Welcome friends of the podcast. So let's go with our sponsor. Blue Crown aquatics So I got some deviously hidden information. You have to be in the depths of their Facebook feed to catch any details like this, but Robbie Chan softly leaked details this week. He's going to be bringing to us what, Jimmy?
I don't know.
What don't you follow the that's right, you're still working through social media. Well, for those of you that don't follow Blue karna Aquatics on Facebook, they're going to be bringing in betas on top of their already award winning shrimp.
That is right. I knew that.
You did?
I did know that.
I feel like you're just playing with me now.
I'm not playing with you.
All right, well, clearly he's been messaging Robbie Chan directly.
Then he's going to do some high end betas.
Extreme high end betas extreme high end betting. There's some great leaks that he's shown us. We don't know what this is coming in yet, but be prepared. Not only do you get award winner shrimp from Bluecarone Aquatics, but Betas are coming soon. To let you guys know about our offer, go to Bluecarone Aquatics.com and check out their award wing shrimp and use offer code aquarium guys with an S and get free shipping.
Free shipping? That is not possible.
So free shipping, if you think on Amazon, it comes with Amazon Prime shipping. No, this is fish shipping anywhere in the United States for nothing.
Fish shipping is expensive as all get.
Out, and I think they also screwed up. If you look on there and use that promo code, you can also get next day shipping for nothing. Yeah, now Robbie is going to hear this.
Don't tell him that.
No, I don't know, but get it on there before they take it away. Bluegron Aquatics.com offer code aquarium guys.
Good job, Rob. I can't believe you got through that without Scott.
I know, I need more caffeine. So next bit is, of course, our charity of choice, which is the Ohio Fish Rescue and the Ohio Fish Rescue, they just got done. I mentioned a little bit last week about rescuing even some native species in a local pond that's going to be torn down. So certainly check out the YouTube videos on that. But they're also continuing to add more and more tanks. Every video I see on there is just more and more expansion with these guys. So certainly check them out. Ohiofish Rescue. And the whole mantra with the Ohio Fish Rescue is, there isn't a humane society for fish. So they want to be that and give big fish a bigger home. People that buy a paku decide that it works in a ten gallon tank. Where is it supposed to go? Well, don't flush it on your toilet and certainly don't put on a lake, river, or stream. Call Ohio Fish Rescue. And if you want to go to their website, Ohiofish Rescue, you can donate money by using paypal patreon. They also have a Go fund me.
But buy a T shirt. Buy a T shirt. Call Bump. Give them some love. Like Rob said, don't take your paco and flush it down the toilet because they're too dang big to flush down the toilet. And the things that you don't know you know, you just told me a secret about about Robbie. He's going to be doing high in betas. Did you know what Big Rich is going to be doing?
What's Big Rich going to he's going.
To be doing hair care products.
Hair care products.
He's going to be doing mullets on YouTube. He's going to be selling some hair gel and some stuff. I'm pretty excited about it. I have not told him about it yet.
See, we're working on we're trying to bribe him into using this, like, new hair volume shampoo.
Oh, my Lord.
So we'll see. Hopefully talk him into that soon. But until then, at least give him a call and tell them that you love them. 216-773-0407.
And he's got to get on this before billy's Race cyrus catches wind of this because he'll step up and he will be trying to steal all his business.
Hey, they got mustache products they need mullet products.
Mullet products.
That's what they need. All right, let's kick that podcast, guys. Welcome to the Aquarium, guys. Podcast with your hosts, Jim colby and Rob olsen. All right, guys, welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast, coming live at you from Studio B.
Studio B, which is Rob's basement, my basement. And Adam, where are you at today studio. O, what's that stand for?
Office.
So I'm Rob Zulson. This is Jim colby.
Hey, everybody.
And Adam elnashar.
Hey, guys.
So today we have a special guest we have from Cleveland, Ohio. If I did my math correctly, it is Dave from something fishy. How are you doing, buddy?
Great. Thanks, guys, for having me.
I appreciate you having us on. We actually got a hold of you two days ago, and you were kind enough to join us last minute. Normally we have a lot more pre scheduled, but you were eager to jump right in and help us out.
I try.
So we were recommended to chat with you because you have quite a bit of expertise in African cichlids, and I've been told that you have had numerous trips to Africa to try to find and hand select rare varieties. Is that not true?
