Good evening. I'm Todd flanagan with AGP News. Our top story tonight, local man Adam El nashar in critical condition after being stung by multiple exotic species. But first, let's check in and with our correspondent Brent spanky with the weather. Brent, how is everything out there tonight?
Cold.
It sounds rough out there. How cold is it?
I can't feel my balls.
Hate to cut you off, Brent, but we have a breaking story. Local shrimp based celebrity Joe tyson, owner of Joe Shrimp shack, is and if, if I'm getting this correct, single and ready to mingle, yes, we can confirm that AGP news that we have entertainment correspondence following the story all week long and can confirm that there is now open applications for your chance for a wonderful date with the celebrity himself, Joe tyson. Simply go to aquariumguyspodcast.com. At the bottom of the website you will find the telephone number, email address. Please call in for your chance with the wonderful Joe tyson. And don't forget, this news is sponsored by Joe Shrimpshack.com, where you can save 15% off everything in the store using promo code. Aquarium guys at checkout. You know, I just love their cholawood. Joe shrimp shack.com. He's not fake news. Last few notes before we start the podcast, we have a winner for the J Four flowerhorns. giveaway congratulations to James W from Texas. We will be getting that sent out right away. Also, don't forget to sign up for cobalt aquatics and reflowers aquascaping contest. Be sure to sign up in the form in the show notes below. Submissions officially close December 3, so get those in as soon as you can. Again, all are welcome. Fresh and salt water. Let's kick that podcast. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolsen. Welcome to the podcast, guys. Today we are blessed to have Jason from redfish bluefish on YouTube join us today. How you doing, Jason?
I'm doing great, guys. I really appreciate you having me on.
I appreciate it, man. It's been a long time coming and you've been busy setting up a new fish store, trying to get in the market while the leases are still good for COVID. So congratulations on that, by the way. It's looking great.
Yeah, I really appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely. You know, COVID-19 hit and kind of freaked everything out. You know, a bunch of leases became available and I guess I guess I jumped in.
Wonderful. Well, today we're going to be chitchatting a little bit about tissue cultures, but I am your host, Rob olson.
Hey, I'm Jim colby.
And I'm Adamashar.
Jimmy, it's deer season and it's crazy here in Minnesota. Are you okay?
It is. It's deer season. I was driving out in the country today. I saw deer hunter after deer hunter after deer hunter. I bought something nice for my ex wife. I gave her a nice beanie with some antlers on it and told her to take a walk in the woods and she told me to buzz off.
It's the only time you get to see rednecks and primary colors.
That's right.
Right. Yeah.
They're all matching. It's like it's like a really bad wedding. Everybody's wearing a bad tuck.
Really bad wedding. And you're holding up to Adam, right?
Yeah. Did you guys hear about the hunter that shot a ten point buck and then shot a three and a half foot alligator at the same time?
At the same time. That wasn't in Minnesota.
Yeah, it was. Wow.
I did not hear this.
Okay. It was up by the cities, I guess, or someplace. He saw ten point bucks, shot it and then near the watering hole there was a three and a half foot gator and he asked the dnr if he could shoot it. They tried to catch it a few times, couldn't catch it. And so he shot it because it was going to freeze to death anyways.
Right.
So I'm like, well, all you had to do is put a piece of chicken on a treble hook and you caught it.
But or wait till today was 25 degrees, go out and just pick them up out of the ice.
I was going to say this morning.
Here Minnesota. Where we're at? We're way up north past Adam. So where we're at it was 72 degrees and then today you go outside it's 31. So the world hates us. That's why everybody is closer to to Jason. You know where the, where the nice weather is like rain.
Yeah, we have a lot of that going on, actually. It's it's been really, really cold last couple of days. We got this crazy cold snap this morning. It was gas. 31 deg, just blowing, freezing. Oh, my gosh. The end of the world.
We're sharing a little bit of hate with you.
And where are you located, Jason?
I am on south whitby island. It's quite a large island, actually, out in the puget sound about 25 miles northwest of Seattle.
That's a lovely place. When I was eight years old, that was the first family vacation we went to is wiggy island. I don't know why, but it was lovely. And there was deer on the island.
It must have been.
There are still tons of deer on the island. Like these. Columbia blacktail deer. They're everywhere, man.
And they were game like it was something else to look at them.
Yeah, they're still pretty crazy. They walk right up, eat all your roses, poop everywhere.
Maybe we should send Jason the alligator.
Right. We'll send Jason the alligator to cure some of the deals. We're going to go through some reviews, a review today. We just got another one in great aquarium podcast. Five stars. Love the content. Great banner. Just watch the explicit, though. We ran out of ducks, people. We had to upgrade to full on bleeps.
Sometimes Rob gets excited.
We made the investment to bleep system. Yeah. That's how you know, for your matching it.
So that shows that we've made it now.
Exactly.
Because we can afford to.
Exactly.
I don't know, Jason, if you've heard some of our previous podcast, when things get out of hand and we used to have a duck that would crack when somebody says something naughty, but we ran out of ducks.
All gone.
Too much naughty.
All gone.
Oh, yes, I'm very familiar with the duck.
We ran out of all class once the George Farmer episode is out, and then we can be our bad selves again.
There we go.
So, the questions, we got a bunch we addressed last week. We actually got a few caught up, but we did get someone that sent us a text message. So if you ever have a question for us and you want it to answer live on the podcast, go to aquariumguyspodcast.com. At the bottom of the website, we have our contact information, email address, a phone number you can call or send a text message to. We have Facebook and even Discord, where we're recording these live on Monday nights. We try around seven Central, if that accommodates the guest. So, certainly join the debauchery. But we have a text message that was sent in and the text message says, hey, this is Marshall from Texas. I feel like I should read this in the Southern accent.
There you go. We haven't sent it to anybody yet today. Right, go ahead.
Could you all explain what's going on in this video and how I trained my fish to do it? Oh, yeah. I sent this over and I can send a link to all of you if you wish, but it's like one of these popular YouTube videos and it clearly has some asians looking at this miraculous goldfish table that are swimming goldfish unison in a line. And if you notice, Jimmy, the fins aren't moving.
No, they're all magnetic.
Right. So 100% magnet board. But I got to say, for rubber fish, that looks pretty decent. So expect a new product coming next Christmas where they have the magic magnetic goldfish. Clearly. They even had made one flicker. You see that?
Yeah.
But anyway, it's going around. We will make sure to post this on our Facebook page as well, so certainly check it out. But, yes, it is fake. So I mentioned back, it doesn't surprise me. Thanks for all you do.
It's like watching Disney on Ice, right?
So I honestly thought it was like, how do I do this? And someone was going to send us another one, like one of those tattooed fish or a new form of glow fish. So it was nice seeing something more mild for once.
Yeah, because then we don't have to go on the black web and have a podcast right, on how to tattoo your fish.
I think the last one we saw was glowing bristlenose platos. There jason, I don't know if you see any crazy craziness yourself?
Oh, yeah, I've seen some weirdness right.
Now he's seeing some weird just looking at our face.
No, that's not what I meant.
Wholesaling. When the tattooed fish first came out, you could actually order a fish that would say, Marry me, or it would say Happy birthday, or whatever you wanted to put on it. It would say, that was a big thing for about 30 seconds. And I can't really see why you'd want to emblazon marry me on a fish and put it in your girlfriend's.
Tank, but that's quite the upgrade from getting your name on a little piece of rice in Thailand, you know what I mean? Kind of thing.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, man.
