Hey, honey, I'm home.
Hey, honey. I need to talk to you about your son.
What's up, sweet cheeks?
I found something in his room. I think you should come look at it.
Oh, boy. What did you find?
Just come look.
Oh, no. I'm a guess he is getting out of the age.
Well.
Hey, Pop.
How'S it doing? Johnny, please sit down. I need to talk to you. Son, we found this in your room. But, dad, if not mine. Son, you're getting of age. I thought we raised you better than this.
They're not mine, I swear.
I'm holding on for them, for a friend. Son, we understand that getting to this age, there's only one thing on a young man's mind, and that's starting a shrimp tank.
We just worry that you might be exposing yourself to all kinds of diseases by ordering from those other guys.
I mean, this is a Shrimp shack household. You should be ordering shrimp from Joe with promo code aquarium Guys at checkout to save 15%, just like we taught you. So disappointed, Joe. Shrimpshack.com, keep your children safe. Also, don't forget about our friends at the Ohio Fish Rescue. You can find the Ohio Fish Rescue in their YouTube channel. They have a great YouTube channel. They do multiple videos each week, and they need your love and support. They do rescue mass amounts of fish. Again, Ohio Fish Rescue. They have their patreon and donations right on the YouTube page.
Hey, guys, just a reminder, we have the results for the Tan and aquatics. giveaway congratulations to Dale duval. We'll be taking home his very own custom tailored Enigma pat for $60 value, courtesy of Scott feldman and our friends over at tannon Aquatic.com.
All right, guys, let's kick that podcast. Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast with your host, Jim colby and Rob golson. Hey, guys, welcome to the podcast. This week, I am super proud and excited to get another podcaster that's about fish. This time on the podcast, we have Scott feldman. He is the host of a podcast called The Tint with a period at the end, because that's just the way to do it automatically.
Correct, right?
The C is like a sentence. The tint period.
That's it.
And the CEO of Tenant aquatics at Ten aquatics.com scott feldman. How are you doing, buddy?
I'm doing great. How are you guys?
We are sublime. I had a lot of sugar.
Sublime.
Not the band.
Oh, God.
I found out from the band it was actually a description of content.
Yeah, we're more like ariel Speed wagon. Keep on loving you all right there?
Well, I'm your host, Rob dolphin.
I'm Jim colby.
I'm Adam on the shy Scott film and the guest.
Yeah, you're Scott filming the guest. That's why we start with you and then go to the rift ref later.
I can't edit that out, right?
No, that's going to stay alive.
That's the best stuff, man. We leave it in the studio.
So to start off with news and updates before we do a deep dive here with Scott feldman, number one, we're doing something new. We've had plenty of people ask us to live stream the podcasts. So what we're doing, in an attempt to test this, there's a new feature in Discord, and the feature is video. So what I did is I opened up a chat in Discord. And if you haven't joined the Discord, it's a fun chat client. All of our dearest fans are in here. And what we're doing is we're doing these podcasts from now on. We're going to do them live. We're not going to upload the recording of this live. We are still going to completely post the podcast edited. But if you want to come, here the uncensored version. You can only hear it live in Discord for now until we get this up on YouTube. And even if we do it YouTube, we're not going to have a recorded copy. We're going to delete the copy right after we finish live. So come join us. According to his podcast, Combat, on the website, you'll see the Discord information. Certainly come and join the party. We have a list of growing people, and we actually got ourselves all on webcam. And even seeing Scott here, it's nice to have a face to face over the whole COVID thing.
He's a good looking man. Yeah.
How much did my mom pay you for that one?
Well, the checks in the mail.
She said checks in the mail. rob's mom pays everybody. Yeah, she does. rob's deep pockets, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I'm not going to take the bait on that one.
No, do it because it's well worth it.
Oh, boy. Every time we send us a nice compliment on Discord, it's always signed by rob's mom.
Since we're in the line of compliments here, Jimmy, I am looking over and you are wearing some delicious new test wag.
I have a new shirt that I bought for the Minneapolis show that did not happen because of COVID Yeah, we're.
Kind of sad it's getting rescheduled. So once that's all over, we will certainly bring this down. But you're wearing a shirt, and I swear to God, it says it's a throat punch kind of day.
It is a throat punch kind of day. And I'm glad I got here early just to get limbered up.
He talked to his PR people and they're like, we need to monetize your asshole slogans. So I'm glad you finally did that, buddy.
Yeah, get her Done was already taken, unfortunately.
Well, I think I've duped our clothing line. So the bottom of our podcast, aquariumgyspodcast.com, we have a merch store. And we sold when we started it, we sold a bunch of stuff. And then I had the audacity to go on the podcast and say, once we hit X orders, I'm going to put on an aquarium guy's crop top. And post it to the public. And then suddenly since then, we've had a whopping total of two T shirts.
People have seen you and nobody wants to see you.
They're like, no one needs to see that. And now our sales went down the toilet.
You should have offered drugs and cash. That would have been better, right?
So I'm doing some homework, seeing if we can revitalize the line. And I promise you, no more crop top. That is over. But we got some art artists and I need to talk with them to see if we can get a new line of logos and shirts. And I swear that this shirt is going to be part of it.
I think it should be. I often have to threaten people on this podcast because certain people no names, Rob.
No names.
And Adam need to be punched in the throat because you guys just don't pay attention or you start squawking off about me being old. So it's just much easier than having T shirts because I'm going to kick your butt.
Well, then quit telling me I need to take Metamusel before the podcast.
You should. You run it over.
I'm regular enough. Thank you. So now to get down to the actual brass, tax and news. So we have many different ways you can contact us for questions. And we have Facebook, we have our discord site. You could email us, you can call us even. And we have a few different messages. Today I have on Facebook, someone messaged us directly and ask us a question about their cyclist. Hi, guys. I haven't had much luck diagnosing what looks to be black ick on only one of my cichlids for two to three weeks. Just one spot in the inner finn. Now it looks like it's more of turning around to the bottom jaw. No sign of affecting the any other fish or of any kind. It's hard to answer without pick. So of course I asked them for pictures. And it kind of looks like I don't know if you guys have ever fished for, like, sunfish. First thing I thought of, it looks like that black spot disease. Now, that whole black spot is a benign parasite that you can easily cook out of meat. Even the Minnesota dnr has no warnings about it whatsoever. It's been there for decades. And that's a whole cycle, supposedly through birds and whatnot that it has to have a cycle out in nature. So having an aquarium can happen, but rather rare. So the fish that he has here looks to be completely healthy and has vivid color. There's no issues other than a few black spots. So a lot of times what you'll see is if it's not a parasite, it's an overconsumption of spare. lena, the stuff that you use for.
Babies, really, what is the causative effect of that?
Apparently, if you have too much in the diet, maybe it's some sort of vitamin, and it should start showing black spots on it. It's like a pigmentation deal. So when they have a lot of cigarette pellets, have a high, especially the plant like cigarette pellets, because there's a lot of protein based cigarette pellet formulas out there. They have a lot of spirulina. So check your food if that's happening, and it's happening only to a couple of fish, see if you can rotate your food, do a couple of different varieties and see something you have something low in spirulina instead of higher, and you'll see different content ratings in the back of your jars. That's my best guess. As to this, it looks exactly like that symptom. Again, the fish is normal, happy, healthy and eating. So, yeah, check the back of your candidates. And gentlemen, I was going to say.
That the first thing when you said about that, about the parasites and I remember as a child back in the 18 hundreds, that my dad would say that those fish have worms. Okay, who's getting punched and throw it now?
Adam, it's T shirt time, baby.
Shirt time. But my dad used to tell me that, yeah, those fish have worms and throw them back. It was always during the dead of heat of summer, like end of July when it was really hot, August. So I don't know. I've never heard it, never seen it. But I mean, the only other thing you could do is maybe add some salt to it, throw it in a frying pan, eat it.
I mean, you live your dream eating your cichlid.
There you go.
I've had reptiles with subcutaneous worms.
I wonder if you ate them before. That kind of makes me wonder now.
No.
All right.
No.
Although if you want a fast weight loss thing, hit me up after the.
Show and I'll eat worms. There you go.
So, again, thank you for that question. I'll do your first name? jameson. We really appreciate stuff like this. And again, if you guys got your questions, message us in. I have a little bit of news. I've been in contact for a while with seagris Farms, and due to this down slump of orders, I got the president of segregation to agree to get their iphoneologists, who they use for disease and infections at seagris. It's their head guy they've had there for probably over 20 years.
They're vetting on staff.
So we're going to get some information on that. And what we want to do is have a recurring segment on the Aquarium Guys podcast called Dr. Fish. Essentially, it will be every so often, maybe once a month, maybe twice a month, maybe less. We don't know exactly the rotation, but we want them on a regular basis to answer fish health and aquarium questions. Who better than having an expert or Ethiologist on here to tell you which medications, how to use them best, what to look for, how to best sterilize, any health questions that you still have to give an actual vetted expert in the field a crack at it. And what we're doing is on Discord, we have an entire channel dedicated to these health questions, and we have gathered a bunch. But if you have your special question that you want to be heard in front of, dr. Fish himself, certainly go to aquariumbuilderspodcast.com bot on the website, click Discord and add it to our list. We have a fantastic list, and none of them asks about what happens when jimmy's viagra falls in the aquarium.
I don't need viagra. I'm very viral.
If you say so.
If you do know the answer to this question, please feel free to send it to us. We can forward it to everybody. That's what we started this podcast for, is to share information best as we can. So if you out there know about these black spots on the cichlid, let us know. Make something up. We don't care. We'll broadcast anything. What the heck?
We have truth filters in our discount, do we? All right, so the next one is actually a voicemail they called in. And our telephone number is actually on the bottom of the Chrome Guys website as well. What it is, it's a voicemail where people can call in and leave an audio question. Now, this hasn't been utilized a lot. Some podcasts are strictly live air questions. We prefer the recorded. We get them on voicemails occasionally. Some of them come in too broken to play in the podcast. We got one that was particularly weird, and it's more of a statement than it is a question. Someone apparently, is a die hard fan of adam.