Actually, I've gone there diving. I got the malawi antegonica. You do not collect in those lake. I collected in South America when I was in Amazon, but in Africa, because some of those fish are deep. 5100ft. So you can't just bring those up the surface, catch up the net.
That's insane.
I mean, even, like, some of the dire frontosis could be, like, 200ft deep. So yeah, you're just not catching fish that easily and then put them in your little bucket and ship them back. So it's like a three days of flying also. So it's very grueling as a trip getting there and the trip getting back, but you learn about where their habitat is and exploring getting videos, pictures, and collaborating with other sicklit experts like at connings and Pamchin and the people of the lake.
Well, I appreciate you coming on the podcast and we're going to do a deep dive on a lot of your cyclist experience, but I do have to do some housekeeping. We've had a few different questions throughout the week and I just want to remind people that we do have a giveaway for Blue Crown Aquatics.
Sweet.
So go to our website aquariumgyspodcast.com, and on the bottom of the website you'll see a giveaway link. Click on that sign up. It just needs, I believe, your name, number, address so we can know where to send it. And it's for $425. Gift cards to Blue.
Crown aquatics If I do my math right, that is about $1,000.
Thank God you don't do math.
It's $100. I'm sorry.
$1,000. No, try again.
Robbie just had a heart attack I didn't like.
Now we're going to have to pull more money out of our pockets. What's going on here?
Yeah, not good, but no.
Certainly sign up in the bottom of the website and we've had a lot of people sign up so far and certainly deliver us questions, but also questions directly to our email address this week. So to dive into that, we have Evan and start from the top. I found your podcast this week and listened to the tips and hacks episode. jimmy's looking at me like all on smiley right now. He's not about to compliment you on your did you redo work?
No. I was going to say that particular episode we pulled out of our butt, it was excellent.
Yes, it was great. We didn't pull out of our butt, sir.
We did we did some homework.
We did quite a bit of homework to build those lists. But again, back to evan's email. I was wondering about making your own sponge filters. I heard from one of you talking about it and getting foam from a hobby lobby, which sounds like a great idea and much more effective than buying elsewhere. However, I was wondering how to cut the hole in it and put a tube uplift tube for it. I can't remember which one of you were talking about it. Also, with making the uplift tube, is there any special ideas for that? I have recently purchased a couple of Swiss tropical filters and love the jet lifter tube in them, which flows a lot of water. Trying to figure out how much. Excuse me. Trying to figure out how to make them on my own rather than purchase them. So that was yours, Jim.
I've done a lot of sponge filters first. I used to purchase my sponge filters from Steve Rubiki and then watch some stuff, talk to some people about how to do it. One of his questions was, how do you make that hole? And somebody turned me on to this. And it works really easy if you take yourself a half inch of copper tubing, all you have to do is just sharpen the edge all the way around. And you can take that copper tubing put in the middle of your sponge and just spin it with your fingers real lightly and push it down. And that thing cuts like a knife through butter, and it works really well. And I use that a lot. And then I just go to the local hardware store and pick up half inch pvc, cut it to length, and make it work for myself.
Like that kind of like an 1880 wart remover.
Pretty accurate. Yeah. Wow. They're already hammered on me for being old.
So what about the tube? I got questions about he used the term uplift tube.
Yeah, Swiss tropicals. Actually, I do buy all my shrimp foam from them because you can order the different size, the 20 PSI, the 30 PSI I'm sorry, ppi, which is PSI. I'm so stupid. ppi. And that's just the size of the little tiny holes in the foam. And they have what they call an upflip tube, which is basically just pvc that they've created to bring the water up through the tube. And the Swiss tropicals has probably got the best price that I found for that particular foam. And that foam is a real high end. It's made just for aquatics. And with shrimp, you got to be a little more careful when you're using different foams.
But you can't beat just stealing it out of your grandpa's cadillac.
I do not take it out of rob's accused me of years of just taking it from a seat cushion or something like that, and now he's going to get punched in the throat again.
It's going to happen.
Absolutely.
All right, so enough of the questions we got.
Does your mom have any more questions, Rob?
That is not my mom. It's Evan.
Okay.
I'll even go with the first initial, evan B. Evan B. Not my mom. All right, so I just want to remind you guys, you can also join us for Discord if you want to join questions. What we do is we actually answer them live on the spot. Discord is an excellent client for chat and voice. So if you want to talk to us, great place to do it as well. So if you want more immediate response is otherwise. We love emails. We love seeing them in the giveaway submissions, certainly just however you're comfortable with. And you can also call us.