What is this for, like, two or $3 you can get, for some bizarre reason, get your name on a grain of rice and they present it to you.
I wonder if they have, like, a bulk discount if I got, like, Jimmy sucks and then just tried to actually feed him the rice.
Get a 500 count of your name.
There you go. You put somebody through school over there.
Something whatever works. No, I was going to say that as horrible as it is, there is something to having something in the aquarium that says Jimmy Sucks.
That's right. How about you get one of those little aquarium podcast ceramic signs that we have and just flip it around and write Jimmy Sucks on there, right?
We got to contact that gal again to see if she'll actually come on the podcast.
There you go.
We had a request for it, ironically, from literally someone messaged us, like, remember those old porcelain signs where the girls go? Podcast time.
Yeah.
So that'll be up and coming. But again, we answered a lot of the questions already. I was actually overwhelmed there for a couple of weeks with questions. That's a good thing. Keep us busy. And there's just too many to review, so I grabbed those two light ones that just came literally today. So if you got more, send them in. We'll get them right on the podcast or join on Discord to have our community answer them live. So let's get into the interview. We need to be respectful of time. You're opening up a new fish store, Jason, so we mentioned that before. But again, thanks for coming on the podcast. And for those who are listening, before we get into the interview, go to YouTube, go to redfish bluefish on YouTube and click that subscribe button. That means a lot more to youtubers than it does podcasters, even though we like the subscribe button, too, don't we, Jimmy? Subscribe, right? Every time someone clicks the subscribe button, a little pillsbury doeboy pokes you in the tummy.
Oh, yeah, I like that.
Hit with a bar of soap. Yeah, no, it's a little darker than an angel gets its wings, but I'll.
Take that leaves a bigger welt.
Anyway, a middle aged fat guy gets a beer. There you go.
That would be good.
Anywho, let's go into a little touch of the interview before we get into the topic of tissue cultures. So, Jason, we ask every guest on here of what got them into the hobby originally. So what is your story, sir?
Oh, jeez. It would have been a historic trip that I made with my father way, way back in the day. I would have been seven, maybe, I don't know, six to eight, maybe eight. And we didn't have walmarts back then. There were no walmarts. The walden family had not crawled out of wherever they crawled out of, and we just had kmarts. So I went to kmart with my pop to buy something. Who knows what. Back in the day, kmart had fish displays. They sold fish all over the place. There were aquariums. You could buy platties and all kinds of stuff. I walked in when I was a little kid. I distinctly remember it, and there was a tank full of platties, little sunrise plateaus, like, yellow and gold. Just something about it grabbed me. Something was super cool about having these animals, like, suspended in air, you know what I mean? Like, suspended in air in a box made of glass. And it was almost magic when I was a little kid when I saw it. And I think that's that's actually what did it way back then.
They got them in.
I totally remember when kmart had fish. I'm 56 years old now, and my dad used to raise canaries, and they sold canaries at kmart also. And so my dad would go in there and buy another female canary, and I would go look at the fish. And they actually sold the little turtles, too, the little 50 cent sized turtles. And my dad would either buy me a fish or turtle because I had an aquarium at home, and then he would always buy a canary. But yeah, I don't know if you remember, too, Jason, they would have the little breakfast area where they had stools and they had a grill, and you can go in there and eat, too, at a lot of these kmarts. Remember that?
No, I think the kmart that I had was pretty ghetto compared to the kmart that you probably had. Yeah, I came up way in deep South Texas. Yeah, it's pretty likely that the marketplace was pretty different, I'm guessing.
But I want breakfast now, and I want kmart back just so we have place to sell martha Stewart shit.
Exactly. And you know what, man? If you ever shopped at kmart, you remember the kmart Blue Light special. Remember that?
Oh, God. Yeah.
That was wonderful. It was great. I mean, I'm sorry, but kmart rules. Walmart rules.
That's right. And remember Rain Man? We said kmart sucks. He's wrong. kmart didn't suck.
I need to watch more films.
But do you remember wolvers? Did you guys have wolvers? Down in Texas.
We did. We actually did have woolworth down there for a short time.
Did they have fish also? Because our local wolverhs would have fish also.
No, I don't believe that they did. Something kind of sad, I think that didn't I hear that woolworths is getting gobbled up by some horrible, huge corporate beast?
Yeah, I think the few that are left are kind of on their way out. Unfortunately.
That was bartel. bartel drugs. That's another huge one up here. A Seattle mainstay. Now I'm in Seattle. I'm not so much in Texas anymore, but yeah, back in the day, kmart's, going to kmart with my old man, looking at all the angels, the goldfish and the plateaus and the guppies and what have you. That's really kind of what got me started. I just thought that it was just magic that you had these floating boxes of glass with these beautiful fish living in it and it's just a whole other world that you could lose yourself in when you were a kid especially.
So what made you decide to transition years later from that wonderful kmart originate hobby to doing your own YouTube channel and sharing this content with others?
Oh gosh, man, that is a long story. Basically I got back into the hobby after having lived overseas for many, many years. I worked for and on behalf of the Us government overseas. And this is I started in my twenty s and I had kept fish for many years up to then when I sort of made this career change and decided, hey, I need to make more money. where's the money? And for me it just turned out to be a career overseas. So I moved overseas, did the whole overseas thing, hopping from country to country. It's a long, long story, but basically I realized something really quickly. You can't keep fish doing that job. There's just no way. So I had to say kind of goodbye to the hobby. While I lived overseas, I could be anywhere from I started in cambodia, I would hop over to Indonesia from time to time, southern Philippines, depending on wherever I was going to be sent on an assignment. How do you keep fish when you have that kind of job? You can't predict where you're going to be from one point to the next. So the short answer is you don't keep fish anymore. Your fish keeping days are over. So what I did is, as I hopped around, I would always be on the lookout for any kind of trade convention, kind of a hobbyist meet up, anything. Facebook came along quite a few years later and made that easy. But back in the day you just had to know people and place calls and see if there's any kind of trade convention, anything going on in the area. That's basically what I did. That's kind of how I fed the beast is that I would attend trade conventions in Japan and Thailand, China, from time to time for koi and goldfish. That's sort of how I quote, unquote, kept fish while not keeping fish, of course. And of course, you know, that's kind of how you're getting your rocks off, so to speak. You get to know a lot of people. You get to get a lot of business cards, you shake a lot of hands. That sort of thing happens. And this went on for years until I kind of had enough of the older overseas gig and moved back to the Us. Got married, got married overseas, started a family and all that, and I moved back to the Us. And some years later, I slowly got back into the hobby. I didn't jump into it full force, but kind of crawled back into it. I wish that there was some groundbreaking moment when I could say, it hit me like a lightning bolt and I realized they just had to open this fish store. Not really. It was a very slow process of coming to the realization that with all the contacts that I had made, the people I knew, that this could be quite a different take on a new fish store.
Well, it's wonderful. I mean, finally living the dream all the way to owning a store is everybody's dream. And you seem to be doing it in a very tasteful way. I'm looking right now into your studio in the background. You have wonderful spotlights, black ceiling to really help focus on the aquariums. And according to your YouTube videos, you're certainly getting in some more unique stock. If you're not just the person that gets neon tetras, you get neon tetras with long fins, stuff that you don't normally see so good on you.
Right?
