Jimmy, it's Christmas time. What will you buy me? Something from Blue crown Aquatics.com, I will.
Buy you something because I get free shipping.
Free shipping? How?
How do I get free shipping? I know a guy, his name is Robbie Chan.
And what's that free shipping method?
Well, I order some stuff and he sends it to me.
Is it a promo code? You forgot the promo code.
Did I?
It's. Aquarium guys on blueprint Aquatics.com. And that's how you're going to send me my favorite Beta? The alien.
What?
Beta.
He's got betas out. Does he got betas?
I forgot he has Betas, and they're brilliant in blue.
And he's got some of the best shrimp food I've ever bought, I tell you that much. I've been selling.
Did you eat it?
No, I did not eat it. Because it looks like egg ramon noodles. Kind of flattened out.
Noodles.
I like it. It's kind of snappy.
I kind of figured you put it with your tortilla and salsa.
There you go. That sounds good.
I'm glad you tested it. It's good stuff.
Good stuff.
Free shipping. That is a $45 estimate value, a.
Minimum of 45, because it's next day.
Shipping than he does for free.
Yeah, it doesn't come over on the mayflower. He comes over real quick.
Us.
Postal Service, straight from California.
Ia to your door.
So this Christmas, when you talk to that fish nerd, you have no idea what to get them, because frankly, you don't know the hobby or a little bit. And he likes shrimp. Just do that for Christmas. Get him some red and white candy cane shrimp. They're not going to be called candy cane shrimp, but that's what they are. Because it's Christmas time.
It's Christmas time. Call them whatever you want. They also have the old snowflake, right? Yeah, they have snowflake.
Get some candy cane, some snowflake. We ought to talk to Robbie, make him do a Christmas shrimp package. That's what we should have done. We can get that done yet. Still. There's still some time in the month.
And we still got to name his new his new what's he coming up with? He come up with that poop juice.
Poop juice?
Poop juice. That's what we came up with.
He's going to have biological bacteria in a bottle.
That's what you call it. I was trying to think of the proper name.
I really hope he locks down poop juice.
Poop juice.
Well, now we have to talk about the charity and Ohio fish rescue again. These guys are fantastic. Go to their YouTube channel, you'll get to see exactly what they do on a day to day basis. And their whole goal is to take fish that need a bigger home and give it to them. They have over 88,000 gallons in their home, and they are their aquarium fish rescue. For people that have made mistakes, it's their forever home. Don't buy a paku, because it's going to be bigger than my Smart car, and instead support these guys. Go to their website, ohiofish Rescue. Don't hit some money. Buy a T shirt and the numbers on the top of the website. Give Big Rich a call and tell them you love them.
Tell him you love him. Call him up late at night. He likes that best. Late at night. We're going to do a podcast with those guys face to face some day, and I'm pretty sure that we're not going to come back alive. I think he's just going to punch us right in the face, and we're going to be dead.
We're going to get fed to the alligator car, probably in small pieces.
Yeah.
And what did Rich send us there? What do you got in your hand?
Well, we got stickers.
And what's that sticker do, Rob?
I hope it can go on my computer, because that's what nerds do with stickers.
No. What did Rich tell you? That he'll give you the sticker if no.
Rich has special stickers to verify stores to make sure that they don't sell paco so they don't end up in his living room.
That's right. And so any pet store that wants one of these stickers, he'll send it out to you, and he just doesn't want you selling pacos just because of all the problems that they cause.
He will certify your store. Ohio Fish Rescue approved.
Correct.
Well, I think we should kick the podcast.
Kick it.
Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast with your host, Jim colby and Rob dolson. Welcome to the aquarium, guys. Podcast. So excited. Christmas is coming, and jimmy's going to buy me a gift. So what we've agreed to is that for the aquarium, three aquarium guys here, we're going to do a Secret Santa to each other. Right? And how it's going to work is I'm going to buy Adam a gift. Adam is going to buy Jimmy a gift, and Jimmy is going to buy me a gift. And we've agreed that we have to jimmy agreed this, please. You have to keep it under $5,000.
Really? Yeah. Because I'm usually the big spender of the bunch, aren't I?
Right?
Yeah. Actually.
Sit down.
I I can keep it under five grand. How much is a lap dance? I'm just wondering.
I don't know.
Adam. Adam.
I don't know anymore.
Yeah, he doesn't know anymore either, yet.
So I'm rob Z olson.
Hey, I'm Jim colby.
And I'm Adam Ellis.
You don't seem so sure of yourself.
He's not confident. He's bashful because he's nervous. The one he has to buy you?
Yeah, exactly.
You're very difficult to purchase for Jimmy.
Me? I am really easy. Buy me some concert tickets and some beer, and I'm ready to go.
So today we have a special guest. We have the infamous mad aquarist Chris biggs. How are you doing, buddy?
Hey, we're doing good, bud. Nice to be here, guys.
I appreciate you jack coming on. You've been traveling. And you just came from a show, is that correct?
Well, last week I was away for work, but the week before the weekend prior to that was the oca, the Ohio Sacred Association extravaganza.
So Chris has a YouTube channel, and he just put up some videos giving the inside scoop on what you get to see on those. And I got to say, I'm quite jealous for the stuff I got to see on there.
Oh, you guys see the way they do it? The oca, the people that set up what I call fish stores in their fish room without the biggest anywhere I've ever seen. aca is the American Circuit Association convention. It moves around the country a lot, and some years it's huge, too. But some years you don't know.
That was pretty incredible. I mean, people were using hotel room after hotel room, filling it up with plants and fish. Any any details to really get everybody hyped with. I saw someone with a rolling bucket of spiderwood. It was crazy.
All you guys. And I mentioned it to my wife. I said, we can go to I'd love to bring you to a convention. And I showed her that, and she said, no way in hell.
Wow. And out.
You apparently are married to my ex wife. And now it's all over.
All right, so today what we're going to go over and we got Chris specially on for is oddballs. So you guys have been requesting especially some of the intermediate beginner Aquarists that.
Hey, you're going to talk about oddball fish, right? So you brought in me.
I brought in you.
Oddball. I'm an oddball. Is that how it works?
Yes, but you have a very diverse knowledge, like someone, say, Chris biggs, they're not just one specialty. You have a labyrinth of knowledge on a lot of different fish. So who better to spitball about oddballs?
Pretty sure if you ask anybody, say you ever heard of Chris biggs, they're going to go.
They'Re just jealous of your beard. All right.
I saw that on the YouTube. You're the mad aquarius. You seem pretty damn happy. You don't seem mad.
Because it's all the stupid stuff that I do. And if you've seen any, if you've ever had the opportunity to see any of the talks I don't get often asked to speak at monthly acclaimed society meetings. And I don't know why that is. Maybe it's because I'm traveling. I'm actually from another country. I'm from Canada, so maybe my ticket is more. But invariably I get asked to speak at conventions all the time. And then it snowballs because lots of other clubs attend these conventions. And I'm generally brought in as the keynote or banquet speaker or late night talk, the humor based talks and stuff, but still also interjecting a fair level of scientific type knowledge and stuff and making it fun.
Well, hopefully you find a great home here. We love a good joke cracking, but we're going to go over oddballs today. And again, how we're going to do this is we're going to be naming a lot of different fish. We're going to do like a round robin style, naming off different species, and we're going to give you a small profile, maybe some of our experiences, but we're not going to give you everything. This is not going to be the deep dive on each type of fish. What I want you to do is encourage you. This is supposed to inspire you to do homework, research on your own, talk to your aquarium clubs, talk to some friends and see what are these fish all about and possibly could it be right for you. So we're going to dive into that, but we have some cleanup to do, of course.
What do we got?
So, a few reminders. Number one, keep your hands and your.
Arms inside the ride.
Well, you last week mentioned about these, you know, plant bulbs.
I did.
And they're in order. They're going to arrive Friday.
Excellent. So what we're planning on doing is at the end of the month, either before or after New Year's, we're around that time we're going to do a drawing for five individual winners and they will each win ten. sorted. Plant bulbs.
Yeah, it's going to be a little bit of a surprise. And they're not going to be the crappy apon wonder bulbs that you can get for 25 for a nickel. They're going to be some nice bulbs. I've got them on order. We're going to do some talk tomorrow on the phone and we're trying to make sure that we get the best price so we can give away as many as possible. Maybe you'll even get twelve. You never know. Perfect.
So we're going to have on the bottom of the website, accordinggepodcast.com you'll see the giveaway at the bottom of the website, click it, it'll just ask for your name, some information, and we will do the drawing.
Yes. We'll need your social security number, your credit card number and your address.
No, that's for a different form. This is just your name, your number, giveaway so we can send it.
This isn't for my other business. Okay.
No, that's everything in time. That's a credit check. If you approve holding, it's like a cell phone company.
That's the black web stuff. That is we won't talk about that.
All right. So the other details is find us on Facebook. We have a big Facebook group, love posting. People ask questions. Discord is an application that we're actually talking on right now with Chris. And we have a big community continually asking questions. They crack memes, and some of the memes they put on there have been pretty mean against you and I. Jim.
Yeah. I don't know. Why do people hate none of us?
I don't know. But they're saying jokes about you and your Secret Service stint and of course they're talking about how much betty White hates us, right.
And betty White loves us.
Right.
Won't return a phone call, but she loves us.
The best one I saw was the Dave chappelle meme. He got any more of that prime?
Yeah, look like you've been out in certain Co cane. He had the big old white on his face.
So if you want to have some fun, talk off topic or on topic and get some fish help, join us in discord the links on our website.
And what I really like about Discord is we've got a large community, and I see a lot of the older aquarius, the more advanced aquarius helping out the newbies. And that just puts a big smile on my face. So it's good to see.
So this last week, we did a quick test stream because we're getting all the equipment to do live streams. So we're on YouTube to do questions live is another way of answering questions. But on our website, Aquariumgeistpodcast.com, we have email address and phone number, so you can call or email us. And we'll do questions live in the show.
