Alright, friends, welcome to the podcast. We are the aquarium guys. And to kick things off, we're here to remind you to please support Ohio Fish Rescue. We talked about it last week. Ohio Fish Rescue is here to help people that have purchased the wrong fish and decided that Red Tail catfish is a good thing to put in with their goldfish, right? Instead of throwing out that Red Tail catfish and watching him destroy the local lake or river or worse, killing the Red Tail catfish because it's not his fault. They are there to help give dedicated homes to fish, either by rehoming or keeping them right there in their facilities. It is a not for profit organization. Please go to Ohiofishrescue.com. They have multiple ways to donate T shirts, PayPal a patreon to donate on a regular basis, and even a gofundme. Certainly check them out. Get yourself a T shirt. And I gave out the number last session and I don't feel like I should do that, but I'm going to anyway because you need to call them 216-773-0407. Call them, give them a high five over the telephone. Tell them that you love them and then give them your money.

Give them a high five or give them a $5 bill or ten. Or ten.

It's not a not a cheap hobby. They do need some help. But thank you, Ohio Fish Rescue, and let's kick that show. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolson. All right, guys. Welcome to the aquarium, guys. Podcast. I am one of your hosts, Robbie olsen. And Jim, you look like you're in pain this evening.

Jim wretched his back and he is in a little bit of pain tonight. But I'm going to pull through. I'm going to do this.

He's just sore because he feels like he's carrying this podcast.

That is absolutely, 100% correct.

So before we get off, we get off to the show, we really need to go over a little bit of housekeeping here. So nobody has called in on our hotline yet. And I'm frankly disgruntled people have questions, if not just to ask you, what do you do to condition your hair?

Exactly. And if they only knew that rob's was bald, that'd even be funnier.

Completely bald.

So, number one, he shaves his eyebrows.

Go to our website. It's the aquariumguyspodcast.com. And if you scroll down to the bottom of the website, you will see a button on the very bottom that says, call us with your questions. Click on it and you'll find our number 218-214-9214. Give us questions. Just at least tell us how we're doing. meme, anything. Just leave us a message using that number and we'll put it live in the podcast.

Send us a photo of yourself standing in front of your aquarium.

We do accept test text messages, so please, Photos, anything else, we'd love to share with the world on what you're doing or what you want to know.

I think we need to start doing rob's. I think we need to start putting some pictures on the website of people's, tanks of things of interest, things that are happening in your neck of the woods. We talked about this weekend. You and I possibly might head down towards Minneapolis for a show, and I think it'd be a good time to snap some photos and show people what's going on.

So I happen to be a member of the Upper midwest Koi Club, and it's a group that really bases around the Minneapolis area. But again, it expands quite a different region. And they have a big koi show, a competition show each year that does really well. I mean, they have really big, beautiful koi and tender loving care, just really precise specimens. And I love going down there. I do enjoy doing my own pond hobby. I am not nearly as skilled as these gentlemen, but if you're in the Minneapolis area, give these guys a reach out. They are just about to have their own auction, and we're going to head down there. And I'd like to do I have the new equipment now, Jimmy. I'd like to do either a podcast there, maybe a couple of sneak by interviews, if not just one in the car where we goof around and have a good time.

That could be great because there's many places down there that we could get into trouble, and it'd be nice if people were listening to podcasts and they could bail us out of jail.

Well, that and I think we don't have cameras in our car, so someone needs to witness the outright rage that I have going down in the cities.

Every time I go down the cities with my wife. And just so you know where we're at, we're about 200 miles north of Minneapolis. My wife grew up down in Minneapolis, and when we get within about 15, 20 miles of the city, her tourettes kicks in and the F bombing and the yelling and the screaming, and I just sit in the passenger seat and.

Laugh and rubbing his nipples and complacency.

Yeah, exactly. It's really a lot of fun for me not.

So we're going to head out there. They're going to have an auction and yeah, I think that'd be a good thing to try. So if you don't hear podcasts, you know, the audio didn't turn out well. But we're going to do our best, see how it works.

I think we'll take a few shots, some pictures. It's interesting to show what they have out down there, and it's amazing stuff. The prices aren't that bad. You can go down there and hand pick your own fish and bid at auction.

So going back to the point you said about the pictures that we should make, I'm going to make a full tank shot bulletin board. fts is what they call it on reddit. And anybody that wants to submit and show off their tanks. I will put the board on our website, aquariumgeyspodcast.com. Please email us your pictures. Text us your pictures. Our contact info is on the bottom of the website and we're still working.

On getting that compatibility poster up. I made a phone call and I've got one on its way. And so we will put a shot of that once we have it. I do have them in my pet stores, but I have them bolted to the wall, so I'm going to leave them right there.

We're going to make a downloadable digital version of this so you can take your own aquarium, guys podcast, compatibility image, make a poster of it, print out a sign, use in a pet store, give it to your friends, whatever you want to do with it.

Every little thing you can do like that will help you in this great hobby of ours.

You don't want to watch your beta get munched up by redtail shark.

Yeah, there we go.

So today's podcast, we wanted to talk more about the industry since we started. We had our first episode where we talked about introductions, a little background, and you had quite the background, Jimmy, of being in the hobby for so many years. But then wholesaling to pet stores is something that not a lot of us get access to. So we like to do a dive of the industry as a whole. And I'd like to cover some topics, but I think the best one we can start with is talking about what happens from the point of a farm to my door or my shop getting a fish. So what's the logistics of that? Where do these fish come from? What's your thoughts, Jimmy?

Well, it all depends on what type of fish you're looking at. There's many fish in raised in Florida, and we keep talking about Florida. They have probably 2025 farms. Now, when I first started the industry, there was probably between 50 and 60 farms down there. And slowly they've been going away because the real estate is worth more money than what they can make selling fish.

And now when you say farms, you mean collectives, because you can have people having a small couple pond farm here and there. People do it as a side business or maybe even a small business. But we see a lot of these co ops. I know you even talked about the Florida co op, but a lot of these farm groups, if you will yeah.

Each one of these farmers down there, they try to do one Pacific or four Pacific types of fish. Some farmers will do like all the barbs. Some farmers will do cichlids, some farmers will do like guppies. So everybody has their own little niche. And so if you're dealing with one particular farmer, if you're buying from a particular farmer, if he doesn't have it, his buddy down the road 3 miles does. And when rob's and I were down in Florida last time, we saw a lot of that when we were at the farms, different farms were showing up in the back of the pickup truck, and they've got a couple of boxes for them. And so they trade back and forth and help each other out. And it is a true co op.

So we always mentioned Florida, there are other spots that do breeding across the nation but Florida has been the hot spot for the aquarium boom that we talked about in the that's where it all started and it was a big issue of trying to import fish way back when because they just wouldn't last.

Transportation too, being a son of a gun back in the day.

So now that transportation has gotten better, we can certainly get fish here in two days time. It is possible to get fish here in two days'time from anywhere in the world. So that's why markets have certainly expanded. But people try to be ecologically friendly when it comes to these species because you don't want all these species caught from the wild, you want them farm raised to protect the wild habitats. And that's really why Florida has taken prevalence. Even holding premise still in this type of market is because they're cheaper when they're farm raised and you're not destroying habitat.

Plus the health factor is usually much better. If you take a fish out of the wild they're completely healthy, but they've never been under that sort of stress where they're netted and bagged and that whole debauchery of movement for that fish, it means it's very traumatic to be pulled. Just assume that you're in your living room, have been in your living room your whole life and somebody grabs you and drags you out in the backyard and shows you the sunshine or whatever and it's very traumatic. You've never done that before. Where the farm raised fish they're handled quite often and they see people every day and yes, they still do stress out, get scared, but they're still being able to be shipped and we don't have the problems with them getting sick as wild caught fish do get sick when you bring them in.

