Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. So our sponsor is Joe Shrimp shack, but Joe himself is going to be going on a expose to all these different aquarium expos for the next couple months, and he needs to lower down stock. So what he's done is now he has a 50% off sale for those that want to purchase shrimp in store. So if you're in the metro of Minnesota, go check out Joe Shrimp shack for 50% off anything he has left in stock. And for those that cannot make it to the metro Minnesota, we still have 10% off anything you'd like to purchase from Joe Shrimpshack.com using promo code Aquarium Guy as a checkout.
Fantastic. So where's he going? Is he just going to go tour of the world or what's he doing?
You can certainly check out.
He's going to Florida.
You can check out his Facebook page. I think the first stop was Florida, but he's going to be at Dallas aqua shella. He's got a long roster of places he's going to be hitting up.
Is he hitting every place that's above zero? Because it's like, negative zero here.
Well, not necessarily, because he's going to be at the Aquarium Expo in Minneapolis with us March 21.
And I'm pretty sure it won't be much warmer than it is right now.
No, it'll be quite cold. We don't care about March of Minnesota. It's just part of winter. Kick the podcast. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob dolsen. Welcome everybody to the aquarium.
Guys.
Podcast.
Hello. Well.
Hi, Adam. To kick things off, let's do some introductions. I'm rob Sulson.
I'm Jim colby.
And I'm Adam elma Shire.
So for today's podcast, I'm super excited to introduce Scott from is it Project piaba? Is that how you pronounce it? We've been pronouncing it all different ways.
Piaba.
Piaba. Excellent.
That's it. Yeah.
So thanks so much again, Scott, for joining us on the podcast. We're happy to have you. And you're the president or executive of this?
Yeah, executive director.
Fantastic. We're going to do a deep dive on this charity, but first we got to do some house cleaning. You're back now from vacation, both of you. And thanks for leaving me all alone for the last podcast.
That's fine. I didn't mind it at all.
I panicked. I tried to find the pre recordings. I only found one of the two recordings that we have. One is still missing somewhere. I think it's on the computer I gave you at your house.
It's probably downstairs in my basement. We always try to keep a couple in the can just in case that we are gone. My wife and I were on vacation.
Last week trying to get the coronavirus.
Trying to get the coronavirus.
I probably got it.
I hope so, because that's the gift that keeps on giving. And, you know, it was to be honest with you, it was scary. A little bit we pull into the o'hare, the o'hare airport in Chicago it is, and see about 1000 different people wearing a face mask and whatnot. And I don't think any of our surgeons, honestly, we sat there for about four or 5 hours on a layover. And I think the first picture I sent to Rob was people sitting behind me with a face mask on and.
You with none and me with none.
Yeah, because I'm a dumb dumb.
They wouldn't serve you corona on the flight?
Wood not on the flight, but on the cruise. I saw a whole lot of corona going down and a whole lot of Corona jokes going down also. And that also came from the stage, from all the performers and whatnot. So I imagine we're all going to go to heck in a hand basket.
So this week I've been listening to another podcast, one of my favorite. It's just a comedy podcast called Middle of Somewhere. It has a couple of comedians on there and they're talking, they're also in Minnesota and they're talking about how all the locals, like the dim witted locals, are trying to get lyme's disease for their coronavirus so they can make sure of lime with their corona.
Oh, that's bad.
That's happening now.
Yeah, we were on the cruise and the first comedian that we met was izzy. Where is he from? St. Cloud, Minnesota.
Soda, I think there's going to be so many more stories we're going to hear from you, but before we do that, we just got to give a moment. Now, normally we have our charity spotlight, but I just want to give more time to that, just to give you guys an update. Ohio Fish Rescue is a fantastic organization that dedicated to three people. That's Josh big rich and Tracy. And Tracy has been in the hospital for an issue where she got sick, had internal bleeding and has been in a coma now for a while. And if you guys want to keep up to it, certainly go on their Facebook page. For Ohio Fish Rescue, tracy is every day seeming to approve in small baby steps, but there's still a risk that it's a coma, that they may never come out of it. So certainly, please pray for that family. And if you want to consider donating in our show notes, we have a gofundme that we started up from our community having requests. Thank you to number one, our community and everyone else that's participated. We have raised now over $5,500 on that go fund me.
That is fantastic. I was on vacation when all this went down. Rob kept me updated and stuff. And thanks to Rob and one of our listeners, sonny, for putting this all together. From the bottom of my heart, all of our thoughts and prayers go with Big, Rich, Josh, Tracy, especially. They're going through a tough time. And if you can afford $5, $10, $20, whatever you can do just go to the GoFundMe page, the links on the bottom of our website and give anything you can. And I'm seeing a lot of people are just going anonymously. That's fantastic. If you don't want your name on there, that's okay, too. rob's and I, Adam, all threw some money in there and we are just so what's the word I'm looking for?
Beside ourselves. Yeah, I'm so beset on the community coming together. I've had some friends looking in and just seeing some of my posts that aren't having to do the fish, and they're like, what is this all about? I was like, oh, we're just fish keepers. That is such a great community. You guys have to take care of your own in such a big way. That just doesn't happen in other places.
And our community is a pretty young community. We've only been doing this since September and so this just totally blew me away. I think we started with a $2,000 goal. I think that's what Rob and sonny started with, blew past that like a ton of bricks. And now we're up to like, $5,500. Like Rob said, we're recording this on Monday night, so by the time you hear this on Thursday, hopefully we're above.
6000, 7000, everything in time. It's going fast, but again, that's a drop in the bucket for the insurance cost. North America insurance cost is terrible. Big Rich is self employed, so getting insurance is quite a struggle. So being in the hospital for two weeks or who knows how much more she's going to be in there, it's just not going to be a cheap ordeal. So as much as we've done, it always can do more and certainly do that. And everything that you post on their Facebook page or the GoFundMe gets read directly to Tracy from Rich. So he takes every one of those very personal and he loves your comments. Even if you can't give a dollar.
Yeah, that's fantastic. If you can't give a dollar, you can't give $5 a prayer. Sentiment. Angel, anything you can do to help, to help our community. We want Tracy to heal. We want to be all one big happy family again. So thanks again, everybody.
Now, a couple more reminders. We're going to be at the Minneapolis Aquarium Expo March 21, in person, in the flesh. And Adam just gave us the news that he's going to be there as well.
Yeah, I took time off one of my three jobs.
One of your three jobs?
So Adam is an exotic dancer at three different clubs.
He is. That's why he's poor, because it's not working out for him.
That and the five kids that can be part of it.
I only have four.
Yeah. She hasn't told you the news, has she?
It's the rice belly.
Wait, what?
No, you just have four that we know of.
Well, come see us, guys. We're going to be there in person. We want to hang out. And above all else, we need a group of people to harass Joe with. We can't be alone to harass Joe, so be there with us.
We'll be there. And if anybody would like to go on the podcast live, and you've got some interesting stories or some there's a.
Potential there that will get the microphones out and do something.
But, yeah, you never know.
Worst case scenario, we're just there.
We're just there.
We're there to have fun, and maybe.
We'Re just eating at the buffet. You never know. Is there buffet?
There is now.
There's a buffet.
I hope so. There better be a Buffalo rods will be.
Alice, Dan, rowe, if you're listening to this, make sure there's a buffet there. We're hungry, people. All right, so the last piece that we have, one of the last pieces is an email. Jim, now, I think I should read this to you. We're going to leave this gentleman's name out. I thought it was his own disclosure. And we put it this way, good or bad, we love hearing your feedback, right?
That's right.
This is where we could classify as our first, quote unquote, bad review, unless you listen to other dreamers out there that don't want to come on our podcast. Cough, cough. But this is our first real bit of what we could consider negative feedback. Everything in my mind is positive. If you care about our podcast and you want to write to us, it's not bad feedback. So let's start this. Hi, I'm 55 years old. I am from jim's generation. Excuse me? That's 65 years old. He got that wrong already.
I am not 65 years old. I'll kill you both.
He is not a representative of our people. He makes it sound like everyone our age is tech ignorant. It's not our fault if Jim grew up in a log cabin in the wood.
Wow, that hurt.
I know. Many guys our age are savvy as Brandon, who's on your last podcast, who built themselves their own leviathan like systems for themselves. Do not let Jim be our spokesperson.
Wow. There goes that money I was going to make.
So before we go, there's two paragraphs here. That's the first paragraph, number one. Let's go back to that podcast that we have Brandon on. He was there to present the leviathan system where you can actually automate almost everything for your aquarium. Lights, heater feedings, micronutrients, water flow, everything. Very interesting in the podcast. We try to rift back and forth. We try to look at every angle possible. We try to do devil's advocate. We try to be excited for the product. And Jim was simply playing the part that day. Jim, he may not be as bright as everybody else. That's correct. Today he is tech savvy. He was just playing the role that time to show an audience of aquarists that do not like to use any tech whatsoever on their aquarium.
And there's a lot of people out there that don't.
And most of them, to be honest, are, like, 35. Right? that'd be me. I get a ton of people that don't like doing it. But no. Jim is quite tech savvy. He sets up his own Amazon alexa devices. He has waze camera system, just used for his fish. He is definitely above average for the Aquarist. But thank you for being our beating stick that day.
That's fine. I can take a punch in the throat any day.
But we need to be serious about this. Clearly, this gentleman is angry because you're the representation of his generation on our podcast, and we need to be wary of that.
