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We'd like to thank everybody for coming.
Back for part two of our interview with Matt peterson of Amazonus and Coral magazine.
Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast with.
Your host, Jim colby and Rob dolsen. Now we're going to get into the.
Part of the podcast where we ask more of the generic questions for a lot of our beginner audience on clownfish. Number one, if for the listeners trying to get into clowns, what are the specific for people that have never done this before, that have just started to dabble into saltwater, what are specific habitats and requirements that you need for clown? Fish in general?
I mean, clowns are different because they're a damsel, so in that regard, they can be aggressive. There's something I'm just going to throw it out there about 30 species, give or take. There's a lot more than just nemo and percola. Most of them now are available captive bread. So unless you're looking for something specific, you're going to probably be buying a captive bread clownfish. The important thing if someone doesn't know it, clownfish are sequential hermaphrodites. So effectively, I'm going to oversimplify. They're all porn as male. So what ends up happening is they go out, they settle on the reef, they find in an enemy to live in. There may or may not be other clownfish there. If there are, they stay small. And what ends up happening is the largest in the social group becomes the active female, second largest in the group. The second most dominant fish becomes the active male, and that's the pair that spawn and the clowns that are there kind of waiting for their turn for someone to die. If the male dies, one of the juveniles will move up into that active male role. If the female dies, the male will become the female, and another one will move up and become the male. So they're understanding how they stay in the colony, essentially. Some species more than others, like marine clowns, I think they're really just more of pears in the wild, but you'll see, like saddleback clownfish and clarkey clownfish in large groups, and then also you have large aggregations of anemies. So sometimes you'll find several pairs living in a colony, and so you'll fish of all different sizes and ages together. It all pertains to how you would keep them in your home tank, because generally speaking, clownfish are a pair. I know there's some examples like brs has a really nice black snowflake clownfish colony that they set up the chad boss and help them set up, and that was done with, I think, buying 30 to 40 siblings all at the same time and starting it off together. And they're the only thing in the tank, and that's not what most people are doing. So most people I think the most fundamental thing you need to understand about keeping clownfish is you're probably going to have just one pair per tank, so don't rush out and buy the first clownfish you see. If you're only going to have one aquarium, buy the pair you really want when you're ready, just because that's it. You're done. As far as pairing them, levels of aggression in the species, but for the most part, getting one that's larger and one that's smaller is usually the basic requirement for if you get a juvenile and one that's a little larger, they'll grow up to be a pair. They may not bond right away, but they will. From a husbandry standpoint, most of them have zero need for an enemy. It's really only wild clownfish that seem to benefit from it, and even then, it's only select species that seem to really if they don't have it in an enemy, they're not happy. But all the captive bred ones, they don't need it. They've never seen it. There's a lot of rumors that come up captive bred clownfish won't use in an enemy. That's just patently false. They will they won't necessarily dive headlong into it immediately, and you still might want to make sure you get the right type of an enemy to go with the right type of clownfish. But I would say that the clownfish hobby, if you're really into clownfish, became a little bit of almost a pokemon affair, because you'll see a lot of people who kind of ended up collecting pairs of clownfish. And so kind of like we were talking earlier about the shrimp keeper who's every type of shrimp needs its own little tank. He starts to get into people who have a rack of 20 or 35 or ten gallon tanks, and each one has a pair of clownfish in it, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. I think it's a lot of fun because you can get all the different designer forms. They've kind of become the guppy of the marine world. They're easiest marine fish to breed at this point.
Even past blue damsel.
What was that?
Even past something I'm just trying to think of, like easiest fish to keep in saltwater and always been told it's blue damsels.
No, I said easiest to breed. Okay, easiest to breed a cap to bread clownfish, especially something like a clerky or a tomato. Pretty bulletproof fish. We talk about danzels a lot of times. I think all of us who have been in the hobby long enough know that Danzel used to be the cycle fish. Before we talked about fishless cycles or anything other than the first fish throwing in the tank were a pair of some blue dandelions. And oftentimes there's something like a three stripe or a humbug or a domino, and it would end up being this horrible fish that you had to get rid of later because it didn't match what you were going for. The clownfish. Clownfish are pretty peaceful, air territorial. They protect their home, so you're going to come and bug their home, they'll fight back. Other than that, they're pretty mild, and some would even say passive. You wouldn't put a couple of solaris clownfish in with a bunch of triggers and really aggressive fish that wouldn't work out well. But clownfish tend to get along in most situations. They just find their home and they stay there. And that makes it really easy to keep most of the clownfish in pretty small tanks. I was spawning black ausalaris in a six gallon nano cube on my wife's nightstand. They had their red bubble tipping enemy pair of black clownfish, six gallon tank. That was all it took. They work with any typical reef community. You'd mostly encounter there's a clownfish for everyone. It's just at this point, the vast majority of what we see are oscillaris or percola or hybrids between those two species. And then all the black oscillaris might be another species. So that little group is really where most of the action is happening, though everything else is kind of shadowed by that group of fish.
So we got a question from one of the listeners that's in the audience right now asking, so NEMO's dad, Marlin, was just stressed out because he was going through the change.
That's the joke that's the if nemo was really accurate, marlin would have become marlena and nemo would have married marlena.
Oh, I don't think Disney would appreciate that one.
That sounds more like something that would happen down in the south.