Well, I appreciate that. I decided to make it central to kind of what we do. I wanted to make it not just another not that there's anything wrong with a tropical fish store. I wanted to make it a little different in that I'm specifically focusing on importing my stock from Europe. There's some stuff that I do and will get locally. But for the most part, Europe has access to quite a few different not just species of fish, but varieties of species of fish that we just don't get and just really don't ever see here in the Us. So, number one, I'm looking to Europe for some different varieties, some different species, and trying to bring those into the Us. And make them a little bit, perhaps not more mainstream, but rather put them into the hands of some capable aquarists. Perhaps they can get them breeding and establish them in the United States as strains that people can enjoy. And the second reason I honestly look to Europe as my main source is that their focus on quality over raw quantity. They focus on quality before profitability, necessarily. I find that refreshing. That's a totally different take from a lot of the wholesalers that people roundly usually import from in Asia. So I really like that European, that mentality, how they focus on quality, quality control, all of that. Nothing but respect for those guys.
Are you using a trans shipper or are you using your old ingenuity to get all these brought in from Europe?
So I have an import license, and I basically use an import agent or an import what are they calling themselves these days? rob's import specialist, import specialist or whatever. We're like a step away from them calling themselves baristas at this point. They're basically import agents is what they are. And I do work with an import agent. It's very important to work with one, but you kind of have to train them. A lot of import agents have imported everything from raw aluminum to raw oil, palm oil, you name it. But the list is very short of import agents who have imported live animals. So you kind of have to train them up a little bit, make sure they know all the regulations and their square, and then you you let them do their job.
And when you're bringing these things in, what are the price difference between, say, a long fin neon and a regular neon that you can purchase here in the Us. Are you getting a fairly good deal, or are they quite a bit more money?
So if you're asking the price difference between, like, a regular neon tetra and like a veil tail neon tetra, it's astronomically higher. It's something like seven, eight times higher. Yeah. So you can, you know, it's not hard to find neon tetras for, I don't know, $0.35, sometimes 40, something like that. Yeah. You're looking maybe eight, nine times higher for the veil tail variety. I don't know for sure why that is, but I suspect strongly that it's because the young that comes from the parental stock. Well, basically the parental stock, I don't believe that they breed true.
And so there's probably a whole lot of culling going on where they're probably only getting 50, 60% of long fins.
Right? Exactly. And there's a good reason why you see a German Brad or Check Brad neon tetras, they have them by the thousands, but veil tails, several hundred if you're lucky. I was just going to say, yeah, I think that's probably because they don't exactly breed true.
Yeah, I know. I deal a lot with Florida and with the glowfish. They have a pretty good ratio of gold daniels that don't ever color up. And so they actually there for a while. They're selling 500 lots of gold daniels, selling them as feeder daniels, but they are just the culls from the glow fish. And I could pick up a box of 500 for literally about $35.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, off to go ahead.
And they don't necessarily want to sell those that didn't necessarily end up from true breeds. Right. Because what if somebody gets those and breeds them out and figures out, oh, wait a minute, they throw some long fins here and there. Right? Right. They don't want to release that stuff.
Got to keep it under wraps. Well, now to talk about our topic at hand, and tissue cultures have been asked for by a bunch of beginners that come to our discord or ask us a question. So we've been saving up to talk about them here. So for the listeners, can you first describe what a tissue culture is for those that have never purchased it or seen one in the store?
Well, sure. So a tissue culture is basically a little cup. It looks like a plastic dixie cup with a plastic film over the top of it. And at the bottom of the cup, you'll see usually a clear gel. Sometimes it's a really purplish or a black gel. It looks like a gelatin or a jello. And there's a bunch of plants, little shoots kind of shooting out of the agar. It's called agar growing on this material. And basically, you can go into a fish store or what have you, order them online sometimes, and you get these sterile plants that are guaranteed to be the species that they say they are. And they're free of algae, they're free of snails. They're free of any kind of pathogens.
How is this process done, and why in the world would they be free of pathogens? Generally, when you think of a plant, like, especially aquarium plant, they're either grown in a farm setting or literally grown in a keeper's aquarium. And we know that that's not necessarily a completely pest free zone at all times, especially if it's grown outdoors. So how are these grown? Specifically? We using this goo.
This goo? Is that the correct one?
I think that is the scientific term for it. It is goo.
And what is this goo, anyway? Let's talk about goo for a minute.
Usually it's made out of a combination of, basically nutrients with agar as a solidifying agent. And the constituents of the, quote unquote goo vary depending on the plant. That's essentially it.
You can get goo to order for different types of plants that have different nutrients.
Sometimes you can get the basal medium, the basal part of the recipe. Like, if you wanted a tissue culture azaleas or rododendrons or something like that, that would be a specific formula right. That you could get from some massive place, save you some time.
The pectin and your mom's jam is what we're trying to go after. The eggar is the solution that makes the liquid agu form, correct?
Right. Okay. We can go into it a little bit. We won't get too deep. But basically, looking at the constituents of plant tissue culture media right. The stuff, the little the jelly, it looks kind of like clear jello, little bit snotlike, to be honest with you. It's made up of a couple of different things. It's always a cytokinin, which is a type of plant growth hormone. And it's always an oxen as well, which is another type of plant growth hormone, also called a plant growth regulator. It always has a carbon source. That's very important. And the carbon source that we always use in plant tissue culture is sucrose sugar. It's always got something that we call mns 1962. That is a basal vitamin mixture that was developed in 1962 by these two big brained plant biologists, botanists named Murray shaggy and Scoog. And in 1962, they came up with this revelation that basically you needed an oxen, a cytokin, a carbon source, and a combination of complex B vitamins and some other fairy magic. And you could pretty much get most things herbaceous to tissue culture. That's another thing that you need, this basal mix that we call mns 1962. You need water, obviously. And you may or may not need a solidifying agent, which is agar. Some plants do much better as liquid tissue cultures. Other plants, you need a solidifying agent to kind of thicken it up and turn the whole thing into, like, a jello type consistency. That's basically the constituents of the media that we tissue culture plants in.
So if I go to, say, like a petco or PetSmart or my mom and pop local store and I find tissue cultures there, generally I see them selling in different types of packs, different plastic containers, dixie cups, everything. You always see that goo. The question people have is, where does the plant come from? Do they gestate the seeds and then just add it to the goo and sell it to you? How does this become a sterile process? Are they growing them right out of the gel?
Well, that's exactly what they're doing. They're growing them out of the gel from something called Xplant. So before we get into X plant and talk about what X plant is and why this whole thing works, we really do need to take a step backwards, and we need to talk about this innate ability that plants have that nothing else has. Okay? So you guys know, all of your listeners, I'm sure, know that mammals, animals, we all have stem cells, right?
Right.
Okay. So stem cells are cells in our bodies that have not yet been programmed to become the cell that they will become, right? It could be an eye cell. It could be nose. It could be lung. It could be blood. It could be marrow. It could be anything. Right? So a stem cell is what we have. Plants do not have stem cells. They do not exist. Rather, in 1832, this crazy German guy, right, theorized something. And don't all these things always begin with some crazy German guy somewhere thinking something weird as we look at our Volkswagen beetles? Exactly. So in 1832, this guy named theodore schwann theorized that it would be possible to grow living cells out of a host's donor body. Given that strict environmental conditions were met. It was just a thought. He didn't prove anything at all. He just had this weird thought one day, and he is basically coined as the father of tissue culture. And he didn't do actually anything. He started playing around with chicken embryonic chicken cells. Right. People that came after him started playing around with chicken embryo cells, and they had some success. So they realized they were onto something. Basically what they were doing is they were harnessing stem cells from mammals. Right. And they were realizing, wow, there is something to this theory. Well, let's go over to plants. Plants don't have stem cells. Rather, every single cell in a plant can become any other kind of cell in a plant, because every plant cell has the ability of something called toadipotency. It's something that we don't have. We have stem cells. If we want to work with tissue culture and animals, we need to harness stem cells of some sort and work from there.