And we even have the right phone number this time. Now we do.
It's all fixed. Don't forget to go to our merch store. We just got a bunch of new T shirts of our actual local artists in our Discord. Decided to get us some and go check those out. We're just excited for your questions. We love questions, and we're able to answer a bunch of Discord. We're caught up on emails, though. But you had an email for us a few weeks ago, Jimmy. How dare you?
Yeah, I haven't brought it yet. No, I still don't have it. I forget I'm old.
Ma'Am, whoever you are that sent a question, know to send it to our website. Don't send it directly to Jimmy. If somehow you have contact, I'm going.
To bring that email. I'm going to write a note on my hand so I remember you're going.
To put a string around your finger. A little reminder.
No, because the last time I did that, my finger turned black and almost fell off.
I have so much to say, but not enough time. So let's get into the oddball segment. So first on my list, right, is plateAS platties glowfish. The first one I'm picking is the freshwater flounder. So people have heard about saltwater flounders. They've eaten flounders, but no one understands that. There is, quote unquote, freshwater flounder. Now, it literally looks identical to a saltwater flounder. There's two eyeballs on the side. They lay flat on the ground, but they're actually brackish. They're not technically freshwater. So you get these in and you'll find them from wholesalers randomly, and you get them in. They're about the size of a quarter is generally how you get them in. They're speckled multicolor when you first get them in. And they work great in freshwater at a small size. As they grow, they're going to need more and more salt to get more and more of that brackish level. Otherwise they will pass away. So as they grow, certainly add more salt to the tank or prep a brackish tank when they get to that size. Check these things out. Once they get to adult level, they'll change color. The eyes will correctly rotate. They're super fun. They'll bury themselves in sand. Certainly check them out. But again, anything that fits in their mouth, they will eat at night time. If you have smaller fish that somehow get left alone, anything that swims by, they'll pop up and grab it. So do your homework. These get I've had them twelve inches, I think as big as I've ever had them. I think they stay a little smaller. I think they say about ten inches normally. Certainly check them out. They're a fantastic fish and real weird. They're almost like a placo and stick to the glass.
And they're rather terribly inexpensive. They're not that expensive at all.
Really cheap. So if you want to talk to your local fish store, I bet they're very willing to get them in.
And is this the one they call Tonguefish Too?
I've never heard them call it tongue.
Fish I've heard somebody call them Tonguefish I thought but maybe I'm wrong.
Can you guys get them in in the states?
Yes, we can, absolutely.
Because that species has such extremely wide it's not one species, but flounders, if you want to call it just generalize it. They have extremely wide distribution and they are native ones all throughout the throughout the southern states, going all through all through Central America, also into South American stuff. They go all along the coast because they're brackish they're estuary fish. So in Canada, that would be a fish we wouldn't probably normally be able to import.
Sad day.
But for because they'd look at it well, you want to know it's even funnier. It's not an oddball, but one fish that is not allowed legal import into the province of Manitoba white Cloud Mountain minnows.
Why?
Well, you could just imagine the threat that they would pose on our native fish, because all of our native fish up here are very delicate. We have musky, pike, rock, bass, walleye froze. These things are very, very delicate species, and they cannot handle aggression at all. So if something like a white cloud got out established whoa.
Could you imagine, like, it just taking down two sturgeon?
It'd just be bedlam.
A five foot sturgeon getting taken down by a white cloud, it'd be over. It happens all the time.
So, in that case, you guys must not allow things like dojo loaches or.
Anything that I don't know. I don't know about whether loaches and dojo loaches. But honestly, same as you guys, the way the laws are written are not necessarily written by the most educated people in those fields. They're usually done by impulse. Same reason that you guys have no access to any of the China species. It makes no sense. That's a massive family of fish with some yes, there's some that could cause damage. Those have been brought in, but they sure as hell have not been brought in by the aquarium trade. Those ones that have caused the problems have been brought in through the underground markets, through the fish markets, through the Asian communities and stuff, because those are prized fish for consumption. And those ones, asiatic, genesis, all those big ones, that's where they have come from. Those are not aquarium.
So you're saying I'm never going to taste it.
Lachana blair eye. And some of the smaller ones, they're ideal aquarium. And a lot of them are wonderful fish. Wonderful fish to work with, wonderful fish to breed. They're colorful. They've got a lot of them have everything that's tough for keeping aquarium fish. But just because they catch one snakehead outside of Washington, all of a sudden it's a bad thing. The whole family is banned.
Smooth.
Yeah.
Well, back to the flounder. So when you talk to your local fish store because again, you're going to try to source this from somewhere, the local fish store, if they know anything about it, they're fine getting these in because they don't have to set up a separate brackish tank because they get them in small and they'll sell before they get too big. Certainly they're cheap. They'll be able to get them in if they're in the United States, check them out. They're a fun species and stick to almost anything. So, Adam, what have you got?
I've got half beaks. So I like the halfbeaks. I've tried to get golden halfbeaks from Jim Forever when I had my store, and I never got any. I got them, I think, Rob, that's how that works.
It's not who you know, it's who Jim likes.
Exactly. pissed him off.
That explains quite a bit, Jim.
Yeah. It also explains a little bit about your whole octopus endeavor. whoa. whoa.
That's another pod.
Spoilers. Now, shame, shame.
We do have one in the can that we'll bring out here.
Story Time.
It's called story time. And if you want to hear how stupid Adam is, I mean, we all know it already.
Hey, be nice to him.
No, I've known Adam since he was 15 years old. Were you twelve? Yeah.
Twelve. Wait, did he come down your chimney?
No, I did not come down anybody's chimney. But anyway, we have a new podcast that will be coming out here in the near future, and it's called Story Time. And it's about silly stories that have happened to all of us, good, bad, or indifferent. And most of the funny ones happen to Adam because he's funny.
When we say funny, harmful, harmful. Painful. Equally funny. Yeah, but no, the half beaks is more of a category. There's a lot of different species, and the ones you were mentioning the gold ones right, are very small. Yeah.
The golden half beaks are what I always tried to grab, but they're about maybe an inch and a half, two inches. They like the brackish water from what I've done whenever I could get them. And they are bright, shiny fish. They stay on the top half of the water. They'll eat bloodworms bugs, pretty much. They won't eat flake food, but they'll eat frozen bloodworms, live glassworms. They really like live fruit flies, that type of stuff. If it sinks, they don't go after it.
When you look up these fish, you'll see they're like a pike body style. They're nice, long, slender fish, and they'll have just a needle beak. But again, they're called half beaks because the top jaw is much smaller than the bottom jaw. And their traits for wrestling generally have to do with breeding. They'll actually lock beaks with another male and wrestle over females.
No, in the industry, you only know those one or two species that have been in the trade forever. Right.
There's like, three species that are coming. Yeah.
Oh, there's a whole new bunch coming because, well, they're actually in the trade already, but they're not the u, and they don't have that sexy appeal. They're not bright colored and stuff. But Hans George evers, formerly the head guy. That from amazon's Magazine. You guys had mentioned Amazonist magazine foreign podcasts.
We certainly have.
From Germany, hans George. evers traveled extensively to the island of Suluisi? I don't know if you know where Suluisi is, but it's this little tiny chain of islands that looks like a sea in the middle of absolute nowhere. But in Suluisi, he's done presentations on this island and the fish from here, and he gets so excited about it. Well, all that's there is these half beaks. There's about three or four species on this chain of islands. They're all brown. They're all completely freshwater, but they're all brown. And then all the super exotic shrimp from those islands, de Nourlari and all those really weird ones, they look almost like saltwater shrimp, some of them, but they're completely freshwater. The only problem being is none of these fish will ever get established in the trade because they need a PH of nine, 8.5 to nine with almost no hardness. Now, you guys are pretty established. Aquarists try and fathom making that water. Good luck.
You live by a volcano for some reason. Yeah.
But the problem being is almost all these things have been destroyed now in the wild by the introduction of calipia, so they're pretty much all gone.
That's pretty sad. So these wrestling halfbeaks, any of the ones that I've dealt with have all been light bearers.
These are all are they're all live there's only two genera of halfbeaks.
So the only experience I've had is with the smaller golden variety. They're generally a white body with maybe a little bit of color on the tail and they have like a golden shimmer to them. They stay two inches relatively and they're a lot of fun. They stay away from other fish. They're generally peaceful. Unless, again, there's males. And it's not one of those deals where you put two males and they're guaranteed to fight. They only do it over females for spawning purposes.
What's that one half beak that gets the male gets that almost like that red little thing on his lip. You'd remember it back from the trade.
Half peak, isn't it?
Is that it? Yeah, that might be it. That's the only one I've ever actually ever kept and branded with that one. But I remember they were probably three and a half, maybe four inches in size for at least for the males. The females are smaller.
Yeah, those get a bit bigger. And you said that they love live food. They really do. They'll take a cricket down that's bigger than them and start trying to rip pieces off of it. But I did successfully get them on flake food. As long as it stays to the top, they're going to attempt to interact with it.
But did they thrive on flake?
Mine did. I bred them on flake food.
I think that fish has been established in the trade for a long time. It knows what the problem with engineered fish foods and that's what they are is actually getting the fish to actually realize that it's food. Right. The food is there, the food quality is there, the nutrition is there. It's sound, but it's just getting the fish to actually recognize when it's food.
Right. And I actually did have to do a little bit of training. It wasn't overnight that it did this that you actually have to take a tweezer with some food, hit the water surface, kind of like you're training a beta to go on pellets that have been wild Beta caught. They'll see that surface tension wiggle and actually just they'll hit it just for the sake that it's trying to imitate a bug. Once they did that, they'll dither learn meaning another fish. They'll see another fish eat it, then they'll give it a try. So after that it was all downhill. But I had to at least get it started on flake.