He should have saw me at the cruise.
Yeah, clearly. Eight coronas in your hand, drunk out of your mind, totally representing your generation.
Exactly. Yeah. And I was only one standing.
Right. But no, to be serious, we're not intending to have anybody represent any type of generational gap. In fact, the majority of our guests have been middle aged experts in their.
Field in this day and age. What we're trying to do is bring in younger listeners, because, let's face it, all of our people that we love and adore who have been around the industry, such as Jack watley, just passed away. So we want to invite younger people to be in this love fest that we have here called the aquarium hobby. Don't take it real serious. We're not scientists.
So to sum it up, you're a snowflake gym and buck up.
Hey, I don't care.
All right, next podcast. If Jim wants something a bit more simple than the leviathan, he can buy a smart plug that communicates with a smartphone and he can schedule turn on and off with his smartphone. A bit more effort. If you want to connect smart plugs, Google Home or alexa to turn the aquarium lights on and off via voice command. It's not as elaborate as leviathan, but simple enough that even Jim could do it. I know Jim is already doing it, but again, this really shows us that we mean a lot to you. Jim did not understand that he would have any fan out there that he could possibly represent. No, we're taking a take that to heart. I'm going to be nicer to you, Jim.
Don't.
If we're playing a role, we'll try to announce it.
The thing about this podcast is that we don't take ourselves seriously. And if you're taking it seriously, great. I wouldn't we're here to educate what little we know. What, because I'm old, I'm 55, I don't know nothing. And so I'm just here to help you out. I want to tell you that things I can run, I can run the blow dryer in the bathroom when you put your hands under it when I was on the ship. You put your hands underneath the water and you wave it, water comes right out.
Pretty cool. You can do better than that. But again, thanks for that. Any feedback like that is positive. That means you care. So I appreciate it. Mysterious man that I can't talk about on air.
That's right.
Right. The only thing we take seriously in this podcast is the topics at hand and our fish hobby.
That's right. We wanted to take care of this fish hobby, and we want to take it to another level.
Everything else is free game.
That's right.
So I think that kind of does it, other than I have to tell one story quickly before we get into this. I know we're going a bit long here, but Jim, I'm embarrassed.
Oh, you should be embarrassed because that haircut sucks.
Well, number one, it's been a long time since you've seen me, but no, I'm embarrassed because I'm my way home. We generally try to do these podcasts Monday nights. We'll try to accommodate some other schedules if we see a guest isn't able to accommodate. But I get off literally 30 minutes before this podcast begins. I drive home and I'm trying to just keep the research notes that I've done on our guests or the topic at hand in my brain. I've been researching all these things you can do to improve a podcast, what professionals do for podcasts, because I want to be a big boy, too. And they always say do voice exercises. What better voice exercises than singing along in the car? So generally I try to find a new song in the last ten minutes, please. On my trip home. And I think I have scared my neighbors.
Yeah, don't do that.
So I'm a six foot two man, I'm not a small man by any measure, and I drive a tiny Smart car in the middle of Minnesota. So imagine me with a Smart car, striped pipe, exhaust, mind you, and imagine the guy that rolled down his window two blocks ahead of time, yelling to the top of his lungs, asking, alexandria, right? And it was like a ballad. It wasn't their normal stuff. My neighbor that I did not see was standing on the curb where the snow is taking her dog out and me just bellowing, hell bent for election singing. As I get home to pick up the mail. I back up just to see her, and she's doing like, one of these, like, slow clap of plazas, you know what I mean? So I need to update my routine, but my voice is in shape for this podcast.
You're in shape? I'm a little rusty. I did a whole lot of hollering and hooting and singing along on our cruise. We were gone for five days. We saw maybe about 22, 23 bands, I think. A whole lot of sing alongs, a whole lot of talking to friends and stuff. And so come back a little bit hoarse, but feeling pretty good.
Did you see any fans that were on the ship?
I did not see any fans on.
The ship next year.
Yeah, exactly.
Next year, we'll get bigger. That will infiltrate the monsters of rock.
I don't think that's going to happen.
Everything in time. All right, well, let's dive into our actual topic here. Scott, thanks so much for coming on the podcast, buddy.
Thank you very much for having me.
So, scott, I don't know where to begin on this. Number one, let's start with you. So you work at the new england aquarium, is that correct?
I do. Tell us more about that biologists there, and I specialize in freshwater. I have always been into freshwater, and I live not too far south of the new aquarium, and that's the place where I would always ask to go when a birthday came up or any excuse I could leverage. And then when I became a punk teenager, I figured out how to sneak on to the public transit system, jump on the subway, get myself into Boston, and I figured out how to fake the indication of payment that you paid for your admission. And I'd sneak in, and I'd just spend all day walking around hanging out at the aquarium. And my parents were very patient and tolerant, and I was always hanging out at a pet store and changing water and cleaning box filters back at that day. And at the end of the week, the shop owner would give me a few fish. And so my basement was a fish room, and I kind of had it set up geographically, kind of how new england aquarium was set up. And when I became old enough to become an official volunteer, I started volunteering to at the expense of my my college. I did I did poor in school. You can tell where my my bandwidth was allocated in, let's see, 1987, I think I was a sophomore, and an aquarist had left the aquarium, and by then, I was sort of a fixture there. Probably june or so. A department head said, we're in a pinch. We're really busy with other stuff. Hiring somebody, recruiting and vetting a new aquarius takes a long time. Would you mind coming on staff for the summer while we get past this busy period? And we promise you we'll work something out by september so you can you can get back to school. But that summer ended up lasting about 20 years. They they never got around to to filling the position officially. So, yeah, let's see. I think during the economic crisis, I felt a little bit unstable, well, just in general, but academically unstable without that college degree. But I talked my way into a master's program in scotland at university of sterling. They have the world's best aquaculture program. So I took a year off from the aquarium, got a master's, and aquaculture came back kind of parallel to that. And we'll get into this. I really loved amazonian fish, and in 1990, there were groups of hobbyists going to Peru around that time, and I went on one of these peru trips. It went a little bit rough, and I think I said out loud on the way out as we were sort of licking our wounds and hanging our heads, and I said, it'd be great to go to Brazil some time. And one of the people on my trip said, hey, great. If you organize it, I'll go along. And so that was sort of a pivot point there. So that's kind of my background. Fish. Fish are my life.
That's fantastic. You have quite 20 years of a summer gig. I got to get one of those.
I hope it wasn't a volunteer gig. I hope you're getting paid there.
No, yeah, I was getting paid. It's a nonprofit, so not a whole lot, but sure. They just the system, and off I went. Yeah. So that's how I became a professional. Aquarist.
That's incredible. People don't understand that if you're around there as a volunteer and stuff, it can do nothing but grow. It actually sent you towards a career, from what I understand.
Yeah, I really recommend it for young folks that are into the hobby or thinking about a career in aquatics. Even if you found out I don't like being wet all day and smelling like fish, then that's a valuable lesson. But it's a way to sort of network and put yourself in a setting that you're sort of gearing your life career for. And so if you can get involved in a public aquarium, either through an internship, through school, or by volunteering, it's time well spent.
Now, do you guys have summer internships that you take people to come work at the aquarium?
We do, and I'll tell you, it's great. They're usually full of enthusiasm. And there are a lot of things that I'm responsible for that are time consuming, but a lot of them are standard, routine. And things like that, I'll train interns up on. And then whatever time they can spend, it might be scrubbing algae off backgrounds and feeding flakes and pellets around or maintaining some of the filters. That kind of doubles my time. It doubles my day, and it lets me get a lot more done. So we usually build it around the academic year. We'll have summer interns, but then there'll be a quiet period in September that we all brace ourselves for because Boston is a very academic city, so many universities and stuff, but we kind of go a little bit high and dry for a lot of our helpers that we benefited so much from through the summer. But then when the young folks get settled into school, we pick up another semester's worth of internships. But there's a couple of different levels and descriptions folks can fit into. There are some people that are volunteers. They might be retired, or they may have a free day a week. And I have some volunteers that have been with me for more than ten years. They're just absolutely indispensable.
Well, while we're on the subject, how can someone apply at the Boston aquarium if they're going to try to do for a summer volunteer ship? Where's the place they need to go?
Well, go onto the website and where volunteers and interns are so important to us. I haven't checked it lately, and they always keep the website really fresh, but I'm sure it's not too hard to navigate and find the volunteer intern department. I'm sure you can fill out an application online. It will ask you what amount of time do you have available, if it's specific days of the week, and there's a lot of we have job descriptions. I am in charge of a gallery that's the freshwater gallery, south American and local fish. But we have north Atlantic, north Pacific galleries. We have other departments that work with some of the marine mammals and just all sorts of stuff where we take volunteers and interns into. And you can read those job descriptions and find out what seems to click best. Some of them are more competitive than others. So you can either say that you just want freshwater, or you can say that, you know, you're you're open to wherever there's a need. And yeah, that's that's the way to to get into a situation like that.
I will have the link in their show notes if you guys are interested. But before we get fan mail on this, I just want to point out that this was years ago. And if you're looking to find a way to scan the Boston transit system, they have surely replaced the monetary system to get a bus ticket.
And then you used to sneak into the aquarium also?
Yes, I did, and I was very shy to share that. But one of the heads of our PR department really liked the story, and he would tout it if I was sort of getting involved with any media engagement. That's one of the things that he would give is my background that when I was a teenager, I was just so drawn to the place and I didn't have any money, and so I figured out a way to sneak in the aquarium.