So think of it, I always try to explain this to people between wild caught and farm raised fish. So let's take the Amazon rainforest. The Amazon rainforest still have indigenous populations that have never seen another human being. In normal modern day society. These people are extremely susceptible because again, they're only in their own limited ecosystem to any disease. So when the conquistadors first started dropping off on Amazon, they would bring with them flus and other things to kill off big populations of people. Fish populations are not that different. They are not raised and acclimated in different areas where they can be exposed to germs or other diseases and build antibodies throughout generation to generation. This goes with the fish. If you're going to get farm raised, you're going to have a fish product that has been maybe 18 generations down the road, that has been raised in dirt ponds, in our water, with our environment, with other fish and a mix.

Of fish and have been introduced to some sort of chemicals for treatment. At times they'll use a nitrophere zone or they'll use acid, depending on what they feel that needs to be done in the shrimp and the tank. Raised fish are normally treated for parasites before they are shipped to you. Even though they're raised in ponds in Florida and they can have parasites, they are treated for parasites before they're sent to you. When I have people that want cardinals, and if you don't know what a cardinal tetra is, it's real similar to a neon tetra, but rather than more blue, it's got more red. And when I order from overseas, I can either order tank raised cardinals or I can order wild caught cardinals. Not a huge difference in price. The wildcats are a little more expensive because they're actually going out in the wild and collecting them. Benefit of having a wild caught cardinal, you're getting a fish with probably a little bit better coloring at first only, right.

It doesn't last.

And you might have maybe a little bit better genetic. Let's say you're going to raise carnals and you probably want the wild ones because when people are doing this with angel fish, they bring in wild angels to help bring up their what am I looking for rob here for better genetics, I guess.

That'S not even the biggest point. The biggest point is even the food, if you're getting a wild, they're not accustomed to food. They haven't metabolized and grown with essentially human given food.

Yeah, intervention. I mean, they're used to having different larvas, mosquito, larvas in the water and any little tiny microorganisms that live there.

Completely different habitat that you cannot emulate in captivity. So when you get these, most of the time they're just directly caught, bagged and shipped. They are not held and acclimated to food. So if you bring them to a pet store, once you grab them, if the pet store hasn't had them very long, you have to train the fish on how to get the food. And even if so, they could have a reaction to it.

And the mortality rate is much, much higher than tank raised cardinals. So nine times out of ten when people ask me to bring them in some Cardinals, I always say, do you want tank raise? Do you want wild caught? And nine times out of ten they say, I want tank raised because they're going to come in, they're going to eat, I can sell it, I can make money.

And that's only if you really give them the option. Most time they'll request, hey, what options do you have, jimmy's? Very ethical, we always try to get our fish from Florida or farm raised places at all costs. There are certain species that can only be caught in the wild or they're still trying to acclimate where they can breed them in captivity. A perfect example that's something recent is the panda loach. The panda loach comes from hill streams in Asia and this was recently discovered to science like 2006 seven is where they finally identified it because it was hard to identify small infants that look pure black and white. But then where do they go? Well, they morph. When they actually followed and developed the morphing behavior, they're they look like a completely different fish as an adult, so they really didn't understand what breed that was. So it was finally really identified. 2006 seven begun to be brought into the aquarium trade 2008 and finally brought into the States on a beginning scale in 2011. And Jimmy and I were actually on the ground floor when those came in. We had a lot of fish connections that say, hey, you got to try these fish. I know you guys try. You have a guy like Robbie that tries a lot of weird shit and sent them in and no one knew a lot of details about them. They knew that they came in decently, fast flowing water. They generally came from a mid range temperature and they assumed that they ate plant life was the assumption. Everything past that. They just wanted to essentially assume they were another type of loach. Well, I got to raise them and people didn't know how to breed them. There was a substantial stock, but now it is now 2019 and they're now being successfully farm raised, so there's no need. The hobby has gotten a lot cheaper. These fish were easy $100 a piece, $80 a piece when they first came out. Now you'll see them floating around the internet for $40. Sometimes you'll even see as low as 30 and it'll just keep getting better as it goes. And these are a newly discovered species. Something that's been established like Cardinal tetris shouldn't have to be caught even though they're indecent high number in the rainforest, should not have to be caught from the wild. It's not a better species. And do your best to be ethical or ask where they've been purchased.

And another great fish that Rob just talked about that has a similar story is the zebra pleco, which is the L 46. And when I say L 46 plecos, there are so many different plecos. They actually have an L series of books that you can acquire and buy. They are not cheap by any means, but if you are a pleco lover, you got to have them. And I think there's at least two, I believe. robs, do you know how many in that series of books is there? Two books for the L. I think.

They finally got up to three. It's a published book series and this is essentially from scientific journals, but they also try to replicate that information. And now they've finally got most of it. It's not as up to date as the books or where you try to get the other information. But wikipedia does have the L numbering system for placos and they have it published all the way down to L. I'm just pulling it up here. 427 with an added L 600. There's a gap between there showing a subspecies when they discover them.

Yeah, there are some incredibly beautiful plecos and there are some people that just devote their entire basement to different types of plecos. Now going with the L 46, that was a zebra pleco. It is a small pleco that is black and white like a zebra, like you would see in a zoo. These zebra plecos were available when I first started 30 years ago and I could pick them up for 2020, $5 a piece. And people said, you're crazy. I'll never spend that kind of money for them. Right now in their natural habitat, they have put so many dams in all these rivers where they're found that they are going extinct in the wild. But thank goodness that the ones that we have here in captivity, many, many people have had success raising them. The problem is that they don't have a lot of babies. They have very, very few babies. But the babies that they do have are very coveted and go for a lot of money. And right now, my wholesale cost is about 140 for a pleco. And I think that you can probably find them as cheap as $100 online. But you're talking about a small, small fish.

So the reason they actually had a big price spike a way back and the reason was because these fish are extremely popular, because they're gorgeous black and white bard colors. And even the black and white transcends into the eyeball, so it matches the entire fish. So $25 was really high when it first were sold. And in your opinion but as it continued growing that popular didn't change. Everybody that wanted to spend some money and get a really beautiful, gorgeous, unique looking Blaco got this. This was at the time the creme de la creme of placos. So they were all farm caught. They all come down the same very soft water river and they caught as many as they could and destroyed habitat, a lot of habitat. And this particular pleco, it breeds, and it only has up to six individual pups or fry when they produce. So very slow breed, unique source of body of water. Where these come from, it was just the apex of disaster. So eventually there was an international ban in a lot of different countries from capturing these from the wild. The United States bars them from being imported. So if you're going to try to get one, they had to be bred from the stock that we already have.

And is that called the sadie's list. I know my friend Adam always talked about what list? It's some crazy list they talk about, but it's a list that they have barred these fish from leaving the country anymore.

I'll have to pull up that list. But again, they are banned. And so the prices spiked. I mean, I saw them. I think the record for wholesale was $300 for in a single individual small grade zebra playco.

Right? And right now if if you go back, if Rob and I are a we, we love research. We, we love the different magazines. And amazon's magazine, going back to that magazine a few years ago, or a year or two ago, they had a fantastic series on the zebra pleco and how they're being bred now commercially. And there is a couple of guys doing it commercially and they're doing it, they're getting some numbers and stuff and then they're finding some oddball ones. And some of the oddball ones, which have different markings, are going for an extreme amount of money. Extreme in thousands.

So going back to the original point when we brought this up again, there's multiple different sources where you can get these fish from on a wholesale level. The average is you either import them from a foreign farm raised location and generally you can either ask for it's a conglomerate that does this. Generally they're transported a distributor, so they gather from many different countries. They all get many different lists. And you can order based on a country list or you can sometimes in rare situations get the farm name, but they'll never work with you. They have contracts with these distributors and you have to work exclusively with these distributors. And most of the time, as long as you order in large bulk, can be cheaper than some of the stuff you see in Florida. But you have to get in such quantity that you either have to have your own warehouse because a single pet store will not handle this, or you're going to have to pay different type of freight rates and be in a shared pallet and it's a mess.

Yeah, if you're trying to go out there and deal with these fish farms, first of all, most of them don't speak English and I have a friend who deals with them directly. Second of all, they're in a different time zone. So if you'd like to talk to them, you're getting up at 03:00 in the morning because you want to talk to them at 05:00 P.m. Their time. So it's very I don't want to say agitating, but it's a lot of work to try to deal with these farms and then if you deal directly, then you have to try to pay them in their currency. And now if you have any problems with these fish, good luck getting your credit. If something comes in dead, it's probably going to be buy money.