And the reality is several of us are older school aquarists back in the day and even still today for some of these oddballs is almost all of them are still wild caught. Right. So a lot of people that's a very important to bring up is a lot of us are forced to deal with those type of challenges. Getting that animal to eat properly first on the best type of food we can offer that's closest to its natural food and then slowly trying to transition it to something that's a bit easier than readily available.
Absolutely.
And when you're saying the other fish, you mean like a fish had already eaten this food, correct?
Correct. So one fish will see another fish eating flake and give it a try.
Because I've had some pretty good success. I've been bringing in some discus from China and I bring them in and they don't know what flake food is. But I usually keep one discus left from the last batch and when he's eating flake within two days of eating flake, and they're doing fine. And I've had very good success with these particular type of discus. I've also brought in a lot of Tony Tan discus. That's what I have in my own aquarium upstairs. But the Chinese discus that I've been bringing in have been the best bang for my bucks where I'm able to make a few dollars.
Well, shame on you for not having live blackworm established and ready for them.
I do have live black worms, but I went to the doctor and I got rid of them.
Oh, thank goodness. All right, so, Jimmy, you were pretty excited when we got this list together. What is your first fish?
My first fish is the South American leafish. And the reason I like the leaf fish so much is dead or alive, still looks the same.
I feel like you've gotten burnt in the past getting these shipped in.
Yes, I've been burned many times on these. I had a customer up in War Road, Minnesota, who was bound and determined to have every type of leafish known to man brought in and he wanted to keep them all together. And the South American leaf fish is what he had the most success with, I should say. And he would bring them in and they're brown, they look like a leaf, they got a pointed nose, and they're more of a brackish type fish. And so you need to keep a little salt with them and stuff. But once they are in the tank, man, they are just wonderful little fish to have. And I think they're just spectacular and you don't see them anywhere.
So a lot of these oddball fish that you hear, they're mainly unknown because people don't want to give brackish a try. Brackish is a really easy thing to maintain. You don't have to have hard mass amount of salinity. It's just adding some salt to the tank. So when you do water changes, simple test, add a little bit more here and there. It's a very easy thing to do. And there's so many fish that can be brackish that are normally fresh, like molly's. molly's excel in a brackish environment that are normally captains of freshwater.
I just brought in 75 sailfin mollies this evening, went up to fargo, went up to melt Airlines and picked up my fish. And they're sitting in a box in my home and I still have to go put them away and we get down to this podcast.
All right, so we're on a two hour timer, is what you're saying.
I don't care. I get all night.
Excellent. So one question, though. When you brought the gentleman in War Road, his fish say that they didn't come in. Did you just prank him and put a bunch of almond leaves in a bag?
I did, and he was not that smart, so yeah, he was. Hey, that's only $12. Thanks, Jim.
Didn't check it until later.
No.
Call you back.
And I said, Well, I must have died and see your problem. That's my guarantee. It died. It's your problem.
See, Adam, it's not just you he hates on a lot of people, apparently.
Sham.
Sham. All right. So, Chris?
Yes, sir.
What's your first fish?
First fish?
Yes.
Your first oddball first oddball fish. First fish that I've bred. That's an oddball fish.
No? First on your list, you want to tell listeners about?
I don't know. Let's talk about ferran, as that seems to be something everybody likes to talk about.
Hell yeah.
What weird, I've never kept any of the real, what we'd call the sexy ones, like somebody had mentioned. Was it Adam mentioned, like the Rhombius types, the blacks and the silvers and the golds and all those ones? Those are fish that you can only keep singly for life. You buy them small, they're going to be expensive. You're going to grow up big, they're still going to be expensive. And you keep them by themselves forever.
So what ones are you mentioning are.
The Red bellies and the Caribas and all those ones that are nice, shoaling.
Fish, they're all like you've had these in your own experience.
Like I say, I've never kept any of the long gated, the long beak ones, those ones that have to be kept solely by themselves. My interests are very black and white. My interests are always in captive maintenance, captive breeding, and then I move on. I figure out that every fish to me is like a puzzle, and I figure out the pieces of the puzzle to make it happen, and then I move on. Because as an aquarist, that's what the way I view my goals are. And I can manipulate almost everything that I want to manipulate to make a fish breed. I can manipulate water chemistry. I make my own water using Ro water. We can manipulate it as aquarist by heat, so we can make any environment we need to with the advance. Now we're using all these different botanicals, like you guys were talking about, the almond leaves, these things. We can alter chemistry of the water and adding beneficial products to the water. Those leaves, all those different types of leaves offer medicinal type products to the water.
I got two questions.
Sorry.
I got two questions. Number one, we definitely need to know how you bred Red belly Prana, because it's a mystery for a lot of people, because number one, they're hard to ship, they're hard to keep, much less breed. So we need to hear that. And number two, since you had such extensive experience with breeding. We need to know, what music do you choose?
My fish room is always my old fish room. My one now is my old fish room. Back in the day when I was in my peak was always referred to as the lab. Everything was set up very specifically for doing breeding fish.
How romantic.
Very, very much. Variety of tank sizes, going from small, very controlled tank sizes all the way up to 750 or 1000 gallon tanks. And that way I had my list of fish that I could always work with, and they could move around depending on where I need to go. Using reverse osmosis water gives you that ability to do anything that you want. The only thing you got to bear in mind is reverse osmosis water by itself is extremely volatile. It's very violent. And what it means by that is it needs a buffer. So if you don't put any buffer in that, it will find a way to buffer itself and it'll strip the calcium made out of the anatomy of a fish if you're not careful. So shells will dissolve. So just use a proper buffer, stabilize the water, and then either adjust it up or down.
Making a lot I learned that the hard way, too. I learned that the hard way. I was young and dumb. This was like, what, eight years ago? Nine years ago yesterday. And actually, this is how I met Jimmy. I was sitting at our local grocery store, and because I didn't have the test kit, it was still coming in the mail and I didn't know how perm water was. I was sitting there getting jug after a five gallon jug of Ro water to at least have a base to start with. And Jimmy came in like, what are you doing? Because I took up the entire aisle.
He couldn't get through 50 gallons of Ro water.
I was trying to get 75. It was still filling. It took me that long because I had to fill these. They weren't pre full. And you're like, no, don't do that. I'll call you tomorrow. I did it anyway. Sure as hell. It literally dissolved shells in my tank.
I did the same thing with a tank full of amano shrimp. I brought back a large group of, I think it was 100 amano shrimp from Rachel o'leary one time, and I added them to 120 gallon plant tank. And within a day, every single one of them was dead. And I couldn't figure out what it was. And it was simply because I never buffered that water chemistry. Just have to stabilize it, that's all.
Yes, I did the same thing. I had 125 gallon tank. I had about 75 breeding adult angel fish. And I did a water change with too much Ro. And the body slime came off of it like snot. And as they're swimming around, the snot just kind of drugged behind them like what did I just do? It was horrible. It was so sad.
Yeah. The problem with Aquarist is we all think we know what we're doing once we start using ro water and all these things we're actually playing real high levels of chemistry and we just have to sit back a little bit and respect it. And often but as bad as it sounds, more and often some of us have to go through one of those type of mishaps to learn that you'll never forget it now.
Yeah. When I saw Robbie at the grocery store and he had all that ro water I flashed back to Vietnam when all my angel fish were flipping, falling apart and it was a sad, sad day.
I just thought you're on like meth or something?
No, I can't afford math, you know that.
Do they sell that in the grocery stores there?
Yeah, we do it's right next to the cocaine.
So we got to get back to the questions though. So we still need the piranha breeding and what song selection you use for breeding?
Well, music has been my entire life. I started playing drums when I was three, I started touring when I was twelve. I did it professionally for a number of years and I've toured a lot of places and stuff like that all over the world and stuff. And I got out of it because I'm very compulsive and I joke about the Meth and all that sort of stuff with you guys there because I knew some good friends and stuff that lived in those kind of areas and I knew that that's a big problem that's prevalent to you guys. And I'm not segueing into something that I was one of those type of people but I have the very type of pulsive personality that I'm either all in or not. And after going to a pile of funerals in my 16th or 17th year I says no, I don't want anybody a part of this and now you keep it. I stepped out. So I got into fish because my fish has always been around my life and I always want to find but I have to have that science background and that's where the breeding came in really quick and easy. My first breeding, the first fish when I was a little kid just cemented that quick. But for pranas. pranas, like if you've ever bred a conduct cichlid, okay, you can breed piranhas. They breed very, very much like cichlids.
Really.
Problem being is people don't understand. People buy three piranhas and then they set them up in their 25 gallon tank and then as they get bigger they buy a 40 gallon tank and they slowly move them that way if you really want to be successful with piranhas buy a group of like eight or ten. Like for me for breeding fish, if I go back in the years when I was in my infancy and I was starting to breed fish. A bag of six at an auction or at a pet store, no problem. But as the species get more obscure, harder to find. Eight to twelve is now my minimum. And for pranas, the bigger the number, the better because you're going to lose some as they go through. You know how you keep a big group of cyclists, they beat each other down to cement that pair puberty. Yeah. Prawnas are exactly the same way. And once you've cemented a pair, they will state as a pear pretty much for life, as long as they're well fed. And the problem being is back in the day people always just used feeder fish and stuff. Or even worse side is that they would basically try to convert them onto things like strips of beef art. That is the most wrong type of product. Just a good quality krill smelts fish, fish based proof, meat based that these fish would naturally see and just keep them good and healthy. And once the other factors they have to be mature, like you're looking at a prana puzzuru, you're looking at well over a year before it's going to be mature. And it's got to be, you know, a good five inch, six inches in size before it's going to be fully sexually mature. And then they'll show you it. They actually the male will start courting the female. It's exactly the same for all large carousels, be it the silver dollars, all the different matinis species. And I'm sure pacu would probably be the same if any of us ever had a tank big enough, maybe Big Rich could be the first to be successful because God knows everybody wants to have some freshly tank raised paku.
