Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. Today's sponsor for this episode is joe's Shrimp shack.

I love shrimp.

Wait, this is not your 599 all you can eat shrimp bar. This is 599 for some dank individual or a mental shrimp in your tank.

Mental shrimp.

That's ornamental.

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Well, you'll go mental when you see the awesome selection. And he has a Joe shrimp shack.com. He just actually had an open house. Joe Shrimp shack is located in Plymouth, Minnesota. That's in the metro of Minnesota. And he had an open house to our Minnesota Aquarium Society.

Yes, he did. We did not get invited.

No, we were invited. I just didn't tell you because I'm a terrible human being.

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That is phenomenal.

You bought me shrimp, right?

No, I'm not buying you shrimp.

Well, that's because you didn't invite him.

Yeah, it's right. I'll buy you something.

That's it. Adam is buying me shrimp. It's all right to it.

Somebody'S not buying you shrimp.

So now this episode want to talk about the Ohio Fish Rescue as we do each week. But there was a wonderful piece of information on the Ohio Fish rescue's Facebook page this week. Go on to it. You will see that a young boy decided that on his birthday party, he told all his friends, I don't want presents, just money to send the Ohio Fish Rescue for my birthday.

What a sweetheart.

So he took a picture, sent a big letter to Big Rich and Josh and got $150 donated to the Ohio Fish Rescue and almost put them in tears, but maybe did put them in tears. We don't know. Yeah, I mean, that mullet, he's a brave man. He's strong. He'll hold those tears in.

Man, what a fantastic thing to do to help out these guys over at Ohio Fish Rescue.

So if a boy can sacrifice his entire birthday party, you can spend $5 going to Ohiofish rescue.com and donating to the cause to give fish a big fish, a better home.

And if you want to buy a T shirt to help support these guys, or else you want to go on their Facebook page and donate a little bit of money, they will be greatly appreciate it.

Let's kick that podcast. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob tolson. Welcome, guys, to the aquarium. Guys. Podcast. And I've been so excited this week. I have got the best guest yet, Jimmy.

You do?

I do.

You do.

Today we have on the podcast dr. Joseph pollock of the University of North Carolina, wilmington. Is that correct? Did I say that correctly?

That is correct.

Now, you're a doctor of marine biology and a Doctor of Love, is that correct? I'm sorry, I just got that off of your LinkedIn profile. It's quite long.

No, just the first one.

He was unprepared for that.

Have you ever been called Doctor Love?

Doctor of Love?

No, never.

We are going to call you.

This could go in any direction.

It's going to I mean, we had nothing to give. We can't give a handout to our guests to prepare them for this. All we can tell them was, like, listen to our podcast. And even then, it's very much random, so roll the dice. But thanks again for coming on the podcast, buddy.

Totally. My pleasure. I'm glad to be here.

So far.

He's glad to be here. Right?

We'll do that might change. We'll do a question here at the end of that.

Well, actually, HR contacted us. They have to have each guest now do an after action review on each one of our podcasts. We know not to what make fun of that is going to be on it for sure.

Yeah, we have HR.

Okay, so I haven't signed any forms.

That's right.

Everything in time, if we have to.

Do will disguise your voice so nobody knows who you are.

We do that before every roller coaster ride. So I am your host, Rob Z olson.

And I am Jim colby.

And I'm Adam ella shar.

And how come Adam doesn't get any billing?

Hey, I like this guy already.

Oh, man.

Here, I'll tell you why. Because Adam came late to the party. We paid for that great intro. And then about three or four weeks later, I introduced Adam to my buddy Robbie here, and we went, we got to have Adam on this podcast, and then we already had it done. So why spend an extra $40? Right?

So we have a lot of emails, so I'm going to try to cram these down so we can get right to the interview. But this podcast, we want to go over Victorian era aquariums. I've been fascinated by these. You cannot find these just laying around. They're not like your metal framed meta frame aquariums from the these are a completely different animal, and they only come up in extreme rare options. Or you can see them on antique roadshow.

Antique roadshow.

They have them occasionally.

But these are aquariums made back in the 18 hundreds, correct?

That is right, yeah. And, you know, metaphrames were made well into the 70s. Really? Yeah. My first aquarium in 67 was a metaphrame with a slate bottom and asphaltum sealant because Dow corning hadn't come up with silicone yet.

Yeah, they made it a little bit better. I have a 1930s one that I'm restoring, and it definitely has the flaxseed oil, tar, all the, you know, lead oxide. It's as gross as you could be.

They leaked within two years because basically the stuff got too dry.

100%.

Yeah.

So we'll learn about that today. But let's go over the emails again. So the first one I'm going to give to Jimmy. Because every time I talk to or hear someone this is like jimmy's big pet peeve. So it went down on me. Okay. Good afternoon. I'm doing some research on lowering my PH in my aquarium in order to accommodate my fish a little better. I am new to the hobby and have a 36 gallon planted tank. And I'm getting ready to set up another 55 in my wife's basement. His wife's basement, wife base it. This guy knows what's up.

Either that or he's been married a very long time.

Right. Our city tap runs PH about 8.28.4, which is rather hard, and I'd like to lower it to seven range to accommodate fish that I'm keeping doing a reading online. I know I don't want to do an ro system or purchase a silver water consistently. Peat moss seems to be a good option without much hassle, but I'm unsure if I decided to attempt this option. What issues may I run into for my plant nutrients? Keeping a PH stable through water changes. Is it even something worth hassling with? Thanks so much, Kyle from Lincoln, Nebraska.

Lincoln, Nebraska.

Yeeha.

Maybe he's a corn husker or something. I don't know.

He's got a good etiquette and he knows that his wife owns the house, so I'm just saying he's above average.

Kyle is a well trained puppy. I like it.

So Jimmy, what should he do?

PH drives me up the wall. Personally. One of my stores truly believes in PH up and PH down, which I think works great for about four days and then it drops or gets jacked back up. When you start having that wild of a swing on PH, that's when your fish start freaking out and having problems. My personal little peat moss wouldn't hurt. Unfortunately with peat moss, you're going to get that dark color in your tank. But a good way is just to mix half ro water and regular water which will kind of meet it in the middle.

And even then you still risk that much RL water stripping stuff in your tank. We've talked about it before in the podcast that ARL water has nothing in it, so it will find the calcium. It'll rust away shells right off your live snail. It'll pull slime coat off your fish. So be careful how much ro you're using. But otherwise almond leaves.

Almond leaves were great and I like almond leaves. They don't really make the ink all that dark, but they do a great job. Today I just brought in about 150 cichlives. I just picked them up from the airport this afternoon and in every bag there's a six or seven almond leaves. And those sick leaves were just hidden in there. I brought in 150. I think I lost three. So I really like almond leaves.

So if you do this PH up, PH down type products out there. A lot of them are just like solvent based, and they oxidize in the tank. So you add them to the tank after four days when your bubblers running, your filters are running, it's just not going to maintain that mixture. It's not like you're going to set up a saltwater aquarium, add this much salt, and the salt is going to stay there. It's going to evaporate and go away, and the sitting tank won't maintain PH.

It's kind of like a yoyo just goes up and it goes down. And that's when you start having problems with fish.

It's a real bad Band Aid, in my opinion.

What else you got?

Well, you guys also forgot about driftwood.

Yeah.

Any type of organic material. So welcome to the podcast.

Adam heavens here.

Well, that and Adam, he's a consequence of wooden and all things. That's right, tank and life. He has an old woody car. Does he? On the panel, on the side?