Adam. Yeah. And I think this is very flattering.
If you ask me, we got no name on it. Without further ado, here is that voicemail.
I never knew that a Minnesota accent could be so sexy.
And, clifford, adam's voice, that's all that was your voicemail.
That was it, yeah. That was like a drive by shooting, wasn't it?
It was. It's beautiful.
I think that's full of shit there.
No, that was literally a message that we got last week.
We've been holding it until this quality right there.
It's quality.
So, Adam, tell your mom thanks.
Yes.
And your Minnesota accent is so sexy.
As you would think.
I got to play it one more time. Ready?
Oh, do it.
I never knew that a Minnesota accent could be so sexy until I heard adam's voice.
Oh, my.
See, I wish adam's webcam is working right now, because I just figured that sexy brown face of his all red, will be all beat red right now. You know what I mean? So I'm just saying that adam's got.
A fan out there.
We know that Jim has hardcore fans. He's got this big fan base. I call him Arnold schwarzenegger. And Discord. Now we got people calling in saying that adam's voice is super, super sexy. And clearly they do it for him.
No.
It's so sexy. where's my fans? where's the rob's love? All right, call in. Let me know how much you hate me. Love me. I feel a little out of the loop here. Must be nice, gentlemen.
It is fun, right? Driving the turd wagon. Is it?
It must be nice. So, Adam, do you have anything to say to your fans up there?
Send her back some love. Adam, do it.
I don't think that this was a fan. This is probably right, 100%. I'm not joking here.
No, it's a fan.
My wife's voice is extremely raspy. She cannot do anything like that. She's got a broken vocal cord, dude.
Can I put her in the throat? I did not put her in a throat.
Set him up for that.
Yeah, I know you did. Okay.
I don't understand. How do I, as the Egyptian, out of the three of us, have the most Minnesota accent?
I have a theory on this. I think it's because you have the yabecha blended in with it, and that's what makes it just work for her.
It probably comes from all the kabucha he eats.
God, you drink kombucha. Every time you say the word kombucha, I just smell filthy hippie.
We could just call it bouch.
It smells like a Volkswagen beetle from 1969.
Oh, man. Well, we got some more, but I'm going to spread them out. We got questions and whatnot. But at the beginning of this podcast, again, because we're recording this ahead of time, when this airs, we'll have Scott recorded already grabbing a winner. So this was pre recorded, but number one, we want to thank you for that sweepstakes. And just to remind people about it, you gave away a brand new car enigma Explorer pack, a collection of leaves and goodies to add the perfect tenons to your aquarium. And before we dive into the entire tenant conversation, I just want to thank you for that and explain that product a little bit before we go too far.
Well, what it is, without getting too commercialized, my company offers we offer a variety of materials that you could pick yourself from our selection. But what a lot of people like is they'll send me a message saying, hey, Scott, I have a South American tank. I'm doing or I'm doing an Indian biotope or whatever. Can you pick me some appropriate botanicals from your selection to accomplish that? And so what we do is we look at what we've got, we go into it. I geek out, like any fish geek would, and I choose things that I think are appropriate for the tank. And we put that collection together for you, wrap it up in a little paper bag, put it in a box, send it out to you. And it's kind of a mystery, but usually I call it enigmas. You don't know what you're going to get until you get it. So you're getting a curated selection just for you. So it's fun. It's one of our more fun products. If botanicals could be considered fun.
Oh, they are.
A hand curated ten and kit for your aquarium. I can't wait to someone after the podcast calls you up. It's like, yeah, I got, like, this five gallon data tank. It's got one of those bubble castles in it. What do you and I'm tired of.
Looking at the bubble castle. Can you make the water darker?
And don't forget the clown puke in the bottom. That's the most important part.
Pink gravel is good, right?
He knows about clown puke.
He does.
Wow.
We're the only ones that were left out of that.
I know. I've been doing this for 30 years, and I didn't know about clone puke.
Well, Scott, let's dive in again. The subject we always try to do these podcasts on a clear subject, and who better to talk to about why we need tenants in our aquarium and why some people think that my mud aquarium shouldn't be like that. Right now, I'm looking at my 75 gallon aquarium. I just put this last week, a massive log of Malaysian driftwood I basically stole from a friend. And now it's just getting to that what I consider. And you consider that wonderful tint point of that tea color going through the whole aquarium and explain what tenons are to beginners and why we need them to kick this off.
Well, tannins are sort of a broad name for a bunch of different compounds. And one of the characteristics that tannins do is, first of all, they come from botanical materials or trees, wood, soil. Tenants are the same tenants you find in coffee or in wine. Different tenants do different things. There's literally thousands of different types of tannins, but it's what they also give up for what's called humic substances, various chemicals that are known by science to actually benefit fish. As far as their health, they're found in all sorts of water. But the stuff we're talking about here today is cannons. That's what provides that color to the water. So you'll see that in tanks that you use leaves in, that you use wood in. You'll see it in natural environments. Most natural ecosystems are not clear. We have this vision that everything's crystal clear and perfect. The reality is, most of you have ever spent time, obviously your fishermen, you spent some time in the wild. There leaves decompose in the water. Wood falls into the water. It gives off tannins and stains the water. Tannins can provide some health benefits for fishes resistance to bacterial infections. There's some things that have been studied, but there's lots and lots of different tannins. The problem is, we don't really have a means to test for what material gives off what tannins. So a lot of times we're just sort of saying, hey, the water is brown. There must be some tannins in it. So we're kind of falling back on the aesthetic thing, but there's a lot of scientific benefits. You can Google it and find all sorts of stuff about that and the medicinal, potentially medicinal benefits of tannins.
When you're in the wild, again, like you said before, no one's cleaning that out. The leaves fall in, there's debris. And this again, tints the water. Now, how is that supplemental to fish? Again, we know that it softens PH in a lot of situations. What other benefits? That's always the number one that people just think, oh, it just makes my PH a little different. What else does it do to the aquarium?
First of all, tannins and materials with botanicals or leaves can only lower PH in water with little or no carbonate hardness. So the water here in Los Angeles out of the tap is like 8.48.6 stalactites. That's why African cichlids and reef aquariums are so popular out here, because we have nice hard water. But obviously, if you use reverse osmosis or deionized water, you have no carbonate hardness, and then it's more malleable. So you can use leaves and katapa leaves, which are Indian almond leaves, and you can use bark and all kinds of things to lower the PH. But generally, just throwing leaves in the water won't lower the PH. They will impart that color almost always, even if the water is hard, you'll get the color and you will get humid substances, which are again found in botanical items, soils and so forth. They're thought to have a broad range of benefits for fish in terms of their health and their ability to maintain various levels of immunity and body chemistry. And so for a lot of stuff that's highly technical, way over my pay grade, but there's a lot of good information on it.
Perfect. So I always start out I wanted to just cover that before we move in, because the whole subject, your entire approach is why we need tannins. And you have this podcast called the Tint, where you have the long format podcast every now and again with the guests. But what you're known for on that podcast is essentially an audio blog where you're putting in brain snippets of the topic that you're reminding people of a note maybe they didn't think of and really why those types of botanicals and what you can do with them, and daily reminders. So, again, I just wanted to get that point across. So everybody's on the same page, but Scott, I always start out with these interviews with asking, how did you get into the hobby?
Oh, gosh, okay. Like many of you, I was pretty much born into the hobby. My dad bred guppies. I was literally probably three or four years old, and my dad gave me culls from his he bred blue delta tail guppies. So I'd get the culls and little goldfish bowls, and I fed them and took care of them. I had an aquarium before I could read. And then I had my first five gallon aquarium. I think I was like four years old, and I've had a tank in one form or another ever since then. Later on in my early teen years, I got into saltwater, got into reef aquariums, actually spent a lot of time with reef aquariums, did a lot of writing, was on the lecture tour there, spoke at the marine aquarium conference in north America like eight times. That's like the super bowl of the reef aquarium world. I co owned a coral propagation and importation company called unique corals here in Los Angeles. But always in the back of my mind, I was fascinated by blackwater stuff, by fish. South American cichlids and carrisons are my favorite. And so I always wanted to do something with this. I always played with kili fish, fishes that came from these black waters with all the tinted stuff, and I played and experimented. And then one day I said, you know what, I don't want to propagate coral anymore. And much to all my friends horror, I sold my interest in that, got out and said, I'm going to start a company that does nothing but sell all this cool stuff that I've been experimenting with for, you know, the last 1520 years. And so I started a company called canon aquatics, and we've been doing it since 2015. And I try to be like, what? You guys are honest, open, fun. I'll tell it like it is. If I don't know something, I don't know it. I try not to bs. It because that's not helping anybody, but I am rather opinionated. I think the aquarium world, we can get to this later, but I think the aquarium world is a little too dogmatic. We're a little too set in our ways. And so tenon is sort of a punch in the throat, if you will, to conventionality. I try to do some things different. It's not just tinted water, blackwater aquariums. It's about looking at things different. I do a lot of work with brackish water aquariums, mangroves, mud. I would love to hear about your mud aquarium, that kind of stuff. Taking a look at nature as it is, as opposed to how we edit it, that's always been my focus in the hobby, and that's kind of where I'm at today. And we've developed a global following of geeks like me that are into that kind of thing. And it's been really fun to invite people along, and we're all learning together.
So I think that this is a revitalization. So I'm actually trying to do a bunch of studying on the history of modern aquariums because there's the whole victorian era of aquariums, the modern era for those that are listening, and we're going to do a podcast on this as well. It started around the 1890 1910 era, and that's really where it conceptualize. You heard about the whole sea monkey craze that started was it post World War Two?
Fifty s and sixty s, right.