So besides just the business aspect, let's say that these farms weren't catching wild. Most of them do breed, I mean, versus a guy sitting out with a net trying to catch fish versus having a farm. A lot of these are farmed. It's not a shock. But they're in different countries. They have different humane legalities, and a lot of them earn poverty. They'll do anything they can to get the fish to you for what they have to. They have to do what they can to make money. So these fish may be kept in extremely unethical environments. They may be purposely radiated so they can't be bred in the United States, so they think they have some sort of stock. And so we talked about guppies before, and they'll also do anything foreign. They'll try to attack patents and the quote, unquote trademark. GlowFish is an owned patent by a business in the United States. And they'll try to genetically cross different types of fish and do all kinds of crazy stuff. So we had our Angel Fish episode, and you were talking about Angel GlowFish.

Yes. They're out there on the Internet. If you go out there and look, you can find them. I've never seen them in the United States, and I wish I could get them. I think they're beautiful. But no one has them here because they have not been I don't know if the word is that they haven't been approved yet, because I know every time that the glow fish here in the United States, they come out with a new color. And when we talk about GlowFish, we're talking about the glow tetras, the glow. daniels each and every color has to be approved by the Us.

So there's many different steps for these types of fish. Number one, you have to get the approval. You have to go through some sort of ethics board. You have to work with the people that own the trademark, and they go through all different processes. That's where they started with the zebra danos being crossed. Then they worked on the white skirt tetras. That's the kind of coin shaped tetra or goldfish. Now they have barbs, like tiger barbs that are done in these neon colors. So we're seeing other people experiment with the same processes overseas. We don't get to see them because of these limitations of shipping. But it just paints that they're willing to do anything. They can just make a buck because they're probably in a lesser situation.

When you look at the GlowFish, as beautiful as they are, people either love them or they hate them. There's no in between, it seems like, because people saying, well, you're messing with genetics. A red glow fish or Glow daniel they've taken the DNA from a jellyfish and somehow inserted it in the fish, and they actually will continue to be red, and their offspring will be red. But if you're breeding them here in the United States, it's illegal unless you have the trademark and it's owned by that company, and we do deal with that company on a weekly basis.

Every place that you see GlowFish all have to come from the same trademark.

Yes, it's some friends of ours in Florida, and they have two farms where they raise these and hopefully we'll get them on future podcast and they can tell us a little bit more about them. But I saw the glow fish probably about three years before they came out. They did not have any numbers, but I was in the office of the facility and I saw them for the first time and went, oh, this is going to be big. And what they did is the zebra, Daniel, is probably one of the cheapest fish that you can buy. And what they've done is they've taken a cheap fish and made it very brilliant in color. And now you have a demand for this fish.

And then the second fish, the white skirt tetra, equally just as cheap, very cheap. They're just taking hearty known bread and butter stock that are really low cost and seeing what they can do for color because mommy, mommy, I want the pretty one.

That's right.

So aside from the glow tetra, which is again, a genetic crossing, which is not as inhumane, there's a big debate on it. Stand where you will. There are other things that they do in the industry that I generally frown upon. And you'll see them everywhere. It can't be helped. People are going to purchase them just because of the color. But education is the key. So you'll see different fish that are either injected with coloring and these are all temporary. The glow fish are long term. It's part of their jeans and they'll cross it into their offspring. Other ones are taken at very small ages, needle injected, and if they live, they get sold. You'll see glass fish taken with a needle and have just across their spine injected with green, purple, pink, whatever type of a neon dye that will fit in the glass fish, you'll also see the dyeing. So they'll take a fish, they'll put it in an acid dip with coloring or other creature. We see this done with African threetoed frogs, and they'll dip them like an albino frog and they'll maintain and tattoo the color across their body. Over time, this color will fade out. And this is again very unethical, but it started overseas, finally has now been adopted across the United States, and it's a crime. But I think by far the worst I've ever seen are tattooed fish. The tattooed grommies tattooed fish are not done in the United States. If you see a tattooed fish, and trust me, you'll remember when you see a tattooed fish, they're only done overseas. The tattooed fish is they grab a healthy, maybe mid, young adult fish and they'll literally laser tattoo ink onto it. Not like a human one, but literally like laser tattoo. It will draw. A pattern, maybe a heart, maybe a star, maybe they'll poke a dot and you can even order these custom.

You can order them custom. And let's say you wanted to propose to your girlfriend, your boyfriend, you can get one that says marry me. And I'm just thinking, wow, that is a lot of damn work to do this harm to this fish, to bring them home for something silly as that. And I really do front upon on the tattooed fish. A lot of these fish I just don't like, but there is demand out there and I've got pet stores that feel exactly the same way I do that. I wish they wouldn't do these certain things to these fish but yet they sell and when it comes down to it, it's all about the almighty buck.

So just to enable the process so you order the fish and Mary Me will say, jen, right, we'll pick on your wife, right? And they'll send you a bag of eight because lord knows half aren't going to make it because they've been tattooed.

Absolutely. And they're not cheap. I've actually had people who have asked me about it so I've asked my supplier and you're looking at 35 $40 a fish. You're looking at probably one hundred and sixty dollars to two hundred dollars for the bag. And these poor fish will have this on them forever. And I just feel like when I look at them I go, it looks like someone just graffiti to a nice school bus and I just think it's just in poor taste and they're really.

Not discriminative on what they do. This too. You'll see them a lot on live bears because again, those are easily hearty bread stock and I've seen them on molly's Balloon, molly's platties. I haven't seen them on Las Vegas because again, they need real estate to tattoo on, right? But still but they'll do.

It valentine's Day one time I ordered in a bag of balloon mollies and they sent me by mistake. Tattooed balloon mollies and they all had little hearts tattooed on their sides. I'm just going, this is so lame, I don't want to sell these. But what else do you do with them?

Not everything's. All this grim and scare from ordering online you can get great product. You can make sure they're shipped ethically and work with the correct distributors. It's not a taboo. You just got to make sure they ask the question is it farmed? And they make sure to have proof and evidence of this. You can work with your distributor on all of this. But the industry has changed from how it used to start shipping because again, it used to be a logistics issue. Logistics got better over time and then they could ship mass amounts of product overseas into the United States and Betas and this is a big tragedy that's been improved over the years. As an example, betas used to be shipped on a wet paper napkin.

Wet paper tall. Very, very layer after layer of wet paper tall.

So betas have their own lungs, so they can actually use air to breathe in. Their natural habitat is in Thailand during rice ponds, and they have to survive in dry seasons and maybe a small puddle.

Yes, and they do. And they will jump and wiggle the way from puddle to puddle. I've seen pictures of babies living in the hoofprint in the mud of like an oxen that has walked by and there'll be bettas in these hoof prints, which are probably three inches wide, just.

Waiting for the next rain, right, so.

They can move along. So, like Rob said, they do have a lung in their head called a labyrinth. And so these fish used to be, a long time ago, they would ship them over from overseas in a box and they would put wet paper towel.

Wet paper tall, and they'd just stack.

You a bunch of betas.

Bunch of betas. Now, again, things have changed and it's really become from an outcry for ethics. Now they're nicely shipped in their own containers. They're not much different than the, say, the Walmart containers you see, they'll be in just air bubbled plastic bags and they're quickly, every I believe two days every day, they'll be completely rebagged with fresh water. If they have to stay an extra day in a warehouse before someone picks them up.