There's been a few articles about that, especially in light of some of the rather homophobic things that have happened in the reef hobby. It's like we're all keeping these gender bending fish. Most of the marine fish that's a big difference between freshwater and saltwater fishkeeping and breeding is most of the marine fish are hermaphodites of one former or another, right? So they're either being born as effectively as the primary sex is female and secondary sex is male, or vice versa. They are able to switch roles as they grow as part of their biology. Jimmy and I have gender exploded.
We always thought that saltwater was the place that you'd have the gender bending, the metaphorites when they're born. And then jimmy and I had the beta specialist on. We just lost our minds that that happened so often.
Even freshwater, I think it's more prevalent, though, in salt, for sure. It makes being a salt water fish breeder a lot easier because you're not buying a dozen of something to get a pear, right? Hopefully there's a female in this bag of six. You get two young fish, and most of the time, you'll get a pair. You want to breed angels, you want a trio, you get two small ones and a big one. Boom. I was spawning pygmy angels two weeks after I got them. It's not always that hard. Everything else is hard, but the pair formation part of it. I think we've really made great strides in understanding the the social structures and the reproductive structures of reef fish and how that all can can be put into play in a reef tank. So I I remember sitting here with frank witcherba, watching his 300 gallon reef one evening a few years back, and all of a sudden, all his fish start eating like someone just spawned. What? Oh, no. Someone else is spawning. The next thing, he's like, I never knew all this was happening. Every evening, all his fish were spawning in his tank. So it's pretty interesting to see that side of the hobby, and it's really come a long way since I had my interest in it.
I love the fact that you can take people that just started getting in the hobby they don't know what's going on and then explain to them what's going on. We can interpret that has been in the hobby. That fish is doing that right there. Did you see that? Oh, that's what that is. So I had my roommate forever. His name is trent, and he had a bunch of mollies in his tank, and they were all males because he thought the males were the coolest. I'm like, dude, you could breed those. Oh, really? So we got an equal amount of female self in molly's, and the moment we put it in there, he's like and I put him in there, float him, like, all right, you take the bag out. You take care of it. And the whole night, 30 minutes, he put it in there, acclimated him, and then I go back in there like 4 hours later and he's playing his Xbox or watching a movie and like, dude, you watch what's going on in your tank? I'm like what? I'm like, take a peek. Well, they've been doing that since I put it in there. Yeah, that's how they breed.
No? Yeah.
See that right there? That's their got a podium. And I had to teach him about the birds and the bees and it was all over. It was a great, entertaining night. So he called it his triple X tank. And he still keeps fish now. In fact, he's got more aquariums because of the entertainment.
So man, I know everybody's doing the math in their head and stuff. What's the typical spawn? How many how many babies? How many eggs do they lay? How does that all that all go down? Are they good pairs?
Maroon clowns? Maroon clowns can spawn thousands. I don't think I track that many of her batches. Where I did egg counts. It's really easy. You just take the nest because you spawn them on tiles or a clay pot. Really simple substrate spawners. Just take a picture, go through it with photoshop, dot all the eggs, get a count. I want to say she was I don't think she was having thousands. She might have, but you don't always rear that many. And I'm not the best clownfish breeder by a long shot. I I would rank myself pretty low. I think the I think we had 120 out of the first batch that we really reared well, and that was probably the only real batch I ran. Because they're so mean to each other. They just shred each other because they're maroon clowns. So that's a problem that I almost was like, I'm not even going to bother rearing them again until I figure out how to keep them from killing each other. Which is why all the commercial clownfish hatcheries didn't work with white striped maroons because they were too aggressive. Joe lichtenberg ran a company in Chicago called Reef propagations, Inc. rpi, and he was kind of flying under the fourth largest commercial banfish hatchery in the country. And he was fond of telling me that when he bred white striped maroons, he had a tank of 500 offspring, and within it, he could only sell five of them because they were that vicious towards each other. They just shred each other's fins, and we saw it in the offspring. All the culls I held back, first of all, missing fins. Their faces were just mangled. And it wasn't from it wasn't from bad rearing. It was from them shredding each other when they were ten days old. As soon as they would settle out and get their color, they'd start curt, wheeling in the rearing tubs, going head to tail, circling around each other, trying to kill each other so all the commercial coffee breeders had pretty much with the gold stripe variant because it's not as aggressive, and you can rear a sizable amount. So I want to say we maybe only had like 50 fish that we really kept and let go, but if you're I've had much better luck with other fish as far as producing quantity. But I think the biggest problem with breeding marine fish is if you produce something like clownfish, it's really easy to overproduce one good batch. And if you're not set up to be distributing clownfish as a business, it can take you a year to get rid of them, maybe more. I don't know. You see the dollar signs when you think about, well, every single one of these clownfish retails, let's just say for $60, that's great. But when you rear 300 of them, not all of them are $60 clownfish. It might be $200 clownfish, but there might be $4 clownfish in there, too. And who's going to take all these clownfish? So it's a smaller hobby Than the freshwater side. And unlike, say, you're breeding, I don't know, even just african cichlids, someone might buy six of one kind or a dozen of one kind and put them together. But you got to go back to what I said about clownfish before one pair per tank. A lot of people got into breeding clownfish around the time of the lightning maroon. There were some other variants that were kind of coming up, and they sell a lot of money, and there was a lot