Have you fixed that whole defense yet, or is that still available for other people to use?
I won't say.
So this the Boston one?
Yes, the New England Aquarium.
Oh, no, I think that I went to the national one.
Adam thinks he's stuck in that one.
Maybe everything else. Don't worry, they have security out front. Now, don't try to sneak in and keep illegal. If you need tickets, just, you know, hook up. Call your, your buddy Scott up and see if he can hook you up.
Exactly. We're giving away free tickets.
Let's get on track here for the reason we brought you on, because we can certainly talk a lot about the aquarium. I was there for 3 hours when I visited. But we want to talk to you about Project piava and how did that get started. Let's start with the beginnings of that organization.
Well, like I said, there were certain sort of group of hobbyists that wanted to get out into the field and see the places where their fish came from. It's what a lot of us think about when we're setting up our aquarium and doing the aquascaping and figuring out community of fish and how to maintain our water chemistry and diet and all that. And the next step is to actually go there and see it all. And Peru had a structure. There was an outfitter that had some liverboard boats that had a program going. And I think there were two or three people in the Us. That would set up groups, go down to Peru and the person I connected with was Dr. Paul Loisll. He's one of the leaders in in the Lake Victoria cyclist conservation program. He's been to madagascar many times and he's he's doing a lot to promote conservation of cyclists in madagascar. And he actually he wrote the book The cichlid Aquarium, which was one of my bibles when I was young. So it's quite an honor to spend a couple of weeks down in Peru with Dr. lizelle. So Peru was having some problems, I think like the shining Path group of terrorists were cranky and the shining Path?
Yeah.
The shining Path. That was there. The translation of the name of them. So they were making travel difficult. And I forget there was some disease that was pretty prevalent.
How long ago was this?
This was 1990.
I was in Peru then. I used to learn in Peru. Yeah.
Wow.
I lived in Peru for like four or five years.
And what group were you part of? Adam?
Just he was the dim light bulbs. Just curious.
No.
So this is actually kind of cool. But yeah, they would go and they'd kill everybody's cows and then they'd turn around and give them other cows.
Don't say this was actually kind of cool, and then talk about slaughter.
Well, no, you never knew when they blew up the transistors all the time down there. They blew up the electrical power thing. So you'd go without power for like two or three days. It was kind of cool.
I'd like to apologize to our listeners. He's one of those guys that listens to mystery murders all the time.
He thinks he's a terminator or something.
I don't know.
No, it was really fun down there and I learned a lot how to.
Blow stuff up, apparently.
No, I did not blow anything up. We live in a gated community.
You're kind of a terrorist anyway. You're just looking at you, jim, I'm.
Going to fly soon. Will you quit saying that?
That's right, I forgot.
You stopped at tipping the cows over. You didn't actually blow them up.
I like this.
Guy.
We got to keep him as a guest.
Yeah, they're doing all right.
So, 1990, you get the charter.
I mean, the logistics were what they were. But I spent time snorkeling in the Amazon and looking at all of our dream fish, and I think I was maybe 20 or some 19, maybe. Just got a high from it. And I started calling contacts, first at Harvard University and then at smithsonian. And smithsonian put me in touch with a professor at the University of amazonas in manaus, Brazil. manaus is the big city where the Rio negro meets the meets the Amazon. The guy was quite the character. Dr. chau. He wasn't originally from Brazil, but he had taught in the Us and Canada, southern Brazil. Brazil. And he landed in the Amazon, and he was fish guy. He's anchor theologistsist, and he wanted to teach the local resident students about fish, but also mainly scientific methodology to give those students the tools, the proper way to ask the question and go about answering it. He had limited budget, and when I first wrote to him, he expressed a lot of concerns. Brazil had a lot tighter regulations in terms of accessing their biological material. In fact, heico, Blair ended up in jail there, even though he grew up in Brazil and his folks had exported fish.
What a time.
Jack wally also had an arrest warrant out, too.
Yeah. And so that made me nervous. In peru, you would check your fish just like you were checking a bag. But Brazil, it was a different story. But that didn't stop us. We said we'll go for it. And what I told him is I'll put together a group of enthusiastic, crazy gringos that will cover the budget for chartering boat and doing the variety of things that needed to be paid for. And we'll make sure to hold a handful of slots open on the boat for him and a group of students that he chose to bring along. I think it was about four or five students. And so we flew into manaus. We go to a riverboat, and early on in planning this trip, he said we should go to the Rio negro. The Rio negro has a lot more aquarium fish coming from there, and it has a lot less mosquitoes. So let's go to the Rio negro.
I feel like this is the start of a really good scary movie. I'm thinking, like, anaconda what was that movie? I'm thinking anaconda Cross with deep blue sea. It's just going to happen.
We've had a lot of things. I've run this trip dozens of times now. I've kind of lost track, so it's become an annual thing. But this was the first one of this expedition. I was by far the youngest, and I had organized this expedition to the Brazilian Amazon, and it just fell short of organizing a trip to the moon in terms of difficulty.
So how long were you planning when you were making this trip. If I'm packing, I'd be like, well, I'm going to be gone for a week. I only need one pair of underwear.
Yeah, well, it came together, I think, shortly after I got home from peru and had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.
It was probably the color, probably the cholera.
That was a good one.
Adam it was the very next year, it was 1991 that we did this first trip. There is a city, 450 couple of days if you go straight by boat. The city is called BARCELOS. It's a small city, about 40,000 people in the whole municipality, and it's a hub of a querying fish. There are some different stories. I was with herb axelrod once, and he told me his version of BARCELOS coming, what it refers to itself as the ornamental fish capital of the world, and how herb had gone upriver there in the 1960s, I think, in search of another source of the neon tetra. How his story goes is that's when he made the discovery of the Cardinal Tetra, parrot carried on axelrodi. There's actually a process for describing and naming fish, and it has to be published. And if you go through the old tropical fish hobbyist magazines from that time, the issue in which he published his description and his naming of the Cardinal Tetra is the only tfh magazine that has an actual date on it. They were usually just monthly magazines. This particular one had a day on it, like June 12. And the reason was he was racing against a scientist who was doing the proper description and publication. It was going to be the vermilion Tetra. But axelrod supposedly well, I guess I could say he backdated his issue to come out to have the fish named after him. One of the little tumultuous aspects of the story of the Cardinal Tetra. But since then, I'm looking at my.
Book right now because I have the handbook of Tropical Aquarium fishes, you said talking about axelrod. Is that him? I had to go over to my cabinet and grab the book right now, so I'm going to look and see if that actually has it.
I got several axelrod books.
So do I. Oh, sure.
No, he wrote everything. chinchilla is for fun and profit and hamsters as pets or meat. And whatever he wrote. I got to go to his printing facility in neptune City years ago, and I went to his house, and it's like his house was just frozen in time in maybe 1975. All the naga hide and all the decor. I could almost see some of the backdrops, some of the photography from some of the tfh magazines from back then.
Well, see, that's because he was hiding from tax fraud.
Or violent controversies. Anyway, let's keep moving.
My apologies.
You run with a rough crowd. I'm just saying.
Well, I love this hobby. I love this industry. I love everybody in it, from the fish collectors to all my hobbyist friends. But back to BARCELOS, they started exporting, pouring fish, and the cardinal tetra was the main species going out. The Rio negro is kind of special. It's very unusual. The PH runs around 4.5 or so where most of the aquarium fish live. It has almost no conductivity and no dissolved solids. Even though the river is jet black, I have vacuumed that water through a very fine filter disk, and there's almost nothing, almost no dissolved solids there. It also has a really dramatic high water and low water season, about 10 meters. And the land in the area in the basin doesn't have a lot of elevation. So when that water goes up 10 meters, it's almost unfathomable. About how many acres, hundreds of thousands of acres get flooded and go from a tropical forest to flooded forest. And the fish are connected to a lot of this. Also, the reason the PH is so low and the river is so black is the guyana Shield. Northern and northeastern South America is actually of a pretty low elevation, in contrast to the headwaters of the Amazon in peru and western South America. It comes from the Andy, so there's very high elevation there. So that water comes at a very high velocity. And that keeps a lot of organic material, a lot of silt and stuff in the water. And that's the basis for the different trophic levels. Like, there are little fish and shrimp and invertebrates and things that eat the little stuff. And there are other things that eat the little things. And that's where a lot of the giant amazonian fish come from. The arapaima and the big giant peacock bass.
The stuff that you see in river monsters.
Yeah, that stuff. Because of all the silt in the water, and that affects it chemically. The PH is much higher in the Amazon than it is in the Rio negro. The Rio negro's water comes from rainfall that falls on this very broad guyana Shield low elevation. So when the soil does not torrent, there's not a lot of streams. The water leaches through the ground, and the ground is full of a lot of decaying organic matter. So where we use peat moss, almond leaves, and different organic material to create the black water or, you know, some of these bottled elixirs we get off.
The shelf for those that are listening. That would be the police to pick up Adam for the last comment.
Yeah, right.
Sorry. Do continue.