Yeah, they still could ship a lot of fish in a little package, like Rob said. But when we wholesale them, we bring them in. I talk to my trans shipper and I say, I need a box of bettas. A box of bedtas was going to be 150 box, 150 pieces, 150 fish. In individual bags, the bags hold about one to one and a half ounces of water, which doesn't seem a lot, but when you are transferring fish, it's all about the oxygen and not so much the water, because they tranquilize these fish to a point where it slows down their breathing. They've been not fed for a day or two, so they do not poop out the water. And because if you've ever been in an outhouse in July and you know what I mean, if you're sitting in your own waste, it's going to kill you. So these fish aren't fed for a day or two, which people think that's mean, but no, you have to get all the waste out of their body, they're put in the small bag they're shipped and they're in 48 hours, your responsibility. You bring them in, you take them out of the bags, you put them in cups and you start feeding them immediately.

So things have definitely changed for the better. And ordering internationally, as long as you've done your homework, isn't that scary taboo. But again, we just want to enunciate farm raise versus wild cot. That's the biggest concern with ordering. So now you got your fish, you ordered it from Florida, you ordered it from Singapore and they're coming in. And how does the transport work, Jimmy?

Well, there's two different things here I want to talk about. The first one, Rob is talking we've talked so much about overseas, the use of a trans shipper is invaluable and going to using a trans shipper. There's many good trans shippers in the United States. They're the ones that have all the connections to all these farms over in all these different countries. I can pick from 18 different countries, I can order from 18 different countries and have them all come in at one time to my door. Most of them are out in the Los Angeles area. Do your homework before you do deal with them. But you order from them on a Thursday or Friday and they are at your airport on Monday and they're a transcript, like I said. But there you're looking at quantities where a bag of neons is 300. You're going to order betas, 150 minimum for 150 bedas minimum. When my children were younger and they pissed me off, I made them cut betas. And at that time the beta thing was the plant with the bamboo. What was that?

It was a big gimmick. So you go to either a floor shop or help. They had them everywhere. And you'd go and you'd see this giant glass clear vase and on top you'd see a cup with a plant in it.

That's right.

And the roots would grow down and they'd have a bait in the bottom that they torture and never feed and they watch die and they go with the big myth that no, it's an ecosystem. The fish will eat the roots.

Yes. And I went from selling a couple of hundred bedas to selling 1000 beddas a month. And if my kids had been naughty when they're little, they cupped bedas until the cows came home. And my son, who is now 28.

Years old, says does not have fish in his house, let me tell you that.

Yeah. He comes downstairs to my facility and he goes, who was bad? Was jen Bad last night? And he made her cup bedas. And that's how overseas the people that are raising shrimp punish their children and make them count shrimp. And I read that in amazon's magazine and I chuckled, I went off, I've done. That excellent.

So the fish come in, they've shipped overseas in probably, what, two days? That's certainly the average, average time for them to get sometimes three if they have to wait in an airport.

Yeah, I order on a Thursday, that order is in place. So Friday they need a day overseas to let the fish poop out, as I call it. And then they are shipped on Saturday. They all come screaming into Los Angeles airport, at lax airport on Sunday. And that's the busiest day for this transcript is on Sunday because all they do is run to the airport for shipment after shipment after shipment of fish from Singapore Airlines, from Malaysian Airlines. And they've got many customers like myself. They bring in all this stuff and, yeah, I might get one bag out of this shipment and one bag out of that shipment, and they just rebox everything and it's gone out of their Sunday night. And on Monday morning, it's in my airport.

So again Saturday, Sunday, Monday so we'll say two full days, maybe two and a half days. So you get them in and they're again drugs so they're not using as much oxygen, they're medicated so they don't stress out maybe deal with ic. They're prepped for slime coat treatments because again it's just stressful deal and they're kept dark on purpose. And some of these bags that you'll see especially discus you'll see an actual black liner around the bag so they don't actually see through the bag when you open the box to stress them out more.

Yes discus are very, very tough to ship. They freak out a lot. So by putting in that black liner it just helps them stay a little more calm. When you bring discus in from overseas it's a whole different deal just trying to get them to eat when they come. You find a supplier that you know and trust and you find out what they're feeding the fish and essentially over there they're getting a live food all day long and so they come over here, you offer them flake food and they look at you like what is this? Because what they're doing is where they're raising this stuff. It's out in the middle of the jungle. They're just going to their local pond and they're scooping up mosquito larvae or daphne, whatever they can find. And that's what these fish eat all day long and that's why they can get fish to grow so quickly plus the fact that they'll do on discus a 90% water change daily.

So we live in a very cold climate. You want to explain how they take care of shipping from a tropical climate across the world to a frigid cold place like a 20 below Minnesota?

All right, well so going back to trans shipping still when they tranship it they get to La where it's pretty consistently warm all year round so now they have to logistically going well, I've got stuff going to this state and to this other state in anchorage, Alaska. anchorage, Alaska or Minnesota or possibly Texas.

Quebec.

Yeah and they have to know so the trashcrapers actually sit there and they have the weather app on their computer just like everybody else and they'll call and say what's your temperature going to be? And that will determine how many heat packs they put in and these heat packs that they use aren't like the ones that you see at your local store like menards or Home depot the ones that you break open and they're small and you put them in your pocket to keep your hands warm. These are some pretty good sized heat packs, but they're good for 48 hours, whereas the other ones are good for like six. And the whole trick to a heat pack, it's very hard to try to explain this to some people, but the heat pack needs to have oxygen continuously doing it. Some people want to take a heat pack and if it's going to be too hot, they'll wrap it in a plastic bag or saran wrap, right, which just suffocates it. And if it doesn't have oxygen, it's not going to work. If it gets wet, it's not going to work. So what's really crazy is some of these companies have come up with some novel ideas. One of my favorites is one of my companies will take the heat pack. They'll fold a paper plate in half, put the heat pack in there loosely and put two staples in there and then tape that to the top of the box. But every time they tape it to the top of the box, it usually comes down. And when you're shipping fish, those bags are always a little bit wet. You'll get a leaker and as soon as that heat pack gets wet, it doesn't work. So what I've got them to do now is they'll actually kind of duct tape it to the side a little bit heavier, tape duct tape it to the sides and the fish come in and they're toasty warm and they do just great. But if that heat pack gets cold and it's sitting in Minneapolis overnight in an unheated warehouse or outside or outside sometimes the biggest problem you have is in our neck of the woods in the winter. It is sitting in the belly of the airplane and they're deicing the airplane and the belly of that airplane. There's only in the front is the only place where it's heated. So if they're in a hurry and they don't get it up in a heated part of the airplane and it doesn't matter where your airplane is going, once you're at 36,000ft, that airplane is cold, regardless if you're going over Texas or if you're going over Minnesota in the middle of winter. And so if they don't get put up directly, let's say they're shipping a lot of mammals. When I see that, I mean dogs and cats. And a lot of dogs and cats come in through the airlines and they put the dogs and cats up in the heated part underneath the belly of the airplane to keep those dogs and cats warm. But they don't give a rats butt about fish and so they might be sitting in back, which is unpressurized. And that's when you start having problems. You're still at the mercy of the airlines, no matter who you use or what you do.

Another point is not just heat packs, also the container it's put in so normally you'll see a thin styrofoam box shipped anywhere during the summer, in the winter, that you get like an extra thick, like a triple thick, just foam block that you put these things in.

Yeah, Alaska boxes is what they're calling them right now. And they do work very well. But then again, you have the added cost of that box, where a normal boxes cost you three to $4. Now this one is costing you eight dollars to ten dollars.

And they do work great when you're tubing down a river to hold beverages. That is a proven fact for myself.

That's right. You could put a lot of beer or soda or nachos, whatever you want, and there is some secondary use for those things. But when I was cranking out a lot of fish, I was probably tossing away many more boxes that I could give away. I'm getting 25 boxes in a week, paying three and a half $4 a piece for them, and then I have to go to the local landfill and throw them away and pay them again to take them away. And so if I could give them away to people or let them use them, I'd be more than happy to do that. But they've been working on, for years and years and years, they've been working on trying to get some reusable boxes that could come back to them, and they just have found no way to really do it. There logistically to save money.

So what we do is on the pet stores that you wholesale, too, is we make sure that we give them all the foam coolers they want. People buy fish, they can put them in the foam cooler, take it with them, do what we can to use it as insulators, because they have to still take them on the drive home. And their cars are cold.