of money going around, but a lot of it was tween other breeders. It was that pokemon aspect of, ooh, I got to have that pair, because that pair's going to make me babies that I could sell for this much more. But it kind of I think it kind of collapsed a little bit. I don't see it going on like I used to because there's nothing new. But at the end of the day, you can only sell so many people can only put a pair in their tank, and they're done unless they got another tank sitting, waiting for another pair of clownfish. So I always looked at it, what can someone buy a dozen of? And so that's where now they're breeding yellow tangs, and that whole fiesta going hawaii that's come to pass, those kind of things. People can buy more than one yellow tang, and they want to buy more than one yellow tang. So you're not sitting there with this product that has a finite amount of people who want to buy it. A lot of people would ask, what fish should I breed? And I would, for the most part, in the last five years, have been pushing them away from clowns and things clowns have been done unless you have a particular thing you want to do. The only clown fish project I'm working on is a hybrid pairing to try to replicate something that's been found in nature, and those pairs just sit there and don't do anything. So that's where I am in my marine breeding world, is I have pairs of fish established that are not doing what I want them to do. What are you trying to recreate? Tomato cross. The clerky. It's been found in the Philippines, and it's really cool. And it looks like nothing you've ever seen. That was my big thing about producing hybrids. When you produce things that can't be discerned from one of the parent species, you shouldn't be doing it because then it can be confused and work its way back into the gene pool. And we see it happen on the freshwater side with people breeding cichlids and things like that. victorians are notorious for it, but it's a little different on the saltwater side, first off, because we don't have a thing where anyone can breed anything. And if you produce something that's unique looking, no one's going to confuse it. No one's going to look at the hybrid tomato clarkey and be like, oh, that's just a tomato, or, oh, that's just a clerky. It's a very unique looking fish. So I feel that it's okay to pursue something like that because it doesn't have the risks. Whereas that hybridizing of lightning maroons with gold trait maroons, you mix them together, you can't tell. And that's why I said, at this point, anyone looking to try to have a pure lightning maroon is going to have their homework cut out for them to track down like a pedigree dog. Okay, where did you get yours from? Where did you get this one from? Trace it back to Matt, basically. Otherwise, who knows? But yeah, that's the one clownfish project I have going. I'm trying to do clarke with tomato, and I have a couple of pairs that are getting along, but nothing's happening. Go ahead.
No, I'll you, adam, what about the lord?
How is clownfish? I saw that people finally have captive bred them. Are they something worth working with?
Yeah, but Karen britton is producing them on occasion, and she's been the only source we wrote about it in coral. Well, actually, let me step back because there's two fish that go by the common name. Are we talking about mccullicky or are we talking about lattice and addus?
Lattice and addus.
Okay. Yeah. So that's the wide band finding wild ones. That was back in the early 2000s. Breeding breeding was different because it was mostly clownfish and gobies and dottie bags. That was it. So people were looking for lattice and addis or some of the clownfish species that weren't easily accessible or hadn't really been bred because it was something new and different that no one else had. You could get into the market with it. But now we have all the designer genetics pushing that interest away. What's the next funky fish? I think ladies and adds Are really cool. I've had them I actually had babies from Karen. They lived reasonably well, but they're still ladders and addus a prone to jumping. They're kind of sensitive. Other people who've bred them have had horrible problems with misbarring. Misbarring is where the stripes don't form properly. Karen, for some reason, has figured it out. hers come out with good stripes consistently, and she doesn't even know. That was part of why I interviewed her and wrote the article was, what's your secret? And she just flat out and said, I really don't know. I'm not trying to hide something. I don't know what it is. But related to that is that other fish erase the mccullough clownfish. And that has a really interesting backstory. That's the one that comes from what is it called? Lord howe Island and Norfolk Island. And it's endemic to just that small area. And pretty much the story goes, there was one permitted collection to happen. It's a World Heritage site. There's one permitted collection to happen. They were allowed to take ten fish. The locals got all angry about it once they found out what was happening. And those clownfish, when they were released, the F one fish, they were selling for $3,000 a piece because you couldn't get them. It's basically for those of you who don't know the fish, it has the body shape of a tomato. Clown fish, solid black, has a white tail and a white splash down his cheek. mccullough clowns are around. People got them. They ended up proving to be really difficult to breed because they're so aggressive towards each other. If you think about like, certain fish are like that. At this point, the only place you can get kaliki clownfish is captive bread from ore. They're the only ones producing them. And you can't go to the wild, get more. So if people don't buy Mccollocky clownfish, eventually you could argue that or A would stop producing them, and that species would be lost to the hobby. So that's one of those cases where if you want to make a purchase and get a fish that has a little more interest to it than just getting your standard old clownfish or the latest designer percola, go out and find some acolytes, they are around once in a while, buy that fish, because that's different. And it's a species. It's really cool. There are clownfish species that we don't have access to. There are just a handful of them. But fusca, karatas, omensis, they come from these protected areas, so they can't be legally collected so we don't see them in the hobby.
You've got a couple of questions about the Finding Nemo authenticity. I got to answer what we get asked, right? So in the movie, they have a scene where the dad asked, nemo, did you scrub in the anemone? Is there any backing to this anemone scrubbing? And if so, what is it?