And it all started, as you know, no real pumps, no real big filtration. There's no way to heat it besides a bunson burner on your stone bottom aquarium. And these were direct from nature. They were trying to cut out a slice of nature because if it worked in nature, I can try to recreate it. And since the modernization passed, the Sea Monkey craze when metaframe was sold to a toy company, this whole thing spun into a different direction, where now we're having filtration all these modern elements and we're forgetting the details of how that accordion is supposed to be a slice of nature. We're starting to see it big in the pond industry that they're doing natural ponds. I spent probably ten years studying ponds from koi experts that all they did was sit in their garage talking about their filter systems. It was much less about how they can make it natural, how they can have a biological system to remove the waste. And now this last decade, we're seeing people really move into the aquascaping and from that spins off a craze of slicing nature back into your tank. And now these tenant aquariums are becoming more and more prevalent and you're seeing professional aquascapers really try instead of trying to make it look like whatever modern scenario they're going at as a literal square slice of nature out of the Amazon. It's really breathtaking seeing what they can do with this. I really want to go back to a beginner's perspective. Most of these aquariums, at least, they're trying to start just to get tannins in their aquarium because it helps one soften PH. Add those botanical elements like you were speaking about before. But I think this starts out with like, the cardinal tetracrase. Right? You're smiling already.
I'll go further and say it's more than just the aesthetics. I mean, that's the thing a lot of people are drawn to the I mean, for a long time people thought black water or tinted water was like, oh, your tank is dirty. Like, I had an aquarium in my office at my coral facility, and it was a blackwater aquarium. I mean, you can't get any more opposite of a reef tank than that. But I had one and people would come in and say, dude, when was the last time you changed your filter? People don't understand. And I'm like, no, that's what it's supposed to look like.
No, check the tea bag in the back.
Yes.
With all that crap on the bottom. It's leaves. And then after a while people would start looking at it and they've be either mesmerized or they go, oh yeah, looks like shit. But I mean, people would figure it out and if you go and look at natural aquatic habitats like you're talking about, they're not clean and neat and orderly. And I have a lot of problems with modern. Aquascaping as the pinnacle of what a cool aquarium is. The word nature or natural has been appropriated by a lot of different factions in the hobby, and it's become sort of a catch all for things. I believe what we're doing, and I say we mean people that play with what I call botanical style aquariums are more in tune with what's going on in nature because we're utilizing real natural materials leaves, twigs, seed pods, the things that actually fall into the water in some of these environments. Many of the things I get are from around the world, and we're able to replicate to some extent not only the look, but the function of these systems. And that's what's so important. In other words, when stuff falls in the water, if you're a beginner, you mesmerized by the look, which is great, but when you realize what these materials are supposed to do, they're not just supposed to tint the water or add an aquascaping look. They're also growing biofilms, which are beneficial bacteria. They're propagating fungi, which most people freak the hell out when they see this stuff. They're like, what is this gook in my sink? Well, that's what you see if you look at the underwater photos of habitats like the igarape and Igapos in South America. That's what happens. There's tons of this biofilm and all this stuff. Fish feed on that. There's even an argument that bacteria maintains water quality. There's a whole lot of interesting stuff going on. It's a very complex biological environment. And so that's what I'm fascinated by, with people getting beyond just the look and thinking about the function. And I believe even a beginner, once they grasp the basics of water chemistry, I'm sure you guys talk about that all the time. Sometimes I cringe when a beginner sends me an email, says, I'm thinking of starting I'm just getting into tanks, and I want to do one of these tinted blackwater tanks. I'm like, okay, well, you need to understand the nitrogen cycle. You need to understand maintenance. You need to understand all the basic stuff, because what you're doing is basically adding a whole lot of material into your water that's bioload. You need bacteria to break it down. So it's understanding that holistic the kombucha perspective, as you might say. You need to understand the whole thing. And that's the fascination to me. So I can just go on and on, but stop it.
The next time you have one of these great aquariums in your tank, you should put an old beer can in the bottom and say, that's a Minnesota. That's the Minnesota one right there.
Yeah, keep it going, keep it going.
Because we go snorkeling. And you would not believe them on a garbage that you find down there. Again, you'll find the beer ribbon, the pepper ribbons, the old Milwaukee cans, stuff that people will drink, but they're embarrassed to take the empties and throw them.
In the garbage in ostello as well.
Oh no we can't afford this man.
I got to know this. Can you put aluminum in your tank without having to worry about it? I don't know.
I don't know.
I got to talk to some experts on that.
I think it's a bad idea but.
Hey it's just amazing though you'll grab.
One of these cans because when I'm circling if I see this stuff I grab it to throw it away. I take it up to the short.
I'm hoping it's not open.
Well that's the first thing I check. Maybe it's a whole I love the.
Moment when we say I love the moment when we say slice of nature and Jimmy just goes the bottom of a Minnesota lake with a beer can.
With a beer can looking for bodies perspective. But what you're talking about is the slime the bacteria even on these cans once you take them up in the air and you look at them and stuff you can see all kinds of crazy little things growing on it and it's all this part of nature and the bioload and whatnot. I just thought it was very interesting to see. I thought for at one time that I was grabbing a big rock full of moss but it was just a beer can that was covered in this really crazy looking moss which I'd never.
Seen before for yeah nature doesn't waste anything right? Everything becomes a little ecosystem right back.
Even the can.
So what I wanted to spin at is not just the benefits of having it but sometimes the need. The cardinal tetra has been demanded for many generations. We have the neon tetra that's been propagated since the 40s right around after World War II and they finally were able to floor to breed them which means they have generations and generations that acclimate over time in a captive environment to higher PH. We actually had Scott from Project piaba.
Yeah we did a whole podcast make sure you check that out if you haven't heard that one. What a wonderful guy.
The entire idea is to try to find renewable ways of harvesting amazonian species while supporting their ecosystem, supporting their lifestyle so they don't take away rainforest so they actually have jobs coming out of it. They found out that floods in the Amazon kill millions of fish a year anyway so they're taking them out of flood pools they would die in. So it's a sustainable recurring way of getting these tropical fish out of the wild. But the problem is the PH in the Amazon in some areas is completely missing anything and sometimes it's as low as four. When you're bringing all of these wild species in it not just adds benefits to the aquarium regards to wild caught species from the Amazon tannins are absolutely necessary in some of those acclimation standards. When you're trying to not only drip acclimate but keep a species that's been wild caught sustainably in your aquarium.
The argument is often made that discus have been bred for since the 1970s in hard alkaline water and you can keep neons and breed them in 7.4, you can. But I just have this thing and I challenge people. I'm thinking, okay, they've been captive bred for what, maybe 50, 60, 70 generations or whatever over all these decades? Does that mean that somehow we've bred out their natural ability to adapt to these types of environments that they've evolved under for eons? That in only a few generations we've erased that genetic programming that says I belong in this type of environment and that we're actually harming them by putting them into softer and more acidic water. I don't think it's necessary to keep fish in these types of environments, but I think it's beneficial. And the other thing that you touched on, which was great, when a lot of these fishes are wild caught and collected, the blackwater habitats have very little in the way of bacteria. So these fishes have very little immunity to bacteria and parasites and so forth. So when they come into water, that is more parasite laden, that higher PH and so forth. With outlaws, tannins and human substances, they're more vulnerable. So potentially, keeping the wild caught fishes in this type of a habitat makes sense. At least while acclimating them, maybe you could ultimately adapt them to more cap water type conditions. But I'm talking to my friend Mike, too.
Canardi I do not I think I've seen him on your podcast a couple of times.
Yeah, Mike, mike's a great guy, he's an explorer kind of guy. He imports fishes from South America and all over the world. He said the key to success with a lot of these species when he imports them is to make sure that there's some catappa leaves, which is called the Indian almond leaves in the water that puts this tannins and human substances in there. It eases in the acclamation process and keeps the bacterial count low. So there are some tangible benefits that people that handle a lot of fishes deal with so yeah, it's important and you mentioned acclamation, that was a really good point.
So the only things you can do, because a lot of these measurements are extremely intangible, we can't tell you that it's going to guarantee to put your PH at a certain level. If you're from here, there's no way that we can say on a medication level that it's going to do X. Like you taking plugins going to stop swelling in your body. It's not a plug and play element. Every scenario is different because everybody's water is different but in my experiences that I've had, I have plenty of tanks in my basement. In fact it's getting more and more the more we do this podcast and I have purchased imported in wild caught species, farm bred species and like you said with the discus especially I've had discus I have two tanks. Side by side of 125 and a 75 bolt planted both same temperature, both same time. We do the water changes with the same tap, the same sand bottom elements. I try to keep them similar. One of them has. An epic amount of tannins the other one doesn't. And of course the one missing tannins. The discus actually have issues and I've had not disease but a condition that discus get where they go dark and then just eventually die. It's like a stress reaction it's like a stress reaction in that other tank where they just crap out. I actually moved one of them. I have one discus that was rescued. It was a cult. It's got a bent spine. It's a beautiful discus, but moved it into my tank and it's the only thing I can keep it in. It's almost like it has to have tenants because again, same temperature, same water. Both planted. It's just crazy.
Were they captive bread or wild caught?
These, I'm assuming, were actually captive bread.
These are captive bread.
And they were we've had wild.
But, you know you know, I just don't think we've bred out the innate need for a certain type of habitat for these fishes whether it's a physical habitat or a chemical habitat. So I think there's some important things. Of course, you can keep them in all kinds of water. Fishes are very adaptable. I saw it with marine fishes and corals. I mean, we used to get corals that would come in and water that was so contaminated and cold because it sat in the airport for hours and hours you think, how could this be? Life is surprisingly tenacious. Fishes aquatic life are, but they do better in an environment that's more similar to what they evolved under. That's my position. That's my opinion, and I just think it's worth experimenting with that. And I think that's something that we're starting to see more of. It's beyond just the aesthetics. It's the function.