Right. And the other thing, too, is that some people will use them. They're great size little boxes, and we'll sell them for a dollar piece, which is a two dollar loss to us. But still, something is better than nothing, and they'll take that box home. And let's say you went out fishing. There's a lot of fishing up here in northern Minnesota. The last thing you want to do is put a bunch of fresh fish in your good cooler because it is stink like fish for the next six months. And that will also make your beer taste like fish, which is not good.

All right, so going further in logistics, now that you got the, the foam box, you see the heat packs, you see fish in there. The immediate thought is to just do normal, you know, float the bag 30 minutes, crack it open, let the fish out. But what's the process for this?

Well, it's always a trip to the airport, which we all hate. The airport does not care that you're standing in front of them because they're in the middle of their break. They stare at you like you're on crack.

Also shout out to Delta to please go jump off a cliff.

Oh, man. These guys do not care. And it doesn't matter what airline it is because I hear this voice over and over and over about how these airlines do not care about anything but the bottom line. And I totally agree with that. And here just off subject, the only thing rob's, the only thing that the goddamn airlines can move quickly is an HR. Ask me what an HR is. Seriously, when you go back, if you're ever after 911, you can't go back in the back room of any of these airlines anymore. But back in the day, they had a chart on the wall and and it was called a priority chart. And number one priority was HR. You know what the second one was? Passenger luggage. Do you know what was at the bottom of the list?

Dead bodies and fish.

Perishables perishables HR is HR. I'm going to tell you now, HR is a human remains. And that's the only thing that they can move quickly because nobody wants a dead body in their back room. And I want to tell you nine times out of ten, when you're on an airplane and I don't care what airline it is, there's a dead body underneath your feet downstairs and holding.

That's the truth.

It is. When I go to the airport, I pull up to the back of the airport and I call in and say, I'm here to pick up my tropical fish and say, I will be out in a couple of minutes. And then the local hearse pulls up and I go, Well, I guess I'm waiting. And they'll come out, they'll see him and they go, I'll be able to take care of him first. And they'll come out out with a forklift, with a really shoddy pallet, with a waxy box usually held together. I'm not kidding you. I've seen them being held together by duct tape because these boxes they use to transport human remains. Let's say grandpa and grandma go to Arizona for Christmas and grandpa passes away and you need to bring them back home for the funeral. It's about $300 to transport grandpa back.

And that's just for the plane ticket even.

Yeah, no, that's and anyway, I've talked to the people that pick up the morticians and I I said, what are the laws? And he said, well, you know, if if you die in another state, you have to be embalmed first before we can even send you anywhere. And he says, I pick up this is a small airport, folks. I pick up twelve to 15 bodies a week from the airport. And I have helped load so many hrs in the back of hearses because they come out with a forklift. They look at the poor mortician. He's standing there and and he's supposed to throw in this 300 pound box in the back of his mortician wagon.

All just waiting for fish, right?

And so that's the only thing. They can move quickly, because nobody wants a dead body in their back room. So grandpa moves pretty quick. Your fish does not.

All right, someday we'll go over some of your favorite airport stories. But you get the fish from the airport. What do we do next?

So you bring back home the fish. Wait.

First, as you leave, you have to give them the middle finger. Then you load it in your car and you're driving home.

I had a little incident with the Secret Service one time when Bill Clinton was in town, and that's a whole nother podcast.

I'm writing this down.

Yeah, you should write that down, because that is a fantastic story. I was at the airport one time. I'll just give you a little heads up. I was at the airport one time, and I drove around these two black suvs that were just kind of sitting, talking to each other, and they came pulling up on me and said, what are you doing? Drive around our roadblock. And we're in a rural area where people pull over the side of the road and talk to their neighbor all the time. And I mouthed off and got in some trouble with the Secret Service because Bill Clinton was in town. And yeah, that's a 15 minutes story.

You tell him you're monica's cousin?

No, but here's the highlight of the story, is that these numbskulls that jacked me up, and I was having a bad day already, and I melted off to him, probably way too much than I should have. And I thought to myself as I went home, and I still have it, I still have the Secret Service card that they gave me, because they came rolling up on me and going, what the hell are you doing? I go, who are you, you morons? And then they whipped out the cards, and the deal was that Bill Clinton, president Bill Clinton at the time, was coming into fargo, North Dakota, to speak, and they were there securing the area, and he was going to arrive the next morning. But anyway, the two guys that jacked me up and on the way home, I thought, I'm probably going to get audited this year. I'm probably going to have the irs crawled up my behind.

You're lucky you didn't have two fingers up your ass.

Yeah, exactly. So, anyway, these two knuckleheads then were staying at the local motel, and here's the reason I know that, is because it made national news.

Wait, you made national news?

No, they made national news because these two Secret Service guys went into the hotel and they stayed there, and they were very rude to the help, and they got drunk, then proceeded to go up to the room, and they left a briefcase with the President's. itinerary in the goddamn booth that they were sitting.

No shit.

Yes. And the reason I know this is somebody that I know, his sister worked there. She was part of this. And this comes directly from his sister. And she was there, rob's. And like I said, these guys were jerks to the staff, to the wait staff, and to the bartenders all night long. So the waitress is cleaning up at 01:00 in the morning because the bar is closed up here at 01:00 in the morning. She goes, I found this briefcase. It's not locked. They open it up there's President clinton's itinerary. And they're like, what's this? And they went, this is not good. So they said, Well, I'm going to run it back up to to the the room. They said, screw it. These guys have been jerks to us all night. So they called the FBI, and the FBI came out, got it, went upstairs, woke them up, and they all got to fly home early the next day and lost their jobs.

Oh, boy.

But yeah, it's more of a story than that. But that was kind of fun.

And I just like to put out, that's all. Just because you had to pick up fish?

Yes. And I drove around the roadblock, and I was having a bad day, and I moulfed off. I love America.

God bless America.

God bless America.

F Delta. All right, so you got your fish home. Let's get back on track.

I wish betty White was with me, but that's another podcast we've already done. So you come back to your facility. You open up the boxes, especially when these ones come to Trans Shipping, they'll have the box. They'll actually have a bunch of newspapers there for insulation. Newspaper is a wonderful installation, keeping the boxes warm in the winter. My kids used to come down when they were probably 1012 years old, and they've always wanted to look at the newspaper because all the Sri Lanka, Malaysia, they've always got naked women pictures.

They do. I confirm this because I've got a.

Couple of boxes with you.

They still have nudies on them.

Yeah. Anyway, my ex wife would come from cleaning the bedrooms of my children and go, look what I found in their room. Now I think there's rats.

No, they like nude clipping.

Yeah. So I have two boys, and they would both like to unpack fish. So when you bring home and you've got 300 neons in a bag, they're probably in two gallons of water, which seems like a lot of fish and a little bit of water. And it is. And what you slowly I pour it in a bucket and then slowly start doing the drip acclimation, like Rob has said. And the whole time I put an amp quill, which actually will take out the ammonia in the bag.

That's important because most people don't understand. If you take a fish from your pet store bringing home, say, it's 6 hours. So you have to drive across the state to get your fish. The ammonia build up in those bags are nothing compared to two and a half, three days in the air. So when you open this, the moment the oxygen from the environment hits it, the ammonia skyrockets to a lethal point.

And you can smell it. You actually can physically smell it. Oh, yeah.

You open the bag and you want to vomit.

Yeah. And so you always have maybe a few dead fish in there because somebody got pinched in the corner or somebody just didn't make the trip. So as you're drip acclimating the water into there and then you take out the dead fish, you throw them away, and all of a sudden you've got 15 buckets going and you're trying to watch so you don't overflow. And once you get to that point where you've gone about 50%, depending on what it is, LG eaters, I'll do probably 75% to 80% because LG eaters don't acclimate well. And then you put them in your 40 gallon breeder tanks or your 55 gallon tanks, whatever you've got. And those fish will just kind of lay on the bottom because they're drugged up and they're jet lagged. But then normally it's usually an evening process. I'll leave one small light on in my warehouse so the fish don't settle to the bottom so much. And you will not see any normalcy of fish for about 12 hours until they kind of come to and start acclimating to where they're at.