Yeah, when clownfish are introduced to an anemy, let's just say a Catherine bread picasso. If you just thrust it into an enemy, it very well could get stung and eaten just like any other fish. Scientists don't know the exact mechanism still as far as how the fish masks itself from the anatomy so that the enemy's nematocysts, these little poison to fill the harpoons don't fire off into the fish. But when you watch a clownfish acclimate tune an enemy, it goes in first, like just touching it ever so lightly might take a nibble on it. It looks like they get stung a little bit and they're adjusting something about their body chemistry or their slime coat. So naturally gets into it over a period of hours or days until they're finally in the anatomy, not being stung and getting along just fine. So in that regard, that would be where that analogy kind of comes from.
Kind of like dating. See what you can get away with and not get stunned.
Oh, and then eventually they'll just be like, yeah, you can come over on tuesdays.
That's right.
And that's how you have an ex wife, jim right.
Just one.
Just one so far. He found out it was a fake anemone.
Yeah, exactly.
So another question that we get constantly asked is how did that darn movie movie series really affect the hobby? Because I know it wasn't necessarily clowns, because again, you compare clowns to the guppies of the hobby. But how did that movie affect otherwise? I'm assuming the quote unquote, dory candidates get a lot of grief as well?
Yes, absolutely. The arguments from the scientists were that more clownfish were taken from the wild. Obviously more kids wanted a pet nemo. And there's really nothing wrong with that. If you're getting set up properly and buying captive bred fish, it's a perfectly good pet. Yeah, definitely. The hobby saw a boost and it also saw a lot of negative attention and then dory kind of same thing. The difference is blue heptangs aren't. At the time, they were not able to be captive bred, so they have been done. Now people are working on making commercial scale blue tang culture a reality. It's not here yet, but I think it's realistic to say that in the next six months to two years, it'll probably be here and then it will be kind of a scenario. Like with yellow tang. I mean, Captain Red yellow tang has been around for three or four years now. The quality continues to improve. We're always more expensive than the wild caught yellow tang, but now they are the only yellow tang because hawaii's fisheries completely shut. That's not going to happen with blue hep tang or hippotang or dory, at least not yet. But at some point it could happen. There are people in the marine aquarium hobby who want to own a 100% captive propagated, 100% captive bread, nothing from the reef aquarium. And I think that that's a laudable goal if that's your aspiration, because it can be done. Whether we should be rooting yellow tangs or not is another story because that fishery was sustainable. Fishery was a good use of the resource, the data was solid on it and yet it still got shut down.
What happened with that? I don't know much about that.
Yes, I called the center for Biological Diversity and for the fishes and snorkel bob and renee Hamburger and like five other Earth justice, I can keep rattling off these big, heavily funded environmental groups. And it's interesting because there are times I agree with center for Biological Diversity on some of their missions. But shutting down hawaii's aquarium fishery was not one of them. And you could argue the amount of resources it takes to make a cast of red yellow tang. It's a much better use of the planet to let the ocean do that because it could be done sustainably. The reason the fishery is shut down is because for years these groups are trying to legislate it out of existence. They are trying to do it through passing laws. And the fishermen had to keep capitulating. And it made me angry because it was one of those you give them an inch, they take a mile kind of scenarios. You compromise here and then five years later you're just compromising even more and you're giving up even more. But what ended up happening was they filed a lawsuit and basically overly simplify it. Basically they alleged that the fishery needed an Environmental Impact Statement. Now, there hadn't been one same license for any other commercial fishing in the state of Hawaii covers the aquarium fishery. The aquarium fishery had tons of data and science behind it because it was a managed fishery, which is what the Department of Natural Resources does in most of our state. They're the ones who say, sorry, there's not enough walleye lax. You can't keep any. That's their job. That's what they do. You don't need an Environmental Impact Statement on recreational fishing and Malax to decide whether or not you should allow that. That's just the job. That's what the Department is there for. But they said no, you need to have an environmental impact on this artisanal small fishery. And there was actually one prepared and it was rejected and it needed refinement. So we're stuck in this position where the court struck down certain things. They left loopholes. Fishermen could kind of hobble for the last couple of years. They couldn't fish certain places that they used to. They couldn't use certain gear that they used to, but they could still fish. So the price of fish had gotten higher. And then basically they just went back and said they're still letting them catch fish. And that wasn't really what was supposed to be happening. And so the court said, yeah, you're right. So shut it all down, close up all the loopholes. And that's why we have no aquarium fishing in Hawaii for the last couple. Of months and no idea if or when it will ever reopen. And the cry from scientists, and I'm talking like the Bruce carlson's of the world, like aquarius, who have a scientific background, who do conservation work on things like nautilus. They're the ones who are sitting here going, this is an idiotic move. It shouldn't have been done. This is the best studied, most well managed fishery in the world. What does it say? The best studied, most well managed fishery in the world can be shut down. What does that say about all the other places where our fish come from? It's this whole can of worms argument that you've already said, next is Florida. Well, where do you get your Queen angels, French angels, blue angels, your Florida aquaculture, live rock, your dragonians, your cleanup crews? Where does all that come from? It comes from Florida.
I mean, Florida is going to implode on themselves for a different region than legislation and a bunch of people controlling shit. It's going to be for the shit that you see in the news because florida's, Florida. If you type in Florida, man, for any date, you're going to get bat shit crazy stuff. Like Jimmy and I are sitting there and Jimmy always hands me all these articles all week long and Jimmy finds this crazy thing. Now that the latest and greatest mass invasive species are Arabima. Can you imagine? Creatures that have been measured in captivity to exceed 14ft in our history now are going to explode in Florida with literally no predators. It's going to be besides game fishers. It's going to be probably the craziest shit we're going to see. But what's the python rate? I think they just found a 16 foot python that grabbed a small child in the backyard. So it's just the crazy stuff you see in Florida is not going to be the same as Hawaii. They're going to be locked up for reasons that people are just dumb.