Okay. So the water has this strange composition to it. Very acidic, no conductivity, very little organic matter in the water column. It's kind of hard to be a fish. It's almost like an underwater desert because there's nothing there's. Very little aquatic plants. They don't like that water. There's so little nutrients and low PH. A lot of you probably know Karen randall. She's a really incredible aquarist specializing in aquatic plants. She knew what she was getting into, into going to a river with almost no plants. So we're having a laugh about that. How fish deal with that? They're little, they're diverse, and they're specialists in making use of some of these tiny little slivers of niches that they can eke a living out of, like marble hatchet fish. How weird is that? Having a mouth on top of your head. And if a predator comes, they can fly away. And also the flood cycle, the populations boom during the high water because suddenly the fish have access to all that newly inundated flooded forest and all the organic material that's been growing in the terrestrial period that they and their young can survive on.
If I may interrupt, essentially what you're saying is during the normal season, when it's not the flooding season, they're essentially sitting in a biological desert and they're holding off until the flood. And the moment that the planes flood, it just lights off. It's breeding time, it's flourishing. You have all this nutrients, everything is hitting the water at once.
Exactly. And it's really rough on the fetch in the low water season when they're limited to just the main channels, that there's not a lot of places to hide and there's a lot of hungry predators. And so a lot of these fish are almost annual fish. A lot of the carousels, tetras and things from the Rio negro are almost annual fish. A small percentage of them have the capacity to avoid the tetras and they have the fortitude and the endurance to get through this time of little food. And in fact, even more remarkable than that, at the end of the low water season, when they've spent so much time under these stressful circumstances, that actually gives them cues that the time of plenty is coming. And as you are saying, when they can sense the coming of the rainy season, they come into breeding condition. And that blows me away, where these fish are so starved and malnourished and stressed they come up with mustering the energy to develop eggs and stuff because they want to spawn as soon as possible when the forest gets flooded to give their young first cracks at the new resources and also give them the most development time during the high water season so that they'll have the best chance of living through the next low water season.
So this is what you guys discovered on that trip in the 90s?
No, I'll tell you what. When I was there in 1991, we went to BARCELOS and indeed it was a hub of aquarium fish and I saw millions of fish. BARCELOS is pretty remote. There's no road that goes to the city. There's a relatively small airstrip, and it would be financially impossible to ship fish out of BARCELOS by plane. The main connection to BARCELOS and a few of the other cities along the Rio negro are these ferry boats, large boats that go from manaus and they stop at a handful of cities along the way, including BARCELOS. And on the way up they'll be bringing a lot of the provisions that the cities need. I've seen buses on these boats and motorcycles and refrigerators and all kinds of food and stuff that's going to the cities. And then when the boat is making the return trip down river, when it stops at barcelona's, that boat gets loaded with tubs of aquarium fish. The lower deck, it's about three decks high. The lower deck gets filled with tubs of aquarium fish and then it takes another couple of days to get down to manaus. The export companies have trucks waiting at the port. They pick up their fish and bring them to the export facility. But I'll tell you, I was raging hobbyist and I had gotten to my mecca. We were sort of some of the first aquarius gringo's to get there other than some individuals like hiker, Blair and stuff. I had adrenaline pumping. But I'll tell you, I saw that bottom deck of the boat and we counted some tubs, we counted the quantity of fish in some of the tubs and they would have like 800 or thousand and there were thousands of tubs on the boat and the boat would stop there like three times a week. And suddenly I had this sick feeling. I thought, oh my God. You know, I think it's safe to say that all hobbyists are also environmentalists, care deeply about the environment to the point of where we're driven to recreate it at home, that's another story. But had a bit of a rant and a rage and I said, this is awful. And I'm pretty sure at one point on that first trip to barcelona's, looking at that boat full of accordion fish that was going to be coming out to all of us because we were providing the demand. I made it my mission, I'm going to stop this. We should not be taking fish out of the rainforest for our hobby. Just seeing that the sheer volume of the fish cardinals represent about 85% of the export. There are dozens of other species that come out of that region that represent.
Was this the 90s or this now? Because 85%, that seems significant.
It is significant in many ways. I'll tell you, it is very different now and hopefully we have time to get to that. But this was, this was kind of at peak and then this peak had had flatlined for a long time. There were probably decades that this volume of fish were were coming out of there. That other 15%, the vast majority of that were other carrins. It was marble hatchet fish, ruminos tetras, bleeding heart tetras, but then a very small sliver were cichlids, catfish and stingrays. And the cichlids would include a lot of the earth eaters that occur up there. The heckle discus that come from up there.
So in the 90s, stingrays were actually exported as a norm. I didn't know that was done in the thought that was picked up around 2000s.
No, it's been opened and closed. It's kind of gone back and forth between being permitted and not being permitted. But they were small quantities. It just wasn't much of a demand. In 1990, not a lot of hobbyists.
Wanted to get their self stung and die.
Yeah. And have a fish that's going to get to be the size of your coffee table. It's been trendy for a little while and we've done some sort of experiments with some stingray fishing communities to work out. Some different methods and see what would work and what didn't. That perspective and that conclusion that I came to, which it was sort of a knee jerk reaction I saw an overwhelming amount of fish and I'm from Boston. And we've wiped out our cod populations and our fisheries are in rough shape and that the target species are in rough shape. And the way that we capture fish up here is we use trawlers and draggers that do. A lot of damaged the bottom of the ocean and damage fish habitat, and we do a lot of things that have resulted in the decline of our fisheries. So I came there as a bostonian and I saw all these fish coming out. And that was sort of the basis for some of my conclusion for thinking that this volume is not sustainable and it's not acceptable. However, that trip did work out. I'm turning the clock forward a little bit, logistically. We all had a great time. It was really fun, and I'll never forget it. The professor and I, professor from down there said, you know what? Let's do it again next year. That worked out. This professor, this was a means for him to get his students out into the field. And that's when they started seeing things like these fish coming into maturation, coming into spawning condition before the floods happen. Seeing the populations of Cardinal Tetris, that their population peak is during the high water season. But when the water level drops, there's a massive die off. Even if humans didn't exist, if hobbies didn't exist, creating the demand, if we're getting those fish out, there would be a natural die off. Cardinal Tetras and other carriers and other species that they would just plummet down to a tiny fraction of what it had been a handful of months before at the peak of the population. But that cycle goes every year. It happens.
Was this your idea, Scott, all along?
No, it wasn't my idea. The scientist was doing the science, the students were doing the science.
So you all collectively were eating a lobster in Boston, going, wow. These lobsters habitats going, we got to fix this somehow. And then it suddenly clicked. Oh, the Amazon floods. They're going to die anyway. We could do this as an ecological harvest.
Well, there were a couple of other big pieces to it. When I was on that rant saying, this is terrible. It's going to be my life's mission to stop it. I didn't know about that annual cycle of most of the fish going to this natural death. The other thing that I totally ignored or didn't see was the socioeconomic role that the aquarium fish trade plays for the people in the region.
So originally you were petitioning just to stop importing altogether. Like we shouldn't be doing this.
I don't know how far my petition went, but it was certainly my opinion that this is a very bad thing and I care about the environment, I care about fish, and I want to stop bad things. Then the science of the fishery and the population dynamics were really enlightening. But when the students at University of Arizona were studying the overall fishery, it became apparent that the vast majority of rural folks in that region made their living based on catching and selling aquarium fish. In fact, we had a PhD student studied it and he found that 60% of the revenue from I've mentioned the municipality, it's kind of like New York. New York barcelo City is in the municipality of BARCELOS municipality is the size of Pennsylvania. So when I say there's 40,000 people living there, it's not many people at all in a region. I think it's like the size of Belgium or something. The alternatives it's human nature. If you have a family, if you have kids and they need to eat, which kids do pesky habit you as a parent, they eat a lot. Yeah, they do. So you would do anything that you could do that you had to do to feed your kids. And in other parts of the Amazon, where there isn't this livelihood basis of the of the aquarium trade, people do the stuff that you see on TV. They cut trees and they grow exploding cows and crazy stuff. And that's not good for the environment. And it's sort of a human nature act. I would never point my finger at those people because they do it because they have no other way of living. But in the Amazon, in the Rio negro region, they have this global market demand of these beautiful fish. And again, back to some of the impacts of the hydrology and the water chemistry on the fish. It's hard to be a fish. So many different forms and species have come about. A lot of these species are weird looking. They're bizarre because there's not much organics and fish food in the water. They've miniaturized. So there's a very high abundance, very high speciation of weird little fish. And we love weird little fish. So because of the guyana Shield and affecting the water chemistry and all that and then this global aquarium hobby which has created this demand and this revenue stream, that's the whole background that created circumstances for BARCELOS to be this incredible hub of aquarium fish and for the majority of the people to be involved in the aquarium fish trade one way or another. The folks there, the fishing communities, I've since learned Portuguese and have very good friends in the region that I enjoy talking with quite a bit. I don't have that barrier that I had in 1991 where I was just I might as well have been from another planet when I showed up there in terms of how much my understanding that I could grasp of what was going on right around me.
Yeah, the Boston accent doesn't help in the ambulance.
I do. It's kind of funny sometimes. I have a Brazilian Boston accent, which is kind of funny.
Well, don't worry. If I hear the P word, I'll censor it. Don't worry. What's the P word? No, I have to censor it. I can't say that spanish.
Portuguese is different than Spanish.
Oh, don't worry. See, I had a foreign exchange student from Brazil.
Oh, that's right.
Right. She spoke fluent Portuguese and the first word that she taught me was the F word.
Yeah, I don't take that.
Jim just rolling his head. No, we won't say it on air, Jimmy. This is for science. Come on now.