Oh man, do we ever.
Wow, that get his hair up in a hackle.
399 apiece, baby.
Yeah.
But the pranos will start the male will start courting the female. And if they're in a school in a 180 gallon tank, the male will start courting whatever female he wants. They're not like other carousels where they just kind of come together and gush and stuff just goes everywhere. Like some of the supreme is like barbs and stuff and koi, these guys actually form a parabola. And then the male will start courting her and bring her over to an area in the tank and he'll build a nest. He'll take detritus and leaves and litter that are in the tank and make kind of a nest for her. I don't think the nest actually shows any benefit to it other than it's just an isolated kind of an area. There's no visual barriers. Like he has to be behind a wall of driftwood or rocks. It just becomes this visual thing that they creates this kind of a nest and then they'll spawn and the male and female a nonadhesive kind of gelatinous kind of eggs and then they will take care of them. They will watch the eggs, which is very uncharacteristic for a carousel. Normally they don't silver dollars. They come together in the tank. The courtship is identical. They don't build a nest, but they'll come together and they'll spawn and they'll release milton eggs at the same time. And if you have in my 750 when I was working with some of the silver dollars, when you get like dinner plate sized silver dollars spawned in a big tank like that, it's really adult looking and it's gross.
If you say so.
Wow.
I have a quick question here for the piranhas. Did you try to have baby piranhas and baby silver dollars at the same time? Because I know in the wild the baby piranhas will take little bits out of silver dollars or pacos to help release aggression because they'll all pretty much go at the same time. Or how did you diffuse the aggression in the babies?
It's very challenging. I'd be lying if I'm saying anybody that I know that's ever bred piranhas, and I probably know 20 people that bred certain species of prana, it's generally the same sort of list because nobody's working trying to breed some of those insane, solitary, mean ones, because I don't know anybody that is. But any of those ones that are in that red breast or the Caribbean types, those ones there, they're all the same, but they're all extremely predatory on each other and same as cichlids. Like when you raise a batch of cichlid fry, doesn't matter if it's a big dovi or if it's a convent. You will notice that if you're not diluting and keeping your water chemistry on par all the time, you will notice that certain ones will grow faster than other right, while the bigger ones are always going to be your dominant males. So if you want to greatly reduce all of those type of factors, biggest factor that I think that is ignored by most people that just don't get it when they start evolving and trying to breed other things is water. And the one thing that I always had a massive advantage on was that my entire fish room was fully automated and water changes were automatic all the time. Now, you and all four of us could do water changes of the same rate, of the same volume of tank. One would do it once a week, one would do it once a month, one would do it every two weeks. I'm doing it every single day, but a much smaller amount. So none of those hormones or that chemistry builds up. Do you get what I'm getting at? Those dominant ones that are growing up, the males are releasing hormones into the water, so it's chemistry and they're releasing these products into water that inhibits the growth of the other ones. So if you can keep that water parameters because in the wild, you wouldn't see that you catch almost any fish in the wild. You go and catch a cloud of fry, they're almost all going to be the same size. But in captivity you get these irregular growth patterns all the time.
That's fantastic.
That's water chemistry because they don't deal with that in the wild. The water is constantly flowing in the wild. But we don't do that in aquarium.
Right?
Yeah.
Secrets of fish farms in Florida, they.
Do the same thing. Like a lot of the big fish farms that are really southern Florida, there's no mud, there's no ground. So you don't go down there and think there's all these beautiful mud ponds and stuff? No, no. It's crushed coral rock and they dig it, they etch it into the ground and the water runs twenty four seven. And where does the extra water go? It just filters through the bedrock and this pumped right back up again. And you don't get that irregular growth in all those cyclists that are raised at all those South Florida farms.
Right.
You just don't see it. And that's what it is. It's a factor of water chemistry.
Well, to continue on the prana subject so Adam, you just talked about Red belly prana. What are the other two obscure prana?
So I've actually had both black and gold in my store. I had special orders for them and they were a pain in the ass to get because they had to come straight from peru, or supposedly from peru, at least that's what the list said because I had to translate it. The golds that I had come in, they were bagged individually and they didn't stay in the store very long. They were all special ordered. But I did keep one in the store and it was in a ten gallon tank by itself. And anything you come near the glass, boom. It just tried to kill everything that it was near. The gold one and the black ones too. And they were in like the darkest tranquilizer water that you could what's that? Tranquilizer red?
Yeah, I can't think of I just call it trank. I know what you're talking about.
Yeah, they were in the darkest colored red water that you could get for the trank. And this thing was begged like five or six times and it still ripped through three of the bags.
Have you never brought in a big one, though?
No, I never could get them.
The local wholesaler here is a good friend of mine. He brought them in regularly. He gave him this one call. I remember the last one called a diamond.
I don't know, I've seen those.
I don't know the common names of it had blood red eyes and the thing was just like pressed metal and whatever. It was stunning. But it came inside. The fish bag was like a gas can with all these holes punched in it and it was like this pepper rated gas can. Then this hole cut out of it. The fish was thrown in that inside a bag, and then it was in a wooden jean. And I'm like, what are you sending here? But he always saves those type of things. When he brings those random weird ones and he saves them, he says, oh, I got a treat for you. Come see what I got.
If you can find a picture of that, that would be amazing to put on social media.
Yeah, he had the same thing when he brought in the electric heels. He saved those specifically for for me because he thought it would be fun.
Yeah, I've seen some of those come in, and it's like an ice cream pail with a lid on it with a bunch of slots in it, and it's floating around in the bag.
In a bag, right.
And it's genius because I can't tell you how many times I have taken put a piranha in a bag and then picked it up off the floor 30 seconds later because it went right through the three layers of bag and newspaper.
Yeah, well, that's how they shift the red bellies. They take a big box, a foam cooler. They line the cooler in newspaper. Then they put four thick hefty bags and then dump shredded newspaper in hopes that they won't puncture three of the four bags.
There was a guy down in southern United States I used to buy him from, and he would take a garbage bag and cut it like confetti and throw it in the tanks or actually in the bag with the oxygen in the fish so the fish would have somewhere to hide. And still those goddamn things still you'd buy 50 of them or 100 of them. And 75 75 had one. Yeah, 75 had one eye, and 50 had no eyes. And there's two fat ones, and they're happy. Yeah.
And wild caught piranhas. Like, even just your common red belly, the wild caught ones versus anything you're going to get from the farms in Asia that are captive bread. We're talking two entirely, vastly different fish. It's like a pet store Oscar versus a wild Oscar.
Wait, there's a big difference.
Oh, huge fish.
A pet store Oscar is like owning a basset hound. And a wild Oscar is like owning a wolf.
Right now, I can purchase wild oscars that are caught. They're paying people money to go out and actually physically fish for oscars out in Florida. In Florida. And it looks like somebody first took them out of the wild and then drove a truck over them and then punched him down the road and then drug them behind a car. They are so beat up and so scarred and so ugly looking.
So walmart Oscar is what you're saying.
Wow, there we go again.
They're no longer doing fish trap on their parade.
All right.
None of you guys ever had experience with actual wild oscars?
Yeah, just the ones that I've gotten out of Florida that are I have.
Once ugly I have once wild oscars are very waspy.
They're cryptic. They hang up in the shallows near the leaf litter, and they kind of dart out at stuff versus a pet store Oscar or the oscars that are in the trade. They're like owning a dumb puppy. They just sit there and stare at you until you feed them. And they train you to feed them all the time. But the wild ones are not like that at all. The wild ones, if you go back in the days and start looking at the literature, you look at what the actual wild oscar's patterning looked like. It's all broken up like camouflage for them to hide amongst the leaf litter and all the trees on the riverbank. And that's where they find their food, because an Oscar only gets to be about a foot. So in the wild, it's probably only going to get to be about eight inches to ten inches in the wild. But if you know what the Amazon the Amazon is like a giant channel. And all the giant pills, delinquent cats, all your predatory cats, they own the Amazon. So every other fish that's from South America hugs the walls, so to speak. Keep your little epistos. They're in the leaf litter, buried under a leaf for their entire existence. And all of a sudden, then they get a little bit bigger. But that's where an Oscar lives. He lives just on a foot or two of water in amongst all that leaf litter and in amongst all those submerged trees so he could feed on all those little fish. Because if he went out in the open water, the oscar's food and it's.
Pretty shell right where they're at the Amazon.
Yeah, it might only be three, 4ft, 6ft, whatever. I'm sure they have a zone that they kind of work within. But as well as I do, all the catfish, they come out predominantly, and that's when they come out and high. So all these trees and branches and all that stuff that we put into our tank to make them look like, oh, I'm making the Amazon. Well, that's also the shelter that these things need. If not every single fish in the Amazon be gone, the catfish would just eat them. gobble, gobble. Red Tail cat gets to be 6ft. Pereva gets to be 9ft. These things can take down a fair bit of fish every night if they want.
It's taller than you, Jimmy?
Yeah, everybody's taller than me. One of my first memories here of I was down at Florida Fish Farm, I think I actually was at 5D, if I remember correctly, quite a few years ago. And I asked them about if they raised their own oscars, because I had somebody who wanted at that time, longfin oscars were just becoming a thing.
Boo.
Hey, I'm just telling you a story. And so I said, hey, you guys don't have any longfin oscars. I got a customer looking for them. And they said, no, but you want to see where we breed the oscars. And so they took me and they had an entire greenhouse. The entire thing is probably 75 foot long and maybe 30 foot wide, and there was a walkway down the middle. And what they had done is they took each half of the greenhouse and they had lined it with a pond liner and brought the water up to a depth of about two foot. And what they did is they took cement blocks and made basically little bedrooms for these oscars. So as you walk down the walkway, there'd be a pair of oscars inside these cement blocks, and the male would be standing in the doorway protecting the eggs. And so they would go by and check for eggs every day. And they'd grab the eggs on a piece of slate. And because the oscars were forgottening possessive of their eggs, the slate was probably about the size of a football, but they actually had a wire on it that stuck out of the water. So you could grab the wire and not put your hands in the water to grab the slate. But they probably had, I want to guess, probably 75 to 100 pair of oscars in there. And they were pulling eggs left and right. And I was just totally amazed about the amount of Oscar eggs that they were going through. And I said, there's no way you guys can sell that many. And they just laughed. Yeah, we wouldn't think so.