How are you? how's his fortune?

He watches Toy Story a lot just because woody is his favorite character.

So how big a piece of driftwood should he put in a 55 gallon tank, Adam?

Well, I don't know a big enough one that fits. Probably two or three.

It depends.

Why is he trying to lower the PH to like, seven neutral? Like, is it for the fish? Well, he never said what kind of fish he had.

According to this. Right. It says fishing plants. I believe he said that he looked up and it suggests that he's just going off of a manual that this is what they think they should be. If your fish are healthy and they said they should be in six and you have an eight, guess what? You're doing it right. It's using your tap. Your fish are healthy regardless. They've already acclimated to your PH. Don't change it because the book told you otherwise. If you have a healthy fish, keep it healthy.

Yeah.

And depending on where you're buying, I mean, if you're buying your fish from down the road, they've already been acclimated to the water in your local community.

So ask your local fish store what PH their water is. Then you know how long you have to drip them in, or if you have to somehow borrow his water to acclimate them slower over two water changes. There are certainly ways to do it, but there are some species that you're just not going to be able to have. For instance, the cardinia versus neocardenia on the shrimp. Some of those are going to be touchy and you're going to have problems even with long term acclimation. But work around it. If you're fisher healthy, leave them alone. Thanks, Kyle. So next email we have Leonard. Leonard says, hey, guys, I thought I was in a few picks and possibly post on your page. I added four keyhole cichlids to one of my tanks. These are pretty cool. So he sent some pictures of his tank, his plants. goodies. Now, we had on our website a fish Bolton board. We put that up at the early stages of our podcast, thinking, well, we only have X fans now. We have thousands of fans across the world and it's impossible to keep up with the emails that we're getting with all these pictures. So what we're doing instead is on our discord. You can go to aquariumdispodcast.com. On the bottom of the website, you'll find our discord link. We have an entire feed filled with a communities full of pictures, just scrolls for days. It continues because we got people coming from all different countries. Discord never shuts down. So if you want to share some pictures, get them in there. And soon we're going to have a picture contest where Jimmy himself gets to pick out his favorite pictures.

I'm probably going to win because with.

My discus, I mean, you can't pick your own fish. That is part of the rules.

Then why do I want to be part of this if I can't win in?

Because you're captain.

Yeah, right.

They won't trust me. They have to trust you. I said the Arnold has to vote on the pictures.

Nobody wants to be captain of the sinking ship, my lord.

Well, you have to stay on it, all right? It's too late. You have to pick them. So put your pictures not it our fan page, discord instead. We love these pictures, getting them, but there's just too many of you that love us for some reason. All right, next email. This one has no name. He calls him a self reptile crazy. So it must be adam's friends.

Okay.

This one's for Adam.

I don't know. Hey, guys. Absolutely love the podcast. Was wondering I have a 6.5 gallon planted tank. My plants are growing like crazy and the tank looks awesome. Started a few days after Christmas. I got four guppies doing awesome a week or so. Added some black tetris. The day I added the tetras, they started showing white spots in their fins, eventually covering their whole bodies like salt.

Sounds like IC.

I immediately treated the tank with api. Super iq. Plus. Decent product. It's got the methyl and blue in it could find at my local fish store. I've been treating them now doing water changes over two weeks. Got the tetras have somehow gotten worse. My guppies are showing signs of it now. I'm assuming it's IC. I have been diligently treating the tank, like I said, for two weeks. And problems are even worse. Can you tell me what I can do to try to set my fish from dying? Also, do you think the treatments will hurt my bio filtration or my plants? I love the podcast. tremendously. Keith, it does have a name at the bottom. Keith from Portland, Maine.

Portland, Maine. Anytime you put a chemical like methane blue in there, it will screw up all your bios. There's a couple of different ways you can do it if you're looking for a different way, I've had some luck with just doing a dip, taking the fish out and dipping them in really thick blue methane, blue water, and leaving them in there for half an hour with a bubbler and bringing them out and stuff. There's also some copper products out there.

That will kill those plants, but it.

Will kill your plants. Yes.

A lot of these that they have, like, super thick here have copper in them with the methyl and blue. And methyl and blue stains everything in your tank. So if you have just plastic plants or decorative ornaments or even wood, it's going to turn blue. It's going to have some blue in it. You're literally putting a hard blue dye in your tank. So my recommendation is, if you have that, get yourself a uv filter sterilizer.

There you go.

Get them for like, $30 online, put it in your tank, and it literally treats the water. As long as the flow is enough for your tank and 6.5 gallons, any uv filter is going to work for you as long as it fits in your tank.

Yeah, you helped me purchase a uv sterilizer not that long ago. It looks like a glow stick.

So there's the prior uv sterilizers that look like an in water filter or hang on the back filter. Those are that $45 filter because it pushes water across the uv bulb. What I got you instead is you have a hang on the back filter in most of your tanks. So it's cheaper just to go on Amazon and purchase just the drop in bulb so you can just put it right in your filter. They're like 1012 bucks, and it turns your current filter into a uv filter.

And it works fantastic. And I laughed at Rob when he said, hey, check this out. And it looked to me like a glow stick that you would go to a rave or something and wave it in the air when you're dancing or something. But I put it in there at some discus that I imported. They did great for the first three or four days, and then they came down and they started clamping their fins. And so Rob came over and said, Jay, try this out. And so we put it in the back of the filter. And my gosh, after a couple of days, they came around, start eating, and they're doing great now. Right now, I've got about 1520 discus in that tank.

Now, when you do this, if you get just the uv filtration with the pump and everything, they covered the bulb. That's not on purpose because it's ultraviolet rays. If you want your fish to get skin cancer, make sure it's covered. Don't just leave it out in the open or expose or even if the light, like, on the back of my wall, they're in this the hard way. I have a little painted or wallpaper wall behind it. If the light exposed out of the filter, it'll bleach anything it touches. So if you have a blue wall, it's only going to be white in those spots. You have uvs there for the next six months. So make sure you're covering it up and you're putting it in the filter so that your fish aren't exposed to direct rays.

And basically it's just kind of like microwave and all the add stuff out of your water is how it's working.

Sterilizing all the IC in the water so it doesn't treat the fish. The fish will automatically go through their cycle and their sores will heal. It just stops more IC in the tank from spreading. You're killing the IC in the water.

Good answer.

All right.

Garlic works also.

Yes, it does. Talk about that. Let's talk about heat for a second.

Oh, gosh.

Yeah, heat works because heat accelerates the cycle of the IC. So it increases it, it makes the ick mature faster, and then it drops off and the spores go into the tank. And then if you use the garlic and feed it to them on the frozen food or flake food, the garlic builds up in their slime coat, and then the IC can't penetrate their slime coat.

So what are we doing here? We have a gentleman that is a professor of marine biology, and he's got a class for the noobs that are listening to this podcast.

He got his head going.

Can you explain the cycle of ICT to our audience, sir?

Well, basically you guys have done a pretty good job of that. What I would use is a diatomaceous earth filter.

These guys have been doing it for.

A while, old school, because you basically get the reproductive part that's in the water out, and if you raise the temperature of the tank and you use one of those, you'll watch it just sort of fade away.

I didn't know that trick.

Don't use old ones.

The problem is that well, actually, I still have one of those old fashioned mason jar ones. They still work pretty well, but a lot of the new canister filters have diatom attachments. Those work great, but it's kind of a mess, but it works.

We've heard from other people in this podcast, too, that there's different diatom filter powders, and some are a lot different than others. Have you come across that?