So let's say that you ordered something personally and you got it in the mail ups and you got it at your house, right? When you open that bag and you don't have any applicator to reduce the ammonia in there, you are left with a challenge. Either one. You pray and hope to God that your drip application will work. And it won't. Because the moment you open that bag, it's shit. So have your quarantine tank ready. Make sure that you float in the bag for an hour. If you have nothing to do with the ammonia, you have to deal with the shock change, because if you leave them in the bag, with the bag cracked at all, the ammonia will crash the water. So acclimate, make sure your temperatures are exact, then put the fish in. And you have to hope and pray at that point because you have nothing to do with the ammonia. You have to take the fish immediately out of the bag without a drip application and put it in the tank, because that's your best hope of dealing with the fish.

And once again, you don't want to put anybody else's water, I don't care where it's from, you don't put anybody else's water in your water. So you actually want to pour those fish into the net and use a soft net. And I like the blue nets because they're a finer net. But if you have one of the green nets, I mean, those work, but.

Treat it like it's blood protocol, right?

When you go to the big stores and stuff, they all use the fine nets and nobody likes using the fine nets because you can't chase a fish quickly with a fine net. But by using the green nets, which work just fine, if you handle the fish several times, you actually will give them a skin rash. And especially like when you're in a place that there's one particular place I buy from down in Florida, they'll have 5000 neons and they have to teach their health that when you grab fish, you don't go in there and grab 500 and cut out 30 because then that fish has been handled and put back. So you grab ten at a time and you don't want to handle those fish any more than you have to because that's abrasive to them. It's just like getting a rug burn when you're wrestling with your kids on the floor. And so you want to use a soft net, you want to put them in there, you want to put a tight lid on top because maybe they're not jumping now, but tomorrow morning when you go over there and you flip on the light, they're going to freak out. And a lot of tanks that I have a 40 gallon breeder. I can use two pieces of styrofoam from fishboxes and they fit perfectly in there. And you'll hear the fish hitting it like popcorn when you turn on the light in the morning, because until they're used to what's going on in your room, they're going to be real skittish. So with a trans shipper versus using, like, somebody from Florida, a trans shipper, you have to buy large numbers. And you might only get in four boxes of fish. You might only get ten different varieties. But you're getting 300 of this and 400 of that and 500 of this. And they pack a lot of fish and a little bit of water. Whereas versus buying from the local guys here in the United States, you can get smaller quantities. So you might be able to get twelve or 14 different varieties of fish in a smaller box.

Yeah, if you talk to some of the co op seagris, the other places, they'll easily put six in a bag, six individual fish for you and ship.

Them out, right, which is wonderful when you're a hobbyist or if you just want to buy some oddball stuff. Because we talked about annabelle. annabelle and I could get six eight inch fish, right? And if I had to buy those from the orient, they'd want to sell me 50 and it would be one full box and it would be a huge amount of money just to spend on one fish.

So I think we've got it covered. I'm just going to go from my list to make sure we have covered, where they come from. To really give you an idea that farm raise versus the wildcat. We described in detail how they get to your door, how they ship and what to do when you got them. We talked about some of the crazier, how I put scary shit of the industry that we fear and to look out for and be wearing educate your fellow fish hobbyists. And we also talked about some banned but one other band piece. So let's go to the most extreme of the concerns of different fish in the United States. The Asian marijuana is banned not because the fish is illegal or you can make drugs out of their scales or anything crazy like that, or the government thinks that there's an illegal trade off of it. It's entirely for an ethical purpose of like we talked with the pleco, their habitats are destroyed, but it's on a much more vivacious scale, wider scale. The particular zebra plato comes out of one known stream. So it was a very small case. The Asian marijuana comes from a lot of mixed places, but an individual Asian marijuana can go from $2,000 to the moon. And when I say the moon really is the moon, depending on age, coloration, quality, every detail. And let's just say you get two grand off of it. Two grand here versus two grand in anywhere in Asia is a completely different thing. You're talking well over an entire year's salary for someone. So if you had the opportunity, choice to go build an iphone for a dollar an hour or whatever pitdy piece they'll give you, or go grab a net, destroy some habitat and try to find one fish to make your entire year salary, what would you do?

Exactly. That's what they're doing.

So they've had thousands of people go in lakes, rivers and streams, destroying every habitat just for the hope of finding one fish, stealing eggs, anything they can do. So that's why we need to be cautious in some of these and really know where we're getting our stock from. But again, Asian marijuanas are illegal in the United States. So that's an example of what we've done to combat that. But be wary what you're getting and where you're getting it from. So the last pieces of getting it through the industry is we talked a little bit about farmers and we mentioned in our original podcast they do things so cheap. Can I get another, deeper highlight on that?

Well, we've already talked about trans shippers, now let's talk about Florida. And my very first trip, I had already lost a lot of money and I thought, you know what? I'm going to go as the last hitch effort, try to get educated. And this was before the Internet was really a thing. And I know robert's been a thing since the day you were born, but I'm a little older.

I remember when there wasn't much for Internet. I remember when my internet first got turned on.

Oh, really? Was it probably like the highlight of your life maybe?

Absolutely.

Really? So yeah, I lost my butt on many of things and I was just going to go over and get educated. I'd start buying fish from seacrest Farms and they in turn turned me on to a couple of different farmers. So in my mind I see all these pictures in at that time, was it called Tropical Fish Hobbyist Magazine, what I used to get. And you see these beautiful fish rooms and they all had the same lights on and the same heaters and same decoration, and it was all nicely done in cabinetry and stuff. And that's what I was trying to reproduce. And that's just exactly if you're trying to breed or keep a large amount of fish, that is exactly what you don't want to do.

There's a difference between a showroom and an actual fish farm. Completely night and day different. If you look at a showroom, you'll see if you go to the King of diy, joey on YouTube, number one, tropical Fish, youtuber, I'm not even a shout out because he's way bigger than any other hobbyist as far as media goes. But he has built a pristine showroom that is not a breeding habitat. That is where he can show the ecosystems of different fish for educational purposes. He is not doing that for the sake of breeding.

Yeah, it is absolutely beautiful. You walk in there, like Rob said, it's a showroom. It's like going to buy a new car and you go into the showroom. When you're going into a facility that just holds fish, you're basically going to the back used car lot and where everything is held together by duct tape and string, where it's dirt parking lot.

You got verne sitting in the back with no teeth saying, yeah, I'll get you the keys.

I'll get you the keys. All right. So when I went down to Florida, what I learned the first farm I went on, these people don't want to give you their secrets, their secret sauce. They don't want to give you their secret sauce. That is so wrong.

Rob, I'm hungry, damn it.

Yeah, but you know, they you go in there and of course, Florida blessed with it's hot all the time. And so they they've got goddamn little greenhouses everywhere and this is where they're raising fish. So I walk in there, they've got cement blocks, and on the cement blocks they got timbers going across. And then they put the aquariums on the timbers, and then they put another cement block on top of that cement block and another timber, and pretty soon they've got a whole wall of cement blocks and timbers that aren't doing anything but sitting there. They're not attached to the wall. They're not connected in any way. They're just sitting there with tanks.

So to talk about how low key this is, this is a higher class farm. They have tanks. Some of these just use literally cement basins that they've poured forever ago and they're cracked to hell. And they barely hold water.

The first time we went to 5d, they had all these cement vats one after another. And I'm talking hundreds, if not thousands. And the one room that we went into where they had rosie barbs, they had literally 150 in this one building. And I went, oh, those are cement fats. And oh, no, that's what they put the caskets in. What do you call that? Where they put the cement where they put the casket in the vault. It's a vault that they're buying. And so these things will last forever. You can beat them. The wind can blow. It doesn't take them away. You got a cement vault, which is basically the size of a casket, and they've got four inch walls and they've got them full of fish. And they have a trickle system going there, which the water goes in there constantly and flows out the back, go through filtration, goes through different chemicals that they might have in there.