So there's some questions that, of course, we have to go over. Number one is, we got to talk about. Beginners. How do I get started? What does some of these different tan producing products how are they different from one another? So we got to cover that. But first, I want to always write down, because again, anything that's intangible like this, we know that it helps create bacteria, but we can't say that measure them in your water is going to create this much so just for the people that are listening. Because we hear a lot of people talk about tannins, but it always seems like it's some sort of herbal life pitch, right? I hate saying that.
It's true. And that's why, if you read my stuff or come to our website, we never say, use X amount of leaves per gallon or this, because there is no formula for this. So I can give you guidelines and say in my aquarium, where I use straight up rodi water, I use, you know, five of these leaves per gallon. And it gives my PH down a little bit, whatever. It's not a it's not a science. It's as much an art as it is a science. And I think it's irresponsible for any vendor, myself included, which I can proudly say I'm five years of doing this, I've never made those types of recommendations because it's irresponsible. And I think when people go on forums and they see these things that I threw a bunch of leaves in my tank, but that doesn't tell you anything. You do need to test the water. You do need to have an understanding of the nitrogen cycle. I'll make this guarantee you'll kill every fish in your tank if you dump a whole lot of botanicals into an existing tank at one time, because what will happen is your bacterial population will be able to keep up with all that input and bioload. The co2 level rises, your fish will be gasping at the surface and ultimately die, or you can get an ammonia spike. It's common sense as much as anything else. So it is as much an art as it is a science. And for beginners again, the thing I stress enough is that you need to do the homework, and this is something I have. Maybe you guys are the same way. There's so many good resources out there your podcast, this forum, all kinds of forums. There's a lot of junk out there, too, but there's a lot of good information if you're willing to deep dive, and people have to be willing to do the work. And that's something I'm unapologetic about. We present materials. We give our experience. I have literally hundreds of blogs about all the things you can do and the good, the bad, the ugly of working with the tentacles. But I lay it out there and say, at the end of the day, it's your call in how you manage an aquarium, because you could do everything that I say and still kill your fish if you don't follow the basic tenets of aquarium keeping with anything. saltwater I've had tons of people buyeries I had a guy that this is the true story. He would buy coral after coral from us, and he could constantly ask for replacements, and I can figure out why. Finally I called him up and said, dude, every time you place an order, you're killing coral. What are you doing? He's like, I don't know. Maybe my clown loaches picking on them. I'm like, what clown? He was putting them in a freshwater tank.
Oh, God, that's a spendy building there. I can feel your butthole. Parker there jimmy man, I just fell.
Off the turd wagon.
Yeah, that's the turd wagon guy. But I mean, people, you have to take responsibility, and that's anything in the hobby, whether you're keeping betas, whether you're keeping discus, cyclists, whatever. There's a lot of common sense that I think people want to maybe that's the good and the bad of the time we're in where information is so readily available that they want the easy answer. Sometimes you got to dig for it. The thing I love about what we do in the botanical style aquariums, we don't have all the answers yet. You can measure tenons in parts per million. There's tenon testus, but there's 6000 different tenons. Nobody knows which one is the one that simulates the discus into spawning or does this or that. So it's as much an art as it is the science. And that's what's so fun to me about it. It's real open source right now. And so it's a learning curve for even the most experienced people. But there are tangible benefits that people are seeing as a result of using these materials in their tanks, like fish breeding and stuff like that.
There's a comment you just said I want to address. Is that not just to dump a pile in your tank and watch it crash. The reason being for that is people associate ammonia, fish eating piss, I mean, that's essentially what they think about it. You're adding waste to your water, there's the ammonia. But plant matter creates its own form of ammonia. So if you have a naturally shedding plant, or you're putting a tunnel leaf litter in your tank, you're putting a decaying log. All of it creates its own levels of ammonia, much less, again, and much different type than the waste you get from the fish. But still, if you're putting it in there, you're risking spiking ammonia. So you have to be well established according to you can't necessarily just start it up with no repercussions and put fish in, add the botanicals in there alone, start your cycle, be aware of the extra ammonia and conditions you're adding to that tank. I have a massive planted aquarium. It's wall to wall, it's stonewall, it's 125 gallon aquarium tall, and it is top to bottom. I cannot see the back, I cannot see the floor packed with plants. So you assume that it would not have an ammonia spike. Well, I had a bunch of shedding plants in there. Something was unchecked. And sure enough, my ammonia spikes in that big of a planted aquarium where some people don't even try to do water changes. So be aware of what you're putting in your aquarium. I just wanted to make that point on that one as to why.
No, it's a great point because the very few problems I've ever had or customers had over the years were all caused by not applying common sense. When you're adding anything into your aquarium, whether it's plants, whether it's like you said, plants that shed or botanicals or anything, when you're adding something to your tank, it has an effect on, on the the environment, especially in established aquarium. So it's always best to go slow, do water tests, gauge, just take a look at your tank. People think that we're in such a society, I think now, and it's creeped into our culture and the aquarium hobby that you just dump something in, and it's instant amazon, and that's what we expect. It's like, no things have to happen, and the bacteria in your tank have to adjust to the increased amount of material in there. Just like when you add fish, you don't dump 50 fish in at one time. If you do, you're asking for trouble. It's the same thing. It's a living microcosm, an environment, and an environment moves along slowly. You can't just make these huge moves and expect nothing to happen. So, yeah, responsibility.
When you talk to people about tenants, well, it makes the water better, man. And you're not trying to do some weird sales pitch to try to put on this a tangible list you're doing for measurements that may be intangible. For instance, it lowers PH. We don't know by how much, but we know it does it. So that's an intangible, tangible item. Right. If we could list for listeners, especially people that haven't used a lot of leaf litter or those old school aquarius that literally don't believe in it, I've heard that quite a bit.
Sure.
Can you list some of these tangible items that this does for the aquarium?
Yeah. Well, number one, you mentioned potential impact on th. Number two, when you put terrestrial materials in an aquatic environment, they recruit bacterial biofilms. These biofilms are little colonies of bacteria and little sugar strands. Basically, they not only provide potential food for the fishes, because many fishes do forage on the stuff, they also provide foods for the creatures at the bottom of the food chain, some of the crustaceans, fungal growths, all these things work together to process water, process nutrients, potentially even export nutrients. So you're getting a potential not only a potential supplemental food source, an onboard food source, you're also getting potential biological filtration, if you will. You're getting a physical component, which is a structural component to the tank. In other words, a leaf litter bed is a natural habitat for many species of fishes. So you're giving them that kind of textual, that depth that they're used to. A lot of these fishes from the south american and asian streams, they hide in leaf litter, or they are more comfortable over leaf litter. They go in there for protection, to spawn food, for feeding, fry, grow up in there. So you're creating a physical environment as much as a chemical environment. Food webs are really important in blackwater communities because it's an impoverished environment. There's not a tremendous amount of I'll pause you there.
You said food webs. Explain that to us, because I've heard that term. They don't understand it at all.
Okay. Food webs. Well, think about it this way. At the base of a food chain, at the top of the food chain are the fishes. They feed on what crustaceans? Some of them feed on, well, they feed on actually the botanicals and leaves. They cut them up and smash them up and macerate them and eat those. They give off waste. What feeds on that smaller crustaceans? What feeds on those fungal growth, bacteria, et cetera. So it's all a big cycle. So food webs are really fascinating. Some of the food is what's called aliphonus input. In the jungles, you'll see these trees overhanging streams and stuff and fruit and seed pods fall into the water, which is kind of what we're mimicking in our types of aquariums. There are fishes that actually eat fruit. Like, have you ever seen a picture of like an arrangement swimming or a fish, like an arapaima big carousel, and they come in, they actually eat fruit, fruit that falls off the trees. The terrestrial environment influences the aquatic environment. So there's all kinds of food webs, insects that like ants that crawl up on these little branches. Some of them get clumsy and fall into the water. Fishes eat them. When these forest areas flood, what happens is, like you were talking about with the cardinal tetras, they're seasonally inundated by the overflowing rivers and rains. So what used to be just a forest floor becomes an underwater environment. What happens? There's a lot of food that the fish follow the food. So that's the other component of botanical style corns. It's not just influencing the PH. You could do this at a high PH, it doesn't matter. It's about creating a biological system. So it's a little different approach, I.
Think, just to go over a couple of these, just to go a little bit tighter on some of these points. So like that food web you're mentioning, let's touch just for fish, let's say you have plecos or certain rare placos that you're collecting. Most of these placos that you get are decavors. They will eat protein. They'll eat the fish flick. You'll put it in the aquarium. Some people attempt not to feed their plato, thinking that they're just going to eat the algae. They do consume some algae, but that is not their main food source. Again, they're eating off the random scrap flick that hits the bottom of the aquarium. They do eat that. And on top of it, they're looking for that decaying material in the tank that leaves the wood. That's why when you hear from these plato experts, they always put wood in it's. Their go to dial force. Wood for them in a breeding situation is much easier to clean. And if they have to sterilize something, they can keep a piece of wood in for a plato. But in your tank you're trying to make that slice of home for them. Having that leaf litter, having those alder cones, it goes a long way. I have a ten gallon tank right now with a bunch of glass platos that are growing out. And the best thing I could have done in there is put in a bunch of almond leaves, alder cones, a lot of debris, and they're ripping it apart. You think, why are they ripping it apart? They're not just using it for homes. They're using it as a food web.
And they're eating the creatures that live in there as well as the actual material stuff. They're eating detritus. Detritus is another thing that I have, like, wore on Detritus. Everybody's convinced that Detritus is bad. Detritus is the end product of the biological sultration cycle when you think about it. It's demineralized stuff, but it's food for a lot of organisms at the bottom of the food chain. Chain, and a lot of fishes. The other thing that you mentioned that was kind of interesting to me is about feeding, supplemental feeding. I've done multiple experience. I have one going right now with a tank full of tucano tetras. Tucanixes tucano.
They're great fish. Another thing from Project paiba that they have started bringing in now.