They're actually talking about banning everything in Florida. So all the commercial reptile breeders are.
Going to be done.
They're just really sick of dealing with all of the horrible invasive species. When you go down there, jimmy brought me down there. Jimmy has been down there countless times. You look in some of these like, little ditch ponds and whatnot that just flood up from wherever. And I'm looking in there and I'm looking at angel fish, I'm looking at guppies. You're seeing all kinds of stuff in there because for years, since the 50s, people have just had a different attitude. That's just how we farm down here. This is our area and that hasn't been capped enough where we have. I can't fathom it's a different world. It's like science fiction thinking about arapima breeding on their own and exploding in that type of area.
I mean, you got Atlantic lionfish. The saltwater site is not immune, right?
See it's there. But I just feel like Florida is, I can't say, just deserved. But you see it coming.
I did the arapaima get to Florida because I didn't know that they really exported them.
No, they do. It was just part of the hobby. But people that had licenses to do legit things got non legit things, and now they're there because of very lax control. And well, they know what's better. Someone just doesn't audit right now. If you went down to a legit place that does their homework, like Casris Farms, they have inspections on the regular, but I'm assuming that they don't have people checking every day to see if someone miss shipped a fish. Jimmy gets international shipments in, and heck, you get random fish you never ask for all the time. Just imagine if one of them happened to be on the Side ease list or whatever else.
It's just stuff that way.
Yeah, it's just not a great thing.
Many times I've gotten in feeder fish and you go, what the heck is this bag of feeder fish? You got pipe fish, you've got all kinds of crazy little things that shouldn't be in there.
Minnesota is just lucky that the Death stalker scorpions cannot handle the winter.
Yeah, but let them stay in the house.
Adam'S got a good story about that.
I heard a gentleman, I can't give out any information, but this was a little while ago, ordered some stuff from overseas. And he ordered it was a good batch of stuff. And in it he got a Wells catfish. That's a big no no for those that are listening. That's like two steps below Asian arijuana. Asian marijuana are more black market fishes because there were so much. But Wells catfish are as illegal technically as the Asian arijuana.
Really?
I know a guy, but no big. Rich has plenty of stories where he's got friends that had them for years before they were illegal, had papers on them.
That when they were purchased.
Where they were purchased. And they still got repossessed by the government.
Absolutely.
They backed that. Yeah.
They don't care.
So I think we can all agree that this whole thing is Ellen degeneres fault 100%, because she was the voice of dory, and she's not being nice to people, and I think we can just blame it all on her.
No, we can't do that. We just didn't blame her on her dancing. All right, any special food that you recommend? Because again, you're the guy at the insider secret. What did you have great success with?
Clowns at this point? I mean, any pellet food, any good quality pellet food is a staple in any hatchery, and then it's just a mix of prepared and frozen foods. So mice, shrimp stuff like pe, the Canadian mice, if they're big enough to take it. One of the tricks if you're having bad quality eggs is to actually feed eggs, to feed capel and row. Yeah, there's a lot of diets out there. The Rods food, the original Rods food blend. A lot of people know rod dealer more for his food now, but he was a clownfish breeder. He had a little shop, but he really made his name first with the rods onyx. Percola clownfish and the rod's food was his blend for feeding his clowns. And it's got shrimp and Astronanthin and a little bit of nori and all sorts of other stuff all mixed together. But clownfish are really easy to take care of at this point. If you're doing captive bred ones. They'll be happy living on pellets and just staple frozen Formula One. Formula One was a hatchery diet for clownfish breeding before it ever ended up being a commercial product. As that frozen cube that we all know. Any frozen food, frozen foods just tend to confer superior nutrition, so they're generally in the mix. If someone's breeding clownfish as a staple diet, they don't need frozen foods. They will subsist very happily on just regular old pellet. Fair, no problems.
You're not talking like caviar eggs that you can feed back to them, are you? Where do you get those?
Yeah. Capelon Rome. Technically, when you see sushi massago, I believe that is capelon. And the orange is just a dye they apply to. It.
Interesting.
That's actually where Joe would get his eggs. When he was feeding eggs, he would feed them. He would just go to the Asian market and buy it and rinse it and then just use those eggs. It's really just the high quality nutrition that's in it. And that all. pertains more to. Yes, the clownfish will do well on a regular old prepared diet. If you want the best quality offspring, then you have to put it in the best quality foods and get the right nutritional profile in there so that you produce good eggs. So the parents don't eat their eggs. We didn't even really talk about that whole accomplished life cycle, but I should just kind of throw in here.
They get it up is the time to do it.
Pounds will spawn, depending on the species. Some of them will spawn every 14 to 21 days. Some are more like a monthly spawn. And we're talking about the number of eggs that can be 200 to 2000 eggs, depending on the size of the fish and eggs incubate as short as seven to eight days. And some longer ones can temperature and species can get up there more like twelve or 13, I want to say. And then the larval duration. So the baby clownfish, they're not protected by their parents. Parents car the eggs, take care of the eggs. When they hatch them, they go up into the plankton column, into the water column and live there. And then eventually when they have grown and eaten enough plankton, they come back to the reef. They settle in an aquarium setting. You could have Percola and Australia's clownfish settling out at eight days after they hatch. So it's it's a a really short larval stage, and we're breeding them. Rotifers are the first food, and I'm just like throwing the little tidbits out at you. I love tidbits.