Well, the stuff that they sell for people's swimming pools are of a different grade than the really high quality stuff that they used to sell specifically for aquaria. I think it's because the places where they mine die tomaceous earth, there are really pure areas and areas that have lots of other stuff in it, too. So it's basically an issue of the quality of the diatomaceous earth.

So along with the higher qualities, can be a little bit more expensive, price. I'm assuming.

Yeah, only probably because when you buy the pool filter stuff, you're buying it in great big 50 pound bags, and usually that you buy a little canister of the stuff that's for aquarius. So it's a matter of the amount of money per unit, tomato surf that you're paying for it. Yeah, I would buy specifically the stuff that's made for aquaria.

Excellent. Now, when I say that some diatom filters explode in the I believe it's the 70s, there was a line of diatom filters that kind of ended the popular use of them. They were made a little cheaper. They had way too fine of filtration media, and over time, after a long time of use, the pressure would clog the filter and they would literally crack and explode. And there was a lot of recalls on these, so check if you're having one that's made of a Mason jar, you're probably fine, like the one you were speaking of. But if you have an old one that's manufactured, check when it was made. Check if there's a recall, because they've literally labeled recalls and stuff that broke five years down the road.

Once upon a time, whisper had one here. Not that many years ago. Probably 15 years ago. Adam, do you remember the Diet to Magic filter? It was like a backfill that hung in the back, and he put diet on.

Oh, yeah, magnum. The magnum.

Hot filters. He's mistaking that for condominium.

No, it was whisper. Diet to Magic is what it was called. And I don't know if they're still available. You probably can find them on ebay or something like that, but they actually worked really well. I use them a lot in my pet store.

Perfect.

Adam'S right. The magnum filters did have diatom inserts.

They did, yeah. Holy cow. So there's all kinds of different things that we can do for IC. But another thing we can do, too, when you bring in new fish quarantine, we've talked about that over and over.

Quarantine for two weeks, minimum.

Quarantine for two weeks. And that just gives you another reason to buy another tank.

Exactly. Just to support the hobby and make your wife love you that much more.

It's a win win.

It's a win win.

Gain, gain.

All right, guys, before we continue on with the podcast, we have some future merch that we're looking into. There is a fun gal that I've been working with for years ago, actually getting these old ceramic signs. So back in the day, when I was a wee boy in the 90s, my grandma would go out to the pet store. I was never we.

You're never we.

I took a we go to the pet store, and you find these little ceramic signs. They're just little wood, the fake wood and white signs, and they have little sayings on them. You could get mermaid. cove. You could get all different, like fun little sayings on it. Just out fishing no fishing, no swimming.

The one here in your tanks. Is skinny dipping encouraged.

Well, see, that's the point. I have worked out with this wonderful lady in Michigan to make custom signs, so we can put pretty much anything that isn't super offensive on these things. And I even have skinny dipping encouraged. mermaids wanted.

How about don't pee in the water? That's what that one says, right?

Don pee in the water. We have the new the Aquarium Guys podcast. Official signs. And I'll post the first prototypes on Facebook, so check them out. Those will be coming soon. And again, if you like what you hear and like the podcast, certainly number one, support our sponsors. They help the podcast going. Or you can donate directly to us on the bottom of our page. According to podcast.com, there'll be a donate button you can do one time or recurring. It really supports the show. And help us get new audio equipment, like this wonderful green screen behind you, Jimmy, that we'll be using for YouTube streams.

Yes, I'm very excited about this. And when you're not around, I'm going to do the weather for the local people.

So I've been talking to Jimmy because, again, a new little podcast studio we have, and he just refuses. Every time I mentioned that we should get green screen suits, he doesn't want to get in a green onesie to just have floating heads for the podcast.

I look like a fat zucchini.

No one knows this. They just see your face, which I guess is fat, isn't it?

Yes.

You should let him have the green, Jim. You could tell him that you'll wear the suit if he lets you play the diggery Do for, like, five episodes.

There you go. So think of it. Five episodes, jimmy's, floating head playing a digger reduce.

Playing did reduce. And I also told you we do have guitars at the house. Maybe I bring one of those. And yesterday I looked at drum sets.

Excellent. All right, well, Joe, thanks again for coming to the podcast. Yeah, thank you for staying with us.

You got off the quiet. I thought he hung up.

No, he's just laughing at the magnum joke.

Yeah, the magnum joke.

So, Joe, how I found you was I was scouring the Internet for these Victoria aquariums. I've been obsessed with these types of aquariums for years, always dreamed of having one, and I've always looked for, like, third party businesses that could possibly make me one. But I found your video on your YouTube channel, and you have and have restored your own Victorian tank. Where did you find this tank?

Well, I had no idea these things existed at all until the dawn of ebay and online auctions. I own a house that's also a Victorian era, and I was in DC at the time, working for the government and decided to start going to the local auctions there. And over the course of time, just sort of perusing whatever was at these local auctions. I came across one of these and it was like, I have never seen anything like this. And I've been keeping tanks since 1967. I had no idea these existed. And so I trotted off to the shenandoah Valley, to this little high school where they were having this auction, and here's this beautiful I mean, it wasn't in very good condition, but just the whole concept of it was so cool. There was a phone bidding war over this tank and it wound up going for over $11,000. And I did not come home with it at that price. So that was the first one I ever saw. And I was hooked. I had to have one. And it was at that point I started researching them and realized that they were as rare as you said. They very rarely come up, even at auction. And then the ones that did finally come up at auction usually went way beyond my means until I just lucked out. There was one at an auction house near Boston, and basically the online Internet situation sort of collapsed like some of what we've been experiencing today. And I got through. I was the high bidder for a fraction of what these other things have been going for and drove 36 hours to Boston from wilmington and picked it up and brought it back. And that's where I am.

Wow. 36 hours. Is that one way or that both ways? Two.

Both ways. Both ways? Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

The thing about a cast iron, it's like glass. You don't want to ship it because if you drop it or in any way sort of bump up against it, you can crack it. And the older it is, the more likely it is. It's very strong, but it's like glasses or porcelain. It's very strong. It just doesn't take being beat up in any way. So I didn't want to break the bowl part, which is the heaviest. It's the thickest cast iron, but it's the most likely to be damaged if someone were to drop it. So I drove up there and put it in my vehicle and came all the way back.

So when you drove home with this thing in the back, were you like a first time parent with a baby in the back going, get away from me. Quit pulling out in front of me. Quit. teal got me.

He got a little fine fish tank on board.

Fish tank on board?

Yeah.

That goes a long way on the interstate, doesn't it?

And the thing was heavy as can be. So I'm driving this pt cruiser, and I'm very concerned that I'm going to get in an accident. It's going to go right through the front end of the vehicle or the.

Back of your head. One of the two, right?

Yeah. It was an event.

Final Destination movies are popping through his head, thinking it's going. To go somewhere.

Oh, man.

So when did you purchase this? How long ago?

This was 22,007, six or seven. So I've had it that long.

So in what condition did you get this in?

No glass in it. All the pieces were in the basin. So for your listeners who don't know what we're talking about, this thing basically looks like a bird bath, a pedestal to bird bath with an octagonal tank on the top of the bird bath bowl, and then a set of connecting cast iron cross pieces that hold it all together. And you really have to see a picture of it to appreciate it.

For the listeners on our podcast, we're actually going to have the videos. You have a set of videos? Three videos, I think, of this tank and how you restored it and a lot more details into it. And number one, seeing the end product. It'll be in our show notes, but you can also go to YouTube and just look. pollock Lab, you have a bunch of other videos on your page as well of your work at the school, right?