You do a duck. anyways, so how I said that it's safe to say that Us hobbyists are environmentalists. It turns out that the fish collectors are also environmentalists. Even though these fish have such a robust life cycle where they can their populations can be decimated down to a fraction, and then they have this explosive sort of repopulation. They're very sensitive to environmental conditions. And if there's any significant environmental disruption, like a big giant exploding cow farm or something like that, the fish won't tolerate it and they disappear. And the fishing community knows that. I think everybody knows the word nimby. Not in my backyard. So the fishing community are these eco.
Nimbys class for those that don't let a listening right now, because we have people all over the world.
Not in my backyard. It's when people are living somewhere and there's some development going on that they don't like, let's say windmills. That's a good example. All of us environmentalists are pro sustainable energy and we love windmills. But then when it comes time to put a windmill field in your town, suddenly everybody is opposed to windmills. The fishing community, again, they earn their family suspends from the demand and the revenue stream that comes from here, from these aquarium fish. So fish are extremely important to them, and catching fish is a pretty low technology thing. They have a dugout canoe that they make themselves. They make nets out of window mosquito mesh material. And that mosquito mesh is readily available and it's very cheap. And one reason for that is there are some government want people to be able to have screens on all their windows for their house just to try to cut down on any mosquito borne disease transmission. So you'll see that stuff that mosquito mesh used for tons and tons of things in addition to window screens. They know the Amazon. It's very humbling for me to spend time with Fisher friends out in the field because I feel like such a clutch and they're just so second nature. They're just natural. They're at it. They'll point to a bush 100ft away and they'll say oh, there's probably pencil fish there. And I'll say, which bush? And they'll say, the green one and, and whatever. And we'll go there and I'll jump out with my mask and snorkel they'll start wielding their net and indeed it's a time of pencil fish. So they really know their stuff. That provides their incentive and motivation to try to protect the environment and minimize their impact on it and anybody's impact on it. So holy cow. Going back to that rant, I was on about this fish hobby that I've been in my whole life. My hands are dirty in this and I feel sick about it and we'd better stop catching these fish. I could not have been more wrong. I was 100% wrong. Had I been able to snap my fingers and shut down the cardinal tetra fishery and turn it over to being farmed in Southeast Asia and, and Tampa, it would have been devastating on the Rio negro because the whole carpet would have been pulled out under the whole human community. Suddenly fish wouldn't be worth anything anymore and they'd have to find something else to do to feed their families and they would lose that incentive to protect the environment.
I would say you guys now came up with this conclusion that this is an ecological safe way to harvest aquarium species that are already going to die because the flooding planes would dry up and keep the economy going for a lot of these native cultures and people. What does the light bulb go off that, hey, we need to make this into an organization to try to preserve this area and preserve this culture.
It was about 1993 or 94 that we had we sat quiet a little bit in 92 and 93. It must have been 94, 95 before we shifted from the Gringos to having an enjoyable fishy vacation and supporting some of the local academics to having some of these results coming in from the students thesis and the different projects that were going on. And we sort of started getting chills like realizing that even back then kind of the Holy grail was to say that something is sustainable, unsustainable that can be continued without doing damage. And we were saying this fishery, that word sustainable that falls far short of what's going on here. This is not just a benign, neutral, low impact thing. This fishery is a high impact fishery. And under normal circumstances you wouldn't want to call a fishery, it wouldn't be a good thing because the cod fishery was a high impact fishery and boy did that have an impact. But we can say that the cardinal tetra fishery is a high impact fishery but in a positive way.
So how did you guys get started on all this again? I'm looking here at your notes and it shows on the website that 1995 this became an official nonprofit to work this. So where was the inception? You guys contacted a lot of the natives and said hey, we're going to start this organization and I'm assuming proceeds went to them but it also went to the organization. So what does the organization do besides fund this channel of reasonable cot fish?
Yeah, it's really complex. We aren't really financially tied to the fisheries. Sometimes we get some one off donations from some of the trade groups. But when we had the realization of this that dream, that obsession that I came up with in 1990 unfortunately had come true. Yeah, unfortunately the thing I wanted in 1990 started happening and I freaked out. It has been a lot of freak out but anyways, they've been producing neon tetras in fish farms for generations because the andes sourced water is a lot more like the water in Tampa, in Singapore, in Malaysia. So neon tetras were bred with little problem. But if you take a fish from 4.5 and try to breed it in Tampa, it ain't going to happen. It's a pretty tough thing if you're trying to do what's done with neon tetras. But the aquaculture industry has come up with techniques to make spawning of fish a lot more easy to control by using hormones. You can treat fish with hormones and physiologically kind of induce or force them to come into breeding conditions. And then as you go through your generations, you can selectively choose some of that yield from that brood that seem to be more tolerant of the conditions on your farm. And you can selectively breed a strain of fish that look just like a cardinal tetra, and they probably have the same DNA, but suddenly they're tolerant of higher PH water and they're tolerant of captive circumstances. So that's why I say when I wanted to shift the wild fishery to a farm situation it came true and my dream became my nightmare because that was around the time that I was realizing that oh my God, I don't have blood on my hands. I should be proud as a hobbyist because myself and my community that loves aquarium fish and we open up our wallets and we put a lot of money into this revenue stream that goes to a lot of these developing countries. It's been the benefit to the region. Not just the benefit, it's really protected. If conditions are good for cardinal tetris they're good for jaguars, they're good for monkeys, they're good for the whole biodiversity of the whole region. And a couple of years ago I had a carbon. Specialist come along with me on a trip. And he did some calculations about how much forest was in the region that's being protected by the fishing community. So he did some calculations to figure out how much carbon is sequestered in all of those giant amazonian trees. And not only that, but how much atmospheric scrubbing is going on. But with all that photosynthesis and the tropics, how much co2 is being removed from the atmosphere from this region that's protected because of the fish hobby. Actually, something interesting to Google, you might put this link on the page as well. The United Nations has 14 goals for sustainable development. And in this region, this fishery in the Rio negro tips every single box in terms of benefiting humans and food security, equality for men and women. Women get paid exactly the same that men get paid for cardinal tetrans. And they always have you're paid by fish. So there's no gender differential whatsoever.
Well, let's talk a couple of logistics now that we got a lot of the background. All right, number one, what does it look like in a day? Now, everything that has to do with cost of living, and I'm assuming cost of living in the Amazon is a lot lower than it is here, but let's say wholesale, right? A cardinal tetra costs a buck and a quarter, right? Wholesale. So they get a quarter of fish.
Actually, they get closer to a penny of fish.
Okay? So you got to remember that that's encapsulating shipping, all the handling, all the port taxation. So, I mean, it's certainly something, but.
Yeah, we have a table of the different tiers of the supply chain and what they pay and what they get paid and what their overhead is. I think it's still unfair. I think the fishers need to get paid more. And that's something that we're working on, and we're doing some things back to the future here. Currently, one of the reasons why farmed cardinal tetras might outcompete the wild cardinal Tetras is things related to how the fish are handled and the quality and their condition for trade compared to fish that are raised on a farm. So we have a veterinarian, a specialist in aquarium fish. He's amazing. He's been all over the world. He's a professor, and he's come on quite a few trips. And we've done a lot of observations about where stress might be happening, where there are issues related to nutrition or disease management or things like that. Years ago, we helped the fishers organize a fishers association so they'll have some power of numbers for negotiating. And what we've been doing is working with all the members that are registered in the association and training them in best handling practices. So with best handling practices, we've gone about that in three phases. The first phase was to identify everywhere where something needs to be improved. Then we rode up what on a practical level, you have to have reasonable down to earth expectations about rural amazonian fishermen, the level of care and technology and stuff they have access to. We wrote up what should be best handling practices. We shared that with our Brazil team for them to say, no, that's not going to work like that. Let's refine that. So phase two, we called it Train the Trainers. The veterinarian and I knew that it was completely impractical for he and I to be the ones to train the actual fishers. To have gringos standing there, that's just going to throw the whole situation off completely. So we have a fantastic team, about a dozen and a half people that are all volunteers in Brazil. None of them are veterinarians or fish clinicians. They're all very smart and they're all educated people. They're all people that know how to sit in a lecture and take the information. This was funded by the World Pet Association in the Us. This phase two trained the trainers for about a week. We had a very intensive training program for our Brazilian team and stuff, even on the molecular level, that we knew would be way more minutiae that they would have to include in things that they were talking to fishermen about. But we wanted to give them a very sound, comprehensive understanding of the basis of the fish stress response and the effect that trauma has on fish. Phase three was to actually do the training to go out into the field and train the fishers. When I I did my master's thesis on measuring the physiological stress response in Cardinal Tetras in the trade chain, and I lived down in the Amazon for a while, and the aquaculture industry has developed some methods where you can measure some chemistry in the fish's body that happens when the fish experience stress. There was one publication that was I was thrilled when I came across. It was simple techniques for measuring the fish physiological stress response in the field. And I thought, Holy cow. Although all of those techniques were based on aquaculture, fish in the field meant standing next to a fish pen, but it was mostly cell monitors in tilapia and you could stick a hypodermic in a fish and draw basically as much blood as you wanted. So with Cardinal Tetras, I found that they weighed 0.2 grams at the point of capture. I developed techniques to get blood and plasma from 0.2 grams fish on a canoe in the middle of the Amazon. But I wanted a tool set of scientists like numbers. These lights he used. Establish protocol so you can refer to them. So when we develop best handling practices and someone challenges us, say, what do you mean best handling practices? We have ways that we can measure the fish stress response that's the industry standards. Some of it is just totally intuitive. Don't leave the fish in the sun and things like that. So we're working to maximize the quality and minimize the stress on the fish.
