associated with a lot more complication until you got to reef. So in cold water scenarios, is it more difficult than warm water?

Salt water tanks, you get into like all the gorgonians and things like that. You'll have the same issues you'd have with any nps kind of system compounded with how much you keep in the water. Cold on the other hand, like the fish are pretty damn tough. Most of that stuff is it's adapted to a less hospitable environment for the most part. The animals, I would say, are easier to keep. The one thing you don't have to mess with is lighting. That seems to be it's not necessarily a difficult thing, but with the tropical side, people go on the cheap a lot and I think they fail because they always underestimate what they're going to need as far as lighting. So I think a lot of the cold water people, I want to say a lot, some have gotten into it because they were running on the cheap side to escape the expenditure on lighting and they also thought that they could just go out and harvest the stuff. Free livestock, right? Then they're faced with the cost of purchasing and operating a big chiller. So just it depends on what you want. In the end you should just get what you want or else it's going to seem like a waste of money. Right.

So what are some of the caveats of, say, starting of a tank, just comparing warm to cold water and marine? I always look up details and they say that the cycle takes a lot longer and it's more difficult. Is that correct?

Yeah, at least that it takes longer. One thing you can do is start it out warmer. Presumably you're going to be cycling it before you start adding a bunch of livestock. Right. So you have the freedom of cycling at any temperature that you want. So the recommendation is cycle it at 82, 83 degrees, something like that, and then bring it down. After year, I was satisfied that the cycle is complete.

So what is the temperature of the cold water tanks that you keep? What do you bring them down to?

Sure, depends on the environment that you're trying to replicate. But the kind of point that everyone goes towards is around like 55 degrees.

So it's not like you're doing freshwater cold water where you just kind of let it sit for room temperature. Where it goes, say your house is 72, it goes like, what, 67, 60, 66? You're literally having to force it to go much colder than just room temperature.

Absolutely, yeah. These animals die. Unlike fresh water temperate animals, which are adapt, they live in small bodies of water that are subject to really wide temperature fluctuations. Sample, they can handle the lower oxygen content that you'll find in warmer water. Cold water animals, the ocean is a pretty stable place. So if they're adapted to 55 degrees, they're expecting 55 degrees.

I guess that's why global warming is such a crisis for the marine life, is because they really can't take the change. I'm just not used to that with fresh.

So ecologists are finding that cold water fauna is moving steadily, moving northwards, and subtropical stuff is moving northwards to fill its place.

So all these items that you put in cold water tanks, are these all deep water species?

But that's a good question. There are actually two different, I would say two different kinds of cold water tanks. One is a deep water tank, or even in the tropics, if you go deep enough below the thermocline, which is the seawater, is layered, right, because different densities of different water temperatures. So the cold water sinks and it's deeper down. You have those fish that live in the really deep water that can get that cold. Most of those, if you're keeping like the tropical deep water stuff, you might shoot for more like 60 degrees, something like that, depending on the iotope. But if you're going with temperate stuff, stuff that's extremely northern or southern latitude, then yeah, it could be shallow water stuff, tight pool, even staying at pretty cold temperature, you have your inner title stuff that's a little more adaptable to temperature fluctuations, and then you have your subtitle stuff. They're never really exposed to that and they're a lot harder to keep. So in the temperate area, that's another little division, I guess. Find more challenges with the subtitles stuff.

Now, I know over here, down in minneapolis, there's the Minnesota State zoo, and for years, they had beluga whales always on display. And they eventually were having so many health issues with these animals because they couldn't keep the water cold enough, which is really strange. You can't keep the water cold enough in northern Minnesota and they felt the salinity of the water wasn't good enough either and stuff. And so they ended up eventually giving those animals to another zoo, like a beluga whale and stuff. Are those a real cold water species, beluga whales?

Coldwater species, yeah.

Ask the marine guy. That aquarium.

I just want to see if I can get one of these for my tank, because I think you're cool tale?

No. You've seen the documentary blackfish jimmy solved it.

Yeah, I watched half of it and turn it off.

I think they're arctic, actually. They venture up that way. It was a good, interesting segue. So the thing with a lot of these whales, they live in places where there's a lot of plankton, whether because they feed on it directly or because they're huge fisheries that depend on that plankton, that's one big difference between tropics. You're used to seeing, like, really clear water because it's oligotrophic, it's nutrient poor, whereas as you run up a latitude closer to the northern or southern pole, the water tends to have more nutrients in it. That has a lot to do with ocean currents and so forth, but anyway, more nutrient rich. So the water up there Is really green, just a lot more plankton. So you'll see, animals are different. The cessile invertebrates in a cold water system are almost all filter feeders, have very few zanthalate animals. There are old notable cinema's that a lot of people keep that are photosynthetic. But for the most part, it's all feeding. It's heavy, heavy, heavy feeding. So the struggle is to maintain water quality, usually with these types of systems.

You said water quality. What difference is there? Because even like in freshwater, I always just assume that cold water are easier to deal with. Maybe it's the species. And why we get that with freshwater species, because goldfish, for instance, are so hardy, white clouds are so hardy, our normal traditional cold water species can really take an abuse. But is it that much different to maintain water quality in a cold water tank? What's some of the caveats that make it that way?

I suppose if you have a lot of invertebrates and you feed heavy because it's kind of wasteful feeding, you just broadcast feeding, like plankton and things like that in there, that a lot of it will go to waste. So eventually, yeah, that'll build up. And then if your nitrifying filter isn't running at the speed that you might be expecting to, if you have previous experience with a marine tank, then you'll start to see ammonia nitrite creep up on you really fast. These systems, I would probably recommend some kind of supplemental nitrification, either like a giant oversized biofilter and then also maybe a refugium, like a planted refugium.

And that's just because the process is.

Slower, you're saying nitrification? Yeah. So you can feed at any speed you want and the fish will pretty much produce the ammonia as it accumulates in their bodies. They'll, they'll just release it into the but, you know, the biofilter isn't running at the same speed would if it were at, say, you know, 79 degrees fahrenheit. So you can have ammonia creep up on you really fast after you think the tank is cycled.

So let's assume that we're reading some filter that has bioballs in it or some sort of media to try to create that bio cycle. What do we in a cold water marine tank, are you looking for more filtration or just simply more biomedia?