So let's talk about holding containers. So we've seen cement caskets, and these are just something reused. They're not actually poured in purpose just for this. They're literally purchased from another purpose reused, because they're the cheapest form of holding. We've seen, again, the tank systems, but even those are cracked and they're just cocked or shit, and they're sitting on cement blocks. Then we see different plastic containers. And I've seen every plastic container from a 55 gallon drum of just holding random fish. And these are just different ecosystems, and it just has trickle and trickle out. And they're planted, some of these have mangroves planted between them just for extra plant life. And when you walk into these areas, whatever container it may be, there's wildlife everywhere. There's snakes, there's raccoons, there's a lot of the floors are flooded trying to catch extra fish that jump out because they don't want to put lids on them.

Yeah, they'll actually put a pallet racking on top that you walk on, and every once in a while they'll lift all the pallet racking where the water is and they'll catch a fish because every fish scoop out once a year. Yeah, and like I said, the last podcast was talking about like those sword tails that I purchased that were huge. This fish that jumped out of been living there for Lord knows how long. So, yeah, the other thing that was really cool that I saw, one of the things I have over at my house that Rob has been begging me for is I've got an old ten gallon stainless steel edge tank.

And I went with a slate bottom.

With a slate bottom, that's how they.

Used to do things.

And a stainless steel lid. And I bought mine at a secondhand store.

And the last time that they used to have these things for the 70s.

Yeah. And so I've had this one over at my house and Rob comes over, looks at it, he goes, what are you going to do with that? And I go nothing. And I just let it sit there and let him stew about it because he wants it.

You son of a bridge.

I know. But anyway, I went to 5d where they breed grommies, and they had five gallon stainless steel edge tanks and they had hundreds of them. And I said to him, I said, Why don't you get newer tanks? He goes, Why? They hold water. That was their answer. I mean, anything that holds water works for them.

So some of the other breeding solutions, I guess, in 55 gallon drums, other plastic things, so they'll go, they'll buy rubber made totes and they'll buy the big long flat tots. Anything that can hold water that's cheapest, that will not intoxicate the fish with, say, chemical in it, they will use for betas. Here they do betas a bit differently. They actually use like smaller containers where they will hand divide, do a little more prep in foreign areas, singapore, other places where they breed these betas, they are literally using your pickle jar method.

Jimmy pickle jars, plastic yogurt containers.

The pickle jars are stacked racked on top of each other, seven to eight deep. On top of each other.

Yeah. I did just recently watch one online on YouTube. They had glass jars probably, like I'd say, probably 1012 ounce glass jars. They had a beta in every one of them. Then a sheet of plywood, another layer of bedtas. This is a whole entire greenhouse. There must have been 10,000 fishiness, and these guys were walking 6ft up in air on top of these bedas. And I don't know how they continuously do water changes and feed these things, but it's just a non stop process and that's what they do. And they're doing it for pennies. I mean, these guys are selling adult discus for a pack of cigarettes, which over there is going for $3.

So if you're seeing potential in trying to raise some fish and do this on a hobby on the side, the more of the stories we want to put by talking about how these breeders do things is, number one, know the needs of your fish. So if you know that the fish, wikipedia says you have to keep them between 72 and 76 degrees. The truth is, look in their natural habitat, see if you can make a call, talk to some people because maybe they can go to 80 and they can be a greenhouse and they need to have filtration. Yes, but can they have trickle filtration? Can you use plants? Can you do better water changes? And how can you do this absolutely as ghetto and redneck as possible, just.

As cheap as you possibly can. Because bottom line, if you're trying to do this to make a buck. You don't want to spend a bunch of money. So when I had 600 tanks at one time in my warehouse, I did not have a heater in every tank because that would have costed me a ton of money. I heated the entire room and water would generally be between two to three degrees colder than the air temperature of the room.

Up to six is what we even we estimate depending on the room. And the air flow is huge.

Air flow is huge, absolutely. I've had, you know, my top row of tanks, which was up near the ceiling, I think it was 82, 83 degrees in my room.

This is the great for the cichlids, the discus, the angel fish.

That's where I kept all my breeders. It was up high. I kept all my breeders up high and I kept all my babies up as high as I could because the warmer the water, the faster they'll grow on the bottom. I kept all my goldfish and anything that needed lower temperament, cold water, some.

Tetras that needed a lower temperature, even some grown out fish.

Yes, and you absolutely so by heating a room is a lot cheaper than heating a tank because anything that draws heat, be it a hair dryer or a heater for your aquarium, that draws a lot of electricity and electricity is not free where we are, not at all.

So that kind of gives you an idea of farmers then. I've also seen categorized breeders. So breeding especially for, on a smaller scale, not the farming. That's what I really want to separate is breeding versus farming. So breeders is I'm in the hoppy, right? I decided to pick up a few guppies and I'm far beyond that now. I'm on to shrimp or some other specified fish. And now I have a small fish corner or fish room and maybe I'm selling to the, the pet store. You know, look for how you can stack that efficiently. You can certainly purchase small pallet rack, but maybe buying a two x four and building your own system is the best. Or if you're doing shrimp again, you're keeping them in separate, different tanks. But maybe you're using sponge filters rather than the hang on the back filter or canister filters. There's so many different ways to do it and to be honest and there's the elaboration of shrimp. Sponge filters are going to be always a better solution than these expensive units.

Yeah, sponge filters especially like when you're raising shrimp. And we just started doing this recently. Once again, I've spent more time on the phone talking to people because I've learned over the years, it's better to learn from somebody else than learning from your own mistakes. It's a lot cheaper.

So do your homework, see how you can do it. And maybe if you're doing an air filter, get one pump to run all the tanks. There's examples of trying to make sure you're not cutting on the fish's quality of life and quality of breeding while still doing it on a budget. So the last piece on this is pet stores. What is the industry standard of how you take care of a pet store? What's the rotation? Talk about Pet stores. Jimmy.

Pet stores. Back in the day when pet stores were on every street corner, these guys were trying to just carry the basic bread and butter stuff as a draw to bring you in. Because basically, let's say you have a pet store, and I don't want to pick on some of the big box stores now, but we can Walmart walmart.

Or dump their fish away.

Well, I'm talking about, like, have you been into your local petco or pet smart in the last few years and has their fish selection and parakeet selection and lizard section. Has that gotten any bigger?

Mine hasn't.

Yeah. No, the thing is, they've become a dog food store. I mean, when you're looking at our local stores, 80% is they're trying to sell you supplies, and they're just kind of secondarily carrying the livestock just so you come in to look at something. But they're more interested in selling you a bag of dog food than they are selling you a parakeet or a hamster. Or would it be our local one nearby here? The biggest day to sell your fish in any pet store has always been Saturday and Sunday if you're open because people have the weekend off to take the kids, let's go buy a new fish. But their local stores here in town get their fish supply on Tuesday. Everybody knows it, and by Thursday, they got nothing. And you go in there on Saturday and people are walking around going, don't you got anything to sell? And so that aspect is going to be very frustrating for me. It's like going to a zoo, but there's no animals. And I'm just serious because you go in there and they have assorted guppies, but they don't have anything fancy. There are so many cool things out there. I'll have rob post a picture of some guppies that recently got from god, I even know what country it was, but they are white with black dots, and they look like a dalmatian. And I've ordered them one time, and my wholesaler can't get them in again, and I will find that picture. And I'll have rob post it, but I'm always looking for specialty stuff, and you're always finding the same 1825 items every time you go in there. And I just wish pet stores would get a larger variety, and with the amount of space they're giving to selling dog food, it's just getting to be crazy. I have a friend, Adam, who, like I said, he used to own a pet store in grand rapids on a $57 bag of dog food. He is making about four and a half dollars because he can't compete against the pet smarts and the Petcos of the year and he's better off buying a bristol's pleco for a couple of bucks and selling it for six. And he's making $4 on a bristol's pleco and he's turning it over and he doesn't have $45 tied up in that because his big deal was when you are a small business owner and you have $8,000 tied up in dog food and you're turning it over twice a month and that's what he was doing. He's turning it over twice a month and you've got livestock where you've only got $2,000 worth but you're turning it over three times a week or three times a month. I'm sorry, it's just a no brainer for me. But that's what we're seeing is that let's sell dog food because it doesn't die and there's no maintenance.