Just to paint that it's not just the care of the fish. This is to essentially combat what you called your worst nightmare of farm raised cardinals. And this is so backwards for me, listeners. My listeners are going to be messaging me back like, no, the rule book is if it's wild, don't get it, only get farm rice fish. That is like the go to thing when you hear any of this. So when I talk to people about, oh, we have this project pava, and these are all wild cot fish. The immediate responses, unless you're Adam, because Adam loves everything wild. But most of it is. I do know it's. Going to destroy their habitat while you do it like, no, this is sustainable cot fish supporting a culture and it's really hard for people to wrap their head around. But that's essentially what you're doing with this project is you're trying to find ways to now combat one of the most popular fish in the Amazon and trying to get them cultured the way they should have been because we fought incorrectly for years.
Is the whole goal then to just try to keep because, I mean, there is a large percent of fish that you lose, unfortunately, in transport. And is the goal to try to minimize the amount of loss you're going to have with these fish?
Of course. And if the fish are handled in a better way, we know this is hobbyist and mortality is sort of the last line that you cross. We want it much better than that. We want these fish to be thriving and if they're exposed to a stressor, low dissolved oxygen, high ammonia, something like.
That, jimmy with his pants off.
We want those fish to be in the best possible condition. And it just makes sense on every single level. There's nothing of stressed fish other than some academics reports or something. But we know that a lot of it was just basic knowledge. But you need the numbers and you need to use the accepted protocols and all of that.
So now to try to fast forward, okay, we have this established in 1995. You guys go out, how long until essentially you put a program together and bring what, the first batch to market or the first shipment to market? How long to begin to kick off?
The fish have been going since the 1950s. The fish have been coming out and the money has been going in. That's in decline now. And so we want to reverse that. We want to increase the revenue and we want to maximize the economic benefit and the environmental, the driver for environmentalism and all those other good things that come out of the fishery. We want to maximize the good stuff and minimize bad stuff. So as you say, this is counterintuitive and it's going to cause that wince. And I'll tell you, I was wincing at the introduction to the show when you were saying we had one negative response. Come back later. I hear what I have to say about I'm advocating I'm a conservation biologist and I'm advocating for the extraction of 40 million individual fish per season from one region. And I am, I'm saying this now, I've been in this for like 30 years or so, but we've been very cautious. You haven't heard about a lot of this because it is such an extreme statement. We just wanted it to be bulletproof and indefensible. So we feel that we're there. So we're in an action mode now, which is working with the exporters and the fishers, the exporters. A lot of them use stream water at their facilities because that stream water has a PH of 4.5. And they know they don't want to PH shock the fish. They want to give them that acid water that they came from.
Well, I guess to elaborate on the question, Scott, would be from 1995 to the first batch, we see when we talk to wholesalers that there's stuff labeled Project by eba. And that's what we're looking for on purpose because we don't want wild unless it's been gone through the process. That's what the organization that you provide has a stamp on the fish saying this was gotten a sustainable, responsible manner.
Okay, I'll try to get that. You're asking about sort of our development in 95, the light bulb went off. I remember sitting at a stream, we were sitting in a real bronco and we came up with this slogan buy a fish, save a tree that has endured. That's just so catchy. And that came on and I established a 501 Us nonprofit organization. We have federal status as being a nonprofit organization because I'm an individual and I'm organizing these trips and tens of thousands of dollars, if it's going through my bank account, that looks kind of funny. And the 501 lets us take donations and give people acknowledgment so they can use that for their tax refunds that they're supporting a charity. And we started getting more organized. We have a board of advisors representing people from the aquarium trade, people from public aquariums and people from the conservation community. And I'll tell you, if you turn the clock back even just ten years ago, and you said a wildlife trader, a conservation biologist, and a public incorporated person sit down at a bar, it's not going to be pretty. What would the conservation people say to the wildlife traders? But I'll tell you now, groups like the iucn, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the Wildlife Fund, Conservation International, they see this case study, something of great hope, and they now look at people like Sandy Moore, the president of Seagrass Farms, as being one of the most effective conservationists around. Because she's writing her checks every week. She has money that's going to all sorts of regions of biological importance and a company like Seagrass Farms is sending money to all these places. They're doing business. They want to buy fish, and fish cost money. But the outcome is all these things of food security and connecting people to the environment. And so with me, I'm working well with everybody. But my hope is one of the rules for the zoo and aquarium community to play a very meaningful role in this, to accept this hypothesis or these circumstances and look at it as a mechanism of achieving their highest goals of protecting the environment. And the thing about the zoos and aquariums is there's an organization called the association of Zoos and Aquariums in the Us. countrywide. We have about 180,000,000 visitors a year that come to zoos and aquariums. This is a self selected population that you can say is drawn to wildlife. And they care about wildlife, and if not before they went to the zoo, aquarium certainly after, because they're just so effective about connecting people with wildlife and raising concern about the environment. The other thing about zoo and aquarium visitors is they have disposable income. It's not cheap to go to to pay admission for those who do and, you know, feed the kids and pay for parking, you know, all that. You're probably looking at a couple of $100 by the end of the day. If we say we spot like Cardinal Tetras downstream from some of the most compelling exhibits where we've really accessed depths of the hearts and the minds of these people, and then we get these people thinking, oh, my God, these fish are incredible, and they're in trouble. What can we do? What can I do here in America to help fish in the Amazon? And then downstream in the exhibits, you see a home aquarium type exhibit with Cardinal Tetras, and you tell this story. So not only do you tell the story, these are my dreams. I'm dreaming here. This doesn't exist yet. What I'd like to have is a qr code or something like that at the exhibit so the visitor can snap the qr code. And that's going to give them this whole story again. But not only that, it's going to have their GPS flag fish stores. A few days after their aquarium visit, they'll get a text message, hey, what about this? Do you want to think about starting an aquarium? And here's an lfs down the street from you that has wild caught aquarium fish. And one of the participants in this is hagen or another producer that's supporting our World Pet Association members that are supporting this hobby. And you can go and you can buy an aquarium, and you can buy some Cardinal Tetras. And let me tell you this, this is also a dream, although we're getting there. Part of it is this Fishers association? They all have license numbers, and we have satellite coordinates for where they live and where they fish. What I want to do is when that fisher comes into BARCELOS with his fish is that tub either gets a poker chip or floating piece of styrofoam or a sticker on the tub, but it gets a tracking number. And when it goes into BARCELOS, a file is started, and we'll know who caught that fish and where that fish came from. So when it gets to the exporter, they update the file as to it comes in. And the best handling practices for exporters is, by all means, when you receive the fish, keep them in acid water, feed them some special food with special components that help fish recover from stress and get stabilized and hold them in the least expensive water. The other water that they have is well water. In manaus, the well water is about six or 6.5. And so if the fish come in at 4.5, have them at 4.5, give them some good food, get them physiologically in good stable condition, and then pre export, take a couple of weeks, a month, whatever. We haven't really tested exposing these fish to PH shifts and at what rate they can go up two units. Two units is a lot. But condition them to a near neutral PH, and that's a heck of a different fish that's had good nutrition and has been PH acclimated. So when the fish arrives in Florida or wherever, it still has that tracking number with it. When the retailers order their fish, the tracking number goes with the fish. When they receive the box of fish, there's a sticker with our logo and our biofish save a tree.
They can follow the whole bouncing ball.
They actually have this for saltwater.
They do. So they have a numerical code. And when the hobbyist gets home, they go to a challenge page, and then they put in the tracking number. And if that group of fish has gone to Chicago within the last 90 days, just to confirm if they're in the Chicago area, so they're online, and like you say, they can get a picture of the fisher that cut their fish. We do interviews. I'm a member of Boston Aquarium Society, and I asked them, all right, guys, tonight at this meeting, let's come up with ten questions you would have if you could ask an amazonian fisher ten questions. And we asked them those questions, and I added one more question onto it, which was, if you couldn't sell fish one day, what would you do? And so we started reporting those because I want the hobbyists to get chills. I want them to look at their aquarium with individual cardinal tetras, look at their computer on whatever social media platform or whatever. You guys know more about this than me, but they learn about the history of their fish. Now, in one other thing. Tell me, what was that system that you were talking about? goliath or something? Wherever.
Leviathan.
Leviathan. Here's what I'd like to do is have a mini leviathan. That's sort of an oxymoron. But have your home aquarium have a plug strip labeled. Here's where you plug in your heater, here's where you plug in your lights. Here's where you plug in your pumps so that plug strip has bluetooth, and you tell it from your smartphone the tracking number of your fish, and it knows the lat and the longitude of where your fish come from. So let's say you get up at 05:00 in the morning. Your fish tank is going to be dark, about 530. You're going to see your Led lights start to dim on because they're accessing the global satellite system that's monitoring the weather patterns, and it reproduces it on a live basis in your home aquarium.
See, Scott scott, we got to hook up. Scott with Brandon. We got to get this on motion.
But, Scott, other things like this sorry.
Just real quick, won't reel you back in yet.