Probably more biomedia, more water changes, other filtration and treatment components to help the process along. I know a lot of people in cold, some anyway, have successfully used ozone. I don't see that a lot in the tropical side, but seaweeds are a lot bigger in temperate tanks because there are so many more cool seaweeds that you can have in a cold water tank. Some are more like, you know, the equivalent of a freshwater planted tank. And those algae have released a lot of bones into the water, for one thing. So it it clears that up. It also helps break down all the organics that accumulate. If you have animals that are gorgonians, they're filter feeding sea, cucumbers, barnacles are a lot bigger cold water stuff, all these things have to eat. And you just, some of these people just dump it in the bucket full. So you got to get it out of there one way or the other.

For the newbie listeners, I apologize for the newbie listeners, you wouldn't explain what the ozone that you're speaking of would be correct.

An ozoneizer just generates ozone. It oxidizes organic compounds, breaks them down into simpler compounds that are more easily consumed by bacteria removed by your skimmer, so forth. skimmers are a big thing for cold water tanks because of the high organic slowed, but also they help keep the water oxygenated, which is really important, especially if you're not keeping the temperature down as far as you should be. Can be a struggle in the summer for some people if they don't have AC.

Now, going back to the filtration conversation, so generally we have a lot of beginner. aquarist don't get a feel for how much filtration they need, especially now with a cold water tank. They really rely on the box instructions. So if a box is rated for an aquarium for 55 gallons, what do you rate a marine tank for, say, like a biological filter? Would you want to say three times the labeled box rate? Or what's your rule of thumb on how much biological filtration you're going to be looking at for that same 55 gallon tank?

Be honest. And I really thought about that. I thought of it in that way. I would just recommend over sizing, maybe doubling. But the thing is, I wouldn't rely on one form of filtration. So if biofilter, for example, said it was rated for a 55 gallon tank, I might double that. But I'd also make sure I had a really good skimmer. I'd use activated carbon and change it religiously. I'd plan on doing a lot of water changes. All depends on what you're keeping to. Again, some of these people just want to have, like, catalina gobies or something like that. They're not heavy in the filter feeding animals, in which case it's really the same or even easier than maintaining a tropical equivalent.

Well, I guess the better way of measuring it then, instead of going to a box rate, is a sump, because generally you have the same mechanical structure and a sump, no matter how big the sump is, the excess size just goes for how much biological media you have. So if you're having a cold water marine tank with the skimmer and all the details, you probably want an oversized sump. Correct.

Holy yeah, you just have to remember that's more water to have to chill it's, more stuff to have to insulate. Yeah, definitely that helps. One thing about a larger system and oversizing your sump in particular is that it helps stabilize water temperature. So you have a bigger volume of water. Obviously, that's going to be more stable. But you can also it makes it a little bit easier to put a fan on. A lot of people, in addition to the chiller, they'll throw a fan on, and it's easier to put that on the sump than it is on their main tank.

Sometimes a fan, I mean, I'm thinking 55 degrees, what benefits a fan going to do off, that being that cold? Yeah, it's going to chill your floor.

Absolutely. It's supplemental, but that's when you're mid summer and you're running into problems knocking the temperature down. evaporative cooling works pretty well, actually. If you can get it down a temperature or two, it may save, you know, may save your tank, even though.

The difference, even if you're sitting like, 60 degrees and you want to go to 55, a fan will help get you there.

But yeah, usually a couple of degrees. teco, I think, is the name of the brand. I haven't seen them in a while, but they made a really bad ass fan, actually controlled everything. It was made for cooling tanks. I don't remember the ratings. Same thing. I've done the same with my tropical tanks when they got really hot. evaporative cooling works pretty good in a pinch. But again, you have to have a really good chiller. I would add it should be there are chiller companies out there that make units just for cold water tanks. And I would certainly recommend that to one that's made for just kind of cooling a few degrees a drop down on a tropical tank, because the ratings are different.

So you said insulation. What do you need to do for insulating a tank? Do you start getting collecting foam coolers or go to your hardware store and get some foam sheets of insulation? What do you insulate on one of these tanks?

Okay, well, I've seen a lot of different things. I've tried a few of them. Big one is to avoid glass. I think glass sucks. It's a terrible insulator. You do have the double aim glass, if you've heard of that. I think they fill it inner space with argonne or something like that. Definitely don't hold me to that, but.

Night Jimmy shaking his head.

Yeah, those might work pretty well. In fact, you guys mentioned the lobster tanks or whatever. I think a lot of those old Marine land tanks have that layered glass. By the time you figure how expensive that is, might as well just opt on the acrylic, a nice thick acrylic, because it's a much better insulator. And then you can't break it.

I assume you're not going to get the sweat either, like the condensation on the glass.

Well, that's why they use a double pane. A lot of people are familiar with Red Lobster and the different places where you go in there, and their whole thing is they want you to see the lobsters. They don't want that tank sweating. And they do use that double pane glass. And so that's what you almost need, or else you're going to have sweat continuously coming off there. But there again, like you just said with the acrylic, if you get half inch acrylic, that's going to be a pretty good insulator.

This guy just took the show. Yeah, it's called sweating. And it's a problem when the temperature and humidity outside of the tank are too much higher temperature than that's inside the tank. Then you'll start getting little beads of water and fog. And there are actually little indicators you can use, little algorithms you can find online to calculate how thick of acrylic you'd need based on how much pull down and what the ambient temperature is going to be. People will use wood, especially for larger tanks, but it is a really good insulator. They'll build tanks mostly out of wood, and then they'll glaze it in the front, usually with glass. Then the very front double pane glass. I've seen all kinds of things weird, like foamish sort of tanks I worked with at the Marine Center insulated. Really?

Well, what about the equipment? Like you have filters, you have all the other stuff that's maybe, I'm assuming you don't use hang on the back filters. Or if you do, you have to buy specialty ones to have some sort of insulation on them, correct?

Yeah, that open top, I don't know. There are a lot of reasons you wouldn't use a hang on the back, but one is just most temperate tanks are going to have a lot more water flow. Even in an SPS coral tank, if you're trying to mimic a rocky inner title sort of biotope, we're talking about like surge devices, dump, buckets hits, and some really big pumps because you really want to see that water just churning. You want to see bubbles rolling around. Generally, it's really, really strong water flow, which means bigger pumps, which means a lot of heat input from the pump. So the one thing they usually recommend is an external sort of pump so that it doesn't dump all that heat into the water.

You have to even think again, this is like alien world for me. So put yourself in my spot. I'm just thinking there like, I'm going to set up a tank. Number one, I have to make it out of wood or pay a crap ton for double pane insulated glass or even just do thick acrylic. All right, that's one. Then I have to sit there and what am I going to do for filtration? I'm going to have to go to the hardware store, and if I do a canister filter or even a sump, I'm going to have to insulate the tubing that goes down from the tank down to the sump with, like, some hardware store copper line insulation. The rolls that go over it.