So we're seeing a lot of transition from what it used to be in specialty shops. And when I say specialty shops it can be from independently owned from a large scale to small mom and pop shops. And the ones that succeed are the ones that make correct decisions on making sure they have great presentation to remember the zoo setting like you spoke of. And one of my favorite pet stores in the state of Minnesota is in Forest Lake, Minnesota. It's Forest Lake Pets. If you go into that place the front section is where you get all your supplies, your extra dog food and everything else. Half over half of the entire building is essentially a zoo display setting for all their different types of fish and they have a little bit of everything but they make sure not to get anything too exotic as far as loss in their tanks. They make sure to have adequate space and they make sure to have people on staff to answer correct questions and they've made it into an interactive place where all that is so beautiful and you'll have someone walk up to you and saying oh, you want more information and they'll be sure to create that experience. And you'll come back, you'll drive across the state just to go see these guys and they've made that reputation because they understand that the amazons of the world, the Petcos of the world, they can't compete on the product but they can compete on everything else when it comes to stock choices, quality and the overall zoo experience.

We were just there Labor Day weekend, robs, I don't know if I told you this or not. We went down there, we went down to Labor Day to see the Minnesota State Fair. I always want to stop it at the Forest Lake because you never know what you're going to find. And they're the only people that have a nice variety of discus and I love to go. My wife loves the discus. She has her own tank upstairs so I always want to see what they have for discus. You're just saying that that store is probably like half and half of, I'd.

Say 60, 40, 60% tank base.

So we went in there and we didn't even think the place was open. We went on there on Labor Day weekend on Monday, 03:00 in the afternoon we drive up and there's hardly any cars around and it's in a small city on the north end of Minneapolis, very small.

It's outside of the Minneapolis area. It's a bit of a drive even for Minneapolis.

Goers yes, and when we walked in there, there was at least 40 people in that store and there was at least 38 of them on the side of the fish. And only two people looking at heaters and stuff like that. So those people that were there were looking for something. And they weren't just looking. They all had something in their hand. They had somebody scoop it up, stuff. They might have had 25 or 30 large stingrays, different varieties. They had tons of cichlids, tons of discus, tons of angel fish. And now they've just recently added a nice showroom for their salt water. But like you said, it's a destination store and if I want to go look for a particular type of beta which they had a huge variety of betas, that's where I would go. And how far is it? 200 miles?

Yeah, it's a ways but if you want to find yourself in the correct market, find yourself as that destination place because you're not going to beat on anything else. And as far as the background goes for pet stores they try to make different specialized choices but they want to hear from what's in the area. In fargo, North Dakota area, we are a cichlid territory, right? The hobbyists on the Facebook pages everywhere around here they all love the peacock cichlids so we have one of our places in fargo, North Dakota, the tropical fish shop. Yeah, they do shout out to Jeff and Nancy.

Yeah, they do a wonderful job and they are known for their cichlids and they are a wealth of information accommodate.

To your customer, make sure it's a showroom and as far as other changes, they'll order what you want and they.

Are a true fish store. They don't sell dog food, they don't sell reptile stuff, they sell live plants and they're known for their live plants. They get live plants in every two weeks and people wait for that live plant to come in. They also do Tony Tan discus, which is where I like to get all my discus from is from Nancy and Jeff. Because you bring them in, they eat they eat from the second you get them in. They'll bring in about every two weeks of bringing a load of cichlids in. And the first person in line is my wife. She's up there. Nancy will send her a text. She also will send it out on Facebook and she'll bring in a large shipment of discus. And by using Facebook, she puts out there saying, here's what's here? The last time we're there, she had sold eight or ten discus that morning over the phone site unseen. People had just seen the picture, said, I'll take that one. And she's over there just throwing them in tanks with a sold, I think.

It was two weeks ago, she had a post that says shrimp are coming in on Monday. I think it was by that night I saw post, shrimp are gone. They'll be back next Monday.

Yeah.

What do you do?

I have to deliver shrimp up to her again because that's where she got them from this last time.

You're the shrimp guy, right?

She's been selling a tremendous amount of shrimp. Likes to do a lot of orange, yellows, red, reallys blues.

I just got to take a Monday off and go visit Nancy.

Yeah, they do a wonderful job up there. Up in fargo, North Dakota, we've got a petco and a pet smart in.

The same town, mind you. And she's still made herself unique from both of those competitions.

Independent, very successful. They got people driving from Grand forks, North Dakota, which is 100 miles to the north all the time because that's what they're known for, is their cyclist. So if you want a successful pet store, give people what they want. Listen to your customer get in those unique things, because anybody can get a guppy from the local stores. But if you want something crazy cool, then get it from your local people and they can find it. Just give them a little time.

So I think we did a nice generalization coverage from where fish come from, either farmed, wild, how they get here, how we take care of them, how distributors handle it, how pet stores and breeders handle different details. The only thing I really didn't cover is, and I did this on purpose, see, Jimmy is different types of outdoor fish. And when I say outdoor fish, coin goldfish. And what I like to do is I have a friend from bacal Fisheries in Toddsville, Iowa.

Shout out, shout out, shout out.

I'm reaching out to him and see if we can get him on the podcast. He has his own really well put farm. He's able to use some of the natural local river systems without having to release his stock into the wild. And it's really interesting how he does it. And he's very unique on how he breaches koi. Most people pride themselves in making sure they have, oh, it's imported from Japan. We grew it out. No, he imported many years ago, really high end Japan stock, and has kept his farm extremely inclusive on his own stock. He's been breeding his stock and now there's diseases and all these other issues happening with koi. He doesn't have that. He has a very unique breeding method. And I think taking his approach on the podcast and. Getting an interview with him will be beneficial for everyone to hear.

Yeah. That's a lot of these guys have done over the years past. They'll go ahead and get some top stock and then kind of quarantine themselves and continue just breeding their own stuff and being themselves protected from importing.

And that happens with other fish, but koi has never really gotten that part. No, koi, they'll bring them in. They'll put them in their own ponds. They'll grow them out for a year or two and then resell them.

The problem that you have with koi, as you do down in Florida, you could easily get birds grabbing fish from one pond to another, dropping them like eagles, hawks, that sort of thing. If you've got a contaminated pond that you've got under quarantine easily, something could happen where one fish gets picked up by an eagle and dropped over here and contaminates that. So it's been an ongoing problem for everybody throughout the years. That doesn't matter where you're at in this world. You could have a raccoon, take a fish and drag it over and put in the wrong spot.

So hopefully we'll get an interview with him. And also, we've been talking with some other people to get the interviews, more interviews on the podcast. So you'll be seeing exciting things coming from us, certainly. Go to our website, aquariumgyspodcast.com, pick out your favorite platform, and we have everything now. We finally are approved on Apple. We're on Google Music. We have stitcher spotify. If there's a podcaster out there and we're not on it, I'm shocked. And I will send you a $5 bill in the mail.

All right. I'm going to see if you're on pornhub.

That's not a podcast.

As far as I'm concerned, it is. Yeah. Okay.

The guy who just learned what a podcast was a month ago.

I know, but if I don't see something shocking, at least one podcast, you.

Know, hey, what happened to the Bill Clinton story that's we need to go further detail?

I have I have two Bill Clinton stories, and and we'll share that later on. All right. And how many betty White stories do you have left on me?

Hey, she's a beautiful, amazing woman.

Yeah. I'm going to go home and Google that.

Oh, boy.

Google that on my inner tube.

Well, thanks again, guys. Please not just subscribe and get the notifications to your phone, but share this with a friend. People in the hobby aren't alone. You've learned this from somewhere. You have a bro that could use some aquarium tips, and let us know what you want to hear in the podcast.

We are here for one reason, and that's to make you successful. And if we don't know the answer, we'll make one up or get a hold of somebody who does know the answer.

Thanks again, guys, and podcast out.

Podcast out.