It's one of the top 25 aquarium fish in North America. Now, 5D has not bred that fish for, you're talking probably at least over a decade, right?
Yeah.
5D has not been breeding that fish actively for a long time. There's one guy, honestly, there's honestly one guy in Florida that controls the availability of oscars for all of North America trade. His name is Patrick. I call him like the mad scientist. This guy is amazing at what he does. I've been to his facility a few times. I've never been able to be there. When he's an actively raising, which is the one thing I definitely want to do. But to go from Canada to Florida, it's not just a weekend trip to pedro. Everything and everybody has to kind of walk off, treat him really well, because that's all he really does. But what he does is he has a small farm for a Florida size. He has a very small farm. But what he does is he breeds them, like you saw in smaller controlled conditions. He strips them and then in his hatchery, his hatchery is literally the size of a double car garage. And they're only like ten or 20 gallon tanks from memory. But his entire hat tree is run on liquid oxygen. It is insane to see it. He will have 1000, like an entire hatch in a ten gallon tank where it looks like water was added with a pet or a turkey baster or something. There's just so many fish in that tank. But he pumps this liquid oxygen through the whole thing and he provides almost 90% of the oscars for the trade. That's seagrested people. It's all coming from this one guy. It's insane.
Yeah, I didn't know that.
What is liquid oxygen?
I never heard of it before until seeing him.
I've never heard of this liquid oxygen or whatever you're saying. What is that about?
Explained it even further. Like, I saw his place and he's the one on my YouTube list. I have a series called the aquatic Masters series and it's basically wherever I travel, I want to be able to go and sit down with somebody that has something to offer that's different or unique. And Patrick has been on my top ten list since I started and I just haven't been able to make it back to actually sit him down and go through it. He's somewhat temperamental. He likes to do different stuff because he's a super passionate aquarist. And he started working with tarinus catfish and he started working with zebra plecos and he started breeding whole bunch of different weird L numbers just because he could and other people couldn't. He's the guy I call him. There's two guys down there. There's Him and there's Andrea. andreas is another one you really want to pick the brain on. andreas owns a bio aquatica. This is the guy that breeds all the clown loaches for the trade. He breeds different Synodontist catfish. He's the one that anybody in Florida is working wants. If the Florida fish aquaculture says, we want to introduce a new fish this quarter and they can't figure out what it is or can't crack it, they give it to andreas. He's the one that's cracked so many fish for the industry far and above anybody else in North America. I just want to point out he's a displaced Canadian.
There you go. It's the maple syrup. That's what it is.
Oh, absolutely. Go ahead.
Well, I was just remember that one fish that we used to get in where the females and the males the guy would just what the heck were they wrote? And the guy would just he wouldn't let a single female out. All we'd get was the males.
I think they're at that time, I think they're called dace Barbs.
No, you're probably talking about what? What? Like you're talking late 80s?
No. And then about mid 90s. Mid 90s.
I'm wondering if it's Melanotania precox, because heico blair was the one described was the one that discovered the precox dwarf rainbow and they were distributed only through equil Water Resources, which now is seacrest. And they actually sent out a full page flyer of the beautiful neon blue with red fins. But no but no pet store for the first year or two ever got a female. They always got these full colored. Males, and it was stunning. Is that the one you're thinking of?
No, they were a barbie or not a barbie. An Indian shirt.
Well, I'm going to be the ones.
The gray with the red and the black and white fins.
Oh, yeah. You're the Denisomite barb. Yes. There you go. barb. Yeah. I don't even know how you sex boys and girls on that one. And that's a plagic species. So that's not a species that's going to be bred readily in captivity without any hormone induction.
Well, I'm going to pause you guys. We're going to get back on track. We have done a power tangent here. We're about over 50 minutes in. Just for the sake of time, let's watch this fish. Well, I really want to get because you have a crazy story that you told us before the podcast that we really want to get to. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to shotgun some names. And again, this podcast was intended to go over oddballs. So we're not giving you the full scoop. We're giving you some names. We really encourage you to do some research, see the pros and cons. And they're oddballs for a reason. So find that reason to see if they have a specialty need specialty food or environment, but certainly check them out. Do your homework and see what you can find. So what I'll do is I'll go through a few details of my list, and we'll just finish up the list and then finish up with Chris and we'll talk about some heart attack, maybe.
Wow.
All right. He's in. He laughed. There we go.
A lot of these fish that we were talking about are not dead, are brackish fish. And I encourage people to start up a brackish tank because a lot of these cool fish that we're talking about tonight are brackish.
Right.
They're fun.
They're fun. So next few on my list I'm going to try to shotgun these out is the red Barracuda. So most people associate barracuda of either the car, if you're Jimmy, or the saltwater fish that people actually try to catch for sports, they get quite large. They show aggressive to shiny objects. But there is a freshwater variety that has a hue of red to it, and they stay quite small. They'll grow 810 inches, certainly. Check these out. They need special requirements. Again, most of the stuff in the oddball list, you don't see them because they have special requirements. These are very skittish, and you have to associate them with a normal pike you'd fish with. Right. They like to be undercover and some weeds and anything that swims by, they'll go out and strike and try to catch. That's the same type of fish. So if you have an open area aquarium, they're going to act skittish. When you walk by the tank, they're going to dart away and disappear. They're going to get easily stressed out. So keep the light a little dimmer and make sure you have nice, tall planted aquarium so they can literally hang in the leaves and wait for some creature to go by. These are normally kept on live food just because any type of barracuda needs to have that striking behavior. It's one of the few fish that I have yet to see anybody successfully completely convert over to pellets. And even if you do do pellets, you should still find some way to give it some sort of a live food on top of it, because they still need just for that behavior, for their own health. They need to be able to strike something. And just from their nature being a barracuda, don't have smaller fish with it, they will disappear or get hit. You never know. But check them out. They're fun. The ones I've gotten are pretty hardy, as long as you can keep the light dim. Tall planted tank. Next one on my list is the African butterfly fish. So the African butterfly fish looks like I don't know how to explain it. I've had these many times, and if you have a happy, healthy African butterfly fish, they're a cork at the top of your water, completely motionless. If they're at the bottom of the tank swimming at all, you're not doing it right. They're stressed out. something's not right in the parameters. They're sick. If they're happy, they will simply float in the corner of your tank and wait for something to hit the surface. They look their pattern very camouflage like. They have very unique leaf like fins and spines that hang from them. They're just part of their normal fins. And they're a very fun can be a larger fish for your freshwater aquarium that will leave most everything completely alone. They're there to look for live prey or anything that hits the surface. So I've had luck with these because, again, anything that hit the surface along you're dropping or making a motion using small floating pellets work really well with these. As long as you are making a bit of a splash and training them on it, they're fun. But if you expect that you're going to sit there and enjoy and look at that fish, you got another thing coming. They're going to be a cork if you're doing it correctly. My wife thought for the longest time that it's dead, and nope, it just keeps getting fatter and happier, and it just doesn't move.
Kind of like me.
Kind of like you. If you were a fish, you'd be bright pink and up on the top, but this is at least camouflage.
Wow, that hurt. People suck.
I'm sorry, Santa. All right, next on my list is mudskippers. So if you've never experienced a mud skipper, go on YouTube, type in Mud Skipper for National Geographic. And they have this, like, sweet, naked pygmy, saturday morning expose talking about the wild mud skipper and how these fish walk on land. It is really cool. In their natural habitat, they stay on the shoreline and again, burrow in sand or mud. And they literally take their fins, they collapse their gills. So they actually hold water in their gills. And they can, for up to like ten minutes at a time, walk on the beach in the mud and reel around. They come in normally brown color, but they have generally blue patterns, depending on what type of mud skipper you get for getting like African mud skippers. They have a very specialized water need. They have to have a beach. So if you're going to try to put this in, say, a 55 gallon tank, literally, you have to fill half of it with sand and half the tank is down in the water. The rest and have to literally go up onto shore. You can leave a small pool on top, but they still have to be able to crawl out of the water for proper behavior.
What do they eat?
I've had them eat pellets. I've had them eat crickets. I haven't had them long term, I've had them short term. And people buy them and have them meet ecosystems. I'll give them recommendations, but they do do pellets. But again, it's that transfer, like we talked about before, crickets to pellets.
I just don't want them crawling out of the tank and sucking on my face so I'm sleeping.
They're pretty weird looking. They have these dopey faces and eyes that stick out of their sockets. It's real cool. Certainly check them out. It's the stuff that keeps Adam awake. He thinks it's a lizard and gets excited.
No, I know. mudskippers.
Next on my list is marbled handstanders. And to be honest, I have to ask you guys more questions about these because I have not had these except for one variety. There's a lot of different hand standard varieties, and they've been talked about as being aggressive.
So it's just they're head standards, not hand standards.
Well, see, that's why I've only referred them as HEADSTANDERS and I didn't even get that. No, HEADSTANDERS got you so clearly even using the YouTube links as reference.
But don't believe everything you read on YouTube.
The marble variety is the only one I've seen, and I know that these are in river systems and they have to be kept with a lot of motion in the water. So have any of you guys tried these? Because I'm not that knowledgeable on these, quite frankly.
I've never kept that one. But I've kept similar species like anastomus. anastomus, which is a much more long gate, has an upturned mouth and it's bright yellow and black stripes. The whole length of the body gets to be about six inches, and all the fins are bright red. But it's a scale eater, so it sits there just ripping scales up every other fish in the tank.