Just get a noodle.

Yeah, go to Walmart, get yourself one of those foam noodles.

There you go. Just save you some money. Send me the money.

You have to use the thicker pvc.

And then on top of it, you have to ask your pump manufacturer, hey, what's the heat rating on your pump? Never heard of that one. Didn't even think that. What else could potentially create heat in the tank? I'm trying to think a filter. Of course, there's no heater pumps. Is there a special type of gravel that you have to use in the bottom? I'm assuming that's just with the species type, there's nothing that you would worry about being cold or that would do insulation in the bottom because again, you're using double pane glass or acrylic. It's just crazy. You're essentially building a visible fridge in your home.

Some people use the big ass beer coolers as sumps.

Just the whole cooler. Just like get a little mini deep.

Freeze and there's bulkhead in it, and there you go.

Put a six pack of beer in the bottom, you're good to go.

Do you have experience doing that? Just like going and get yourself one of those coolers? And does that work?

Well, I haven't done that myself. I've seen it done, and yeah, it totally makes sense. Great idea. Actually, the guys at Cold Water Marine aquatics, I believe that started that.

So have you made yourself a homemade aquarium chiller?

No. You go back in the really old threads for people doing cold water stuff. They've tried everything from, like, beer fridges with coils and coils and coils of garden hose.

Yes, that's what I've done.

Just a waste of your time. I mean, when you have when you got to drop the temperature down, like, 1015, maybe even 20 degrees, depending on the ambient, I mean all right, so.

I'm I'm going to I'm gonna try to challenge that one because I've never had to get down to, like, as low as 55 consistently. It's always just to make sure the cold water species maintain health. So I've never really sat there and gone, I need a nice low frosty temperature. Like I drink out of a culligan machine. But you can still get those mini fridges are literal mini freezers.

You might use a freezer. Probably.

Yeah. I figured that would probably work better with the coiled garden house. We actually did an episode where you.

Could buy a chiller.

Some of our tips, tricks and hacks, and I described how you can go on like craigslist, spend $175 on an old mini college mini fridge they're throwing out, and where to cut a hole, where to put the 100 foot garden hose. But yeah, for this, the only hope you would have would be a freezer. And even then, I don't know how do you balance that? Because you have to be so precise. There's not a lot of forgiveness.

Yeah. And it's hard to control them. They don't really do anything to begin.

With, most of these species. What is the range that you have forgiveness with? If your optimal is 55, they can go down to freezing and up to 65. Is that the forgiveness on most species?

Depends on the species. Some are adapted to tidal pools, so they may even occur fairly far north or far south. But because they are sometimes trapped in these pools and sit in the sunlight for hours, they have evolved the ability to withstand slight thermal stress. But for the most part, these guys, you don't really want to go. When we're talking cold water animals, we're talking stuff that will really start to stress at like, 60 degrees.

Really? So 55 is optimal five degrees and they're stressing out. That's incredible.

Depending on the species. But yeah, if we're going to try to rule a thumb, sure.

In that case, my beer cooler ideas out.

55 is not that cold either. If you start looking at especially like if you go very, you know, very far under the surface and and we're not just talking about like, you know, shore, the inner title zone, you know, the lower 50s, upper 40s, even like, Oregon, Washington, where a lot of this stuff is collected. But again, it depends if it's cold water means you need a chiller, and that would be any kind of tank that would, you know, say say it's you're replicating a isotope from the Mediterranean, which some people might would maybe say is subtropical. But the thing is yeah, it's it's not quite as cool, but fairly stable. It doesn't shoot up to 75 degrees or anything like that.

I apologize. You had a question, jimmy, what are.

The top four or five things that people keep in these cold water aquariums? I know, like you said, sea cucumbers. Earlier, I was down in Florida at seagrass Farms playing with their sea cucumbers, which are a lot of fun to squirt people with and whatnot?

Wait, didn't you just, like, grab them, like the Wall of Boys episode where they put them in their pants and jack them?

No.

Okay, don't look that up on Internet kids, by the way.

Yeah, no, when we're done with cigarettes, farms and stuff, they're showing us some different things, and they were pulling out sea cucumbers, and everybody was shooting each other with water and stuff, which was a lot of fun. What are the top four or five items that people want to keep in their tank?

The things they kind of start their tanks for, at least I'm mostly familiar with the Pacific Northwest crowd, so they want to go for things that they can collect, sharing their title, things that are pretty so, like giant green sea anemones. If you're familiar with them, they're pretty much like they sound a humongous. Green sea anemone. They're one of the few zamtha lighterians that you would keep in a tank like that. So they do need the bright light. Those people may end up also getting elegant sea anemones, which occur in the same area, but they're more they look like almost like little tiny condolactus. They're kind of whiteish with purple tips. And then maybe another thing would be catalina gobies, which I'm sure you guys are familiar with. People just like those as they're colorful and cute, small, hard, easy to keep. That's usually where people will try their hand at cold water with a nano sort of system and throw that kind of gobi in it. And maybe the other things are fluffy sculpting.

I assume zebra gobies as well.

Say what?

Zebra gobies would work as well.

Yeah, I found that they're a little bit less hardy than catalinas. Basically the same thing. They're pretty cool. You can breed them really easily.

Before we go too much further into species, we have some questions from the audience. So one of them, is there any specific types of cooling systems for marine cold water aquariums that you recommend? Maybe some name brands that you've tried in the past? Because this sounds like it's extremely specific. They're not just going to be able to simply do one search and click on the first chiller. They got to do some homework to make sure it's going to be a real chiller.

And chillers aren't cheap, right? Yeah, especially, like I said, the ones that are actually made for cold water applications. Those are going to be brands that are they sell probably more to, like, public aquariums than they do to hobbyists. Since I've been in this more deeply, a lot of those companies are even gone. There was one called Pacific Coast something. You forget the name, but maybe if you look at Pacific Coast chillers, that might get you there. These, like, current and brands like that are kind of off the shelf at your lfs. As long as they're oversized, they'll work. I'm trying to think, who else? It's been so long. So they make little thermoelectric ones for the people that want to do, like, the nano thing. The first tank, that's about the only time you do anything other than your regular. Basically they're hooked up. They work the same way as like a refrigerator chiller. But you get these little thermoelectric ones, they're called ecosystems. I have to send you a link for some of the brand names. Actually, that's a good one to look at because he manufactures the tank and everything, like a whole system. So it's really thick acrylic, and it's made with cold water applications in mind.