Yeah, they're fantastic fish. And I have them in an aquarium. That is a five gallon aquarium. I have eleven of them in there. They've been in there for seven months. I haven't fed them. All I have is a layer of leaf litter, decomposing leaf litter at the bottom. I literally haven't fed them a leaf litter and oak twigs. And so there's biofilms. And these fish or as fat and happy as any I've ever seen. In fact, about a month ago, there was a spawning event. I did not feed them. Now, I'm not the kind of guy that says I'll just leave the fish alone. This was an intentional experiment with a fairly pricey fish. But I wanted to prove to myself that I could do this, and I've done this repeatedly. I did this with green neon tetras in the same tank. There is something in the food, in the leaves and so forth. There's all the organisms which arise as a result of them. So there's a lot to it. And to me that's a very interesting sort of effect. That's why I think a tank filled with leaf litter and decomposing botanicals and stuff would be a great place to raise fries. At the very least. It's a supplemental feeding station for them. You could certainly feed brine, trim and so forth. But the fish are also deriving some additional nutrition from what's naturally occurring in.
The leaf litter bed. My argument are the carousens. They're in a low light environment. They already have the black water to deal with. They have incredible eyesight. We can only see so much. Imagine what they can see at a much smaller level for food. I thoroughly believe that they're forager hunters. They purposely hit up leaf litter. I've always had that hard belief, and that really just sticks proof behind it.
Well, you want to go further. If you get beyond the aquarium literature like I do. I geek out on trying to find all these papers and things online which you can find in Google Scholar. A lot of the gut content analysis of fishes like harrisons, which I'm a huge fan of, is stuff like insects, like ants. In fact, ants and fruit flies are a surprisingly large amount of the diet. But it's also stuff like detritus. So they're foraging through that stuff. Micro crustaceans like daphne and chiron amid lover, which is bloodworms. These are the natural food sources of these fishes. So, yeah, they spend a lot of their time foraging. And they are you right, most of them are micro predators. They're not swimming looking for pellets of food or tetriman in the water. In the wild, they're rooting through the substrate and I think a lot of fishes will do that.
Now, the other thing is, for shrimp, you said crustaceans themselves, I circle myself and a lot of fish goers, our sponsor of the show is Joe shrimp shack and they go out to all these different shows. Everybody that's doing it right, that's winning the awards, that's doing these individual shrimp, they're all using that litter. Bet they believe thoroughly. And alder cones are huge for it because they expand the open packets and they release so much more than just a single leaf. But even so, they put leaves through their tank. Even Joe, he has his main display cases and he'll feed them once a week. Sometimes he'll go on vacation because there's plenty of, like you said, detritus and they're eating away on these leaves. So he's just got to make sure they have a recurring layer of this decaying material in these two and a half gallon tanks. It's not much, it's just sponge filter, no heater with a bunch of litter implants. It's a crazy concept.
And you know what's cool is if you go into their wild habitats in Asia and so forth, that's what they're doing in nature. They're feeding off a leaf litter. And when we, as aquarists are topping off, like what he said, adding more leads to the tank or adding more twigs or whatever botanical you're playing with to the tank, you're essentially doing what happens in nature, which is things fall off the trees, they get swept into the water. You're actually mimicking the process of nature, not just the look, not just the ability to condition the water, but the process by which fishes forage for food reproduce, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a whole lot of things that we're actually recreating with surprisingly little effort when we try to do this. So it's really interesting. And there's all kinds of approaches you can take. One of the approaches that I've been playing with a lot lately and something I'm doing more and more of is there's a habitat called the agapo in South America. Those are flooded forests. What happens is it's a forest floor six, seven. Months out of the year, but during the rainy season, the streams nearby overflow, and they flood the forest. We talked about that earlier in the podcast, and this terrestrial habitat suddenly turns into an aquatic habitat. It's dirty, murky tinted, and exploding with life. It's completely different than what we've envisioned in the aquarium for many, many generations, and people haven't been playing with it. So I started doing this. I said, I want to do the whole life cycle. So I started off with a tank, put some soil mix and different types in there, grew some plants that he was achorus, which is a plant that could withstand desiccation or not desiccation, but drying and submersion, right? And even grass seeds, whatever grew those. Then let's make a rainy season. Start filling it up with water, put some fish in there. In this case, I was playing with south American annual killy fish. Then I let the water slowly desiccate. They were spawning like mad, took the fish out, let it dry out, and now I'm in the dry season. In a few months, I'll add water and see if I can get that whole life cycle going. There's all sorts of things we can do when playing with aquariums that I don't think have even been touched yet, or if we have, we thought about it, but I don't think we've done it. And that's what I love about this botanical approach, is it lends itself to all these kind of cool experiments. And you don't have to be a genius to do it. You just have to do a little research, have a hunch, and go for it.
The other thing you have on the list is decor habitat. And the thing I really go after is something like a siamese algae eater or what they call flying foxes. A lot of times they're different species. People confuse them a lot. I love these fish not only because they're cleaning crews. They are the best single fish that I've ever had to deal with heralgie of any type. Dead beard algae, black beard algae, any of it. They just mow it down while leaving the other plants alone. With a couple of exceptions, if they have their certain one plant they might go after, but it's very few and far between you'll see them go after plants at all. This particular species has to be for captive breeding, injected with hormone to breed. They have really no idea how to accurately reproduce this species. To get it to breed, I put them on my planted tanks, and I put an extra leaf litter in. I'm using a lot of different red lewd wigs that we're talking shed like mad. So once I decided, you know what, I'm just going to leave that leaf litter, and I'm going to quit scooping it out, I'm going to watch my ammonia, and I'm going to add a lot of different elements. At the time, I had a lot of almond leaves, I put in some extra wood. This was some special type of Malaysian wood that was real, I had to weigh it down, it just bled into the tank and I got them to breed twice. Now, I probably can't consistently do that, but the only time it happened is the moment that they had the leaf litter to rummage around it. And these fish, by nature, hide, so when I have a planted tank, these are, what do you say, Jimmy? Five inch fish? Yes, they're huge, biggie, you'll never see them, they're the biggest fish in the tank, you'll never see them, but when I peek in, they're literally flipping leaves or pushing them around like bulldozers playing in them, acclimating them to themselves and then they suddenly breed. There's no doubt in my mind that that stimulated some sort of source of instinct for them.
And that fish, I call it structural functionalism, I come with all these ridiculous names, but that's what it is. You've created a structurally interesting environment for them that mimics something that they must come from in their wilder must be accustomed to, because that behavior is probably an adaptation to living in an environment that's strewn with twigs and leaves and so forth and they've done that over eons, so you're providing them with what they need. Sure, you could breathe fish in a sterile tank with glass bottom and a spawning mop or whatever, or you could try it this way. Now you can't control it as well, but they'll reproduce and you might learn a few things and obviously you're seeing very interesting behavior with minimal intervention on your part. That's fascinating to me.
That's all it takes. And we had a couple of podcasts. Now we have Gridwit Weight Stock and then we had Ed the Pond Professor on, and when we had Gridwick Whitstack on, he even mentioned how coy they're carp, they're just decorative carp. Carp by their nature, rummage through everything. We have carp in Minnesota and they've been invasive since 1890 when they brought them in different lakes in Minnesota is the British type of thing that brought them in. They wanted it as a game fish, but those lakes and streams that were crystal clear because all the debris settled at the bottom, there wasn't a much stirring it up. The introduction of carp have utterly destroyed those ecosystems because they're rummaging. Now, you can't tell me there isn't other fish that rummage if you're going to put this leaf litter in, it's not just single habitat for cover, it's their natural habitat to dig up stuff, to look underneath, to keep finding. I have dojo loaches that I purposely leave a bunch of stuff in there because they're digging under plants, they're continually rummaging through the tank looking for it and I think it's a source of entertainment for them, frankly.
Oh, yeah, I agree. I mean, you're providing fishes stimulation. Fish are social animals. Some are, some are shoaling animals. Some are territorial. And by giving them those natural types of barriers and natural types of hiding places, there's so much that we can do beyond just aquascaping. This gets into a whole different thing, another topic for another time. But aquascaping to me is more than simulating a mountain range, underwater or underwater, Middle Earth forest or whatever. It's looking at nature as it really is and saying, how could I reproduce this in my aquarium? Granted, growing plants is something that happens in the wild. But the wild is more than crystal clear water, symmetrical plants and rocks spaced just perfectly in golden ratios. It's also about randomness, it's about turbidity. It's about things that benefit the fish. Fish live in an area because the environment provides them what they're looking for. It's not vice versa. Plants don't grow to make the fish come to them. The fish come to the plants because there's benefits. They're deriving from living there. Like you mentioned, they're foraging and stuff. So it's an interesting way when you look at it from that perspective. And I think that's as much as anything we're about as it is just throwing leaves and twigs into an aquarium too. I think that's the whole approach, the whole philosophy.
Just to recap again, these are broad spectrum points lowers PH naturally. It's bacteria that causes its own biological filter or at least boosts the one you have because you're adding more food to the system to create new types of bacteria. You're having that food web that we spoke of not only just for the fish species like placoes and whatnot a deck of ore, but also for the species such as shrimp or even the microbiological material that fish feed on, then decor and habitat. Is there anything else that we're missing as a core point besides looking cool with a tea tank?
No. I think one of the benefits that we're looking at is it gives us an appreciation for the wild habitats that fishes come from. And when we understand it, when we understand that environment and how it functions, we also can tell other people about it. And that puts awareness into the public's mind and we protect what we love, right, and what we understand. So a lot of these environments that our tropical fish come from are critically endangered by man's encroachment and dams and mining and forestry and so forth. So when we understand how incredibly rare these habitats really are and how amazing that they evolved the way they did, we could learn a lot about how to protect them and at least we can have an understanding of the threats they face and the challenges that they face. So there's an educational component too. I think that is a core point of this understanding the wild habitat as it really is. I think that's really important.