I've got one of those in my house.
Really?
There's a reason all those HEADSTANDERS and leprinis and all those things. They're really beautiful and cute when you see them in the pet store when they're small. But almost all of them get up to these massive, socially aggressive species. And none of them have been really bred in captivity because I believe most of them are actually pelagic. They have to move, they have to migrate to be able to breed. So none of them are bred in captivity. And frankly, I don't think anyone's going to divert a lot of attention to trying to breed them in captivity because there's just no market for them.
I never brought them into my store because they just didn't sell. They just stay there.
I got an Albiny channel catfish that I got as a rescue that Rob and I got, and I put him in he's probably 1012 inches. I put him in with a 24 inch coy.
That's your scale ripper.
And yeah, he ripped off all the scales off my flipping koi the big meanie, and killed my coy.
No HEADSTANDERS for you, then?
No.
All right. So again, know that these warnings are out there. The ones that I had for the marbled didn't seem that aggressive, but again, they didn't get to full size either. But these fish, literally, at all times, minimum, sit at a 45 degree angle, like they're pointing down. They go from 45 to a 90, and that's essentially where they sit in the tank. They're high river systems, so they love the current in the water. If you're going to have them, make sure you have essentially jet propulsion in the tank to keep the cycle going for them.
So they're always at that position. It's almost like they're standing on their.
Head, on their hands.
That's it. We're going to give a new, like, a terrible local pet store name. A handstandard. Thank you, internet. Thank you, Internet.
Let's talk about a hatchet fish. Yeah, hatchet. You know why? Because they look like hatchets.
They're also marble.
There's silver ones also.
Yeah, all right.
That's a big family of fish. All those triporteus, the elongated hatchets. Love awesome things.
Love those things.
So I love them.
Yeah. And they jump like a son of a gun.
My last fish I spoke about in one of the first episodes we had in the podcast, that's the annabelle Antiblaps, or commonly known as Four Eyes. And I know quite a bit about these. These get decent size, but they're super fun there. They extensively live at the surface and they have two pupils in their eyes. One set that's looking down, the other set that's looking above the water. They essentially look I can describe them as like a dolphin or frog fish. The ones I had were about ten inches, and they are live bearers, but they have really weird breeding habits. You have to have a ganapodium either to the right or left, and the females privates have to be to the right or left. So if you have a right handed Ghana podium, you have to have a left sided female so they can breed correctly. Now, jimmy's been shaking his head and really not believing this, but, Chris, you got to back me up on this one. You've had these right?
What's even more important is you got to think, if none of these guys, besides yourself and myself, know what this fish looks like, you got to think it from an evolutionary standpoint. Somebody really doesn't like this fish. It's not attractive at all. It's gray, it's chubby, it's got a stretched out body, and as you say, it's got these bisected eyes so they can look independently above and below. And not only that, let's make it hard for it to mate. It's like the fat guy at the bar on Saturday night. He's got to wait for the last.
Pickings on a Tuesday night.
Does your wang curve the left? No, I'm not into that.
Everybody wang chung tonight.
You can't go on Saturday because that's when the new comics come out, right? Somebody has punished this fish for no reason whatsoever.
God hates this fish.
They really are fun, though. They jump up and down in the tank. They interact and socialize and play. And when they're sitting on the surface of the water and their eyes tick up, they're adorable. They're so ugly. They're adorable. I love the hell out of these fish, and I got a pretty penny for them. I still have them today.
And they're a true estuary fish, though, so they do need very, very specific water chemistry.
I want to ask Rob, because I know the answer to this. So you had a huge tank for this thing, and how much did you spend for this tank at Walmart?
So I recommend on these tanks because think of the fish.
What kind of tank you have, Rob?
I'll get to it. The fish needs surface area. They don't need depth, a lot of depth. They just need surface area. So you go to Walmart, right? You take a ten dollar bill out of your pocket in the summertime and you go buy yourself a plastic kiddie pool.
That's like $40 Canadian. Just so you know.
That's like the transfer rate $700 European. Yeah, right. Something like that. And it's just deep enough, and it has a crazy amount of surface area to keep a nice pot of four, pot of six in there with plenty enough room. Really a fun fish. But you can't have them in a normal tank. There's not enough surface area. You have to have something like a kiddie pool or a pond.
He invites me over. He's all excited about these things.
Go to see him.
You got to see him, Jimmy. You got to see him. So I go on over, and there's a freaking pink pool in the middle of his living room with these cockroach of fishes. I just wanted to stomp on them because they're staring at me.
They're literally moving.
Those staring at fish has a lot of problems in the trade because it's not a popular fish one. It's visually appealing in the fact that it's very different. But I think the average aquarist will lose that appeal quickly because they can't keep a lot of stuff with this thing. You got to think about it. It's a soft bodied it's not scaleless, but it's a soft body, doughy fish floating at the surface. Any fish at all.
It's a silver turd. It's a turd.
I just can't handle any aggression. Where this fish lives is protected by these mangroves and these little estuaries, where it doesn't have any competition from anything, so it lives out of life. So if you're willing to set up a kitty pool or, like, as you say, a very big tank with big surface area and work with them and breed them, that's good for you, because that fish should be in the trade, but it's never going to ever have mass appeal. It's wonderful when you see it at a public aquarium.
They're impossible to find. And when you do find them, they're going to cost a bit. But if you do, they're so much fun to breed because they will birth live pups, and the pups are a couple of lynches when they come out there. They're big guys.
So if you find a male with a left one and a female with a right one, and you can interconnect these things, right? You'll have pups.
You'll have pups.
Well, that's the challenge. It's only a couple, like we talked about. The prawn is you can't just go to the pet store and buy, okay, I'll take this male that's hanging to the left, female is going to receive to the right. You can't do that because that's not natural selection. He might not like that one. So you got to buy, like, 6810, twelve, whatever, and hope that they kind.
Of get one pair. Maybe you were lucky.
Did yours breed for you?
They did. They did breed, but then I had to sell them pretty quickly. But again, you're not going to get a lot of babies out of them. They're huge. You're going to get, at most four. You're not going to get a lot out of that fish.
It's not a good retirement plan, is what you're saying.
No, it's not an investment fish. It's just a fun, weird they breed and keep their pups close. It's a weird family system, and they'll stare at you forever. Yeah.
And if you want your friends to make fun of you, get some.
Get some. All right. What are the last you have on your list, Adam? Well, the only one that I really.
Wanted to talk about was elephant nose. These are one of my favorite fish. They are basically I don't know if you'd want to call them blind, but they use an electrical organ to sense around them. They are difficult and they only literally eat like live black worms, frozen blood worms, that type of stuff. I have not gotten them to eat anything else, but one thing I found out is they like toys, so you have to give them stuff to play with. I would go and I'd put bobbers in my tank and little balls of aluminum foil until they got tarnished. So I went to bobbers and they would play with the bobbers at night. I would raise a lot of nocturnal geckos. So I'd look at my tank and they're my one elephant nose was playing with all the bobbers because he would just get bored otherwise. And they're very intelligent fish, and I highly recommend them. I have an idea on how to breed them, and I kind of want to get a big group of them. Chris, have you ever worked with elephant noses and bred them or anything?
I've never bred them, no. I've worked with them a few times over the years. They're not a fish that is ever really in Canada since like the early 80s, late 90s, early 80s, early 90s, since being prevalent at all in the trade at all. The problem is getting fish out of the domestic republic of Congo is challenging at best. It's not an area of the world that has a stable economy. It's always at war or stable trying to get a fish exporter because you have to send them, well, you got to send me $2,000 and you just send it away and you'll never, ever get any fish. That's just the norm of dealing with a country like that. So if you're a wholesaler or importer and you've got a good connection there, great for you. But it's not a fish I see very often breeding it in captivity, though there's a lot of questions that I would pose with it. I think that that fish is going to need, like it's going to need an environmental crash. That's something that's going to be like a trigger. Like when you think South America, South American fish all have triggers that breed them. And we either need one trigger or many triggers, depending on how far away from wild the fish is and how specific its environment is. But they're all things that we can control. And with West Africa and stuff like that, we could probably do those same things. What I mean by something that's going to crash, same with like, clown knife from India. I know it's not related whatsoever, but they breed like sickly. And the way to breed a clown knife is growing up big and mature and then have an accident, meaning your heater sticks on and cooks the tank to 95 degrees. All of a sudden, boom, that's a trigger. Because in the wild, the water is going to start to dry up. Right. Some of these areas, these little isolated pools and stuff, where a fish like that that has no ability to defend itself whatsoever. Its eyes are so diminutive, like you pointed out, it lives in the absolute darkest, shallowst prawns, and it sifts around with its little appendage looking for food sources. I think you're going to need a PH to crash a temperature spike. I think you're going to need lower water, extremely soft, bringing the hardness down to nothing, and probably being even PH down to five to be able to some sort of a trigger to even get that. But there's so much stuff that's not known about that fish. I often wonder if that's a flagship species as well that needs to have a migratory, you know, an area that has to migrate to, to be able to get to some spawning grounds. And that's not something we can replicate. The one thing that we cannot replicate in captivity is fish that need to migrate.
One of the things to consider is you can't use some of the traditional medical treatments, say, like for ic, you can't use methyl and blue with them.
They're scaleless.
They're scaleless. So if you're going to have it, you have to have be prepared with other methods like uv filters or such. Just know that you have to deal wrong with that. Now if you're going to try to breed them, you're crashing the PH, you're upping the temperature, they will get stressed out. Now you have cases of ace or something else and you have limited ways to treat them as well. So it's going to be difficult, to say the least. And let's talk about the most important piece. They look like gonzale, the muppet. They do all right.
Frankly, creepy fish, though.
It's creepy.