So what are some of the average price of some of these chillers that we're speaking of?

It depends on size. And they're all rated by horsepower. A quarter horsepower can actually do quite a bit. If you have like a small tank, then you're talking like 400, $500 maybe for a good one. So that's the biggest investment, really. After the thicker acrylic, you definitely can't skimp on the chiller, but that's going to be hundreds of dollars.

Otherwise for something that's like, say 55 to 75 gallon tank is going to.

Be, what, $1,000, depending on how it's plumbed and everything like that, you might be able to get away with like a quarter horsepower on that. And I haven't priced chillers lately, but a few hundred bucks at least. Probably thinking more like half a grand for a tank that size.

There you go. I got a couple more questions here from the audience. I'd like to ask if you've had any experience using electrolysis to aid mineral acceleration in stony corals. Essentially electrocute them to electrocute them into growing.

No, that sounds terrible.

That's what Jimmy does to get me started in the podcast. He just grabs the nipple clamps and we start the show.

And you're the reason we need to get HR in a meeting with you tomorrow.

If you say so. Last one is how could you water evaporate if I try to chill my aquarium by aiming my fan at it?

Well, that depends on the cooling on the temperature of the water and the velocity of the air and the humidity in the room. But if it evaporates, just top it off. It's a lot easier to just top off a tank than to pulling apart a tank, upgrading your chiller or whatever. But I don't know if there's a real hard fool. I don't know if like an algorithm for that. You're not going to see the evaporation overall that you would in a tropical tank. People mention that a lot. You just don't have to top it off.

I think you hit the nail in the head. It just helps encourage more water changes faster that you're humidifying your house, which is not necessarily a bad thing as long as you're monitoring humidity. I mean, we're in Minnesota, so in the summer it's humid as hell, but you lose a lot of water in the winter, it's so dry, no matter who you are, you're bound to get a nasty nosebleed. So having aquariums in your house and a fan on it not necessarily the worst thing where we're at.

Yeah, but again, you're not going to see the evap that you would in a cold water tank than you would in a tropical tank. And that's like, everybody mentions that that's just kind of one of the things to expect, in fact. And you probably wouldn't be. There are very few things that need a lot of calcium, but if you're using your top off water to dose things, you might find that you have to do more water changes just to be able to introduce those supplements because you're not topping off like you were used to with a previous tropical system.

So Jimmy, you had a question.

What was it?

I don't remember. I talked about nipple clamps and it's all over.

Yeah, I just went right over my head. About ten years ago, I was granted the opportunity to tour behind the scenes at SeaWorld. Our friends at Secrets Farms lined it up. They sell quite a few things to SeaWorld and so we were able to do behind the scenes. And what just simply amazed me is the size of chillers that they have, the size of cars in the back. I mean, we got to see all the equipment, we got to go back and hold baby penguins. We got to go behind the scenes. We saw the killer shamoo whale.

That why security let us take pictures in front of that shamo statue like he was giving us fallacio.

No.

I can post it on our Facebook page.

Yeah, you go ahead and do that. What truly amazed me is the amount of equipment that behind the scenes for the size of the tanks that they have. I want to say that they had twice the amount of equipment in the back area just to try to keep all these filtered and cleared up. But what was interesting is they told us that they do run some of the pipe for the plumbing underneath the cold weather penguin exhibit because the cement is so cold. And once that cement is cold, then they run the pipes through it and it abstracts some of the cold to help chill. So my thought is if you had a penguin display. Also, you could really save a lot of money on this whole thing, right.

You need to find a way to incorporate your penguin display. Marine life working well, right?

But yeah, it's just truly amazing the amount of equipment and so people are going, oh, their tanks aren't that big, but people don't realize the amount of equipment that you need to keep those tanks chilled clear. Especially like in outdoors in Florida. I mean, trying to keep some of these exhibits cold for the people to watch these inverts and different fish and stuff, it's just totally incredible and totally blows my mind.

Can I have a tangent just for a moment?

Long as you don't talk about nipple clamps.

No nipple clamps. So I went to with you to SeaWorld, and I was horrified. We went through and SeaWorld was great. We got to see the whales before the orca whales before they probably got canned. I don't even know if they're showing them anymore, but I know they're limiting stuff. When we were there, everything was just like peeking ahead from the blackfish movie. And we went to the penguin exhibit, and it was really cool. You get in this little roller coaster thing. There's tvs everywhere. It's like one giant rolling projector screen everywhere. And it's like a Disney singalong. And then they open the doors at the end to show the real live penguins. And at that moment, like, oh, penguins. And you look and this wall of like, penguin crap smell.

It was delicious, wasn't it?

Like a truck. It was like freezing, chilled poop smell. I have no idea how they do that, but it was a wonderful experience.

It was almost like it was real.

I never want to see a penguin again.

Yeah, penguins aren't the cleanest animals, but it's totally cool. I mean, where else are you going to see a penguin? People go on tangents about SeaWorld and different places. But you know what? Imagine your life. Imagine your children, your grandchildren in 20 years, and there's no more SeaWorld. There's no barber and Bailey circus, and there's going to be no more zoos. And don't place your kids are going to see what an animal looks like is on TV until they ban that, too. I love zoos. I love SeaWorld, but so many people are so set against this stuff. And we went down to Bartman Bailey circus. robs we saw the last show in Tampa, Florida, bartman Bailey ringing brothers circus. There was 30,000 people there in the arena, and everybody that was there was saying, I'm coming because I know this is going to be the last time you're through. But talking to one of the ringling brothers people that work there, I said, what brought you guys down to this point? And he says, the elephants. We don't have elephants anymore. People quit coming, period. And I realize the elephants need to be out in the wild where they belong. But when you've got 20,000 kids, 30,000 people at these places, these were these kids see these items and go, you know what? I want to be a biologist. I want to give back. I want to go and be what do you want to call it? Like a professor of animalogy? Is that the correct term?

I just love zoology. zoology. It's like a power segue here, going from how penguins smell like poop to we need to keep the elephants.

Yeah, it's so funny. Keep elephants. What I'm just saying is that without zoos, without aquariums, people are going to lose their interest and people aren't going to be keeping aquariums in 50 years if he calls up the public aquariums, that's what I'm getting at.