This is what people come this is.
Not the how to breed clownfish podcast. This is just nickel tour. copepods can be beneficial. A lot of times we used to use baby brine shrimp as the second food that has the wrong nutritional profile and cause problems. So now we've come to realize that there are larval feeds that you can get sometimes get the clownfish to go straight from rotifers to the larval feed, and you don't even need that transitional animal. Different clownfish grow at different rates and mature at different rates. You can have an oscillaris clownfish spawning as an adult female within one and a half years. A male can be down at six to eight months, and he's a functional male. So the generation time, even though these fish can live 20 years, ten to 20 years is a good lifespan for clownfish. The oldest wild one that I'm aware of is 32. Damn. Yes, but a good ten to 15 years. mama onyx is capped in bread, and they know that she lived to be 14 years old. I look at a ten year old lightning. That was a reasonable lifespan. I would have loved to have another five or ten years with her. anyways, that's the nickel tour there on how it all goes.
Now, quick question for you, Matt. You're talking about how feeding the caviar to the fish, would that work? Let's say on angel fish, freshwater angel fish, because I've had a lot of pears at one time. I had over 75 pair going, and I just had certain pears that as they were laying eggs, they're eating eggs. Was that because of nutrition?
It could be. It could be something else. But that was always one of the go to when the eggs weren't good or the parents were eating them, fed them eggs, because the thought was, they're missing something. They're not getting something in their diet. They need they know the eggs are bad, so they're just recouping. That nutrition. So the trick was to feed them eggs. Now, I can't say it works every time. This is all anecdotal, but it has become part of our toolkit. Eggs should be in the rotation. When I was breeding angels, I can't recall whether I tried it or not, but I had never bothered with parent raising with my angels. I wanted the eggs. That's what I was there for. I wanted the babies. It was a commercial operation, so I was pulling the eggs and artificially incubating all the eggs. So I couldn't tell from personal experience whether that would work or not.
All right. Yeah, I'm just saying that to myself, too. I always pulled the eggs also, and I had, I think, a random two or three pair that were good parent razors and stuff. And I would do that for myself because that was just fun to see, to see all those babies with the male stuff. But, yeah, Rob makes fun of me because I used to have jars.
Well, that's why. That's part of the fun of Cichlids. I mean, I've got a pair of cutter eye with fry in the basement right now, and the Lake Tarkana jewel cichlids had spawned recently, and watching them with their babies is just fun. I was like, getting my kids down there. You need to see this. This is cool. That was the thing that got me into Africans. The first time I was exposed to them was at the shed in that kind of old side gallery kind of place they had where they had that whole tank full of Nealamper Logus brushardi. It was a whole colony of the adult pair and then the older offspring guarding the youngest babies. That behavior is so cool. Those are neat fish anyways. But then seeing them display those behaviors with their babies, that's on another level. We don't get that in the saltwater world, for the most part.
Top sedans, if you know much about them, because I have I don't. I have some. They're on the cares list. I got them by chance through a friend with some stuff I kind of half inherited. And I have a couple of jewel cyclists. When you said that they stressed, they spawned as soon as I got them out of the buckets and put them in. And then the eggs didn't last 24 hours, though. They ate them up, and then they fought after that. So I have no idea about that. Maybe I'll pick your brain later.
Do you know that they're repair?
Well, as soon as I put them in the tank, like, within a week or a couple of days, rather. They had eggs on one of the big flat rocks in that tank, and then they hung out for about a day or so. And then I saw them picking off ones that looked kind of funny, and then I was like, okay, they're just doing their thing, maybe. And then after a day, they were just completely gone.
They just need Matt Pellets for marriage counseling. That's what they need.
Now all they do is fight.
Well, I've got them all in a tank together. They're all like, I bought a bunch of cutter eye swatting a pair. Now the pairs are taking turns spawning, so they're carving out a little part of their tank doing, like, you could imagine, a whole bunch of convicts, and it's basically the same fish. And one pair will take over a part of the tank for a while and spawn, and then they'll move out, and the next pair will come in and spawn there. And the jewels were kind of just like, where can we get our stuff going? Right?
It was kind of like a rescue operation. Where there were a whole bunch of fish that were different species, and I only had ended up with a few of them left over after the operation was over with.
And that's where I come back and say, do you know you have a pair? Like a male female pair? Like, there's a parrot sick lit at my doctor's office that has no mate, but she spawns, she throws down eggs. No mate, no other sick lit in the tank. Every once in a while she lay eggs everywhere. So that's what comes to mind. You inherited these fish. Do you know you have a male female pair? The hemicromis. exile. It's pretty easy to tell now which ones are male and female, and they're only like two inches long. They're really awesome jewels. I think I want to cover them in Amazon at some point just because they just totally turned my thinking of Jewel cigarette on its head having these fish.
I got a really dumb question for your hybrids, your attempted, your tomato, whatever, your tomato and what's the other one you're crossing with?
Tomato and clerky? Yeah.