Is it fair to use the starfish analogy, if I cut off my finger, I can't grow another Robbie?
You cannot grow another robbie. Absolutely not.
If you're a plant or starfish, if I break off a branch, I have a small possibility to grow some roots.
Yeah, you actually have a great possibility of growing some roots if you're a plant. So with that said, if all plant cells have the ability to become any other kind of plant cell, right. That's toady potency. If you took a cell from a root plant from a spinach, right. You took a cell from root, and you could given the right environmental factors and stressors, you could get that cell to transform to cambrium or leaf or rackus, which is stem right. Or part of a vascular system. You could do that. And that's what plant tissue culture is. It's essentially taking part of a plant and causing it to transform into a different part of a plant. That same plant, because you're applying stressors and plant growth hormones under sterile conditions to it. And the reason why we have to use sterile conditions is because basically the plants don't have anything to eat. These little pieces of plant that we're working with don't have anything to eat other than what's in the plant tissue culture medium that we're cooking up. Because we're working with tiny, tiny pieces of plant called xplant. Right? It's called xplant. You've heard of wife and ex wife, right? It's the same thing. Plant x. Plant.
Well, thank God nothing can be drawn out of jimmy's ex wife.
Not yet.
I got you for that. Thanks for doing your welcome.
I'm your backup on this. I get a lot of crap about making jokes about my ex wife, and they're all true.
So basically what we're doing in plant tissue culture is manipulating plants inherent ability of todipotency. And again, sounds all fancy. It's definitely a $1520 word on a good Friday. Night. But all it means is that a cell from Plant A can turn into any other type of cell from Plant A. That's it.
So in the aquarium world, then, the obvious questions that we would get is, again, clearly they're not trying to do this from a seed that might take to a longer process to grow a plant. They're taking plant x in a lab. And how much on general do they take to start growing these tissue cultures? I'm assuming they just grab one piece, however small you put it in the dixie Cup and then watch it grow out in the goo, the gel, and literally wait for it to be a full plant before they sell it. And that's simply it. How much do they cut off and how do they make sure that that piece is completely cleaned?
Okay, so what they're actually doing what they're doing is they're taking a little tiny piece of plant, like little tiny, usually less than 1. What they're doing is they're finding a donor plant that's healthy, right? And they lop off, usually like a large piece, like an entire branch, if not more. Okay? And then they immediately take it into a lab, and they usually take all the leaves off, and they leave the stem intact, and they wash it with a plant safe detergent. And then they surface sterilize it, usually with something called sodium dichloroisocyanarate. It's basically bleach, but not bleach. That rocks the PH up higher, up low. Okay? And then they surface sterilize it with this stuff after it's been cleaned. And then they cut it down further in front of something called a laminar flow hood, right? This is a clean room. They're working in a clean room at this point. No bacteria, no critters. And they cut down this piece of this donor plant all the way down to where they're basically left with just the sort of tissue that they want, which is typically something called a node. And then once they have the node excised, they place it onto the medium, right? And it explodes. Usually it starts exploding, shoots all over the place. And then at that point, they don't sell that plant. They do something called subculturing. They do the whole thing again, except they don't surface sterilize it, you see, because it's already sterile.
So they've got this they sterilize one plant in a cup of these shoots, right?
They've got this cup that's full of shoots. Now, this generation A, you can call it, right? F one, if you prefer. And then once again, in front of a laminar flow hood, they crack it open and they start excising all of those nodes off of those expanse again, plugging each one into its own individual test tube. And then they repeat that again and again and again until they have all that they want. And then instead of subculturing it, they move each individual little cluster with a bunch of shoots coming off of it, they move it into the rooting phase, which is where they basically place it on top of medium, which is very high in oxen and low in cytokinin. So oxen is a type of plant growth regulator which induces rooting. Okay. And cytokinnons are kind of the opposite. They don't induce rooting, they induce shooting.
So before we go too much further, we had a question about the hood you were talking about. What is that that you're speaking of? I'm assuming it's a sterilization hood or some light or something.
Yeah, well, basically what it is, it's a very high performance, very expensive hepa filter. Right. That's mounted in a wooden frame, and then on the back of it is basically blowers. So you're drawing in dirty air and you're forcing it through a hepa filter. So the only thing that exits is basically clean air. And you work in front of that.
No one wants to be the next Louis pasteur and get this sweet new fungus on there to create some sort of thing in your aquarium you never knew about.
No. You usually end up with some pretty rainbow looking stuff. When you're sneezing in front of the flow hood, you get some weird stuff. Get some really weird stuff, man. I like the reds. I like the red stuff.
I was going to ask, how many times have you sneeze in front of one of those hoods?
I've walked in two or three days later and said, yeah, we're going to have to do these again.
Oops.
Now, when you're rooting and shooting, do you have to give these plants adam, quit laughing at me. Do you have to give these plants light? Do you have to give it heat? You have to give them both. You have to give it love. What do you have to do special for it? Or do you just let them sit there stacked up in a pile?
Yes. The secret ingredient is love. No, really. No, really. It's light, actually, depending on the type of plant tissue culture you're trying to do, it's going to be light. And a lot to do is made of temperature. It has to be at 68 degrees, or it has to be at 78 or 72. I've found over the years, doing this stuff, that temperature is far less important than is consistency in temperature. So if you start a plant at 72, keep it at 72, it'll do fine wherever you start it, provided it's not 50. That's a little crazy. Or 90.
Now, let's wait. You mentioned before that the first strand that they do, you could say you gave it the label F one. What F do you get when you go into a pet store and purchase one? Generally? F five.
Oh, no, that's that's F 500, 700, a thousand. These are strains that have been established in their labs for years and years.
That's incredible.
Yeah, absolutely. And that's kind of the power of tissue culture. It's just like mycology. Just like growing mushrooms, sterile mushrooms or whatever, like they do with mushrooms. You keep the mycelium running you keep the mycelium running in your test tubes or your petris. You do the same thing with plants, except instead of mycelium, they're shoot clusters.
That's fascinating. So you could literally have something that has literally been lab created a new strain of something just from cross breeding genetics, and it's never seen the light of day just because it's sitting in some guy's lab that he's coming up with this new purple version of a newbie or whatever.
Absolutely, yes. And a lot of those weird versions are actually man made.
Which weird versions? Can you just give us a couple of examples?
I'm sorry, what was that?
Could you give us a couple of.
Examples of the man made versions of stuff?
Absolutely.
In aquatic plants? Probably not. But talking about some of the weird stuff that plant tissue culture lets us do, I don't know. Raise your virtual hand if you like bananas, because I'm not raising my hand at all. I hate them. They're disgusting. But if you do like bananas, then you're eating fruit. That is tissue cultured, full stop. Because the banana is sterile. It cannot reproduce itself. So if you've ever cracked open a banana, peeled it back and sliced it up to throw in your cheerios or your wheaties or wheat bakes or whatever it is you're eating, you'll notice that actually bananas do have really tiny internal seeds, really small ones. You can almost not even make them out well. That's why the banana sterile. The seeds are nonfunctional due to inbreeding and cross breeding and everything. The banana that we love and enjoy today must be tissue cultured. It must be. Otherwise we can't reproduce it.