100%. That's why I like project piaba. I think I said that correctly. I get made fun of a lot for that. That just shows that if we can see these fish that we can't even have because of sighting species, we see them in aquariums, there's more interest in them, love. And then people actually donate dollars because, wow, that was really cool fish. I don't want that to disappear. And they had an interaction, they had a love, and it follows the dollars for conservation. Without that, there's nothing there. But that was a hell of a tangent.

I'm just saying.

Hell of a tangent.

Just saying. I like my elephants, too.

I think Jimmy started this podcast, like, oh, cold water aquariums. And he was expecting someone from SeaWorld to come on, like, yeah, we got a lot of chillers. Hey, by the way, our whale is included. It was probably the best beluga whale.

Question I've ever had. And you guys just totally make fun of me.

I can't wait till we get Gary lang on here and be like, our crocodiles down there.

I'm still waiting for you to get betty White on like you keep promising. And she's not getting any younger, by the way.

A COLVID season. We have to protect our treasures. Sorry about that tangent, buddy. So getting back into it, we have more questions. We have recommendations of nano coldwater species. So if someone's just starting wanting to get in this cold water marine idea, they found the chiller, they found some, or either made a custom made aquarium, what species invertebrate and fish would you recommend putting in some sort of nano tank for a cold water species? Just get started for the first tank.

Besides a beluga whale, just thing to.

Get a hold of too. For someone's first tank and just starting to make connections would be like a catalina gobi, maybe a zebra gobi or something like that. You can get a little over live aquarium or whatever, but they're hardy. They live in little tanks like that, and they're forgiving about water conditions and even temperature. Some of the other gobies, if you're collecting yourself, you can find these little guys called gunnels, almost like little sort of eel sort of looking things. You'd have to look them up, but they're pretty cool. They come in different hate to say come in different colors, but they're pretty hardy too. As long as you have a lid, they can crawl out of the tank. For invertebrates like elegant anemones, that's something else that people can easily collect on the coast where they live. Pretty hardy there too. I've literally just seen them growing in ditches and stuff where there's runoff from the side of the beach or whatever. Really tough as long as there's light.

Now, are there any species that you recommend for helping cycle the tank? Because you said you could have it warmer to try to cycle the tank. I'm always put a fish or two, try to get it going for a hearty species. I've heard people using sailfin molly's a lot and I know that they have a quite a wide range. Could they be in these cold water marine habitats even after the cycle?

Yeah, that was totally what I was going to recommend. Too easy to get hold of cheap captive bread. So if you kill it no big ecological concern there anyway for those that would have that. But yeah, you can eat them up while during the cycle and as long as you bring it down slowly enough. One thing you might do there too is if you buy them from a pet store, they're almost certainly in fresh water. So while you're manipulating the water temperature, you might want to kind of gradually up the salinity as well that up as you bring the temperature down after the cycle. Yeah, that'd be a good one, actually. Hard to think there's not too many, I guess some places are bait fish, believe it or not. I think more on the east coast you can use these things, they're called chummy chub something. I don't know, there's some kind of fun dealless like a pup fish or something. Again, I'm drawing a blank, but that's something that might be cheap and hardy that you can use for cycling. I really can't think of an invertebrate. I wouldn't add anything like that until after it was lively cycled.

So what about any, like blennies?

Blennies? Yeah. So there's like the kamaharai blenny. You can actually get those sometimes at headco. Now, believe it or not, there was a time when those were considered really rare. They're subtropical and I found from personal experience they don't like really cold water, but if you're running something like in the upper 50s, lower 60s, they'll tolerate that. They're pretty cool looking, black with like an icy blue stripe on the side. Myocanthus genus, they're fang blenny. So they swim out in the open. So they're not just going to lay on the bottom like a normal boring blenny. There are some other ones, they're not widely available in the trade. You kind of have to look for this stuff. I think it's called matsuna, like. The only collector I know of right now that deals in any way with private aquarist. They're based out of California and you can find them pretty easily on coldwater Marine Aquarium keepers, which is the Facebook page that I mentioned earlier, started and still ran by the guys who once operated coldwater Marine aquatics. They collected and sold stock to the obvious up till about a few years ago, I think. Yeah, stuff isn't easy to get, but it's one of those things where you just kind of got to look for it when it comes in. I've actually gotten stuff that came in by accident. Things just get collected and traded. People will be like, you'll work in the fish store or whatever and you'll be, what the hell is that? And you look it up online and it's favorite temperature is 50 something. That happens every once in a while. You keep your eye out for that or you may be able to actually order stuff. There are always these oddities at the back of the fish list that people in the lfs are never going to order unless you ask for them. That's a good place to start. Honestly. Talking to people is the best way, really. And then getting in on like group buys is a big thing when people are importing things either from the British isles or Australia where shipping is really prohibitive there. That's the main reason. But there are people actively collecting that stuff down there. It's just to get it up here is really expensive and kind of a pain in the butt. So that's why people get in on these. They pool their resources and get all this stuff at once and then kind of distribute it once it gets here.

It kind of sounds like an underground movement of hobbyists that are happy to spend $1,000 on a tank so they can get a free fish out of a mud puddle. Does that sound right?

You get both ends. You get the people that we started thinking that they're going to get into salt water on the cheap either because they think they're going to collect their own things, which there are two reasons you can't do. One, it's not legal. You have to buy all these permits and then you're limited as to what you can take if you're not well organized. Not a lot of species are just sitting there on the beach for you to pick up and walk away with. It takes a little bit of expertise and research to know how to find these animals. And then the other thing is, when I had my company, I lived just a couple of hours inland. But that actually made it kind of tough even being that close to the coast, particularly in the summer, because you collect this stuff and then you got to rush home because as it gets warm in those little containers, it's already dying from the moment you bagged it anyway. It takes a little bit of research and diligence to get a hold of stuff. Again, I stress that's why I think a lot of people like this. They want to have things no one else has had. Those are more the other end, you get the cheaper people and then at the other end you get the people that are they've already tried in the reef aquarium hobby. They're frankly bored with it and just stumble upon this stuff and they fixate on like they want a certain kind of cold water tank. Even animals, all from one area or whatever. Yeah, you can invest a lot of money in it if you really want to.

So before we let you leave, we have to ask the question that fans demand. Anytime we talk about saltwater aquariums, we always talk about hitchhikers. And a lot of the stuff people get because live rock used to come directly from the sea and they'd get horrible monsters, monsters that come up nessie.

The loch ness monster, right?