You know how when you take water from one tank and you dump it in the other tank and it gets the other ones to spawn? Have you tried taking water from pairs of each and dumping it in at the same time?
They're all in a system together.
Okay.
But no one's spawning in that system. So that is something that clownfish breeders have tried. I couldn't tell you that. There's actual hard data to say it works or not, but I do know that that's one of those things that breeders will try because you'll get a pair that I want them to spawn, why aren't they spawning? But clownfish is like, just beat the heck out of them and wait and eventually they'll get there.
Have you tried any Berry White? Might want to try some berry white.
Yeah, I thought those memes were over.
I'm glad you brought it back up.
You can never get enough Barry White.
Yeah, it's true. We can't even play the clip anymore because YouTube sucks.
Yeah, YouTube yells out of every time.
We put some music in the big cock sign.
Well, now that jimmy's episode can go to jail over dmca.
I don't care.
There's nothing wrong with jail. Get all the free love when you want.
That would be the last thing I think, Jimmy, you call me for I'm in jail?
Why? Because we put the music on the.
Podcast like no, because you shit on your neighbor's lawn, Jimmy. Well, Matt, I think you gave us a lot of tidbits. And I think for our advanced hobbyists, they're going to really go off on this one because who better to talk to than you? But you got anything else going on? I see this Mini Waters website. I'm assuming that's yours.
Yes, Mini Waters is the company that exists because I'm self employed. Even though I a partner in Amazon. I work for Coral. It's all contractual employee type stuff. I'm not an hourly employee. So Many Waters exist as a company for everything. This circles back to what I was talking about with Reef Central. Every fish breeder is commercial everyone to make money. And that's not really the case. But when you produce fish and you're successful as a breeder, you have to find them homes. So you have to sell them because you're not going to give away 200 onyx perks. It's just no one does that with the money it took to make them. So Many Waters existed as a wholesale operation. For all my angel fish were wholesaled. Everything was wholesale. I did it because when we moved to duluth, we always tell everyone, support your local fish store. And I moved here, and we had at the time, we had three independent retailers. And I can't justify supporting my independent retailer being, okay, I'll buy this heater from you for $60 when it's $20 online. I just can't do that. None of us can. We can't take and just give $40 a charity. I might as well just give them $40 and say, Here, thank you. I looked at the problem of supporting your independent retailer from a different aspect and said, what did these stores need? And I knew I was setting up the fish room. So I asked Lisa at World of Fish here in Dutch. I said, what do you need? And it kind of came down to Angels and guppies. Then I'm going to breed angels and guppies. I'm going to give you what you need. And I can't share specific numbers, but I do know that when I was actively providing her with Angel Fish, I was sometimes there every week dropping off a nice box of angels. And she was making a good three to four times mark up on some of those fish. And they were quality. They weren't the junk that people were getting that you just get through the trade. So she was able to ask a higher price for them. It was something you couldn't walk into the box or you can walk into petco to get. So that's how the wholesale side of Mini water started. And so it kind of added retail. When we were sitting on Lightning Maroon clowns, I had gone through the initial wave with Blue Zoo of Pay. That first batch, we're all done. We sold them, we made lots of money. Great. Now I have Lightning rooms and I'm making them available wholesale. And this is when Lightning maroons were retailing for $1,000. And I'd have them on the wholesale list for anywhere from 100 and 5100 and a quarter to 250. Anyone could have come that I'll buy. Even two of them, ship them to me and could have turned around and sold them for $600. And I could not get a store to buy a Lightning Maroon. I think I only wholesaled with one. The entire time we produced Lightning, it was just like we're sitting on them and say, okay, we're making them available at very reasonable price. No one's buying them. Meanwhile, I'm getting people saying, can I get one from you? I'm saying, well, have your store call me. Have your store call me. We'll work it out, figure it out. We're wholesale only. And after about a year, maybe a year and a half of that, I said, look it, and added the retail, added mini waterstop fish, sold every single Lightning maroon at retail prices. So it's tough. Sometimes you say, support your local store, and I love before all of this podcast this evening, I was out shipping wholesale vivarium Plants. I was packing plants for a day after this podcast is done, all night, I'll be packing wholesale orders days, but I couldn't get a stored, buy $150 fish that they could have. They could have doubled it for $300. And this price online was $500. They couldn't make that leap. So that's where miniwaters fish came from. That's where I put things up for retail sale when I feel like it.
Let me tell you, your feel like it selection right now looks pretty good. You have a lot of really cool products I want. Yeah, you have a lot of really cool looking I don't have any stuff.
That'S out of stock. It takes a long time to create those listings, take the photos. Whereas my wholesale customers, I add a line to a spreadsheet, say, it's this price. That's all we got to do. So I was posting on Instagram tonight. I think I posted a couple of pictures of plants and said that were first times. And I said, wholesale customers get first crack. Because they do. Because I can just add a line to a spreadsheet and say, try these out. If I'm going to put it on the website, I have to sit there and write it all up, take good pictures. And I think it probably takes half an hour to put a new product on the website, and I just don't have time for that.
For what you have listed, you still have quite a few different plants and a lot of different options. I got to say. A lot of these you don't see in traditional places. So it must be just your hand picked fun.