Well, that is one fish that I can tell you with honesty that in Florida, aquaculture. They have been trying to work with it, but it's been kind of put on the back burner because nobody has had success. And what I mean by that is even some of the top fish breeders and the scientists have been trying to work with it. They have tools in their arsenal that hobbyists just do not. And they've adapted tools using products that are from like the salmon trade and the trout trade that are hormone induction. And I've seen how it works and I've seen how it happens with fish like clown loaches, some of the different synagogues cats, black ghost knives, white red tail, rainbow sharks, all those fish are now bred commonly Florida, and it's all hormone induction. These things are not done on their own. They're literally hauled out, injected, like they're giving them heroin quickly with a dirty needle and thrown back into the VAT. And that has been done with the different types of morbids, like that one in your dolphin and stuff like that, and none of them have been receptive to it. And that's honestly the only thing that I can think of off the top of my head. That group of fish that oba prim had no success rate whatsoever. So it's a bigger piece of proposal that we're still missing.
Now, Chris, I got a quick question on the elephant nose. And I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard that Germany used to keep these elephant nose in their tanks where the water supply came in and out the other side of the tank to keep eyes on their water quality. And if water quality diminished, then the elephant nose would be stressed out and they could watch that. Have you ever heard of that?
No, but they're probably out of all the freshwater fish that we think of in captivity, they are probably in the top five or ten of the most delicate fish for dealing with water. I don't know how when they got imported back in the day, I remember selling them at the pet store, but you never, ever heard of a customer keeping them for any real length of time. Nobody ever came back three years later and go, oh, yeah, they're doing great. That just doesn't happen with that fish.
See, I read in an old, old book I have some book from, like, the 1920s or 30s written on papris. Yeah.
But on a cave wall.
Yeah.
In jimmy's bedroom, when he was in my handwriting.
Yes.
They were talking about how they were they thought that they were a family fish and that they needed I always was told that they need to be by themselves because they fight. The book was saying that they would keep them together in groups. If you got a group together all at the same time, they would take care of one if other ones would take care of the sick one, and they bring it food and stuff. Have you ever heard of that?
I've heard of something like that. But I think the real reality is, and I think the way we keep fish now is evolving, at least in North America, it's starting to evolve to where Europe has been for a long period of time, and it's going very much in a strong focus towards natural. You go back in the you guys said you'd own stores or own stores, you would never, back in the day, have ever considered taking a 70 gallon tank that you filled with cardinals and making it dark black water, you know what I mean? That kills carbon fails. You would never do that. You'd take your Malaysia driftwood and try and remove as much of that tanic before you put it into the tank. But I think if you were to do buffalo or these elephant nose successfully, or just even keep them, I think you'd need a very large tank. I think you'd want to have a good group of a minimum of six to eight to ten to twelve individuals. And I would want to have so much wood and leaf litter in that tank that it creates these visual barriers that the fish just will. They're always using electronics and stuff to sense different things in their environment that it's almost like sensory overload. There's just too much stuff in their environment that they can't fight.
Yeah, that makes sense.
On a creepiness. Notice their eyes glow in the dark when you shine light in there?
It's because it's gonzo, man. It applied for the muppets, got mad and swam away.
Yeah. And after he shone the light on it, it died the next morning.
That very next morning.
It usually it usually jumps on the floor. I used to bring them in. They were packed 15 to to a bag. I bring in 15 from the Congo. And back in the back in the day, I was picking them up for a dollar 99.
Yeah. They weren't because they were plentiful back then.
Right.
Nowadays, just the price of petroleum. You're bringing Fish row over there because you know this you're bringing fish from over there. It's not the price of the fish that it's costing.
You got to get them here. It's the shipping the shipping, the box, the heat pack charge, the cold pack charge, the oxygen charge. You looked at me sideways charge. Doesn't matter. They just make his stuff up.
Well, what's the next fish on your list, Jimmy?
Well, next fish on my list is something I want Chris to talk about, and that is the electric eel.
Oh, God.
I know little or nothing about electric eel, other than the fact that I've seen some things in National Geographic and some different things where they've done some studies and they've tested voltage and stuff. And I think I heard a story that Chris might be able to tell us a little bit more about how much voltage they can release.
Enough that it hurts.
So this is an oddball that we don't recommend you get. I'm not going to lie to you. This is purely for entertainment.
Yeah. Don't get these.
No one should have it. And the people that we see that in pet stores that get it, I understand that they're doing that to attract customers, and most of the time, they'll just keep it there, and they won't sell it. It's just something for people to look at. It may kill you.
The aquarium in well, I just saw you guys might have seen this, too. I just saw on one of the social media platforms that one of the big public aquariums actually is using the electric eel to power the Christmas tree at the public aquarium. I just saw this this past week at Tennessee Aquarium or something like that.
I saw it as well.
You guys saw it?
I saw it as well, yes, but.
The big zoo in Berlin and I know I've seen that other places, but at least that one's fresh in the mind, because I was actually working on a video pertaining to dangerous animals just the other day, and. The zoo in Berlin has about a three or four foot electric vehicle in a perfectly set up tank. And it has a voltage meter above the tank. And you're sitting there watching the fish. And as it goes through its environment, it'll be kind of poking through the leaf litter and stuff like that. You'll hear these little volts and they amplify it so you can hear it and you see these little spikes as the animal searches for food. It sends out these little pulses, almost like a sonar try and search for things. Well, my only experience in working with one is we had one years and years and years ago, when I was younger, working at the pet store and to really date it. Back in the day, the pet store tanks were all the old school metal frame tanks with the slate bottoms. I don't know if this one had slate bottom. I think this was a little bit newer. Where the net? We're at a glass bottle. All the tanks in the store were undergravile filters and we were a little bit more modern in the fact that this is the advent, where they started having power head pumps, heaters, other than the radiant heater that clipped on the back and actually submersible the old original hagen ones. And this one animal, again, like you said, it was like a store pet. It's not something we ever would sell to anybody. It was just there as an attraction. And a lot of stores should need those things. They need those display tanks to get people excited. And this thing was definitely unique. It just looked like a giant turd, three foot turd sitting in a tank. And it would constantly short out the heaters and the powerheads. But once a week I would work in his tank without any issue. I knew it was electric, but I thought more along the lines of Black ghost knife and elephant nose and those sort of things. I didn't think like touching both fingers onto a car battery type electric. But this one here, I guess I was on the tank and it didn't like what I was doing. My arms wet, my arms resting against the metal frame of the tank. And honestly, I don't know, I have no record whatever happened other than that it pulsed or it hit me or something. It just did something it didn't like and I got thrown as if I stood on a mortar. I got thrown from the tank. Apparently I hit my back against another row of tank, broke a couple of tanks with my back in the fisher full of water and fish and then fell on the ground. And they brought me back in the ambulance and they told me that it had stopped my heart and I feel totally fine. I had no repercussions from it whatsoever other than the story. It's not like I have any scars or did they do an ekg I think I went to that once. I was at the hospital. But we're talking this is like 88, 86. I don't really remember all the details. I just remember a couple of people have told me over the years. You meet an old friend from years ago, and they ask you about that. The details are a little bit hazy, so maybe there was some permanent damage.
We don't really well, the good news is that you've got four kids, so we know you weren't sterile.
That's still working. But I would caution, if anybody wants to keep these, I suggest a wooden.
Handled net, lead gloves, grounding shoes. What was it, a lightning rod to plug in the ground outlet of your house.
I was in the behind the scenes, I think it was the bel aisle Aquarium a couple of years back, because I was speaking to Detroit and I'd set up this thing with the curator and stuff, and we were all there back behind the scenes, and it was literally the only tank that was marked. And all the tanks back then were all like cinder block tanks and stuff. These giant it's an ancient an aquarium and the only tank in the entire building that had all these warning signs all around it. Like, what do you think is going to happen? Let's have some beers and play with them. Let's go for a swim.
I've seen these be fed before, and it's super crazy. They'll put feed or goldfish or whatever they're trying to feed, which again, I don't recommend then just explain the story. They'll put the fish in and again, you're you'll hear it because they'll have a lot of times like zoos will have these things magnified, so you can hear it like you explained before. And you'll just see the fish and they'll get close, they won't really touch, and it'll just stop swimming, just like frozen. And then he'll just come up and slowly eat it. Oh, look, there's food. And just slowly not on it. No reaction, no nothing. Just grab it and move on with his life. Like nothing ever happened.
But they said nothing of a pulse of current to stun that animal. It's almost like have any of you guys ever worked with biology departments or anything? Where you've ever gone, done studies and used an electroshocker in a river?
Yes.
No.
Yeah, that's funny.
It is, because all the fish just come floating to the top.
It just stuns it. Everything in a 20 foot radius just comes directly at you quick.
There are studies on these. These things grow many feet in the wild. You can look this up on National Geographic. People getting hit by these entire gators dying from these, just hitting them because the gator decided to bite the eel, thinking it's food. And it just instantly dead and fried.
There's an episode of like, stevo and the Wild Boys are one of those type of shows where they actually went down to Brazil, and they were actually in this area. It was only like a foot of water, and it was an area the size of an average house. And there was an electric eel in there. And you can see these guys started not taking it because they impulse every once in a while. It's good, it's a riot.
I think they even clamped their nipples with it, if I remember correctly, like battery cables. And they tried to shock some small ones. But it's crazy. Not a fish I recommend to literally anyone. And if you do, please do your homework. What is that? Before, you told me before, Adam, of a recommendation of broken heaters. There's a rod you can get. What was that rod?
Same grounding probe.
So if you're going to awesome item.
Buy yourself a grounding probe. It's a metal rod that you put into your tank, and you literally do plug it into a grounding outlet in your home. And if you're going to keep this fish, probably the only safe way to do it, because it'll redirect all the electricity to your grounding outlet in your home. But let's just say that your house wasn't rated for however many volts this giant electric eel can dump out, and it just burns your lines. That's probably a real conversation.