They come up in the bigfoot in the live rock. So when you're collecting, there are certain specimens, either or vertebrates or whatever you're trying to collect out in the wild. What cold water hitchhikers do you have to worry about or are common to.

See a lot of weird stuff? Actually, there are these things called skeleton shrimp. They're little hitchhikers are all that harmful, but they're just weird to find that mainly when you collect like seaweeds and things like that, you'll get all kinds of different isil pods and whatever because there's not as much knowledge and information out there about cold water stuff. So half the time you don't even know what it is and you don't know if it's good or bad. Right. Believe it or not, I've got sea spiders, picnic, these weird things that they're like parasites on sea anemones and stuff. They actually are spiders and yeah, they just come out of nowhere and you're like, what the hell is that? And you spend a lot of time either on a forum or just doing your own research, trying to figure out what it is. I've had really cool sea slugs come in as hitchhikers and luckily I had the very thing they eat come in as a hitchhiker also. So they lasted as long as that hydroid or whatever it is they're specialized on, feeding on comes with them in the tank. That's the cool thing about this, especially when you're collecting your own stuff, including your own rock and sand, it's going to come loaded with all kinds of weird critters and then as they pop up, you're spending all your time either doing your own research or picking people's brains on a Facebook page or whatever. Yes.

A couple of years ago, one of my friends took his family across country. He rented a motorhome and they wanted to go through yellowstone, but they also wanted to go out on the coast and they were out by Oregon, they went and found the tidal pools and whatnot and one of the most interesting things, he said they all grabbed just ice cream pails. They brought them along because they just want to go out and just see what they could kind of collect and they were going to bring them home. They just want to see what they could find and stuff and they were collecting the different seaweeds and they would just put the seaweed in the pail and they just kind of squish it and just see what would come out. And he said there's just all kinds of interesting looking little crabs and slugs and different weird things that they've never seen before. And he said that was probably the most interesting afternoon we spent on the coast, because his kids have a sense they just love aquariums also and stuff, and they just had so much fun out there. And then they went and found a nice seafood restaurant down there and they took them out and they caught their own lobsters for lunch with cages or what's done and said it was one of the best afternoons they had on their two week trip. But he said it was just incredible the amount of stuff that would come out of the seaweed. He goes, if you look at the seaweed, it was nothing there, but when he switched it to the pale, it was just full. The pale was full after they pulled the seaweed out of just different interesting.

Things, burgeon coast in particular, it's like it's dominated by mussels in a lot of areas. Some of the tide pools by just those two main species of sea anemone live in the upper shore, the giant green and the elegant. It looks like there isn't a lot of diversity until you start digging in again. Imagine taking that seaweed home and having it sitting stew in your tank for a while and all the weird things that pop out of it. That's really the fun thing about it when you've collected it yourself. That's one of the big attractions, I think, to people that do this here. There's a whole group in the UK that an equivalent and half of it is just dominated by what you find after the fact that came out of the sand. Or you ask what kind of gravel some people will use, like the crush coral, things like that. I've seen that in some cold water tanks, it doesn't hurt, but this crowd really likes to completely recreate an area as they found it, so they will actually collect all of the sand or gravel or hash, whatever type of substrate is there. They'll take that type of rock if the law allows, and bring all that back with them and kind of reassemble it right as best they can, the way they found it. So it's just different than like having this hodgepodge of things that you just got from different stores or whatever. It's kind of a different experience, and it's more like the one that the original Marina quarrels had because there was a time where everyone had to collect their own stuff, had to grow their own live foods, even. So, again, it's like the DIY aspect. And also do your own research. Part of this, I think, keeps a lot of people in this niche.

I think a lot of this goes back to I mean, you said earlier that you grew up in North Dakota. I also grew up in North Dakota. Not a lot of things to do there, honestly. But if you could find yourself down to the local crick, you could entertain yourself all afternoon. We used to go down and just take a stick, and you'd see a crawfish, you would just hang off hang off the bank for hours looking for crawfish. And you would take and take the stick and poke at them until they would get mad at you and they would grab a hold of the stick. And then if you pull the stick off fast enough, you could get them on on shore and take them home. And we would spend hours down here seeing what different minnows and different things you could see through there. Every once in a while, you'd see a snake go in the water and go after minnows and stuff. And, I mean, that was our form of entertainment as we were younger. And I think that takes a lot of people back, starting out your own cold water tanks. I mean, a lot of people that probably grew up in that area just want to recreate that at home, like so many of us want to want to do.

I totally agree. There's like that. I think a lot of the people that could order things that are from elsewhere just don't want to put it in there because yeah, their intention is to recreate particular environment. It's hard to order a bunch of stuff, especially the rock and sand, from a particular area. So they just focus on the one where they're at and make it a day. Like they're waiters and their dip nets and a case of beer or whatever and just make a day of it. The Oregon coast, Washington coast, they're beautiful places. It just adds a whole different element where you get out there and you're actually seeing the environment from which these animals came. So you have a way of kind of surveying how things look. Some people will actually take water tests even, so they know what to recreate in their systems when they get back. They take a lot of notes. Definitely something more like it's a lot more proactive.

Well, before we go into the last thing, is there anything that you feel that we've missed as far as trying to dive into the world of cold water aquarium? Again. We only get you for about an hour, so I know there's only so much we can do, but is there any important topics you think we need to cover yet.

In terms of people so getting into the audience's head, I think they would still be wondering what the real difference is between this stuff and tropical stuff. Right. Why even do this? It's like, yeah, what's the difference? I don't need as much light, but I need a chiller. That isn't necessarily going to really rouse anyone's curiosity or anything. So I would say this. If you look at the animals themselves, you'll find that they're completely different colors. The cold water animals are predominantly like orangeish reddish colors, whereas, like, the corals we're most familiar with tend to be like purples and pinks and so forth. But rock is different. Instead of having like this live rock that's made mostly from coral skeleton aggregate and so forth, there's a lot more variation depending on where you collect it from. So it might be like this basaltic sort of cool, jaggity black stuff or granite or whatever. But in any case, you're always trying to recreate it. But anyway, you have almost looks like I don't know, I think the animals look more primitive or something more robust because of the types of environments they live in. A little more primitive, yeah, definitely. Which is interesting because they're more highly involved. Most of the cold water species invaded those areas from tropical areas. So they're actually from evolutionary history. They're actually younger species. But yeah, they're different looking. They behave differently. They really like to eat. In a lot of ways, they're more like a freshwater sort of tank. People really like to dump food and watch things fight over it and stuff like that. These animals are more like pets, I would say. Yeah, it's a whole different experience for people that have already had reef tanks. It might even be a somewhat familiar experience to people that have had freshwater tanks because with the obvious difference of the salt, the systems just the way are probably more similar, I think, to freshwater fish.