So I'm going to get in touch with my hippie self and I want you guys to call me out on this. All right, I'm getting a little deep here. Not drinking kabucha. I won't go that far. I have a firm belief, an unsubstantiated belief, that I'd love some scientists to prove me wrong or right on. I have a firm belief that as your stomach has probiotics to digest your food, that this is the element for probiotics for a tank, meaning that it not only does all these benefits, but that bacteria is one of the best sources to fight off any type of disease. I have a firm belief in this that two pieces of the recipe that I've felt for years is decaying plant matter for tannins in the water. If you have tannins, you're having the correct food for the correct, what I love to call probiotics in the tank. And salt. People don't use a lot of salt in the tanks or even small micro dosing to add a lot of that to help electrolytes to ward off disease. Some fish thrive in a pinch of salt even when they're not brackish. I just think that those two pieces are core for almost any freshwater tank.
Unsubstantiated or anecdotal. It doesn't matter if you're experimenting with them. There's something worth looking at, and these things become substantiated. It wasn't all that long ago that people said, you can't keep this fish or you can't keep that fish, or you can't keep this alive, or look at where we are now from where we were 50 years ago. And the things that we're doing, the fish that we're breeding and so forth. It's all because somebody had an idea and went for it. Somebody tried something a little different, maybe got a little criticism. The status quo got shaken up a little bit. We have to investigate these new things. Again, my personal frustration with this shallow interpretation of nature, they're doing a lot of good because they're getting people excited about the hobby, but they're not really calling attention to nature as it is. And that's the thing that drives me crazy, because nature as it is every bit as fascinating and beautiful as a beautifully manicured, beautifully set up aquarium. I think we can do better, and I think we can take that same talent and try some different things with it.
So now for the listeners that are beginners, because again, we need to cater to those audience. They're just like tenants. I want to give this a try. You hippies talked me into it. What does it take? I'm going to start somewhere, right? I got to go research on my own again, that was prevalent, that you need to go do your own research. But if I'm going to get started of course we told them about that enigma pack, but what's the elements, the best elements to get started with the tank? The common things that we see are like, the almond leaves, alder cones. I mean, clearly you have a labyrinth of stuff on your website what do you recommend to get started and what pieces and why.
Of actual product. Whether you get it from me or somebody else out there that ends up I would probably start depending on the size of your tank. I would start with some basic leaves like Katapa Indian almond leaves. I would maybe look at guava leaves. If you want to collect your own, go collect some oak leaves or some magnolia leaves. Leaves I think, are really a great place to start when you're playing with botanicals because it introduces you to all the things that happen. Things break down, things recruit biofilms. They can affect the PH and the pds and the water. I think leaves are a good starting point. I would start with just about any leaf. I would start with maybe some twigs. I would start with some of the harder seed pods. Like there's a pod called cariniana. It comes from a tree in the Amazon and it's hollow on one. It looks like a little like a pickle almost, but it's hollow on one end. pista grandma love to go into them and catfish like to hide in them. Those are fun. They're decorative and they're also interesting. They don't impart a lot of tannins in the water. But that's not the point. They are structural piece. You could experiment with catappa bark or mangrove bark. All kinds of things that affect not only the water chemistry but provide that structural benefit and recruit biofilms, et cetera, et cetera. All the same themes over and over and over again. But those are good starting points for me. You could try just about anything. I mean, you could do all kinds of different things and not really go wrong if you go slowly. Use some common a sense. But I think leaves are a great way to start. It's a good way to introduce you. You may not like the look. You may put it in there and say I don't like things blowing around in my tank. I don't like the way they crumble over time or whatever. And this may not be for you. And I get it. It's not everybody's cup of tea. It's not everybody's idea of beauty. But I would go with leaves because you could easily siphon them out of your tank if you don't like the look and they start breaking down and making a mess that you're not a big fan of. I leave them in there until they break down. But it some people don't like that work.
I leave them in there until there's just a stem left.
Why not, right?
That's just because I don't want to get sucked up in the pipe.
Right.
I got a quick question for you, Scott. Is there anything that you would consider too dark? I'll give you for instance here.
How black do you like your coffee? Yeah, right.
I had a 90 gallon cube tank which I just sold to Rob here. Not too long ago. Kept a lot of discus in there. My wife loves discus. We had one beautiful piece of driftwood in there and that thing leached and leached and leached five, six years. And finally our friend ty came over and he said, why is it so dark in there? And I go, this thing's been leaching for the last five years. And he goes, well, there's your problem. You got a bristol's pleco. Once I took those, the bristol's pleco out, he quit chewing on it, and then all of a sudden the water cleared up a little bit. Is there a point where you go, this is too dark? I have to buy a seeing eye dog for these fish.
I mean, fish are accustomed to murky waterways and dark water. The too dark is really an objective. I don't think there's an environmental issue with water being too dark. I think it's more of an aesthetic thing.
Right.
It's like how big is too big a tank? I mean, when you have weather patterns forming in your living room because you have a 200 gallon tank that's too big for you, we're going to talk.
To Big Rich after this.
Yeah, it's too dark. If you drop a siphon hose or you drop a net in the tank and you can never find it again, that's too dark. If you're trying to grow plants, obviously, if it's too dark, even no matter if you're bombarding it with 500 watts of light and you still can't see the bottom, it's probably too dark.
But have you noticed there's like some bacterial issues or risk to the fish or any other cause just strictly from tennis? Because you can have dark water or orange water from too much ammonia. You can have certain tints from other things, but this is strictly just from tenants. Is there a point where it's just too much and risking something else?
Yeah. No, I personally have not. Again, I'm very adventurous and experimental. I have done my best over the years to try to it sounds horrible to try to kill a tank by going crazy, doing all the dumb things people would do. I have not succeeded. Once a system gets, I think I guess the word reestablished. This is anecdotal, but I personally believe that botanical aquarium, botanical style aquariums, an aquarium like yours that has a lot of decomposing matter, a lot of material in there has a bacterial population and maybe a crustacean population that's enabled that's, able to process that. And I firmly believe that unless you add a huge influx of stuff, I don't think there's any long term detriment. As long as you're doing your water changes, as long as you're not over stocking, you're not overfeeding. There's a difference between detritus caused by reason, mechanicals that break down, then detritus caused by fish crap or overfeeding. If you're dumping half a can of detriment in your tank every time, and it's going right to the bottom, it's probably overfeeding. And that's a problem. It's a little different.
Well, if you've yet to feed your tetras, I think in that I think we're good.
Yeah, exactly. They're even but I think it's subjective. I really do. I think everybody has to make their own determination.
It just comes down to their personal taste of their company.
Personal taste. Monitor the water chemistry. If you find that something's out of whack, well, maybe you need to do a water change. Maybe you need to take out some stuff. But over time, I find aquariums to be remarkably adaptable. Reef aquariums. I've spent decades working with reef aquariums, and people kill reef tanks all the time because they mess with it. They don't let nature what happens is people embrace part of a system. They try I'm going to add this. I'm going to add that. They're not creating all the components for success. I think in aquarium, whether it's freshwater, reef brackish, whatever, you can't do part of something. You can't just have leaves in the bottom and not expect to eat a bacterial population to process organics, the hands.
Off approach and even freshwater ruins freshwater continually. I know people that have killed tanks that pull out their filter, wipe down every asset, no bacteria growing anything, and they're just resetting their tank every time.
Right. On the other hand, one can make the argument. I know there's always some guy out there that I never changed water. I haven't changed water since night. I mean, a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, too. It's luck. But because you can't just never add water to an aquarium and expect to have magnificent results. Some people have crazy results, I guess, but for the most part, it's something that we all have to address. Now you're going to kill me. This is the worst thing. I can't believe this happening, but I brought the wrong charger. My battery is down to 5%. I need to run and get my charger.
We can pause. Go run. Can we pause it's live on discord? But we broll this.
Yeah, the people listening on discard can suck it.
Oh, no. We love you all. jimmy's full of shit.
No, that was Adam.
Let me just grab that charger.
All right, go ahead.
So I got a question. We've had people on this podcast that have talked about how you don't see ick in nature for the most part. I wonder if there's any tannins if he's ever seen ick in his tank.
That's the probiotic theory that I got.
I'm going to ask him this, right?
Like a tank's, a stomach. This is the probiotics, and the probiotics eat the ic. That's the firm belief of mine.
Yeah, you can told you. All right, I got a quick question for you, Scott. We've had quite a few wonderful people on this podcast, and they've said that you don't ever really see ick in nature, do you? Feel the tannins. Help keep the ick away from the fish.
What is your, like, the probiotic conversation I just had? Like, it's eating it somehow. You know what I mean?
There are studies I found a study done in a fisheries program in Malaysia. They were studying what was it, tilapia that were being farmed for food production. And they found that catapa leaf extract. I forgot what the dosage was. It was like zero point 50 milligrams per liter. Some precise dosage did show some antifungal capability. It did work on Aramonis. The bacteria kept the bacteria count low, and it protected the resulting eggs from the fish from fungal growth. So there are some anecdotal and some scientific studies that were done. So there are some reason to believe that there are some antiparasitic antibacterial benefits. I would not use the leaves strictly for that and botanicals strictly for that. I think that would be irresponsible for me to say that.
But think of it as a preventative.
Right. There's definitely some potential benefit. Look, the reason why you don't probably get a kick in the wild, there could be many different reasons just in these type environments.
Because Jimmy doesn't pee in the wild, that's why.
Yeah, don't believe that for a second.
No, go ahead.
Yeah. No, that's where I'm going with it. Okay.
There we go. There's no human intervention.
I remember someone once told me, don't drink in the water. Fish pee in it. I mean, who knows what's in water? But bacteria are always present. parasites are probably always present, but the concentrations are low and the water is the dissolution of a huge pond or a stream is so great. It's not like an aquarium where they're in the same body of water. But I believe there's some preventative benefits for botanicals.