Lots of diving videos from all over the world.

Definitely entertaining.

But yeah, I mean, the condition that the tank was in when I got to beverly, Massachusetts, was it was rusty, no glass, and all the parts, essentially the parts that support the glass were just sitting in the basin. And miraculously, everything was there. I couldn't believe it because the likelihood of them having lost one of those pieces was huge. And at that point, it wasn't like I could just make something up. These are pretty integral to the overall tank, so if you're missing one of the uprights, there's nothing you can do. I mean, you can't just improvise just.

The amount of detail alone on these tanks. I don't think you'd have to carve it. There's really no easy way to replicate the amount of detail.

So ornate on the bottom.

I'm just looking at some pictures of your tank right now. On the bottom, there's these beautiful cranes that are sticking out with full, long beaks that are protruding out of the bottom. Each and every inch of the tank, besides the very top bar, is some ornate decoration. So even if you did try and have someone try to fabricate one, they're never going to get it. Correct.

Yeah, that's right.

Now, quick question. When you purchased this tank, did you get any history from anybody about where it came from or who had it or what happened?

As is usually the case with auctions, unless the entire auction is an estate of somebody and they actually talk about who that person was, you really don't know where any of this stuff comes.

From because those tanks back in the day were a lot of money. I mean, this is somebody that was well to do, that owned these tanks at one time, correct?

That's correct. Yes. And the interesting thing to think about is that in order for them to put those tanks together, they had essentially 15 linear feet of joint that was underwater. And if any of that leaked, it was a mess. So I expect that under normal circumstances, they probably had these either in a conservatory or outside in the garden, because the likelihood of them leaking, if they put them together with either asphaltum, which is pretty likely, or I can tell that mine was at least once put together with plaster. So they must have put the panes in with plaster paris, waited till the plaster paris dried, and then painted the plaster paris so that it wouldn't be redisolved by the water. And there were actually layers of plaster paris in the glass support grooves in.

The basin from what we learned from the meta frames. Because I've studied these parts of just what they used to use for some of these grooves and crannies from, like, the 1930s tank that I have, that one's made with lead oxide, tar and flaxseed oil. But before they really use any type of lead oxide, they can get that fancy. It was a plaster mixed with the flaxseed oil, and if they're lucky, they'd have some sort of, like, small tar base mix with it. But it didn't bond well with the plaster.

I didn't know about the flaxseed oil combination with plaster. That's interesting.

I mean, flaxseed oil is a cooking ingredient. It does not last long. So it was just there to adhere the first time. And then you're essentially sitting on a hope and a prayer.

I mean, I'm just sitting sitting here listening to this stuff and going, can any of this stuff be good for the fish and the plants?

Well, I honestly think they painted it and then the paint was the surface that was exposed to the water. And paint isn't good for fish either.

Plaster won't hold water directly. You have to have some sort of bonding agent to protect the plaster from the water. Otherwise the plaster just dissolves instantly. Well, within instantly, anyway.

Instantly. So you drove, did a little 36 hours road trip, came home with this thing. Where do you start next? I mean, you got the jigsaw puzzle, basically.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, the first thing was to take off all of the paint that, in some cases was a half an inch thick on the base because it had been clearly painted multiple times and nobody had restricted it. So I used a commercial stripper. I got all of the paint off. And by the way, when I talk about this sort of thing to people that are museum curators, they get very upset with as far as they're concerned, you're never supposed to touch any of these things. You're just supposed to leave them alone and put them somewhere where people can look at them. But that wasn't what I was going to do with it. First, I stripped all the paint off and got the interesting thing. The fisc Company had a lot of proprietary cast iron recipes, and their cast iron was very much unlike the kind of cast iron you find today that rusts in thick rust. This stuff would rust with a very thin patina, almost like, you know, how aluminum oxidizes, and you get that very thin white powder. This developed a rusty powder, but it wasn't anything like the kind of cast iron that's usually made today. And I think what they did was they combined zinc and iron in their manufacturer so that they had a much stronger and less rusty cast iron. So that was kind of an interesting aspect of it, too. And I think that's one of the reasons why all of their cast iron has such incredible detail, that it preserves that detail because of the kind of metal that they use to make these pieces.

Now, to explain some of the other tanks that are from the era that they have had available, almost everything they had were on some ornate pedestal. Even the classic rectangular tanks, which were used a little later in this kind of era of aquarist. They still had they were not a single box frame like we have underneath. They would just have four ornate legs. Kind of like an old Victorian chair, right.

Pretty amazing. Yeah. And some of those still survive as well. These big almost look like feathers that come up and inform curly cues. Or there are others that look like they're more rod iron than cast iron. The difference is that cast iron is made in a mold, and rod iron is usually like rods that are sort of wrought into whatever decorative form they want to make. But you're dead on that. Everything was done to the hilt in terms of ornate mess. To me, what's pretty cool. Of course, I was raised mid century modern, which is like, to me, not worth it. It's just too plain. I like all this ornate stuff.

Yeah, it is very, very beautiful tank. So after you got to the point where you got all the paint stripped, then what was your next step?

All of the parts that weren't going to see water, I just put a very thin coating of black Rustolium so that you could really see the detail of the cast iron. And then over the years, I've gone through multiple iterations of what I did with the surfaces that were exposed to water. And I started out using things that I thought would work well, including two part epoxy. That was for swimming pools. I tried using a dow corning silicone that actually spreads like paint. None of those worked. Over time, they might work for a year, but what would happen ultimately is that you would get these rust blisters on the bottom, and they never seem to hurt the fish, but they look bad. So ultimately, I discovered that West Marine two part epoxy was a thing to use. And so all the surfaces that were in any way exposed to water had to be covered, coated with that. And then black dow corning aquarium sealant. Not the kind that has methanol in it, the kind that's specifically for aquaria that still has acetic acid in it. That's the stuff to use. Trust me. It's a very interesting prospect, putting those uprights in and then having to have the glass cut for it, and then fitting the glass sort of on the beads of silicone, and then making sure that the glass is pushing against the silicone so that the water pressure is actually sealing the tank.

You should see jim's face right now. It's just filled with anxiety thinking about this. It's just like full on clenching his butthole.

I have fixed somebody tanks in my life and I'm getting anxiety just thinking about that.

The good thing about it was the part that takes the most are those upright pieces, the ones that have the corn and wheat detail on them. If you just put big globs of silicone on those and you push the glass against them, it's over. I mean, once that sets up. I have never had a leak in this tank, and I've redone it now twice. And the reason I had to redo it was because the first kind of glass that I used scratched really badly. And so I decided I was sick of seeing those scratches. So I basically took the whole thing down and redid it with glass that was tempered. And those are all things that aquarium companies do for you. They make all those decisions. So you don't realize that there are different kinds of glass, and some glass is easier to scratch than others.

Did you get your glass from your local hardware store?

Did you contact yeah, from a regular glass supply company. The same company that makes glass for your car.

It's so much fun going into those places and be like, I need this weird piece cut to this exact dimensioners. Looking at you like, what are you doing?

They did not bat an eye. They get this sort of thing all the time. Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, as long as I had the dimensions. And I just said, I want you to temper it after you cut it, and I want you to make sure that the edges aren't going to cut me. It's like sure, no problem. It'll be ready in two days. That was it.

You just blew me away there. And you said you temper it after you cut it. How do they temper glass? I've never seen that done.