I got a great email sent to me, and I didn't bring it today. I'm going to bring it next week and stuff. And I'll read that one out because Rob's always getting all the emails I got an email. I'm bringing it next week. We'll talk about that. I'm pretty excited about it.
Are you going to leave this poor listener waiting a whole week just because you forgot it?
No, I didn't forget it. I had another thing that I wanted to do today. You young kids always want to do a shout out. I want to do a shout out to my all right, now we're going.
To do a shout out just for you.
Well, so let me tell you about my day today.
Okay.
My wife and I went down to Minneapolis, 200 miles drive for us. We go to the Chiropractor down there. The chiropractor that we go to is very specialized for Rheumatoid. For rheumatoid for Toleosis.
Okay, thank you.
Yeah. And anyway, he's also the chiropractor for the Minnesota Vikings. And today he grew me a great compliment, I think, and he compared me to one of the players, and he goes, you're nothing like him.
What player? That's what matters. What player?
One of the big fat guys up front.
Well, thank goodness you're nothing like him.
Because you're nothing like him. You're fatter and uglier. And he said, and so I'm taking that as a win because I got compared to one of the football players.
You worked your way up to be compared before, you wouldn't even be in the same vocabulary.
You're talking about comparing me to a professional athlete. So I was pretty excited, but so we spent some time down in Minneapolis. We opted over to ikea. Oh, my God. Spent 3 hours in ikea.
How was the Swedish meatball?
Swedish meatballs were delicious. And what I feel like you have a question.
You ate those? So you can bulk up to compare better to the Minnesota Vikings.
The Minnesota Vikings. After we did the ikea thing, and then we came back home, and I'm listening on the radio, and I heard something pretty exciting. I can hear Adam sighing. He's bored with this story already.
That was him. hiccuping. He drank before the episode. I did not drink.
Adam'S drunk again. So what I heard and I'm very excited, I want to do a shout out to my friends this week. It's it's the 50th anniversary of the Gang from sesame Street. So I want to say hi to Burton. ernie.
Oh, my God.
And Cookie Monster and all those guys. I'm just really excited about this.
Where are you now?
Yeah, but here's the problem I have with sesame Street. I watched it as a kid. Yes, there was TV when I was a kid, Rob. So don't sit there and nod to your head that I didn't watch.
No, it was just started in living color, was the advertisement.
Don't bite me. When I listen to this and stuff, I'm thinking what would make this more realistic is let's update let's update this whole sesame Street thing to 50 years old. Let's make them their age. So I'm going to come up with a new sesame Street thing. I'm going to try to get the wall wall. I'm going to switch it up a little bit.
So what they're going to do, right? Let me guess on this one, right? So you're going to see Burton ernie as an old gay couple driving in a car on Sundays real slow, and then you're going to see Cookie Monster fat like William Bradford. Talk about diabetes.
Diabetes, yeah.
Right?
Exactly. So I want to make this a reality show. We all know the Count, right? The vampire looking dude. So he's been diagnosed with ocd, and he's now suing The Big Bang Theory because he just now realized that they stole his identity and gave it to sheldon. And so I think that would be kind of cool. And like you said, Cookie Monster, we're going to give him diabetes.
I got to give you more homework because clearly you have all this free time.
I had 4 hours of driving it. I had a lot of stuff.
Oh, my God.
I want Big Bird to break a hip. I want him to be in the Big Bird house.
Well, he would be in the sanitarium because he has that imaginary friend. This is integrating very fast.
So the stefolophagus, they put him on antidepressants, stuff like that?
No, he's imaginary.
Stefolophagus is not imaginary. We all can see is.
All right, I'm going to reel this back into the podcast here. Come on.
I have to have one more.
All right.
We finally discover why Oscar the grouch is a grouch. You know why?
Ebola. He's not been laid.
Wow, you guys are evil. No, we finally find out that what happened is that his wife had an affair with Cookie Monster and Darrenees. Yeah, from and then his wife and kids left him, and then he lost his job and he lost his mortgage on his garbage can, and now he's living in a cardboard box down by the river. I think the thing would just be score big on TV. I think the kids love it.
All right, well, I know now to give you more homework during the week.
I like it.
Your kids? Are you the one that took away all the candy from the kids last week?
Adam dad tax is not stealing power.
All right, I have a relevant story that has to do with fish, so we don't have hard tangents. So this week, one of our listeners on Discord was telling me a story of how he's trying to teach his friend more about fish because he's getting into fish, right? He's his personal guru. So I heard a term on a YouTube video called culling. What's?