They're more robust. They're fish for men. Get into cold water.

Marine. Yeah, that's the macho side of the marine aquarium keeping right there.

I can just see your PR team. Don't be a bitch. Get a chiller. I love it.

Well, again, there's one other thing I would say, because I'm not going to let you guys go now that we start talking about this and I'm in nerd mode. But hey, that's where we need to get you. There are definitely people that like the technology and everything in the reef side once you get into cold water. That's why it was attractive to me, I think, is because it's more like you're looking into the ecology interaction between the animals, the effects of all the foods you put in the water and all that. It's more of like an ecosystem, and particularly because you build it yourself often from animals you collected from the wild and even the aquascaping materials. It's just more for like someone who's more interested in the biology than the technology. So you can definitely go there if you want with all the chilling equipment and stuff like that. But I was at a total loss, like getting names for brands and stuff and I come on here as an expert, but I've never really cared about all that stuff. To me it was more about finding these animals and putting them together and displaying them in a way that really replicated this really cool environment.

Well, I think that stands testament that chillers last awhile. They're not like the throwaway equipment. You're spending quite a bit of money on it. And clearly if you haven't needed to shop a bunch of times for chillers, that's a statement right there that it's an investment worth doing.

They do need occasional repairs and stuff like that, but it isn't a cheap piece of equipment. That's the one thing where you really can't skimp on the money or on the research. You really have to know what you're going to need before people make the mistake of getting too big of a tank and then it's so hard to follow up with everything else they need after the tank, if you know what I mean. They insist on having, say, whatever, 65 gallon tank and they think that will work with their budget. Then all of a sudden they're skimping on the size of the chiller, the size of the bio filter and all these other things. So with cold water, one thing I would just suggest is to start really small, particularly because you're already going to be spending more on the tank. Even if it's a small tank, unless it's for cold water, they don't make really small tanks that have the extra thick acrylic. In that case, where you have that much more surface area to volume, it's really important to have really thick acrylic. So they're just a bunch of considerations to make beforehand, particularly if you're like me and you're not into the technology and physics and all that stuff. The best place to go is to just hit a forum or the Facebook page I mentioned, talk to some of those people and get some ideas before you start throwing money down and tell.

Them Ken Wang sent to you, where you get the vip treatment when you go to the Facebook page.

Absolutely.

So before we leave, you mentioned before your store, the best way I can describe it is can you tell us more about your tasty version of vitamin water?

I suffer pretty badly from attention deficit disorder and it seeps into my professional life. So I haven't done anything with cold water really in a long time, to be honest. I bounced around all kinds of different things and two years ago I settled on the microbiological aspect of aquarium keeping. And at that time I was working with a company called Lgbarn and always trying to get them to carry this particular type of bacteria because it just worked really well with what they were trying to do and what their clients are trying to do in terms of water quality management, the approach. And that never happened. And after I left them, I kept that idea in my head and just jumped in and started a company out of it. And this time it's actually like going into a regular thing. It's kind of my day job at this point. But anyway, what it is is it's purple non sulfur bacteria. Not a lot of people have heard of it yet, but I know they will, partly because it's already really important in aquaculture, sees not a lot on fish farms to remediate water quality. It's refreshing salt water. It's an extremely ancient photosynthetic bacteria. It's pretty much ubiquitous in nature, but it gets eliminated from a lot of artificial systems, aquariums, just based on competition with other bacteria or inherent stresses from us cleaning our tanks, things like that. But it's naturally occurring. What they do is they cycle nitrogen, they cycle phosphate and they cycle sulfur. And in an aquarium, what you would expect them to do, actually what they are being used for in fish farms is to remove nitrate and ammonia and phosphate. And they also consume organics as a carbon source. Anyway, they reduce your need for like activated carbon, for example, reduce the frequency with which you have to do our changes. And they're also probiotic. So a lot of people add them to foods for different things. I know they're good for shrimp. Basically saved it's like a food shrimp, but basically saved that industry because of vibritic bacteria that was causing a really bad disease. So, same thing with corals. They live symbiotically with corals because they also fix way off on this. So they fix nitrogen. And a lot of organisms we would add in our aquariums that fix nitrogen, meaning they can take nitrogen gas and make ammonia out of it, which they used to make tissues and blah, blah, blah. But anyway, that's the opposite of denitrification. And that's why in a coral reef environment, these corals last 15 years of research is pointing more towards these bacteria, is being really important. Now, calling the coral hollowion, which is basically a whole bunch of organisms that they consider like a super organism, this type of bacteria is one of them because it's able to basically provide nutrients to the zooxanthaly in a nutrient poor environment. So that's the gist of it. There's a lot more to it than beyond the scope of this show, I'm sure. I've had that company go for about a year now.

I got a private message from one of the listeners. Is this safe to use at all in fresh water or brackish aquariums?

The bacteria?

Yes. This PNS probe bio that you're selling on your site.

Yeah. So it's mostly from freshwater environments. It favors freshwater environments, but it'll survive hyper saline environments, even. So, it's uri hailing, meaning it survives. There's a solidity of any kind of aquarium we would keep, basically. And as far as safety, no bad. It's non pathogenic, so it can't hurt anything. All it does is stabilizes your nitrogen cycle, and it will consume organic rubbish, dissolved and solid. In a freshwater system, for example, you would use this, like, with plants. So you have, like, cellulose lignin, all these things that higher plants produce. Right. And it makes all this rubbish that ponds, too. It doesn't degrade easily because not a lot of organisms possess the enzymes, make them able to break it down and digest it. This bacteria, you'll actually see this bacteria in some formulas or whatever, like bacterial products that are used to they call them sludge eliminators. So they'll eat up all that plant material, but also, because they fix nitrogen, they fertilize plants. So they work really well with freshwater plants. They live in direct association with them.

In fact, I might have to give this a try now no. Just to get rid of my sludge.

What's the shelf life on something like that?

And do you have to put it in the refrigerator?