I know there will be times when you don't feed your fish, where you have your fish call on their fatty reserves to take whatever lipid or whatever it is to have the most natural life possible and a whole new level of the hobby and animal care, because it's going to be so closely connected to nature. And with the zoos and aquariums, if we inspire our fish loving people, we're going to grow the hobby. We're going to help the hobby navigate the challenges that could kill that will likely kill the hobby if we don't do something about it. Suddenly, if we look at the aquarium hobby that so many people are saying is the problem, and then suddenly it's looked at as the solution, we can reinvent the hobby and expose a whole new facet that already exists. It just needs to be elucidated and inspired the next generation of fish keepers to get into it and to get into it big time. Okay?
So if you've ever looked up the word passion in the dictionary, your name has got to be there, because people ask me, why do you love fish so much? And all I have to do is just have them listen to the last five minutes of this podcast, and I don't even have to answer that question. You, sir, are very inspired and inspire us. So I do have to reel in. We're getting towards the end of the podcast, and I have hard questions that need to be answered. So, number one, we asked before, when did that first project, p of a fish come out? But this is a research project to see exactly how it could be done. So you guys were just watching the market for many years, trying to do studies, trying to analyze it. That's why you didn't have a particular answer for me, is because that was a case study, and that really did paint us a picture. What type of fish? Because that's the number one thing we hear. Cardinal Tetras but what type of fish does Project pivot really support? So when I go, you get the example of Seagris being one of the backers, and when I go and look, it changes from season to season, what stocks available, but I'm just going to name a couple and maybe you can fill in some holes. So you said before, cardinal tetras, rummy nose tetras, bleeding hearts, two canned tetras, green neon tetras. We have epistagamas, at least some of them. There's unique angel fish that are wild, all different types of playgoes, including lemon, placos. What are the things really are supported by Project Piaba?
Project piaba is limited to the Rio nagro region. Piaba is the local word for minnow or small fish. And that's where our name came from. And I mentioned a group earlier called the iucn, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, that is the biggest, oldest, most significant environmental group in the world. It's where all the scientists are connected to the academics, and there's a lot of specialists that specialize in different types of wildlife and the environment. There's a group called the freshwater Fish Specialist Group, the ffsg, and I was thrilled to be invited to be part of that group and then knocked off my chair when they asked me. They said, specialist groups can have subgroups. We would like you to set up a subgroup based on deriving benefits from the aquarium trade. And I said, oh, my God, it's gone from the problem to the solution. So I am the global chair for the iucn ffsg and I have set up the Home Aquarium Fish Subgroup. And one little anecdotal thing is, I don't say ornamental anymore. I don't like that word. I don't think that live animals are ornaments. I think it's derogatory. And I think we're shooting ourselves in the foot by calling fish ornaments when we have so many groups trying to burn us down. So the best I've come up with is a quirky fish to not call them ornaments. anyways, when I set up this iucn group, that was the day I said, okay, ornamental is out. Now that I'm representing the iucn, there's no way I'm going to call.
I've always used shellfish because you have edible, you have bait and shellfish.
I know, keep thinking about it, and I encourage your audience to think about it as well. But yeah, according to it. So I am looking, and I hope to do my PhD on this, I'm looking through the whole tropical band globally to look at all regions of biological importance where aquarium fish are or could be coming from. And the fish I'm most interested in are the fish that have a very high recruitment and short lifespans. Tetras, barbs, rainbow fish, carousens, all the carousens.
So this list that we have here is just what's, at the moment, you're expanding to other entire areas, other species. This is just what is really supported at the moment, but it's expanding year.
By year, I'm going to take the world over based on pretty little trench.
There you go, Scott.
I hope I live along. I remember in my early 20s, it was one night, I was working late. I think I was like, literally on my knees scrubbing my floor where I work, and I thought, holy cow, this is going to take a lifetime to do this. And then I thought, I have a lifetime. Now I know what I'm going to do. So anyways, yeah, I've been to India and Malaysia, different countries that want to solve the humanitarian problems and the environmental problems at the same time when they're so often in conflict.
In that case, can we get just a short answer of a hint of what the next thing we can see on the Project Piava's list? Like the next dish that you expect to hit that import list.
I hope the traceability will come about and we'll continue to solidify this case study and then work with folks on my board. I have somebody from the World Bank and humanitarian groups because they're seeing this as a mechanism. So we're going to crawl. My boards tell me, you're telling me you need to reel me in. Imagine, you know, I'm on a conference call with my boards and I'm spewing some of this stuff at them and they'll say, okay, you're our leader, but please come back down to Earth. Let's crawl before we can walk.
No hints, no hint of the species. Come on, give us a leak. We want to know what, what's the next Project Piaba fish I'm going to see on a seagrass list?
Let me see.
Parakeets.
There's a story there.
Oh, I didn't need to hear this.
Yeah, no. Dennis and barbs and indeed Tony. Yes.
In fact, I'm so happy you said that. It's like one of my favorite fish.
I've been talking to tiger people about Dennis and barbs, and I'll say, you tiger people, you're so, you know, you, you're worried about poaching and, you know, habitat encroachment and all this stuff. Get with me on fish. Let's focus on the fish. And the tigers are going to are going to thrive because of it. And if you establish communities in India and the ranges where tigers occur, they're suddenly going to have their food security issues addressed. They're going to have a foreseeable income that will be available for their lifetime and their kids lifetimes, as long as they protect the habitats where Danisonai can spawn.
Give listeners a quick background. These are commonly referred to as Rose Line sharks in the trade. They're a very hardy species, very peaceful in the aquarium. I've had them for many, many years. I have one left that's about probably eleven years old in my own aquarium. And they're very expensive. The cheapest you can even find at a retail rate is maybe like a petco for $20 with no color. I'm very happy to hear this. Because it's a beautiful, gorgeous fish like you drew a marker, a red marker across the side.
And the habitat that would be protected and fostered for maximizing denisoni populations would be great for tigers. And the people that are desperate and starving and poaching tigers, they don't do it because they hate tigers. They do it because they have no other alternatives.
And Las Vegas pays a lot since they're down a couple.
Yeah, exactly. But we the hobbyists can give them that revenue stream and the cost. I want these fish that are drivers of good things. I want them to be recognized for that. And I want them to be treated the way they should. And I'll tell you, I'll give you one example. One of the competitive disadvantages is often air freight costs for bringing fish from India and from some of these places, the airlines are polluters, they're atmospheric polluters. But if they help to support an industry that results in protection of tropical forests, then they offset a lot of their carbon that they put out. And so I think they should carry the fish for free or be compensated in some way from the carbon markets to offset hey, carbon.
I can see this called a smelter. Airlines going real good.
Well, one of my volunteers at the aquarium was good at photoshop, and I have a really cool Brazilian airline plane that looks like a giant cardinal tetra. So I love envisioning, the national airline of India as a deniso nibarb. In every country having its flagship species have a plane, I'm on board, literally.
So a couple of other questions that we have is people are listening to this, right? And number one, they're going to ask, where can I get fish that supports Project Piaba? And two, we'll have pet store owners that some of them heard about this in the past, but maybe just listening to you and your passion have inspired them to display this in their store and educate the customers on this. How can me as a store owner or me as a hobbyist participate? So it starts with the store. How can I start getting signed up with fish from Project Piyaba?
We're working on that. And I'll tell you, I'm sorry I'm burning out the clock here, but I'm sure I could go on.
We might have to have a part, too. We'll work it out.
Do you remember the Marine Aquarium council, Mac?
Yes.
They published a lot of articles, and I loved Mac. I was part of the team brainstorming. And we're going to turn marine reef fisheries into great things. A lot of articles were published and a lot of hobbyists started going into stores and saying, okay, I only want to buy Mac certified fish. And then the store would say, you know what? I'd love to buy Mac certified fish, too. Tell me where I can get them. So there was a major problem with distribution, and they peaked. Too soon, because everybody was just so enthusiastic and excited and stuff and talking about it and saying everything that everybody wanted to hear.
Are you telling us it's too soon?
No, not exactly. I would say go to the independent stores and ask them if they have Wild Cardinal Tetras. The next step is to have something associated with our organization. Mean that they're traceable and best Handling practices. But right now, if you buy a Wild Cardinal tetra, your money is going to the Amazon. Can I tell another quick little study.
We're running out of time. I got more questions.
All right, but I think mostly the independent stores, ask them if they have Wild Cardinal Tetras. Send them to our website. Worst case scenario, drop us a line on Facebook or our website. We'll do our best to connect to you.
So I guess one thing would be, number one, like you said, ask for Wild Cardinal tetris, but two, if they really want to and you mentioned this before, seacrest Farms does have Project piaba species on their list. So talk to your pet store, see if they work with them, and they can get that. But best of all, do you have marketing materials available to educate customers at pet stores that they can purchase from you?
We don't, no. We have no money. We have nothing. Sometimes, as I described that phase two of best handling practices, that was something we could come up with a budget, and the group would say, yes, we'll fund that. But other than that, it's kind of my bank account and my credit cards. What I need to get. I don't think, in the aquarium trade and the pet trade, I don't think that there's enough free money around to afford funding a nonprofit like this. I think I need to get with the people that care about climate change and food security and things like that.
Well, until then, I'll put up your link for again, it's Project Piaba.org. And is there anywhere on your site that someone listening can donate to you directly?
Yes, we have a donate tag.
Fantastic. that'll be in our show notes. So until you get those, we'll have our listeners help out. But the last question is, I see something on your website that intrigues me about some more future plans. I see something that says aquarium kits, and I got excited.