Well, it's all being grown here. I took down the old clownfish breeding rack because it wasn't breeding clownfish, and that whole entire rack is all vivarium Plants now. And I'm kind of reworking the fish room. I saw an opportunity with the vivarium hobby. So for those of you who are familiar with the fish world from the retail side, when you have a really unhappy saltwater customer come in, he bought a 200 gallon tank, and he had it for a year, and it didn't work out. And he comes in, I want to sell my tank. We all know he's not going to get what he paid for it. It's going to be dejected. He's going to be out of the hobby. And as a retailer, you're going to lose your customer. So I always took them over to the cichlid section and showed them the Africans and said, drain out all your water, fill it back up with fresh water, and next week come back and we'll get you like a dozen of these to start. And you could put like 50 of them or 100 of them in your tank. Those ended up being some of the best customers and the happiest people. And I got into the Dart frog hobby very indirectly, but through I haven't mentioned it, but my friend Mike dodi, who runs fog Town Frogs and dodi aquaculture, is the only other clownfish breeder up here in duluth. He lives four blocks from me, and we're family friends. We didn't know that when I moved here or anything. It just the happenstance happened. And so he got me into the dark frogs, basically, because he started having them, and we would watch each other's fish rooms. And one day I said, hey, do you mind watching the frogs? I said no. What does this take? You spray them and you put the fruit flies in here, and you just shake them in. That's it? Nothing else to do? No, I'm like nothing else ever? No, that's it. And the light bulb kind of just went off. And I realized that this was for the person who's just not a fish person for whatever reason. This is a similar hobby. It's like the terrestrial version of a reef tank. So if you get someone who tried a reef tank and it just was a miserable failure, or they tried a planted freshwater tank and they just couldn't hack it, take them over to the Dart Frogs. Take them over to the vivarium, show them these, because, man, it really is that easy. You don't have to have dart frogs in a variable to have an isovarium. You can do bioactive, whatever you want. And I saw the opportunity. I have a plant background as well. I used to run an orchid breeding business in Chicago, and this was kind of also a way to get back into the plant side of what I like to do. But I looked at it and said, the plants are the coral frags. You buy a reef tank?
Absolutely.
You have one pair of clownfish in your little nano cube. How many coral frags can you put in that little tank? And I said, I don't need to breed the dart frogs. I'll supply the plants. I have a lot of plants, and I grow them. They are very oriented plants for the most part. This whole past year, we haven't talked about it, but since COVID hit, I can't get air cargo shipments to duluth, Minnesota. I will gladly bring stuff up from Seagrest and from nautilus and some of the other vendors, because I can get three boxes from Seagrit. £100 of fish. That's $70. That's very reasonable. I'll do that, but I can't do that. So I'm stuck either fedexing anything I want, which is exorbitantly expensive, or with a limited selection of what we can get locally delivered. So I just looked at my fish business when the pandemic started, and when I couldn't get fish, I said, I'm not even going to try this year. So I've been putting a little bit of fish back into the fish room, got some nice quarries because they've been popping up, so I've just been snatching them up so I might have some nicer fish selection this year. The other thing I tried to do with mini waters was I wanted to be a one stop shop for all the captive bread, salt water fish. Certain producers only do certain things, and you couldn't get them all in the same spot. So I tried to work with as many as I could to bring it all together. And so for a while I did that. And then obviously I saw the need for that go away as people caught on and realized they should be doing it. So I didn't feel a need to really pursue that any longer as a business, as a part of my business.
Well, if you guys want to see these things that he has listed or even for wholesale inquiries, go to Miniwaters fish. It is not. It is fish. And if you go in there, you get something put in promo code Aquarium Guys and get 0% off your order and make that smile. So support this man list, go to his site and also check out I.
Was going to say, I don't even use the email list. I think it's just collecting emails that are gathering dust.
There you go. Well, certainly go there, check it out. And then also check out his other works on again, the amazon's magazine and Coral Reef magazine to keep up to date with all things in both of those hobbies.
Coral magazine?
Yes, Coral magazine.
Coral Reef Magazine.
I apologize. You can tell that I only subscribe to one side of the coin.
You don't even subscribe to jimmy gives it to you.
Rob only swings one way, and that's freshwater.
He subscribes to it.
So I just reap the rewards. Well, thanks again, Matt.
We appreciate it.
And we got to pick something for the fourth topic, but we'll discuss. But thank you again.
Thank you for having me, guys. Always nice. Well, for those you guys don't pick on me, great.
We don't need to. You're just too good of a guy, too good of a gym. But if you guys enjoy what you listen to the podcast, go to Aquarium guy's podcast. On the bottom of the website you can find the Go fluke Yourself T shirts. You can support our sponsors. You can throw us a few bucks. Keep the lights on. And, Matt, you should just use the fluke term somewhere in your material. We want that to happen. We don't need any credit. That is yours to keep.
No, I know. I get where you're going with it. Now. Does the hoodie have a zipper?
It does.
How come no one I might just be into that.
We have a zipper hoodie just for you, and it's in fat man sizes. People like me could even get it.
What are you saying about Matt?
No, matt's a fit gentleman. But I'm just listening because we have a lot of neck, beard fat breathers on the podcast. I just want to let them know that they're included as well.
I'm just going to put this out there. We do have the big sizes. I bought one for Rob, the biggest one we could for Christmas. It didn't fit, so I'm now using it to cover my motorcycle in my garage.
Jackass. All right, guys.
Until next week.
Love you.
All right, now, thanks, guys, for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this melting.
Don't even get me started on this.