They put it in an oven to heat it to a certain temperature. Yeah.

Okay. Because I was going to say, because Robbie and I this past weekend, I hate this guy so much, he made me come over here to his house and we drilled aquariums all weekend long.

It was great.

That's fun.

Oh, yeah. So the sound is grinding. Sound like a dentist in your mouth with a drill and maybe a ten piece brass band with four dogs barking in your nose. I mean, that's the noises thing makes as we're drilling.

Such a drama queen, man.

Yeah. And Robbie Saturday, the whole time with his headset on going listen to music or something. I don't know what he was doing.

I'm just listening to careless whisper by wham. We'll play it right here.

Right here. I like it.

Yeah. See that? That song is the best song of all time.

Yeah. No wonder you were just kind of googly eyed.

George and Andy Michael the right there.

Wait, I thought George Michael did it by himself.

Careless whisperer?

No, Andy andy was he published it himself, but Andy helped out. Yeah, andy's the man, all right. He's a secret guru behind it. But anyway, what I'm trying to do offer a tangent off on a tangent, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to set up a rack full of ten gallon aquariums and I'm trying to hook them all up in one system that requires having drains in the back. For those that are listening, we'll just go full tangent on this one, right? For those that are listening, we're going to put up a YouTube video showing how happy Jimmy was when we were doing this, explaining how to drill holes and tanks. But in doing so, we didn't know if they were tempered or not. And jimmy's had a few times where he's cut tempered glass. how'd that go for you, buddy?

Yeah, when you get to bigger tanks like forty s and fifty five s, usually the bottom is tempered. Usually they have a nice little tag that say tempered. The tanks we were doing were smaller, so I knew they weren't tempered. But we'll we did find out when we were drilling glass that the older tanks are much more brittle. Kind of like your grandma at the home.

Poor Grandma.

Yeah. The newer tanks we did went by pretty quick, but we went anywhere from 45 seconds to probably 1012 minutes to drill a tank.

I timed us. Our longest tank was 20 minutes oh, Lord. Just to put a single 1.5 inch hole in the back. And these are identical tanks. They're just all different ages. Some of them are new, some of them them are real old and some of them, they'll even be new, but they'll just have a different glass.

And you can hear that just when you're cutting these. You can hear the different sounds it makes and you can tell this is going to be easy, this is going to be tough. So when joe's telling me about getting the glass and putting in the tank and for those listeners out there, the tank is octagonal. Right.

Jimmy'S just getting flashbacks from nam anytime he hears about glass and gluing.

Lord. So when you go into the octagonal tanks. They're even more difficult than a regular rectangular tank. So I was impressed.

So let's say you're going to make yourself or repair an octagonal tank. The edges aren't flush. It's almost guaranteed if you buy a new tank nowadays that it's going to leak after, say, five, six years. We have one that's upstairs. It's a pentagon tank. It's got some weird corner missing. And sure enough, you look at that tank that we bought, it used, it was resealed, must be at least twice. Right, so doing these, we have to do glass to glass. Yours was glass to pedestal deal. Was there any pedestal deal?

That's the official title.

These things were. You spent a lot of money getting these casts. And were any of the grooves dented or any issues?

No, they're in perfect shape. Yeah. I mean, you had to get all the plaster and the rust out of them. But once that was done, the grooves were slightly larger than the glass size. Of course, you can get glass in all different thicknesses, so that wasn't an issue. But, yeah, I didn't have any problem with that.

So to go into these tanks a bit more, just to give you listeners a small lesson on how some of these tanks were built, the most common were the octagonal tanks, where they had either like a hex design or multiple sides. It's not just the square box design, they had some of those, but it was more common to put them on a pedestal and have the eight side design. The only other tanks that you see from this Victorian era of aquariums are bowls. And you really don't see bowls go up for auction. The bowls that were very ornate, they were blown glass, and when they were blown, they weren't exactly blown perfectly. One side was thinner than the other side, and they were set in these ornate metal holders, essentially trying to make them look like either like a crown design on top, with some bars on the side maintaining and holding that bowl. You really don't see these come up for auction because they broke. Probably within the first couple of years.

Of purchase, you have seen the stands sometimes come up, but not the bulls.

Yeah, the bulls. You have to have a professional reblow them for you, otherwise pretty much out of luck.

Where do you even start looking if you find one of these pedestals? Where do you even start looking to find a glass blower that would even be interested in trying to make this work for you?

There's a TV show on Netflix.

Most chemistry departments at large universities have a glass blower.

Really?

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. And most of them are always looking for something fun and different to do. So University of Minnesota, I'm sure, has a glass blower in its chemistry department.

Interesting. So once you got to the point where you got the glass glued on, what was your next step.

In its most recent iteration, I decided that I really needed a stable gravel bed for the plants that was separate from the water that was moving through the basin down to the bottom of the basin and then up into the rest of the tank. And this doesn't probably sound like it makes much sense, but if you watch the video, you'll figure it out. So I wound up putting a pump in the base of this rockwork column that sits in the center of the tank. The really interesting thing about these tanks is if you set it up that way and you arrange the water output, the output of your pump to direct using those what do you call those black things that stick together so that you've got kind of I don't even know what to call them. There are multiple ball ports that look like tinker Toys that you put together. And the water you can direct the flow.

Like a ball head fitting?

Like a bulkhead fitting?

Yes. Well, no. The ones that have ball and sockets in multiple combinations, adjustable heads, they literally.

Come in like you can get them along with canister filters. It's a ball and socket and then it has like a spout. So you can actually directionalize the water flow.

Right. But there are multiples of them so that they are chained together.

Right. You can just keep trickling water in multiple different directions.

Yeah.

Oh, boy.

He didn't seem so if you go to the video, you'll see what I'm talking about. There are multiple ball and sockets that form a line and you can sort of angle the whole contraption. And then at the very end, there's a diffuser, essentially a flattened, almost spatulate part that pushes the water out. In any case, the water comes from the bottom of the tank. The pump pumps it up there and then pushes it out so that it winds up hitting the wall of the tank tangentially. So the entire tank winds up becoming a ring tank and the water spins in it.

I always call those rain bars because generally they go above the tank. They're just a bunch of little spigots and then have the one like a flat diffuser at the end. These are actually getting more and more common now in the aquarium hobby trade, as in filter, in tank filters because they just attach them to a normal pump and then hold them above the water to make an even flow. They have directional ones that they have for canister filters. And I'm pretty sure because I watch your video, that's what you're using. Or the ones just like those.

I have the directional ones in my acrylic unit that we just set up over at the house.

They're quite handy for dissipating flow.

Yeah, well, the result is that your fish wind up thinking they're in a river. Right. Because it's not a rectangular tank, it's a round tank. It's a ring tank. So the water is traveling in a circle, and the center Rockwear column essentially provides a place where the fish can't see each other. So you get all these really interesting interactions. And you can keep fish that would kill each other or fight, because they can essentially escape from one another by simply getting in another part of the ring.

It's like a pseudo river, because think of your grandma's angel food cake pan. Right.

You have that column in the middle, a bunt pan.

Bun, right.

Yeah. Right.

It's the bunt pan theorem, or toilet bowl theorem, because when you flush, it goes in the circle.

Australia. Yeah, exactly.

So that's one of the interesting and completely different properties of this tank. The other thing is that it has a very large upper surface that you look down into. And I had never kept a tank where I spent more time looking at the fish from above than I did from the side. And that winds up being pretty cool because they're really interesting from above. But what that means is that in order to do that, you have to have a skimmer in the tank to constantly get rid of any sort of organic sludge that seems to be common in a tank that you don't otherwise have a filter in, and it keeps the water surface perfectly clean.