Now, I've got a silly question that I've thought about. I used to work at a grocery store for many, many years, and we started getting the seedless grapes and started getting the seedless watermelon. Can you explain to us how that works?
Is that the same process?
Pretty much, yeah. Pretty much. Your seedless grapes are grapes that have been messed with and tinkered with to where they just don't have seeds anymore. So if they don't have seeds anymore, how do they reproduce? Well, you can clone them, and it's not terribly difficult to clone grapes or you most likely you plant tissue culture. So think of cloning. cloning is a way of cutting, like lopping a few pieces of a plant off, sticking it in water, basically with some nutrients in it and getting it to take root. With plant tissue culture, you can take one piece of a plant, a specific piece, and turn it easily into 300 plants. The first pass, because that is how active of some of these maristems on some of these plants are when you hit them with the right phyto hormonal combination. It's pretty interesting science.
I was down in Florida. We went on a trip to go see where our produce and we're as far away from Florida in the United States as you can get. And what's interesting is we were down there for the grocery store looking at where they grow the watermelon stuff. And we up here in the northland get the best produce available because the stuff that's overripe and stuff has to be sold locally or close by because they'll of course, spoil in the back of the truck. But we were down there, we purchased probably about ten or twelve pallets of watermelon. They beat us home by the time they were harvested. We actually all took a magic marker, wrote our name on the watermelon and they beat us home before we got home in two and a half days. But it was interesting that they were doing over in the corner is they were trying to grow watermelons in boxes by making these watermelons square. Because if you can make a square watermelon, then you could ship a lot more watermelons in the back of a semi. I'm serious, these guys were trying to do that. Have you ever heard of something that crazy? I mean, they were actually just trying to make the shape square by putting it in a box.
I've never heard of that. But you know what? That's an excellent that's a really cool idea. I love that. Yeah, because you can absolutely fruit and tree trunks and all that sort of thing, they will conform to whatever they have to conform to to survive. Right? I mean, that's what we're doing with plant tissue culture. We're taking a little tiny bit of plant and we're almost killing it. We're almost killing it, right? And we're putting it on a carbon source with some cytokin and some oxen and some Ms 1962, some water. And we're making sure the PH is balanced and we're saying, there you go, kid. Sink or swim, Jimmy. That's what plants can do. They will survive.
You're going to haunt me with your nightmares of plastic surgery. Melons that are square. Don't make your melons square.
You know what you think about this and Adam, I think you'll agree. I mean, have you read about them? They're trying to make eggs square. Can you imagine if you could make an egg from a chicken square?
I'm just trying to think of the chicken bottom just coming out square.
Rough. that'd be a rough trip out, man. Yeah, I haven't read that, but I know that in Japan they put molds around their fruit and stuff and they make the fruit have different shapes like teddy berries and stuff. So yeah, square watermelons would work.
If you think about it, the cost of your fruit, the majority of the cost is in shipping. And if you can put in two or three times more the amount of fruit because there is so much wasted space let me put it this way. I work for a bread company right now, and I go into Walmart. walmart's not even using pallets for their items now that they ship from the store, from the warehouse to the store, because the pallet is four inches high, right? And anyway, they put the stuff on the floor, and they actually spend so much time unloading it one by one by one. But because they can get so much more in a truck, it's worth for them to pay extra money for labor, because they can get so much more shipped in. That if you've ever been in back historical Walmart, there is no room in their trucks whatsoever. I mean, it is packed from floor to ceiling.
There it is, Jimmy. I just pulled it up. They have new fruit molds for different products, such as melon. And what you're seeing here that I put on discord for everyone to look at is a heart shaped watermelon. See, I'm haunted. If you just put a tattoo on.
That saying marry me, wouldn't that be grand?
All right. I think we've completely derailed the subcommittee.
That's just all great information.
So to get back on track with what's going on here can you still hear us, Jason?
Oh, yeah, I'm still here.
Wonderful. So to get back on track with what we're going with, we have a bunch of questions. When people get these tissue cultures for the first time and they see the gel in the bottom of the container, do you rinse out or rinse off the gel? Or do you plant the plant right with the gel and let it dissolve in the aquarium?
Oh, no. You got to get that gel off of there. You got to get it off of there. It's packed with sugar, basically. sucrose. That's our carbon source that we use in plant tissue culture. Briefly, for the beginners.
Why is that bad? Are the fish diabetic?
Oh, no. So what will happen is that naturally occurring bacteria in your aquarium will seize on that sugar immediately and use it to reproduce and mind bogglingly astronomical layers to where basically, what you'll notice is on top of your aquarium. Like the top. Maybe perhaps one or 2 mm on top of your aquarium, there will be this layer of very slow moving, crystal clear snot. Looks just like snot on top of your aquarium. That is a massive aerobic bacterial bloom that is responding to the carbon source that we use in plant tissue culture, which is table sugar.
I just thought that was Jimmy trying to mess with me after his bisectomy.
Wow.
You're blushing, Jimmy. But no, no sugars. No sugars in the tank.
No. You definitely want to get any of that agar jello like material off, whether it's green or clear or red or black. I mean, that freaks a lot of people out. I got these tissue cultures and the gel stuff in the bottom black. Clearly, it's evil. It's from mordor. That's why it's black? No, it's not. It's because that plant required charcoal in the agar in order to either, A, provide additional carbon or B, most likely to shield light from hitting the roots because some plants will not go to root is hitting them because they know plants know, hey, I'm a root. Why am I getting light? There's a problem, you see. So you definitely want to get all of that stuff off of the roots. Perhaps a plug here is due to a tropica tissue cultures. Tropica basically makes exclusively liquid tissue cultures which don't contain any agar at all. It's really easy to just basically rinse it off and plant away.
So what's the benefits of why should we use a tissue culture of just getting another plant from, say, a pet store that's growing in a tank or in a bundle already?
Well, getting a bundle of stem plants or a crypt or whatever from a pet shop, that's not tissue culture. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Not at all. If you are concerned, though, about getting snails or algae or pathogens, anything like that in your tank, then plant tissue culture is probably something that you want to look at. Because we have to tissue culture these plants in sterile conditions. Right? Because they're growing. These little pieces of plant are growing on this media that literally will grow anything else on it. Viruses, fungus, bacteria, anything that gets on it will grow very, very well because it's sugar. Right. As such, tissue cultures have to be sterile. So you can be certain when you're buying a tissue culture from somebody there will be no snails or algae or bba or heaven help, use cyanobacteria. That's always a fun one to get.
I watch a lot of stuff on YouTube and these people that are aquascaping seem to exclusively use cultured plants. Do you find that to be true?
Pretty much, yeah. It pretty much is that way. Because of Ada aqua Design, a mono that is the company that kind of introduced plant tissue culture to aquarists, it became very much a cultural thing that if you had an Ada tank and an Ada filter, well, then you were going to have Ada tissue cultures, too, because they're all about brand. Japanese people, I've noticed, tend to be very brand loyal. And so I'm not at all surprised that the aquascaping community that basically came out of aqua design of Mono that they still pretty much focus on using tissue cultures exclusively.