No. So this stuff can it's a really ancient bacteria. It evolved before there was even oxygen on Earth. So it'll live in anaerobic. It prefers anaerobic environments, but it can live in the presence of oxygen, a lot of those types of bacteria. It favors high temperatures, so it really likes the heat. You can keep it in the bottle. This is like the shelf life bottle. The shelf, like bottling it, whatever shelving it, it can survive indefinitely at temperatures over, like, 112 degrees fahrenheit, and it has, like, a shelf life. I use my own product to inoculate new batches so that I know that it's always viable. Right. My expiration is, like, six months on my product, but I've recently, just to test and see how long they last, I had one that was exactly a year old, was able to start a new culture with it. So that's like, tough as nails, really. It's regarded by microbiologists as being one of the most adaptable organisms on Earth, metabolically.

Now, you said it was a big benefit towards shrimp, cold water shrimp that you eat. Would this be beneficial for ornamental shrimp?

Yeah, in terms of being a probiotic, yes. All organisms, actually, I have recently seen this stuff. The same species, rotos, pseudomonas pollutris, is included in human probiotics. I've seen papers, I've read a lot about this stuff, and I've seen on the side weird things where it increases, like broiler chicken production when you put it in their drinking water. It's just a general probiotic. So it gets in the animal's gut and it increases feed conversion. So basically, the animal, when it eats, is able to assimilate more of its food because this organism helps it to digest. It like a lot of probiotics, but then it also protects it from pathogens like vibrio, which commonly affect shrimp. So there was some kind of disease, I can't remember the name of it, but it was in the food fish industry, the shrimp species. But anyway, this stuff is it produces antibiotics in lace, streptomycin and cannomycin, which vibrio is not resistant to. So it actually works as a natural antibiotic inside the fish. And it's proven to survive in the gut for at least some amount of time. Aside from that increasing the feed conversion. What it does, in addition to when you get more out of your food, when you feed your fish, but you get less out of the fish, meaning they crap less, they produce less waste. So when you add it that way, fish are actually producing less waste, but then the waste they do produce in the form of ammonia, nitrate, phosphate and dissolved organics and solid organics. This bacteria can eat it all. Like in a salt water tank. It would just get skimmed off, it would get removed and your water changes. It's never going to cloud your water or anything like that because it prefers anaerobic sorts of environments, so it's not harmful in any way.

How often do you treat the tank with that then? How far does the bottle go?

Most people would inoculate the tank and then see if it depends what you're trying to do. So like, say you have chronically, say you have freshwater tank and it's a planted tank and maybe you put too many fish in it. So you're having issues with phosphates. Some people would inoculate it, use whatever they could out of the bottle. How many doses would depend on the size of the tank. But it's just kind of like up to the aquarium to see how many doses it takes until they get the results they want. But say you're trying to reduce phosphates. That would just take as many doses, maybe only one. If the bacteria establishes itself in the system, it would be in anaerobic and moderately illuminated areas. So this stuff would grow, basically, I guess using the example of a planted tank, this bacteria would live. It kind of form like a biofilm, slightly under the top of the substrate. It's a little bit where there's less oxygen, the light is still penetrating. Basically. In that case, it would take like a lot of carbon in the form of zudates from the roots of the plants. All these waste products, organic waste products that the plants secrete through their roots and leaves. It'll take all that up as a carbon source and then as a nitrogen source, you know, it'll pull out nitrate, things like that, from the water, sophate so it would compete with algae in that way, basically for phosphate. They've used this for wastewater treatment. You can remove phosphates at levels you'll never seen an aquarium, but in terms of dosing for like a small tank, you just kind of see what the problem is some people, and then when it's solved, it's solved. I know that sounds vague, but it definitely works. The stuff really does do all the stuff we say it does. This is one of the most researched microorganisms that there is because a lot of people have been looking into using it for hydrogen production. So it's been studied for a pretty long time, pretty well. So like say if you're using it in a salt water tank, for example, to feed your corals and dosage would be like a regular basis, like an ongoing thing. You can use it to gut load live foods too. So anyone fresher salt water safe, especially if you're raising fish. This is an excellent organism to gut load your live feed with because it comes with carotenoids that comes with very importantly probiotics and helps them digest their foods, which are one of the critical gut flora of a larval fish. So lots of different uses and the.

Best use is because it has the same bottle structure as like one of those teas. Go to your local store, replace the label and give it to Jimmy.

Specifically, the bottle is a little bit suggestive as it is and the product is called the bacteria. One is called PNS probio. And I guess PNS sounds very similar to a word that certain sophomoric individuals get arise out of like Robbie, don't.

Worry, I already typed in Chat. We had a good one. I'm back and forth. We're above that, aren't we Jimmy?

You are.

Rock is not above anybody. If you're looking for this probiotic, certainly go to hydrospace store. And again, we'll have the link in the description of this podcast. Certainly check it out. Also go to Amazon, check out ken's book on the I had this saved, I had it saved right in front of professional.

You suck.

Oh man, you suck.

The cold water marine aquarium, biogeography, ecology and husbandry.

Again, the link is in the description of that as well. And again, Ken, thanks so much for coming on our podcast. We really appreciate it and hopefully we're going to see some beer cooler sums happening in the future here.

Pleasure guys.

And I think Adam disconnected, so we wish you well, sir.

You as well. Take care.

Before we leave, just a reminder to the listeners, we're going to be having Dr. Fish in the episode or two, so certainly go to our discord or send us a message directly to have your question answered live by Secrets Head of Fish Health and we'll get those done. No question is too much or too little. In fact, if we can get some more poo related questions about penguins, that's even okay too right, Jimmy?

I didn't have questions about pluga whales just because I did get my question.

Like I'm not an expert in Wales. Next question.

Next question. Please.

Next question.

He's kind of like the president. Next question.

Right. Adam is back.

I've been here the whole time. Could you guys not hear me?

We couldn't.

We could not hear you at all.

Any last questions for Ken before we leave? Adam?

Well, actually, I did have a question about saltwater mixing. You know how saltwater.

You have to.

Use less salt water or salt in the water when it's warmer? Do you just jack up the temperature to mix the salt and then you decrease it? Or does your salinity levels change in between the two or no, if you're using like a density measuring sort of device, like hydrometer or something, yeah, a little bit, but it's like a slight difference. You can figure out how to offset that if you really want to, but no one really ever find if you get in the one area that you need to be in and stick to it. Consistency is more important than accuracy. There you're typical, like 35 parts per thousand. Okay, that was my question.

So don't overthink it at them.

Not that one.

All right, Jimmy, as we leave, can you give the audience your best beluga impression? Come on, man. Right? That's why you got to give us an impression all right. That we bid that you do. See you next week. Thanks, guys, for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this.

I never knew that a Minnesota accent 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.