And you put it like a small skimmer in your earth. Correct.

Right. They're available on from any of the aquarium supply places. It's a really interesting device. It's a cup that sits on a tube, just pulls the water in through a series of upright bars on a cup.

Like a little crown.

Yes, like a little crown. That's exactly what it looks like. And so you wind up in the end. I have two pumps running the whole thing. The one that circulates the primary water through the tank, and then the other one that runs the skimmer.

And then for heating, you use a 300 watt titanium heater.

Correct. Yeah. And that's not being used exactly the way they want you to. They want you to always keep those in a horizontal position.

Probably why it still works.

Adam I have had nothing but trouble with titanium heaters. I finally found a brand that works.

Here to share with the class not sponsored.

I'm not going to be able to remember it just offhand cobalt.

We'll just start throwing names at you.

Probably a cobalt.

Is it shiny?

No, it wasn't a cobalt. But in any case, the fact that the skimmer pump essentially directs its flow against it means that you don't have the problem that they worry about when you hold those things vertically, which is that the heat rises up against the thermostat, and so it causes the thermostat to malfunction. But if there's enough flow on it, you don't have that problem.

I have a tank where I'm trying to bury a heater in the corner just because I have so many plants in it. So what I actually ended up doing, just so I don't have to worry about that and have flow against it, is I took an aerator aquarium aerator with airstone, and literally took that whole thing and put it to the bottom of the heater. So at all times, this heater is completely covered in bubbles exchanging water across it. And that fixed my issues as well.

That whole problem. Right. Keeps the thermostat reading a proper temperature. Yeah.

So going back to the top of these aquariums, all of these Victorian air aquariums really had a theme where they had no lids. There were no lids designed on purpose for air exchange. I really don't know why, baby. They just were worried about molding. Not sure, but that was a theme with horizontal octagonal or bull tanks that none of these had tops, and that's kind of been lost. We've always had covers because we're worried about water, losing water heat exchanged from the aquarium. And it's a breathtaking design. And seeing your tank on that YouTube video, you have angel fish, betas tetras. Taking from the top view gives you such a different perspective. It's something that I think needs to come back. We got to start a new trend or bring back the old trend.

I'm all for it. And it turns out that the fisc original castings are still around. Robinson foundry in Alabama has them. And I don't know why they've never decided to start making these things again, but someone needs to agitate for a return to making them, because we're going.

To have to make some phone calls and put some pressure. Maybe we'll try to go in business with them.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Now, how much is one of them?

There was a guy in California who started making his own version of them out of bronze. I'm not sure what happened to that.

Bronze is super expensive, isn't it?

No, sculptors use it all the time. I think that as a material, it's probably easier to work with than cast iron is these days. It's almost like cast iron is a little bit of a lost art. I remember seeing a picture of one of his products, and it looked pretty good, but I don't know whether he's still in business. This was at least ten years ago.

Now, back in the 18 hundreds, how much did one of these tanks cost? There's catalogs out there. Correct. Do you own any of these catalogs?

I do, yeah. I own some, and I've gotten people to send me scans of others. And it's hard for me to really tell because in some cases they list the prices, and in other cases it's clear that they wanted you to contact Fisk to find out what the price was. So the other really interesting thing is there are definitely examples of some of those aquariums where they were concepts, only they were never actually made. And jw fisk was really good at this. He would have the drawings made long before he'd actually do the work of having the castings made. He wanted people to buy a certain number of them before he started producing them. And there are a few of these designs that I am certain never actually made it into existence. They're just in the catalog. But the ones that did make it were usually the ones that were also used for fountains. So the base of my tank is a very common fiscal fountain base as well. So they're just, like, mix and match components. And so, in fact, I own a fountain that's in front of my house that has the same base as the base of my aquarium. I've sort of become a collector of fiscal items when I can find an auction.

On your piece that you got for the aquarium, it's almost 100% complete. The only thing that you said you were missing was a boy with an umbrella on top. Have you ever found one?

I found one at auction. I bid on it and it went through the roof. I think I stopped at like, 4000 or something. I think it went for ten. And that was all zinc. I was ambivalent about getting it anyway, because if I put the boy back, I wouldn't be able to get the light to the plants because the umbrella is fairly substantial. So it really wasn't something that I would have only bought it to complete the piece and I probably wouldn't have actually put it back in its original position.

That's that's incredible. So how much did that particular piece end up going for?

You remember what my my fountain or.

The boy aquarium or the the boy of the umbrella?

I believe you said ten grand.

It was over 10,000. I can't remember exactly.

Yeah, I would have quit at $4 too. Right? There would have been $6. Now it's too much for me.

Now.

I've seen some of these were all fountain heads, too. And that was another interesting thing that I've never really seen redone the depictions of the way the fountains worked. They all sprayed water in really fantastic forms. And I don't know how they kept those fountain heads free of clogging, but some of the things they had them doing were fantastic, like whirly gigs and sprays for the boy with the umbrella. The fountain was at the top of the umbrella. It pushed the water up so that the water would descend like rain on the umbrella and drip off the sides of the umbrella back into the fountain. So amazing.

I found some of these particular boys on antiques roadshow, and they were used, again, like you said, fixed use of mixed and match. Well, it was one of their more prized fountain tops. So these things were going for crazy amounts. So it doesn't surprise me that someone saw it and had some other minded fort that wasn't aquarium. Purpose.

Right. So sizes too. There's one that's really large that evidently went on top of fountains that were much larger. The sort of public space fountains you see in Central Parks and that sort of thing.

So is the company still how long did they go for fiscal?

Are they into the think maybe even into the then the company shut down. I have a catalog from the 30s when they were still in pretty good shape, but evidently they sold off all their molds and that's how Robinson Iron got them.

That's incredible. Looking at the tank, I think you said it was like 45 or 55 gallons. How many gallons do you have?

It's about 45, I think.

And so you're looking at that, you're looking at almost £400 of just water in the tank. And it's sitting on a pedestal. Is it still pretty rock solid or do you have to worry about knocking it over?

Oh, no, rock solid. Rock solid. Yeah. The pedestal and the bowl is unbelievably heavy. It takes two people to lift it into position on the pedestal. And fortunately I have it in a sunroom that has a very stable brick floor. So it's a pretty stable setup. But the interesting thing, we're used to aquaria that are all glass or metal frame where the metal is fairly thin. The thing with a cast iron tank is if you put warm water in there, the heat expansion for cast iron is very different than glass. And if you're not careful, you can actually cause the thing to just basically fall apart just from putting hot water in it. Because the iron and the glass expand at very different temperatures, they have different coefficients of expansion. And so you can essentially tear the part apart by putting hot water in it. So you learn very quickly to be only use water that's at the temperature of the room that you're in and not mess with dramatic. When I grew up with cleaning tanks, I'd use hot water all the time. You do not do that with these tanks. That's a definite no no.

So how many hours do you think that you have restoring this tank?

No, it's not hours of work, Jimmy.

Hours of joy.

It's pure passion. That's what it is.

Many days of hours. But you know what? I spend no time taking care of it. It is absolutely breathtakingly beautiful, in my own opinion. And literally every week I spend 15 minutes, I change one third of it with rainwater out of my rain barrel. And I take one of those doobie pads that you clean dishes with, only it never sees soap. I use one of those to take the algae off the inside walls of the glass. And that is it. And it takes care of itself. It's amazing. I've never had such an easy tank to take care of. I have reef tanks at work. I spend far more time with them than I spend with this freshwater tank at home.