Yeah, it's been very interesting watching a lot of this stuff happening on YouTube and just the amount of painstaking hours that they spend planting these tanks and then putting in three fish is always going to throw me off. But I mean, to build these beautiful mountain ranges and these different forest looking tanks and stuff, it's just totally incredible. So I can see why you don't want any snails in there and you want to kind of have a sterile type tank.
I always suggest to different new users, ask, oh, well, I should just buy only tissue cultures. Well, honestly, how I recommend it for people that haven't had a lot of experiences, if you're setting up a brand new tank, you don't have any fish to worry about. Go ahead and purchase plants, right, outright. If you're going to purchase some plants and you don't have a reputable pet store such as jason's Pet Store Buy, you go out to your Facebook communities, go to your social media group and see if you can find the plant nut, right, and say, hey, I'll give you $50 if you put some stuff in this bucket. And I'm a bucket. They'll be tickled pink. They will make your day of all the trimmings cuttings. They'll give you a little everything they got just because they have fun with this. Take it home, set up your tank, and whatever comes, deal with the pests as they come. Because again, it's not an established tank. It's a blank canvas, and you can deal with it as it goes. Now, if you already have an established tank, everything is going great. That tank is beautiful, but you just want to add another plant and you're concerned of getting some sort of bacteria, snail or otherwise, that's the time where forking out the money, get yourself a tissue culture, don't risk it. Jimmy always gives me a lecture of don't screw up. Perfect. You'll find a way to do it. Adding a fish without quarantine, being careful by just grabbing whatever plant you want to put it in your tank sometimes can be certainly a risk. I know one issue that I had is I had some friends come over. We went out to one of our many lakes in Minnesota, and somebody came home with a weed in their pocket from the lake, and they're like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if it was floats in robbie's aquarium without telling me, put it in there, and it was just a small piece of something, right? And just suddenly I started getting a bacteria bloom. I didn't know what the world was happening, and this crazy green sludge bacteria that I've never seen before completely overtook the tank. I had to pull the fish, completely restart the tank over. It's amazing what wild petri dishes can do when you scoop them out of pond scum. And I'm not saying that pet stores or wherever you're buying your plants do that, but especially if you're grabbing stuff that I hear from people, like they want to take little specimens from their local creek or pond, that's when you have to be really concerned and do your quarantine process. Even with plants, tissue cultures just take that entirely out of the game. Are all tissue cultures created equal? I know there's only, what, four companies that really market the United States for tissue cultures on a wide scale.
Yeah. I mean, they're kind of not all created equal. Some of the companies are better than others. Ada makes really great tissue cultures, but they stay away from the liquid tissue cultures, which has always been a bit of a disappointment. Tropica, which is, of course, Dutch, they actually do make their tissue cultures here in North America. If you find any Tropica tissue cultures for sale, they will be certainly liquid tissue cultures. And as I said before, it's really easy to work with them. There's no gel to rinse off. You just rinse it under a little running tap water and boom, just plant it right away. But those tissue cultures are actually made up in British Columbia just north of Me, just on the other side of the border. And then, yeah, there's uns. Obviously uns. They don't actually make their own tissue cultures. They have them made for them by a company in La. I won't mention their name. We'll keep that secret.
We'll keep it secret.
But, yeah, we'll keep it secret. And then I guess I guess the fourth the fourth main player is based out of Singapore and they are a company named Aquatic Farmer. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. And I would say that the kind of the kind of the order that that I mentioned them, you know, with with Ada and Tropica definitely at the top of the list. uns, definitely in, I guess, third place, you could say, and Aquatic Farmer bringing it up in the caboose.
Now, what do I need to look for when I go to a pet store? Because most of these times the stuff doesn't have labels. So if I'm looking for a good tissue culture and I'm not saying to disregard some of your stores, but it's nice to see like, when you look at a product and you see a loaf of bread, for instance, and it's green, it's probably not something you should buy or eat, for heaven's sakes. So if you're going to look at a tissue culture, number one, you can see the plant itself is in a good state. What do I need to look at it for a tissue culture that like maybe I should pass on that one.
Yeah, that's actually a really good question. So I get this question a lot. People asking me, I've been looking for this, I don't know, marcella cornada forever and I found two cups of it at my local shop. But I'm looking in it and they all look healthy. But on top of the agar, I see a little bit of white fuzz. Not much, but just a little bit of white fuzz. What should I do? Is that bad? And I always tell them, buy it immediately. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the start of a little bit of mold. It's very common. It has no effect on the plants. What do you want to look for?
Wouldn't that just paint health or at least there's enough good stuff in the gel enough sugars? Yeah.
If you give mold, any kind of mold or fungus or anything like that, if you give it any chance to grow on anything, it will, trust me. It doesn't necessarily, though, mean that the tissue culture is bad. More often than not, what you want to look for is dead leaves, dead shoots. If you get a tissue culture that's some kind of, I don't know, stem plant diplomas, diandra or some kind of rotola rotunda folia, something like that. And all along the outer perimeter excuse me, all along the inner wall, I guess I should say, of the tissue culture cup, all the little shoots that are closest growing to that. If those are dead or dying, don't buy it. It's very, very old. And basically what's happened is that sunlight shining on the media that the shoots are growing on, sunlight has rapidly depleted a lot of the phyto hormones and things that the plants use, and that's why those shoots along the inner wall, I guess you could say, are dying. That's a good indication of a very old tissue culture. Another thing to look for is a metabolites. And metabolites are liquids. If you're dealing with like an ada tissue culture, and it's a jelly type tissue culture, meaning that they've used agar in it. If you see a lot of metabolites in it, like a lot of yellow liquid, it doesn't look quite very appetizing. You should not buy that tissue culture as well.
What is the shelf life on one of these things?
It really does depend on the temperature that you keep them at, which should always be kind of like a well, let's just say it the perfect temperature to keep tissue cultures in for longevity is about like a wine cellar. Now, obviously, no pet shop has a temperature or a climate like a wine cellar. They're quite a bit warmer than that. But if you wanted to keep them for as long as possible, you would want to keep some light on them. Of course, some light, not tons. And you would want to keep the temperature somewhere around like that of a wine cellar.
Well, the only other questions, I think, to follow up with this that we have to address is DIY tissue cultures. So if one wanted to play around with this, is there a kit you can buy? Because it's not the dixie cups. Clearly, you may have your own plants. Two questions would be how could you sterilize your plants correctly where it's safe enough that you would start tissue culturing? And two, how can you make your own gel for at least a couple of basic plants for someone that wants to start getting into this? Do you put miracle grow mixed with pectin?
Do you go on gun?
I wish we could do that. That would save tons of money, let me tell you. No, really, honestly, the best way that somebody could start to. Learn about DIY plant tissue culture is, honestly, to pick up a book, and it is a fantastic source of knowledge for anyone that wants to learn about not just aquatic plant tissue culture. But it could be roses, it could be azaleas, it could be redwoods. redwoods are, like, the easiest thing in the world to tissue culture. Actually, it could be any of those plants. But the book I want to say it's in its fourth, perhaps third or fourth edition. The name of the book is plant from Tissue. I'm sorry. Plant from test tubes. Plants from Test tubes is the name of the book, and it basically takes the reader through set up of a very basic plant tissue culture lab. You could use a still air transfer box. You could use an actual laminar flow hood. Like I use any of those things, but it basically takes the reader through step by step multiplication, sub multiplication, routing what to look out for things that can get you in trouble, like your vitrification. It's a great source of knowledge.
What is the best way that you recommend to do, like, a sterilization dip for tissue cultures at home? Is it hydrogen and peroxide? What would you recommend?