A couple of questions that I got down the list again. These come up top of my head, some of them from listeners, because this is actually you were requested by our fans. I did not know about the tent. I started listening to the podcast, loving the tent and getting kind of deep into it. So I'm happy to have you in the podcast, finally. But on here, the question is, when they're preparing these almond leaves dried versus roasted, because I've literally heard that people bake leaves on purpose. Does that break down the leaf and make it no good? Do you just simply dry them? How are these leaves prepared that you sell?
That's a good question. No, that's a fair question. I've never heard of anybody roasting leaves, so I don't know, they might be smoking.
I've heard about roasting leaves a lot, actually.
Different. I've heard about people getting roasted from.
Leaves, but that's a different podcast for 2030 Pass.
We missed our opportunity.
Yeah, right, exactly. But no leads are collected. I'll tell you how my suppliers collect the leads for me. They're naturally fallen, usually from plantation grown trees and a few suppliers throughout the world. For example, one of my guys that I get katapa leaves from in Malaysia and borneo, they're naturally fallen leaves. He lays them out under a shed and dries them out naturally in the dark, not in the sun. They're air dried and they get kind of a nice texture, and they're not quite crispy, but they last really nicely. And then we boil them or steep them to soften them so it'll sink number one and number two, that sort of breaks down the dermal layer, the outer layer, and more easily allows it to saturate and release the tannins and so forth. Preparation is a whole art in and of itself. And there's a lot of in our little community, there's a lot of difference of opinion on that. Some people say, I just throw this stuff in nature or relief fall in the water. They're not boiled. Yeah, sure, but you have millions of gallons of water flowing through something. But leaves it's important when you're using leaves that you're using dried leaves or leaves that have naturally fallen because they depleted their stores of sugar and other materials that would otherwise add excessive burden to your water quality. So I will be experimenting with naturally with the fresher leaves because that's something I've always wanted to play with. But right now, no. We use dried leaves, naturally dried leaves.
So when you have your suppliers get your leaves and stuff and they ship you leaves, do you get a lot of crazy looks from my mailman for your mailman or from the airport or wherever you guys are getting these?
And do you ever just open up a bag, dump it in your lawn, and then make like, leaf angels?
Right, exactly. Not with the prices I pay for this stuff, no. But, I mean, I went through a fair amount of permitting, and because some of this stuff is Agriculture Department of Agriculture control, you have to have permits to import some of it. One of the things I've always tried to make sure is that the things that we're getting are sustainably harvested and collected. So, for example, the seed pods are not hacked off of wild, old growth jungle trees. They're usually plantation trees. I really got to know owe my suppliers over the years, and that was really important for me because I like to know who's dealing with it. Like, my guy in borneo, we have a great relationship. I could talk to him on facetime, and he shows me where he's collecting. What do you think of this guy? What do you think of that? So it's important to know these people. But no, I used to get funny looks from all my dhl guy, my fedex guy. They know another bag of leaves. One of my guys from India sends them in like they literally sew a bag together. So every time I get it, it's a bag. Like a huge bundle that's sewn in like Muslim. And I have to rip out the seams that will get the leads. It's really a fascinating thing. Other guys just send it in boxes. So, yeah, they get some weird looks, but not as much anymore. Now my people know me.
You got to imagine him in a mailbox, just cracking a package open, sniffing it like it's a fine tobacco.
I do.
I'm just wondering if there's any black Suburban sitting outside your facility with binoculars.
And one time I purchased from a new supplier in Vietnam some kind of weird bark. I learned about it. And then this guy sought me out, and I said, okay, this is cool. So I did the study. I thought I looked at what's on the invasive species list. I got this bar. I got a few pounds of this stuff. It literally looked like something illegal, but it came through. But in the same box, this guy was giving me some bark. It was a katapa bark, and it was confiscated by usda, which has never happened before because they said it was wood chips. They didn't quite understand what it was. And this guy didn't fill out the customs form properly. So you have to know your supplier. So you do get occasional weird things. But it's interesting. My mail is never dull. There's always something interesting.
He doesn't deal with Schmelta Airlines. I guess Schmelta Airlines probably won't exist after this.
A lot of airlines won't, unfortunately. It's funny because the COVID thing has affected my overseas suppliers, too. Because India was shut down, they're still shut down for a month. They can't do much. Malaysia has issues. You know, thailand, I think, is just opening up again. But some of these guys couldn't ship stuff. So I try to, like, stock up on supplies. And I'm glad I do, because people, they still play with their hobbies, even in the lockdown.
Yeah, we purchase a lot of stuff from cigarettes, farms. I've been on the phone with them. Right now, all their shipping is ups. They're the biggest shipper in the state of Florida. That's who introduced me to leaves and stuff. My salesperson, julie, try these almond leaves. Try this, try that. And I've just had wonderful success with them and stuff. It's now to the point where Secrets Farms even planted some almond trees on their property, and they're collecting them and stuff, too. And she had said what you just said.
Filthy hippies.
Yeah, you need to pick them up off the ground and you can't take them off the tree and that sort of thing. And I didn't realize that there would be that much sugar content in a leaf like that until you just said that. And that's what I love about this podcast, is every single time we learn something from somebody that just takes it to a whole new level.
I love this.
I swear, I'm going to see you smoke oak leaves. I'm going to hit you.
I'm going to get old.
I slept through botany class in college and sometimes I wish I didn't because I've had to re educate myself on some of this stuff. But yeah, it's really leaf drop in general, just natural leaf drop is really fascinating. And how leaf drop occurs in the Amazon, for example, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff that you can learn, but yeah, just that the materials themselves are interesting. I love that seaggress is growing their own. That's cool. And in Florida they have the climate to do it. In California we grow almonds, but not the Indian almond.
I think you got was it guava leaves? See, you got some of them, but that spins the point of people that do this diy. Now, me, I've used oak leaves. I haven't taken the time to research if other leaves can be used. So number one, what leaves can be used? What's the do's and don'ts when you collect these things?
Okay, good question. First of all, leaves that I could tell you were not problematic are oak is a wide variety of oaks. Again, collect them is naturally falling maple. Maple I've never played with, I've played with, and they work just fine. So let's see another leaf that you could use. Magnolia. You can collect your own magnolia leaves. Some guys use beach, some people play with. It's escaping me. There's some other things. You could find your own alder cones, you could find birch cones. I can tell you, categorically, pine is not something I'd mess with because apparently there, and I know this only because people have told me this and I've researched it, I believe there's some oils or something in pine that could potentially be toxic for fish. And plus, it doesn't look very tropical to me. So even though there are pines that occur in the suffix, but it doesn't have the lips. So I wouldn't do pine.
Hey, you never know, they might have a bash tank.
Well, exactly.
Thank you, Adam.
Beer can tank. No, you could experiment with this stuff, but collect it all naturally fallen, collected in an area free from agricultural runoff. In other words, if you're down the street from a factory or something, you're not going to grab even how tempting the magnolia leaf might be sitting in the gutter, you don't know what's run through that. So I would avoid collecting from industrial areas, areas where they're spraying pesticides or herbicides or whatever. Agricultural runoff feel common sense, not polluted stuff. But for the most part you collect from a nice clean, open space area that legally, of course, trespassing or something. You should do okay with that.
So what about like barks? barks is a new one for me. I haven't used a lot of barks. I've used wood with a little bit of bark. I have not experimented with bark, love.
Bark, particularly katapa bark. There are undoubtedly other types of bark you can use. My experiences with the tropical bark. I haven't tried oak bark. I haven't tried oak bark, but I don't see why it would be harmful that I use oak twigs. Oak twigs are not a problem. You can collect your own. We sell them, believe it or not, but because not everybody has an oak tree in their area. So I mentioned the bark would work. We also work with mangrove bark. Now, mangrove is interesting because mangroves are protected in lots of places around the world, but the area we get them from in Hawaii, they're invasive. So the city of honolulu would love to get rid of that stuff. So we get a bunch of it, help take that off their hands, and the bark and the wood is really interesting.
Here's a small dream of mine, right? I want to create a local tank, right? There's a species that's very pretty but disregarded as a pest fish called the stickleback. It's very common in Minnesota. There's a three spine stickleback. They got a lot of color, a lot of character. They look like miniature walleyes in your tank. They're quite fun, and they have a lot of ranges. It's just not a single stickleback. There's many varieties, and nothing would please me more than seeing, like, a beer cannon. All Minnesota escape with a piece of birchwood with that beautiful white paper decaying in the tank. But I've always been scared of that type of bark.
That's a good question. As a vendor, I can't sell anything that I haven't experimented with myself and tried to overdo or tried to kill fish.
We need to experiment together. It's like a good drug dealer.
Yeah, I think you have to just, unfortunately, maybe get some bait fish or mosquito fish or something. It sounds horrible, an extendable fish, but you almost have to just go for it because there's just no way of knowing other than unless you know someone that's a botanist that could tell you there's some toxin or whatever. But for the most part, it's a matter of just going for it. And it really is. I mean, regrettably that some fish may die in the experiment, and that's rough.
I love the little alder cones, and I see people selling, like, regular pine cones, which to me doesn't seem like that would work very well in your aquarium, but they're selling them online and whatnot. Where do alder cones come from? I mean, we don't see the alder tree. Oh, my God. Another one is we get punched in the throat.
You know what's really funny is, okay, this is how geeked out I am. When I go for a walk, my wife and I like to walk in the neighborhood and so forth. And I found a tree the other day. I was, like, looking at these cones on the ground. I was stepping on, what the hell? And I'm like it's. An alder tree. I'm like what? And I'm buying these from my vendor to get I could collect it. So, yeah, you could. You'd be surprised what you could find. Pine cones again, because of the potential for SAP or that's what I'm saying. Whatever. I would be freaked out about it. But maybe they know something I don't. I certainly am not Mr. Botanical. I don't know everything, but I know what works for me, and I do a lot of research. And I had a guy we sell these things called casarena combs. They're from India, and they're also found in Australia. And I remember getting them just hammered by a couple of guys on an Australian shrimp forum and said, These are toxic. And I did a little research, and I've been using them. My customers have been using them for four or five years. I'm like, they're not toxic. What's toxic is the plant puts out the roots that the plant puts out discourage other plants from growing in the area. So they're toxic to other plants, but they're not ixia toxic. The pine, the cone itself is no known toxicity. I mean, I guess you don't want to eat it, but as far as for fish, now, never, ever, ever had a problem with it. Pine wood is no good, but maybe the pine cone is good. I don't know. But I would be a little afraid to over generalize.