You should have seen Jimmy the moment you said dubey. He even made licking a dubious Motion doobie pad.

I'm like, what's that?

The green little scotch pad.

There you go. Over from Minnesota. There's Scotch pads.

Not the ones with the green abrasive. It's got to be the one that has the white mesh with the yellow sponge inside.

Oh, okay.

Because you never want to use anything abrasive on these glass panes because they're not as. I mean, you wouldn't even want to use this on an all glass aquarium.

What about getting out your razor blades?

I never use razor blades on them. Nothing touches the glass except plastic, because you'll scratch the glass.

Or if you've ever done anything stupid, like myself, I've scratched tanks with my belt buckle. When I've gotten too closer, I've carried them.

Yeah, no one believes that story, right? Your le Dunlaps over your belt. No one believes that.

I know.

Or the worst thing that I did is I had one of those double magnets and I dropped it and it picked up some sand. Oh, my God, what a disaster. Yeah.

You've had this thing on YouTube now for some time. Has anybody ever reached out to you and just said, what's it going to take to get that out of your hands?

Well, we are by the end of this podcast, no one's tried to buy.

It from me, but I've had at least three people contact me to say that they had some version of it and they wanted more information about restoring it. invariably, they don't continue the conversation, so either they become overwhelmed by the process or something. That's all that I've really had. No one's tried to buy it from me. Probably they figure I wouldn't part with it anyway.

Well, let's start the auction at ten k, and the first bidder is adam. Yes. All right. 10.5 a jimmy?

Really?

So for those that want to know, I want to get one of these tanks. Now, if we can talk Robinson Iron into doing this, great. I know. I'm going to make a phone call to this podcast because I have a dream. I may not be able to afford it, but I have a dream nonetheless. But if you want to go find yourself an authentic piece that you want to restore, such as Joe did, these tanks, maybe not the same exact tank that he has, but these tanks vary depending on full, complete set. For instance, if you get some of these square tanks, Victorian tanks, the legs may not be included. If you find one of these that's in halfway beat up shape, you're looking at a minimum of two k for a complete set that isn't restored. Because there's two versions of restoring, there's just two. The artistic piece restoring that the historians do, and why you said that people were clenching their buttholes when you started stripping it there's. That or there's running restoration, and that's what you're doing. You're literally making it into a real aquarium again and you're enjoying it as the pieces intended. So there's two different types of restoration, but any type of restoration, complete set, you're looking at, you know, up to $20,000 for some of these pieces. Right now, I'm looking at an ebay site. They have a full, complete set for it looks to be like a 40 gallon long. That's in this ornate complete set. And the glass is broken on it. It's rusted top to bottom. 18k. Right. First bit on ebay, 18.

They actually have a bid on it.

That's what it looks like, but oh, my God, is it real? Who knows?

That's a lot of money.

Yeah. And generally I've seen one of these come up, one of the octagonal fiscs, about once a year, and usually at auction, usually in New England, sometimes not, but they come up. And there's a woman in New Jersey named Joan bogart. She's usually the first person to bid on it and usually the person who wins it. She has an antique store, you can find her online and she sells them, then retail. And the usual markup between auction prices and retail is three X. So it goes up.

Obviously, she is moving them at that price because she keeps buying them.

And you watch her website, she's got the list. In fact, if you Google search fisk Aquarium, you'll see some of her old photographs. They're sold fairly quickly, so she is able to sell them and she doesn't do any restoration of them. She refers people to my website in order to see what can be done to them.

She gets a cut off that she doesn't of course not.

Back about ten years ago, there was a really large one that was in New York City that was available for sale, and the guy had fitted it up as a saltwater aquarium, which just blew my mind because saltwater and cast iron do not go together at all. And I can't imagine what it was like to try to keep that set up going for any amount of time. Yeah, he had that one listed for like, $30,000. No buyers. It wasn't as pretty as some of them, but it was a larger volume, so I'm not sure what happened to that one. It opened a restaurant, actually. It was a centerpiece of a restaurant.

Restaurant would be a beautiful setting. Other than health inspectors coming in, all the fish juice is splashing on the buffet. Right, so I'm on Joe bogart's website and she has quite the list. And you're right, most of them have sold. She has a long list of GW fish tanks that she's bought over the years and I think there's only two or three left.

Yeah, I tell you what, I'm mesmerized you have to have a love for it. And I tell you, I do have a love for it. After watching this. I have seen some of the older books where I've seen pictures of these, but I've never seen one in person. Do they have any of these in museums anywhere?

I saw one in the UK that was from a British foundry and that seems to be in some sort of aquarium museum. It's so easy nowadays to Google search for pictures and then associate the pictures with their locations. And I've done that many times and I've got to find a place where there's one just displayed. I found one that was in a garden setting in some sort of what looked to be like the garden associated with a museum house. And I don't remember where that was. Probably in New England, but that was it. Yeah, they're not very common.

I'm just saying, if they're that dumb, leave them outside. I think we should go and take a look at it.

It's too heavy for you just to cop up.

That's why I'm taking all of you guys with me, right? Take a gaggle and a pickup truck, it disappears. Now watch this thing disappear off this. And then we'll have a knock on the door and be the FBI again.

I just see in the emergency rooms, like I threw in my back how don't worry about it.

Never mind.

So I can ask you two questions before you leave, otherwise I will certainly be hung alive for this. If people are going to your YouTube channel, which you have, again, a long list of marine biology YouTube videos, but just specifically on this aquarium, they'll see your wonderful, beautiful tank and they'll immediately go, wait, he has multiple male betas in it. Please, can you talk about what fish you have in the tank and why you keep multiple betas in your tank?

I love betas interacting with one another. And in a tank like that, where they can escape from one another, if they feel like they don't want to fight or interact, they just retreat. And so they display to one another. There's a lot more behavior than those poor things that you see in the store in individual cups. I always think they're in prisons. What works best for me is now one male and four or five females. That that's no problem. In the past, I've had up to four males and like six females, and I have had some in the beginning, no, no big fights, but I did have at least one where they really got into it. But as long as you've got a predominant number of females and only one male, things are pretty good. The problem with betas is they're two. They tend to overeat and will actually sort of explode from overfeeding, and so you have to be careful not to overfeed them. And the second problem is that they are really susceptible to IC and any sort of disease that you bring in with new fish that you add to the tank. So if you put all your stock in at once with the betas and you never add any more fish, everything is good. But if you sort of add fish and dribs and drabs, if you bring in any infectious agent, the betas are going to be the first ones that die. They seem to be really susceptible to infectious agents when they are in an established tank. Right now, I've got everything that's been together now for five months. Most of my fish wind up dying of old age. They're very happy in that tank.

Again, the ecology of your tank, the actual care of these fish, not just having betas, but having big, it looks like you have a pair of angels with cardinal tetris. Generally, that's a big no no because they'll get territorial. And one wap, you'll just see a poof of scales and they're gone. But having that buntpan style, the kind of like false river, just makes them feel like they can disappear. And I've experienced this in other settings that I've created for other outdoor ponds or other tanks for temporary settings that I've set up. And I found this out from other forum pages that if you have a circular tank or even just a square tank, and you put a column in the middle with flow, it virtualizes that. So your tank is a perfect example of that, where you can have fish that traditionally, by textbook is a no no, but they really work together because you have a correct flow and you have the rare design that we don't see anymore.