Okay, so that's a great question, and it's one that really gives most beginners tons of trouble. Plants are really easy to tissue culture, especially aquatic plants. What they're really hard to do is get clean. So I would recommend that anyone interested in having a go at plant tissue culture avoid bleach altogether and look at something called sodium dichloroisocyanarate.
That's one of those $10 words you told us about.
Yeah, actually, the abbreviation for it is NaDCC. So, you know, NA is sodium, and then dichloroisocyanorate is dcc. So if you just wanted to google NaDCC, basically what it is is it's spa shock. Like spa. Like, you have a hot tub or something like a spa or a hot tub in your backyard, and you have some funk growing in it, something weird going on, and you need to give it a shock. Well, then you hit it with this strange effervescent tablet that looks a lot like alka seltzer, and it bubbles just like Alka seltzer, but it's made out of something called sodium dichloroisocyanarate.
The only time I've seen these are for chlorine tabs. I'm assuming that must be close or the same thing.
It's very much the same thing. So what they are is they're effervescent tablets that start bubbling away in water, and what they're releasing is not so much oxygen as it is free chlorine. Now, the benefit that NaDCC or sodium dichloroisochany has over bleach, even diluted bleach, is that bleach will and always will raise the PH drastically. And if there's one thing that plants really don't like, guess what it is.
PH burn.
PH burn. High PH. Plants do not like alkaline environments. What NaDCC does is actually provide you with a neutral PH environment while you sterilize the plants so you don't get all that leaf burn and stuff.
So I feel like that's too easy. I just go buy some chlorine tabs, put them in a bucket, dip my plants. Let's say I made, like, an ice cream pail with a tab in it, right? Do I dunk dunk dunk and then just put it into the sterile tank or cut off my tissue culture and grow from my goo?
No, what you'd normally do is you'd have your donor plant. You take off all the leaves you're holding a branch, right? A branch with no leaves on it, maybe a couple of leaves on the end of it. And you throw that in your bucket of pure water with NaDCC in it, and you screw the lid on, and you shake it. You shake, shake, shake, shake. You just make sure that that branch, that piece of X plant, is submerged below the surface of that sterilizing agent, that sterilizing solution. And usually, depending on the plant, 15 minutes is what you shoot for.
That's a lot.
Any more than that, you're probably going to start burning tissue, because NaDCC will eventually start harming plant tissue. I mean, chlorine is pretty gnarly stuff, right? But any less than that now, you're going to run the risk of, oh, well, you actually didn't kill all the nasties. And if there's any nasty that's going to survive your sterilization process, it's actually two of them. It's either going to be yeast god help you if it's yeast, because you're done, or it's going to be fungus, and then you're kind of shafted anyway, right?
So chlorine, you want to make sure you take care of fungus.
Going long enough.
Chlorine will not take care of fungus.
It will. It just takes long enough. You got to go strong enough, long enough, which is why you got to do the whole 15 minutes thing.
Got you.
Hopefully you're not getting a lot of plant cellular damage. Now, if you use bleach, even diluted bleach, and you're going 1520 minutes, you're done. With an aquatic plant, you're done. Their cell walls are very thin compared to terrestrial plants, right. So you're putting them in a high PH solution. You're leaving in them for maybe 1015 minutes. You just made green pea soup, buddy.
So is this something that you'd recommend for people that try to harvest? Because we have a whole fan base of ours that try to harvest wild plants, wild fish within legal means, and they have a hard time doing bleach dips. So is this something that you'd recommend just using as a treatment? Otherwise, does it also kill snails?
Yes, absolutely. So NaDCC or any kind of high amount of free chlorine will absolutely kill snails? It will. It just wreaks havoc on their respiratory system, just like it would on fish. Except for the one snail that's unkillable.
Yeah, you can't kill Malaysian trumpet snails. Yeah, the one unkillable, one that can last through anything. Well, that explains why we're joking, by the way. Let you guys know.
So sterilization is easily the number one headache point for people trying to get into this. And I'm really glad we started talking about this. So a really good place for people to start is NaDCC, another substance I'd like to mention shortly. It's experimental. It's called cathon CG. Cathon is spelled kathon. And then there's some bizarre, ominous initial CG. I have no idea what that stands for. Anyway, what cathon CG is, it's a really powerful antimicrobial. Let me try that again. Antimicrobial.
There we go. Don't worry. We're going to get a t shirt of that antimicrobial. Right?
I like that.
Well, that take care of the it's.
A very powerful antimicrobial that they add to for some bizarre reason, they add it to cosmetics, to cosmetic products like revlon or whatever. This crud that people sell, it's a.
Cleaning preservative for cleansers makeup and other things.
Well, that makes total sense.
Exactly what it is. That's exactly what it is. oddly enough, there are many complaints coming out of the European union that this catholic CG that they put in skincare products actually causes massive skin irritation. So you do the math on that one.
Anyway, I'm looking at a picture from google right now of someone doing scratch test to a dude's back. And, yeah, sure enough, the catholic CGS and nickel are like the two things that pop up.
Oh, yeah. Cathon CG, this stuff that this preservative antimicrobial that they put in these skincare products absolutely causes all kinds of skin irritation. Now, what we've discovered monkeying around us, plant nerves in our labs is that this is far less damaging, far less damaging to plant cells and plant tissues than is sodium dichloroisocyanorate. And it's very, very effective at not just inhibiting the growth of little nasties, but killing them as well. So cathon CG is something that's very experimental. It's very exciting. We're playing around with it, and we're getting great results.
Now, I take no responsibility what happens if you purchase this product, but you can purchase it on aliexpress pretty reasonably in a little bottle?
Yeah, I would probably get it from dupont before I got it from aliexpress. dupont? Or is it dupont or Dow? I don't know. One of the dupont, probably.
Dupont.
Yeah, dupont. I knew it was one of these probably former nazi Germany chemical companies that started creating this. Don't get me started on bear, please. Let's do it.
That's for another podcast.
It's a totally different so the antimicrobial that they put in all these in the mascara and stuff, I would imagine that's because you're constantly touching your face and then going back to the product and touching your face. Exactly. And that's what they're trying to do is avoid yeah.
The little eyelash plunger thingy that ladies that you brush and what have you and then put back in the thing. Yeah, you're literally like pulling critters off of your eyelashes and putting it into this delicious breeding chamber. Yeah, no, let's not do that.
That's it. I know I like to wear emo makeup, but I'm throwing my shit out right now. Yeah, you get rid of it. I'm getting a new bottle.
So this explains why you get rid of your jaw kitch when you jump in the hot tub, right? Get rid of your athletes foot, your jaw hitch, and it's all good. So get in a hot tub, take your plants with you, dunk it a couple of times, and have a beer.
No mono bleach can take my mental image from me.
Yeah, there is no mind of bleach for that.
All right, so following up with the last couple of questions we asked somebody, if the sugar substance in the gel is a nightmare for bacteria in your tank to bloom, wouldn't it be a good idea to save that goo into a container and add a little bit? When you're trying to start up a cycle in your tank, that's what they're asking if that would be a good idea.
That would not be a good idea, because the the bacteria in your tank that are beneficial are well, there are many genus that they come from, but the primary one that you're trying to foster is nitrosamonus. nitro SimonIS specifically eats ammonia. They do not eat sugar, so they won't live on sugar.
What you're saying is bacteria is you have a better chance of peeing in your aquarium to get the cycle going versus putting this goo in there.