Those horrible thoughts, those grounding probes, I used to sell them all the time when I worked retail, because if a family came in, you're always looking to enhance the sale. Not oversell, not sell products that aren't required. But if they're willing to buy a proper heater, an extra $20 for a grounding probe made common sense to me, because that's a life and death, that's an insurer, ins policy. If your kids are helping you with your tank and you go to put your hand in your tank and you don't know if that glass is cracked on that heater, it's worth it, right in your life. You only have one of them. I've used them all the time in all my big tank, like my old 750 that we had at my old place. And the new twelve footer, we're going to build it in the new place. The grounding probes go on automatically because I go in them.
It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. Those are eventually going to burn out. And you've heard some stories from, you know, popular aquarius, I think. You know joey, who king eyed, iy he lost some stingrays, you know, priceless stingrays from heaters burning out.
Yes, the old $30 heater kills a $3,000 fish store.
I hate heater.
$20, $20 rod and you're good to go.
Yeah, well, you mentioned we were talking earlier today about that cooling system. I listened to one of the podcasts on the tips and tricks about the cooling system.
I know.
Well, I thought of something else, and it's not my idea, and I'm sure it's not his idea either. But a good friend of mine in Ohio for his 1200 gallon tank. And his video comes out, I think, the day after Christmas. His 1200 gallon tank he heats for free. And how he heats this tank for free is he has a hot water tank that uses natural gas, the clear out valve at the bottom of his tank, he actually put an extension onto it so he can add something to that line. So he tapped into a water line, a hot water line, anywhere in his basement, because his tank is in his basement. So he did it in the ceiling before his Fisher. He tapped in that line and put 100 foot roll of pex attached to that line. And then that roll of pex, he left 90% of the roll of pex in his sump for his 1200 gallon tank. And then the rest of that line goes into his utility room, goes to a cast pump, which is wired to a thermostat, and then it returns from that pump directly into that pressure release valve at the bottom of your hot water tank. And when that sensor, his thermostat calls for heat, it turns on the pump and the pump runs hot water through 100ft of coiled hose, like you said, for your chiller, just in reverse in his sump until the temperature of the sump water in the tank water is that whatever he needs it to be. And all it does is it basically is making his hot water tank maybe three, four, five gallons bigger. That's all it's doing. And if you live in an area with hard water or anything like that, with the problems, the hot water tanks often fail prematurely because of sediment. He'll never have sediment because his tank is constantly being agitated in his hot water tank. He's had the same hot water tank as long as I've known it's been two dozen years.
And pex is a wonderful thing if people don't know what you're talking about. Pex is a very heavy plastic hose that you could use. They have three different types of pecs now, and one of my buddies is in construction and he just educated me last week on the new types of pets that are coming out. But pecs, very heavy hose. And what is wonderful about that is if you're remodeling your house, it's easy to run these through your walls and they're very flexible. And where you're trying to take a copper tubing and trying to, what do you call that? What do you solder. Solder. When you're trying to solder with a hot gun in your walls and stuff, pex, you just take a metal clip and you spank on there with a special crimper. And it's relatively not that expensive. And like you said, pex is just a wonderful thing if you have not tried using it, absolutely go out there and do your research and try to figure out how it can work for you.
It's the fish keepers dream. You can buy those little fittings they call shark bite. Literally, you just cut the hose to length and pop it into this fitting. I'm same as anybody else that's used it the first time you go from using copper to go and using pex, you're terrified thinking there's no way this is going to work. But I've never had a piece of pex ever fail on me. The coolest thing about his system, like the one that you guys talked about in your tips and tricks with the cooler, is that water is not being contaminated in any way. It's 100% enclosed loop with the hot water tank, and it's a giant radiant heater and it's free. It didn't change for him to heat his giant 1200 gallon tank to 83 degrees for his South American biotope. It has not cost him more than a dollar a month on his hot water bill.
Right.
That's insane.
And even the new pecs they've come out with, that pex has a memory. And how you put that one on it is you put a pliers sort of tool inside the pex and it opens the pex up. You run the pex on your fitting and it shrinks back and it has a memory like that.
Wow, that's cool.
I just watched it on this Old House the other day and they were showing that. And I was talking to ty about that because he's into construction.
See, I need more hobbies. I'm a fish guy. It guy. I should definitely transition that into fish construction or woodworking.
Yeah, let's talk about trying to get my fish room for alexa to run my fish room like you were talking about.
Exactly. Which works great.
That sort of stuff. More actual working in your fish room. It's okay to put your hands in the water.
It is, yes.
There's a friend of mine here that did a YouTube video in Chicago, and alexa does his water changes for him. I mean, like, really, what's the point?
I can't even get alexa, do the dish.
Alexa, go watch my fish for me because I'm too busy.
That's the problem with the automation. We even mentioned on the auto feeder on that episode. Don't use the auto feeder every day. You need to interact with your fish, know what's going on. So automation can go so far. But Chris, it's been fantastic. We appreciate the story and we're glad to see that you made it through the heart attack, the electric eel.
I didn't have a heart attack.
It stopped. It just stopped.
Yeah, that's what they tell me. Whether it's true or not, I don't really know. Not dead.
You heart throb.
You not dead and not sterile.
There you go. You built a reputation. You go to these expos, you're a public speaker, you're quite knowledgeable. And now you've started a YouTube channel recently. Tell us a little bit about that before we disconnect.
It was basically by pressure of many people kept badgering me over the years to get started doing it. joey was one of them actually. At the very beginning he didn't pressure me, but I saw the power of it. I was the keynote banquet speaker at the big Fish deal in Washington DC. Or Maryland, I don't know which number it was. And it was the first time joey had ever spoken before outside of YouTube. And I remember meeting him and we knew we were both Canadians. We chatted. I didn't know anything about YouTube, honestly don't think I've ever even watched a YouTube video until that point. We chatted for a little bit and that day we went to the convention. The first night, Jeff cardwell did a talk. He does what I call National Geographic talks. He's an amazing speaker. He collects all over the world. But his talks are bird, river, dog. Here's the truck we took, here's the dirt road, here's where we stayed, here's the food we ate, that sort of stuff. Wonderful, wonderful presentations. He's known worldwide for them. And then Dave Schubercker from Dave Fish did a talk and then joey did his first talk and it was like an inspirational talk and it was legend. And then the same then Saturday, the same format, the same three guys. And then I followed it. And joey brought to that convention just by him being there, probably at least an additional third of the amount of people that were there were there to see him. And when I came on after all those talks that night to close the kind of convention down before their big auction, there was probably 750 people waiting. It was without a doubt the biggest convention I've ever done. And that was at my infancy when I first really kind of came back doing it, but crazy.
So now we're going to finally get all this wealth of knowledge on, on YouTube. We've already got a lot of different content, a lot of the insider secrets, like even the videos of how the conventions go. And Adam was watching some other more humorous content. So certainly check it out. What is the name of the YouTube channel?
It's Chris, the mad aquarist. I'm sure if you just type in the Mad aquarist but it's Chris the Mad aquarist bigs. You'll find it. It's got an ugly black and white picture of my mug. But I won't deviate from what my original mandate was. It's me. It's me. In all honesty, it's who I am. I'm going to showcase things that fascinate me. My major background for me primarily is in botanical sciences or plant sciences and ichthyology was the secondary. So fish has always been an interest. But plants was what I used. I started going towards to finish my masters. So I want to try and showcase fish, reptiles, plants, but things with a bit of a twist. I don't think anybody out there wants to see a 30 minutes video on how sexy I think an oak tree is. It's not something that's easy to do a video of, but the tree of death, poison ivy or some really volatile plant from madagascar, or mimosas, the little sensitive plants, picture plants, all these things are connivorous. Those things I can tell a story to. And then same with fish species, and then have a unique little twist or a story behind them. And then there's sections called The aquatic Masters, where I interview world class aquarists all over the world that brings something different to the table. And then there's different series called rants, which are into the mind of madness, the madam, Mad aquarist. It's just going to be whatever I want it to be, and hopefully the people are enjoying it.
Well, don't miss it. Go to his channel subscribe, and you'll see him on other places. He's guest starred with Rachel o'leary, the Ohio Fish Rescue. Certainly check him out. Give him some love. And don't forget to hit the like button afterwards, because that's only decent. That's like you're leaving your tip without having to do money.
So just give me the tip.
Just give them the tip.
Just the tip.
Well, guys, thanks again for listening. I hope you go and take some of these names and details and research. Remember, they're oddballs for a reason, but if you can accommodate their special needs, you can find a real treasure to show off to your friends that no one's ever seen before. And go to our website, aquariumgyspodcast.com. Join us on Facebook discord. We're going to get Twitter back going again. Shame on you, Jimmy. We'll answer your questions and we appreciate the love. And don't forget to subscribe to this so it goes directly to your phone so you don't have to see when it goes.
Well, if they do that, then I don't have to tweet out anymore.
No, you have to tweet. We're going to get back on the Tweet train, buddy.
I'm not very good at tweeting. I'm not very good with the electronics, unless it's a jukebox at a beer hall. I'm not very good at electronics. Just not good at all.
I need to see this jukebox. But thanks again, guys, for listening. Thank you, Chris, and we'll see you on the next one.
Thanks, guys, for listening to this podcast. Please visit us@aquariumguyspodcast.com and listen to us on spotify iHeartRadio itunes and anywhere you can listen to podcasts.
We're practically everywhere. We're on Google. I mean, just go to your favorite place, Pocket casts. Subscribe to make sure it gets push notifications directly to your phone. Otherwise Jim will be crying into sleep.
Can I listen to it in my tree house?
In your tree house, in your fish room, even alone at work.
What about my man cave?
Especially your man cave.
Yeah.
Only if Adam is there.
No, with feeder guppy.
They're endless.
You imagine loving, fax sucking motherf.
Well, I guess we'll see you next time. Later.