Yeah, no, it's amazing. If there's any sort of altercation, they just simply disappear from one another by going to opposite sides of the tank. And they can't see each other, so they sort of forget about each other. It works great.

Just like your siblings, right? If you take both of them, put them in separate rooms, they'll calm them down. After 2 hours, they can't see each other.

That doesn't work. Adam says father of four.

Well, Joe, before I let you go, matt from amazon's Magazine would stab me if I didn't ask you some of the projects you're working on and some research points of your marine biology study at your work. You just recently published a video a few days ago and it was quite depressing. But I certainly would love just a touch of education for some of our listeners of what's going on.

Well, I've been working on the ecology of reefs in the Caribbean for the last 20 years and been diving reefs all over the Caribbean during that period of time. And Caribbean coral reefs had a really bad time in the 1980s when disease killed all the branching corals. And then from that point to the present day, it was sort of a gradual loss of coral cover from diseases, from high temperature events that are clearly due to climate change. But what we're seeing in the last two years or so is breathtakingly awful. I mean, just so tragic because there seems to have been the introduction of a new disease that's killing corals of many, many species and at great depth. And then we're also having overlaid on that really bad hurricane events and bad high temperature events. And so the video that I just posted this month from footage I took from the beginning of this month, so early January of 2020, is from what formerly had been one of the best reefs, remaining reefs in the Caribbean, which is the west side of the turks and caicos Islands. I was on a live aboard. This is also what I do on my vacations. I go and do videos of reefs to add it to my channel, but also to see what the reefs are looking like. And the first thing I saw when I got in the water was coral that was dying and dead. According to the people that work on this particular liverboard, this started in May. This disease that started in the Florida Keys and has swept, is sweeping through the Caribbean. And then there were high temperature events in August which stressed out the remaining corals. And the result is easily 80% to 90% of the coral that was left is either dead or dying. And you can see it pretty clearly if you know what you're looking for. Of course, if all you see are fuzzy rocks, you won't know that those are in fact dead corals. But it's a pretty tragic situation because those reefs have so many fish, they clearly have never been overfished. They're sharks, they're huge grouper and snapper, lots of trigger fish, all the things that disappear very quickly if there's a lot of fishing going on. It's a pretty sad situation. Those fish are going to probably be okay, certainly for the short term, because nothing is as dependent on corals as they are in the indopacific. But essentially the organisms that build the reef are dead and they're not coming back anytime sooner sort of situation. I have to say it's a bit.

Depressing and it's happening so quickly. Normally you see that it's always like of a ten years of study, or after five years of study, we're seeing that this is happening, but you're talking a couple of months.

Exactly.

It's shocking. So for those that are listening, it's not just talking about what terrible is happening, but listeners want to know that they can help somewhere. We don't know if that this could help with disease, but is there any organization that you know or support that listeners could help donate money to?

I don't actually. I mean, there are foundations that do reef reef restoration. There's one in Florida, and I don't know the name of it right offhand, but you can certainly find it if you Google it. The problem is, Robbie, that that's not going to solve this problem. I mean, these are miles and miles, 100 meters of reef, and there's no amount of restoration work that's going to do. I would love to be able to say, yeah, give your money here, and that's going to make a difference. This is climate change, pure and simple. We're wrecking this planet in record speed. I don't know what to tell people. Honestly, I'm at a loss.

Yeah, I totally understand because I have been on the coral reefs. My wife and I vacationed. We've been out by the turks, I've been out south of Key West, out there on that coral reef. People that we went snorkeling with and said, you should have been here five years ago, you should have been here three years ago. And everybody's saying you can see that. The thing is, dwindling, the one gal said, it's just so sad. I don't even know where to start to try to fix this.

She said, Jimmy, on my site there's actually three videos that are form a playlist that are of vhs tape from the, from Cuba and greyston Rock and another part of the Florida Keys. Go and watch it and you'll see what reefs look like before the 1980s die off. It's very poor quality video, but you will be amazed at how much cover and how much coral there was in the Florida Keys. There were brain coral and branching coral everywhere as far as you could see. This is a situation of shifting baselines. I mean, it's all gone away. It happened quickly, but then it was fairly slow for a long time. So it just became the new normal. Well, we're going through the same cycle again. The die off in this case is just phenomenal. It's really amazing.

We'll be sure to link that in our show notes as well. I found it. It is the Caribbean reefs of the Pass playlist. We'll have it linked in there.

Thank you.

Well, I don't mean to leave the podcast on a bummer note, but I definitely wanted to listen to hear that.

I do have a positive note actually.

We need to tell you need one?

Yes. If you want to go see reefs that look unbelievable, you can check out the videos that I have from the Egyptian Red Sea. astonishing reefs, beautiful and unbelievable shape, 100% cover, and also some of the best diving I've ever done. And the really interesting thing about those reefs is the biologists that have studied them believe that they have been exposed to high temperature events for thousands of years. And they've essentially they are an example of a reef system that seems to be resistant to some of the things that other reefs are not resistant to. In fact, even in the Red Sea, if you go to the Saudi side south of alif or So, those reefs are all dead because that's a less resistant system. There are still places in the world where you can see coral reefs that are in good shape and the Egyptian Red Sea is one of them.

Well, fantastic. Hopefully they can maybe even find out what makes that tick and replicate it somehow without having to move. invasive species. That's always a good one.

Honestly, I think that's what it's going to take.

Well, for those that are listening and they're motivated to help the Coral Reef Foundation, you certainly go to their website, coral Restoration.org. I did find it. They do have a donate button, but again, they have to find a solution. And this is way too widespread. But we appreciate you having on the show, man. This has been fantastic. I can't thank you enough.

My pleasure. I enjoyed it.

Anything that you feel or we missed before we just depart?

No, nothing I can think of.

I had a question.

Sure.

Are the fish spooked when you first put them in from you looking at the top? Because I know with certain animals, they get really weirded out, like a lot of reptiles and birds. If you come at them or come from above them, they get all freaked out. And do the fish seem to notice or are they just kind of used to it after a little while?

You know, Adam, I don't remember in the beginning whether that was an issue, but since I feed them from the top, I mean, they see me from across the room and they're all bunching up. They're waiting for me to come and feed them. So they will come to the surface when I'm over them. And if I'm to the side of the tank, they'll come to the side of the tank. By the way, you can't keep any jumping fish in these tanks. No hatchet, fisher fish?

No, sir.

I don't think loaches would work in any way. What I've got in there is no problem at all. In fact, I once had a discus actually jump out of one of these tanks, especially when you keep them as full as I keep them. But I haven't had a fish jump for probably a year. Yeah, they don't seem to have a problem being observed from above. And once they're used to you, of course it's not a problem at all.

Maybe that's why they started lids in the 1910s as Free willy. All right, Joe. Well, thanks again and let's kick that outro.

Thanks guys, for listening to this podcast. Please visit us@aquariumguyspodcast.com and listen to us on spotify. I heart Radio, itunes, and anywhere you can listen to podcasts.

We're practically everywhere. We're on Google. I mean, just go to your favorite place, Pocket casts subscribe to make sure it gets push notifications directly to your phone. Otherwise Jim will be crying into sleep.

Can I listen to it in my treehouse?

In your tree house? In your fish room. Even a lone.org.

What about at my man cave?

Especially your man cave.

Yeah.

Only if adam's there no with feeder guppy.

No, no, they're endless.

You imagine loving flank sucking motherfuck.

Well, I guess we'll see you next time. Later.