Yes, we've worked with Central, and we're prototyping some Rio negro themed aquarium kits that come with their blackwater material, octwood and the story of Project piaba. That's on a fairly small scale, but yes, Central Pat, we're working on a per type themed aquarium.
Fantastic. So we'll be looking out for that. Now. Jim, Adam, I know you guys got questions. Let's get them out quick.
One of the questions was, do you work with sighty species, or do you kind of avoid those?
There aren't a lot in the Rio negro, and there are other laws that supersede that. So, no, we aren't working with any citing species. I do have a place where I see that, for example, in Singapore, they are producing the Asian bony tongue or Asian arijuana. That's a fish that's highly regulated because their stocks are threatened in the wild. But the ones that they have in Singapore, they're breeding like netback and loboro red. And these morphs, they haven't seen the wild in many, many generations. So I don't think that those captive bread farmed sightse listed because they're the species. I don't think those fish should be limited by cites. And in fact, I'd like to see them microchipped. You know, you can put a little pit tag, passive internal transponder to confirm that they are a farm raised fish, but there should be a duty or a tax that goes to a fund that helps protect the species in the wild. Just because something is on site ease doesn't mean absolutely that it should not be traded. And again, this example is referring to captive bread stock with no draw of wild specimens from wild populations that are actually in trouble. But it would be nice if we could use that as a resource that would result in a benefit to the species in the wild.
It sounds like you work for an aquarium and want yourself some Asian Arizona.
Yeah, I get the confiscated ones. I had a dozen and a half fall in my lap one time, and I'm like, what am I going to do with these things?
Just play them, love them forever, donate.
Them to the friendly aquarium.
Right. Auction them.
One other questions, Adam.
Have you ever thought of using these collection techniques for specimens to go to, like, zoos or aquariums, like, help the native people because they're going to know where the fish are? Like, you were saying about how the pencil fish are in that bush, and they know that.
Right.
Has it ever been an idea to go for collections and take the native people with them to do this and then kind of give them their fish rates or a little better?
Species preservation, I think you're going after.
Yeah, species preservation so that people will see stuff, because there's lots of fish out there that people don't see in the aquarium.
That may not be the terrible word, ornamental.
Right. Well, right now we have about two dozen aquariums that are showcasing cardinal tetras and telling the Prajapiava story. We want to talk the talk and walk the walk. And we're very grateful that seagrass Farms now has it literally listed. Here are the fish coming from a house, and this is their business. They have a lot to lose on this. This is my hobby. If this whole thing fails, I can still scrub algae for a living. understandably, they're going forward and using their techniques to do market testing and find out if there's a return on investment on the small scale and on the big scale? Are these going to command a decent, acceptable profit? And is this going to result in animal rights organizations leaving us alone and stop passing laws that put us out of business? And they're stupid?
Yeah, I agree with that part.
All right, what other questions you got, Adam?
No, I'm good. Jim can go.
I've got a quick question. You're talking about collecting the fish and training the fishermen to collect these fish. What type of things are you teaching them? Are you talking about handling them with certain nets?
Okay, I'll tell you. Right at the point of capture, the nets that they use with the mosquito, screening some fishermen, most fishers, it's a pretty big net and it has a frame to it. They'll put it in the water where they know there are cardinals. Either they see them or they know they're there. Then they'll use their paddle to chase a little school of fish into their net. What they often do is lift the net out of the water and they will scoop out any bisec, any fish that their buyers don't want, and they toss them back in the river. But while that's happening, the fish flop around on this nylon mosquito netting and it damages their mucus coating and it damages their epithelium. And when I was doing my master's thesis, I observed that some other fishers that I went out with, they wouldn't remove the net entirely from the water. They would leave a little bowl, like a breakfast bowl, volume of water, but all the fish would have sort of gone down to that last bit of water that concentrated. And then they would sort the fish out of that little puddle and then take their gourd, depress it into the puddle and scoop up the cardinal tetras. And then in their canoe on their bench, they would pivot their body to their holding container that's in the canoe behind them. They would depress the gourd with the fish in the water into their maybe six gallons of water carrying in the canoe, and they would invert the gourd. And so the fish would never have minimal contact with anything. They would keep them in that cushion of water all the time. I don't know why some of them did it one way and some do the others. I don't know if some of them just don't care or they don't think it's a problem. But we've developed slides showing what happens to fish when they have their mucus and their epithelium, their protective coatings corrupted like that. So that's one thing right at the point of capture, and we're talking about what's practical, what's doable. So if you have a fish right at point of capture that gets physically traumatized like that, compared to a fish that's kept in water the whole time, it's a huge difference in their capacity to endure the subsequent stressors that are downstream in the supply chain. So that's an example. There other things. The exporters fast the cardinals for two or three days because they want to maximize the stocking density for the boxes, just for, you know, get the best ratio for the shipping rate for the box. But fasting a little fish like that and then putting them in a stressful condition can be kind of tough. What I'd like to see, and this needs to be tested, is a palatable food for cardinals. That is all. It's 100% complex carbs and no protein. And the reason is because the waste products from a fish that's been gut loaded with all carbs as opposed to a high protein feed is much different. The, the poop and the pea from the carbs is not nearly as toxic as, as the protein. So anyways, we're looking all, all through the, the tray to do reasonable, practical things. Keep the fish out of the sun. You know, you just got to keep the fish out of the sun. The do is going to go down and the plasma cortisol is going to go up. The plasma chloride will go up. And then they'll retain a lot of toxins in their body because their gills will get inflamed. And they won't be able to discharge a lot of the cellular waste because they'll be going into their physiological stress response. So every little thing that can be done to reduce that stress response and when you get butterflies in your stomach, that's part of the physiological stress response and it's not good for fish. And we can do a lot to take the edge off it.
The last time I was at Seacrest Farms, it wasn't that many years ago, probably a year ago, and they were talking about that they had retrained their people. So like, let's say, for instance, the secrets people buy, like myself, I'll buy 50 Cardinals or 100 cardinals. They want people just to take and catch 30, not grab 100. If you're only doing a 50 lot, they don't, they don't want that net touching the fish any more than they have to. So if you, if you're, if you're screwing out 100 fish, they'll do three scoops of 30 or whatever they can just to reduce the stress in the fish. That's what people in, for instance, like pet store should really take into consideration that when they're catching fish for people. I know I find myself guilty, but when I'm chasing goldfish for somebody, especially feeders, and they want 30 feeders, in my first group, I got, I want.
That one, mom, I hated that.
I still do. But every little bit helps. And that's incredible that you guys have considered that and put that into practice.
Right at the point of capture right there. It makes such a difference, such a little thing. And as hobbyists, we know that. And when hobbyists are saying, well, why should I buy wildfish over a fish that's been farmed in Singapore? There's going to be dozens of reasons why. And we're going to have it down to the minutiae. Like all of the fishers in this co op that we set up, they're all trained, and the fish don't leave the water and they don't contact anything physical. Yeah, it's important.
Yeah. I mean, just even looking at when people just the average hobbyist. When you're buying a net, you want to buy the softest net you can get. I use a white net that I really liked. It's almost like a cloth.
Wasn't that your G string?
No, that was not my if you take one of those green nets and you rub it on your face, it's kind of mildly abrasive. And that's the same thing on the fishing. And so that's when I purchase nets, I always grab the nets and always kind of feel them for the softness that I can find.
Now I know why you buy your nets alone.
What? You people are all too strange.
Well, Scott, I really appreciate the in depth detail that we went with this. It really shows, really your passion to this. educates everyone that I'm just blown away that Wild caught is the way to go. It's been a habit. It's been what I've been raised with. I was raised into aquariums from my grandmother, and it was always written in the books, too. I literally have her handwritten notes in the old axel Rod books to stay away from Wildcott. These are the reasons why notes to me. And it just changes the game. And without this type of education out there, it's hard to do. And clearly you guys got a lot of plans going forward. If there's any way we can help, certainly let us know and go to Project Piaba.org. It'll be in the show notes. And consider donating a little money so they can jump start these aquarium kits, jump start marketing material. Go on to getting us those Rose Line sharks.
Yes. We'll keep moving.
Last notes here.
Yeah, just buy fish, save a tree. Everybody.
Buy fish, save a tree. Best marketing ever. Well, thanks again, Scott. And next week, I'm actually going to be traveling to West Virginia, and hopefully we'll be able to have a podcast remote for all three of our three of us here. I'm going to have Jimmy come into the studio and alone, see if he can handle it.
Throwing glitter in a fan.
It's going to be great. And then we get to talk about the prank that I did to you while you were gone that we didn't talk about today.
And then two weeks from now, we'll talk about what happened to you when you got back home.
Love you, too.
Yeah, long time.
All right, thanks again.
All right, take care. Have a good night. bye bye.
Let's kick that out show.
Thanks, Loscot.
Thanks, guys, for listening to this podcast. Please visit us@aquariumguyspodcast.com and listen to us on spotify. I Heart Radio, itunes, and anywhere you can listen to podcasts.
We're practically everywhere. We're on Google. I mean, just go to your favorite place, Pocket casts subscribe to make sure it gets push notifications directly to your phone. Otherwise Jim will be crying into sleep.
Can I listen to it in my treehouse?
In your tree house, in your fish room. Even alone at work.
What about my man cave?
Especially your man cave. Yeah, only if adam's there no with feeder guppy.
No, no, they're nlerts you imagine loving flank sucking motherfuck.
Well, I guess we'll see you next time. Later.