So would black walnuts because they are toxic to plants.
Would they be toxic to fish or are they not?
Or just walnuts in general?
Yeah, you know what? Walnut shells have been used crushed walnut shells have been used by killing breeders or were used by killers, breeders for many years instead of, like, peat moss. But you would see them use crushed walnut shells. So anecdotally I would say I don't think the walnut shell is a problem. Maybe the nut has something in it, oil or something or whatever. But no, but I mean, I think with a lot of materials, you can experiment.
We can play the can I use it game all day, but I only got two more, right? We got a couple of people that are listening live to the podcast right now, and I get this a lot as well. Pete, as a substrate for blackwater tanks, or do you have a specific substrate preference for blackwater?
Awesome question. My favorite go to substrate is carib Sea torpedo beach sand. I feel like that's the brand White. That's the brand torpedo. I use carrot. I love Caribbean stuff not sponsored by them. They don't. In fact, they actually offer catapults, which is really funny. But no, I love that stuff. Also, one called Sunset Gold by Caribbed, which I love, too, because it's inert essentially it doesn't impact the PH of the water, and it looks very natural. Most of the blackwater rivers that you find in South America, for example, run over white silica of various grades, whereas the flooded forests are soil. So one of the things, one of the products we're working and coming out with later in the summer is we're doing an Agapo soil and a varsaia soil. Those are the two types of forests that flood seasonally in South America. So they're based on what are called podzoles, different types of soil. So there's some interesting things there, but for most of my aquariums, I use that sand. You could use peat, sure. But I would probably boil it and make sure it stays down. And in the absence of buffering in your water, they pete could drive the water down, the PH down, too. And also there's the sustainability issue. A lot of people are freaked out about Pete. If it's from Canada, Canadian Pete is managed sustainably, but Pete from other parts of the world is like a finite resource, and it's sometimes pulling from that finite resource, so it could be problematic. I just be careful from your sourcing. Yeah.
As my rule of thumb, I always try to do something that's PH neutral. That's always my big thing, is any substrate I use, if it's PH neutral, don't care. I can look at different brands. I can do pool filter, sand. I got to be something PH neutral to start off of.
But unless you're trying to get an effect, if you're trying to get yellow.
You go for a beer can. You know what I mean?
Right. Well, substrate is every bit as fascinating as any other part of the aquarium, and that's why I've done substrates consisting of oak twigs and just leaves and dirt and all mud. So I think there's a lot to be done there. I think we in the hobby of need to do a little more experimenting with that stuff. That's a wide open area.
So the last one that I have from the listener is eucalyptus leaves are toxic, but are they a good tannin? You want to put a qala bear tea going on?
They are known to be toxic. There's an oil or something. And it was funny because I had someone approached me, a supplier of these eucalyptus, these pods that looked so beautiful, and these are great. And I researched it, and I thought, I had people approach me with this stuff all the time. Hey, do you want to carry this? And I thought, this is cool. He came up with some doofus name for it. I don't know if he's calling him, like, Wiggle pods or something. Like, what's a wiggle pod? Can you tell me what the tree it comes from? Turned out it came from eucalyptus, and eucalyptus is known to be ichthyotoxic, so pets get sick off eating leaves and soda fish. So I'm like, yeah, I'm going to steer clear that killing my customers tanks outright is bad for business.
Not good business. No recurring customers.
Not good.
All right, so let's go back to a beginner question. You gave us some recommendations on what they can use to start producing tannins in their tanks, some good places to start with, or even just having you curate an enigma pack for them. But how does one add it to the tank? Now, I've heard two different ways. Just drop it in, wait for it to keep on its own, let it decay naturally. Or I've seen people make a literal tea. They take the leaves, they take seed pods, they take the bark, they boil it in a teapot, make it or pour just hot water, maybe it's not boiling. And they brew a tea and pour the tea water into the aquarium. How do you recommend this done? Are both methods good?
I'm not a fan of the tea for a few reasons. Because when you're doing it from natural material, when you're doing it from like intact leaves and seed pods, those are things that are collected in the wild. They have dirt, they have pollutants insects, mold, whatever on them. So when you're boiling it and you're adding that tea, you're essentially just adding all the pollutants that you are trying to get out of those leads into your aquarium. It's a concentrated solution of pollution. So I would say I would be better off using the actual materials themselves. I would steep them or boil them, and you steep them a to clean them up, b to help them saturate the tissues and sink. And you would start your aquarium, as you mentioned earlier in the podcast for Beginner, if you're going to start with a brand new aquarium, you could add as much stuff as you want, go through the cycle and add your fishes. When it's cycled to an established aquarium, you just have to go really slowly, add a few things that of time. We do have a product which is selected, we're about to release, which is kind of almost like little tea bags of very carefully selected botanical materials and leaves that we know will give you a certain look and given size, water volume for a period of time. We know that these are clean materials that aren't just collected, they're sort of prepared ahead of time. So we've done a little of the guesswork for you, but I'm not a big fan of the keys because we just don't know how much to add. I'd rather add the material than add the water. That's why these blackwater extracts drive me crazy, because what's the concentration and how much of what are you adding? And you have to constantly reed, because when you're just adding that as a solution, it falls out a solution over time. When you have the material on board in C two in the tank, they're constantly giving off tannins and humid substances until they're exhausted. So I'd rather add the stuff than the tea.
Well, if you ever want to, when you come up with the new product you ever want to advertise, trust me, we would have so much fun talking about tea bags on our advertisement.
We call them sasha.
Come on.
That's just going to go over badly.
No, it's going to go over perfect. There's no such thing as bad PR. Come on.
I have a quick question for you. Is your lab, like, your kitchen? And does your wife want to throw you out in the street?
My wife, the long suffering wife, has long ago learned to leave you in your bark alone. I have dedicated pots and pans.
I literally go to Amazon and like.
Oh, this is inert. This is ceramic pot. I'm excited. It's only $18. I have my own stuff, my own pyrex stuff, so I get to do all the goofy ferments I want in the kitchen.
So I'm surprised she hasn't put, like, a stove out in your garage or something. Might you go out there and play? Because I'm sure some of this stuff doesn't smell real good.
Believe me. That would be the ultimate lab. Right? Actually, the new thing is when you're boiling the botanicals or steeping up, they smell amazing. Like, people email me all the time. Oh, my God, the mangrove smells so good. It's really amazing. It's part of the experience that I tell people is just the smell of this stuff. It's very earthy. It's cool.
All right, so I have a challenge for you. Let's do a swap, right? I will do a tenant tank, right? I'll upgrade mine, do some of the bark seed pods. Have never done seed pods before. And then you do like, an aquarium guy's version, right, where you have that blue crystal gravel, and then you put a figurine of heisenberg from Breaking Bad and make a mass aquarium.
I'm still all about that. I would do that.
And a beer can.
What do I have to keep in it?
Glowfish? Yeah. Only yellow glow fish, I think, is the only thing appropriate.
Yellow glow.
Maybe some glow bed is, because that.
Gets people fired up, right?
What about those zebra daniels that they've done the glow fish treatment with those.
That'S exactly the person the glow daniels.
Right.
They're very touched.
A lab biotope aquarium.
I love it. One of our fans just put in braking tank.
That's something we don't like to hear. A breaking tank. Bad idea.
What if we do some, like, American flagfish, right? With unroasted just raw peanut shells. You know what I mean?
There you go.
With some pistachios.
The planters or yeah, the generic, rightaches? Would be great, too.
Not the salted ones. Like fresh from a farm. You know what I mean?
50% less salt. You do brackish tank with the salted peanuts. So there you go.
There you go.
Wasted. There you go.
You got anything, Jimmy?
No, we just drove this thing off a cliff here.
I got nothing.
Right?
Off to a plantation.
Right off to a plantation.
All right, guys.
Well, certainly. Check out this podcast. It's called the tint with a period. It'll be in the show notes like and subscribe. They're fun. It's a different type of podcast where he does do the long form podcast again with a guest and go deep dive, but they're just probably every other day, daily blips where you talk ten to 15 minutes and either remind. Go over a topic, do a little short, deep dive on something that either is happening in your life or reminder of the world of tannins. You can also go to tanna aquatics.com and find yourself every different type of thing. You even have shells. It's not just stuff for tan and leaching, but other additives, decorations, natural material, right? So certainly check it out. tanna Aquatics.com link will also be in the show notes, so give it a click. And really, if you want to give this a try, try that Enigma pack. They get to curate it, they'll hear about your tank and they'll send you a big box filled with what they think is best for your tank. I mean, why not try something that's been curated by an expert? Yeah, well, thanks again.
Have fun.
Thanks again, Scott, and thanks for having me. Before we kick off the podcast, if anybody's a tint listener, I've been definitely binging since I've started talking to you. And you have the best segues at the end of your podcast. So if I may try to attempt this once.
There we go.
Stay brave, stay thirsty, stay tendered, but above all else, stay wet.
Here it goes. Stay wet, stay wet. mob's never been wet.
This way. And that's the podcast. Thanks, ladies and gentlemen. Just damn. Thanks guys for listening to this podcast. Please visit us at aquarium guyspodcast.com, and listen to us on spotify, iheartradio 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 tree house?
In your tree house, in your fish room, even alone at work.
What about my man cave?
Especially your man cave. Yeah, only if Adam is there. No with feeder guppy know they're endless.
You magic loving fat second mother Frank.
Well, I guess we'll see you next time. Later. bye.