Absolutely.
Don't pee in your aquarium.
No. So the bacteria that will live and thrive on that goo are non beneficial aerobics that will just basically turn your top about two, maybe even 3 aquarium into a giant clear loogie. And if you're not pumping air into your aquarium, guess what? Your fish are dead. Dead. Dead. Because there is no gas exchange happening through that ectoplasmic afterbirth whatever it is, it's bad.
Essentially, you're just putting a goo and seal on top of your aquarium. There's no yeah, exactly.
It would be akin to pouring paraffin on top of your aquarium and sealing it.
The only hope that you have is your dojo loaches farting some air out.
Or that you have a massive linear air pump on your little five gallon cube and you can burst the wax seal on it. Who knows?
Fingers crossed.
Now, when you're culturing your own plants, do you make your own goo or do you go on like goo.com and get goo? Is there a place where people can buy their own goo or do they have to make their own goo?
Well, you can buy goo. You can buy the constituents. Basically, that you basically add water pressure cooker, put it in an autoclave or pressure cooker or whatever.
But there's not like, premade, is there?
What was that?
There's not like, premade, is there? Like, you can just buy there is.
Some pre made, but they're always for plants that I'm not interested in, like azaleas or rhodies. Rhododendrons. What do I care about rhododendrons or like various woody plants? Now, there is a very recreational plant. It's very easy to get that pre made. That is a very common, very common combination of two phyto hormones. And we use both of them in aquatic plant tissue culture. Actually one of them, the cytokinin that we use in tissue culturing this rather psychedelic plant is called tdz thy Diazerone. And it's actually not a cytokinn. Technically, it's an herbicide. Believe it or not, there is a class well, not a class, but a family, a group of herbicides. Very effective herbicides. When you look at them molecularly and you compare them against naturally occurring cytokinins, which are naturally occurring plant growth hormones, molecularly, they're almost identical to it, just a little bit different. So one of those that's very common in this recreational plant tissue culture is called tdz thy Diazerone. Now, used in tiny, tiny amounts, it's a very powerful cytokinen, but used just a little tiny bit more. You've never seen anything kill a plant faster. So the other hormone that's used in this psychedelic plant to induce rooting is called naa naphthalene, citic acid. We also use this oxen, which is also a plant growth hormone. Remember I mentioned cytokinins create shoots auxins create roots, right. And you always have to use them together in plant tissue culture. By the way, we didn't touch on that. You can't use one without the other. They have to be at the same time, just more of one than the other to do to induce shooting or induce routing. Does that make any sense?
It does, but is there like, pre done? I'm trying to think. You said there's some for other brands, so let's just pick on the hoera joanna plant that we're talking about, just like a delicate plant, because again, you said that was used for a lot of it. So if you wanted to try just for funsies, like you're just getting your toesies wet and trying to do some aquarium plants and clearly this is a basic form of it that's commonly used for Hoaware joannas. Where could you find this pre made goo? So you can try, say, some of your own anubis tissue cultures or hornworth, if you're so wanting to be brave.
For the recreational plant. I mean, Google, there's hundreds and hundreds of sources for that stuff.
Excellent.
Now, if you wanted to get some of the the premade, like, like specific prenatal premade stuff for like azaleas or rhodies or, or woody plants, that's another very popular one for trees. You could go to PhytoTech labs.com and they sell everything from the individual hormones to premade mixes. They sell agar, they sell scalpels, they sell buns and burners, they sell everything except laser beams.
Wonderful.
You could go there and you could say, hey, I want to tissue culture african violets. I don't know why you would want to, but it's a very easy plant to tissue culture. Or if you wanted to practice tissue culture in your new lab, cauliflower, there's another plant that is easily just the easiest plant in the world to tissue culture. And you could just phone them up and say, hey, I want a tissue culture. This one plant. And they'll quite literally put you on the phone with a botanist.
Wonderful. So this is you said PhytoTech labs. Is that what you said?
Phytotechlabs.com? Yes, sir.
Wonderful.
Great company.
Well, I think you answered all of our questions. We certainly got a crash course on tissue cultures, and the only thing we really didn't talk about is price point. And if you guys are interested in tissue cultures, the average market price, it's very much plant dependent, but they start at around, like, $15, $20 for the average tissue culture. Again, if you get those crazy ones, there's no stopping that price limit from going up for rare plants or difficult to grow plants. I've even seen some tissue cultures for $120, easy for just a small dixie cup tissue culture. But if you guys are looking for some fun tissue cultures and you want to get your foot in the door and try us them out, go to Joe shrimp shack.com. He's the sponsor of this episode, and you'll find yourself tissue cultures listed right now. I believe they're on sale for 899, and you can get yourself 15% off using promo code. Aquarium guys check out. But again, thank you, Jason. This has been fantastically informational. And who knows how many people were on the Hawaii Engineers? The what? I don't know. I keep making that a word up.
Every time, like smelter.
I don't have to. We're just having fun being obscure. I mean, we could just talk about it to me.
Just make sure you make sure that the media and everything for your horror rijuana is kept nice and super. Anti micro.
Right?
Growing pot in a hot tub.
It sounds like we've been dipping into the Coronavirus. You don't want to just rob everything's legal in Oregon.
Yeah, you don't have to worry about that in Washington.
Hello. Hey, neighbor.
What's godding, country, state? Just okayed. Heroin.
I think it was Washington, wasn't it? No, they decriminalized it's. Not legal.
Decriminalized it?
Yeah.
Every drug is legal.
No, decriminalize. You're giving wrong information, sir. Okay.
Not legal federally, but legal statewide.
It is oregon. All right. Thank you for confirming audience.
Is that what it is? Oregon?
Yes, Oregon. Oregon. I need someone to slap me after we say this. We're going to get fan mail now.
Origami origami yeah.
Oh, boy. Jason, it has really been a pleasure. You guys go to his YouTube channel. Red fish. Blue fish. It's filled with fantastic content. And right now, really going through his new store, it's a fantastic place. Do we find out what the name was? Of your store?
Well, I'll do some little shameless self promotion.
Here it is. redfish bluefish, the self title for YouTube and the store. Who knew?
Yes, sir. Yes. The artist formerly known as redfish bluefish. We can say that wonderful.
And does Dr. seuss know about this? Just wondering.
I think he shoved off of this mortal coil some time back. Unless he's got amazing legal representation from beyond the grave, I think we're in the clear.
Yeah, you're good. It's not owned by Disney, so you don't have to worry about it.
Nice. Definitely coward from the Disney lawyers. Oh, my gosh.
They've got nothing else to do right now other than crawl up your boat.
Well, they're definitely not busy over at the Magic Kingdom right now.
There's nothing magic happening over there right now.
No, nothing at all.
I hear it's a magical place.
We're going to let you get to your dinner.
So is that box of cereal.
But again, thanks so much. Jimmy, you got any of that last minute notes?
I got nothing for you, man.
That's so sad.
Thanks so much for having me. It's so fun hanging out with you guys. It's a great honor.
The pleasure is ours, sir. And if you guys like what you hear, go to quarrying. Guyspodcast.com. On the website, you can find a place to donate help keep the lights on, support our sponsors, and above all else, click that subscribe button on redfish Blue fish on YouTube. Until next week, Jimmy.
Bye.
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I never knew that a Minnesota accent could be so sexy until I heard adam's voice. Go frank yourself.
Don't you know that's my boy don't you know?