Culling?
And he sat down and explained it to him. Well, they have these fish when they're born, right? Say you have a hundred in a batch. They pick the ones that don't swim, right, that have some sort of disability, or the finn didn't grow.
Right.
And then they just kill them. And he described it as killing disabled children.
Wow.
Right? So public service announcement, bad way to do it. Also hilarious. You're not wrong, but it's slightly more humane than that.
There's a lot of snowflakes out there crying right now because of you.
Right. So to get properly informed, join our join our discord again, aquarium guyspodcast.com. And quick shout out to the people on the discord some of our usuals Got skilla Residezi, danielle, zenix, elroy, and.
Of course, Mr. pickle.
Mr. pickles. Yes, Mr. pickles.
Mr. pickle is one of our first listeners who is a young gentleman from Canada, and we feel bad for him because we're from Minnesota, and it's colder up there than it is here for the moment.
Give it time.
Yeah.
All right, so we got to do some questions. And just want to remind you, merch stores out there this time is running out. Like, we got to put a clock on this. If we don't get enough people buying the merch. I won't do the crop top if it's past December 31.
And let's set the timer now. Oh, it's over.
No, we're going to wait until November 31. Again, if we have I think it was 20 different people ordering from the merch store.
20 T shirts. That wouldn't count.
No, it has to be 20 separate people burying from the merch store. I will wear an aquarium guy's crop top and take a picture for you all on social media.
And so far, we've sold two. One to Rob and one to his mom.
No, we sold more than that. All right, just to make you more nervous.
All right.
But I'm not going to tell you. Yeah, you just got to get more people on there.
All right, let's get to work. People have got nothing else to do.
Oh, I'm the one with the Cookie Monster story.
You know what? When I'm a millionaire because of this or in jail, I swear to God.
HBO is going to talk to you about this new aquarium sesame Street series. Yeah, I'm through.
Epstein didn't kill himself either.
Yeah.
Oh, boy. All right, Dave. Excuse our zaniness.
He's hung up and he's out. We're in the corner drinking.
Yes, we are.
I'm ready to sleep.
We have that effect on a lot of people.
Well, to keep you awake, we got to get some information out of you. So, Dave, okay, again, let's start with more about you. So again, you own something fishy in Cleveland, Ohio. Tell us more about that.
Yeah, I've been in business over 28 years. Started a business I was 22. Been working in the industry since I was 15 and a hobby for over 40 years. And we didn't have video games back then. And when you had hobbies and it became addiction bred something, whatever it was, convicts, molly's. And then it just grew from there. And I got into African cichlids. jeez, probably about 36, 37 years ago and been hooked ever since. I didn't want to do construction all my life for factory work, whatever. And I work shops and different stores over the early years. And that's when I started my own and started doing the maintenance service, doing installs, and chrome was servicing and then my first pet shop, and that was a failure. After two years and just did the maintenance, I worked at amateur officer. And then I got back into retail in 2000 and then I bought my building, like, two years later. And I'm over 500 tanks, 36, 37,000 gallons, running with, like, three hatcheries. Wow.
So clearly you do breeding on site, then. That's an incredible amount of tanks.
Yeah, we do quite a bit. Not everything. Everybody else breed everything. No, it's impossible to breed everything. My favorites is Fritosis from like take anika. I have probably 1000 Fritosas. I breed sayers when they do breed, and then I have all different types. burundi kagomas Mazuas, samaz Nangos Medivarians Makulas mobas Capapas quite a bit.
Will they interbreed with each other? I like different places.
Absolutely. I get that question here and there. People want to buy different ones and I'm not for that. You keep them exclusively. If you want a group, you have five or more in a group because they're co species, aggressive, and obviously a six foot tank is ideal. pertussis can live average 1015 years and get up to 16 inches. My last name goes my 350 here at home I had before my wild ones, my males were 18 inches. They're the size of ten gallon tanks, so they're massive. If I raise some babies, if I have like, cagoma, seven bars with burundi, it's pretty obvious to tell the difference because the cacomas have seven bars. I do have a controversial one. I don't advertise too much. I'm not breeding them yet. I'm raising several. Up is the Black widow variants. It's not a hybrid. Everybody thinks when something's different or new, it's a hybrid fruitosa with miss bars, mooning or whatever. And it happens in the wild. So it's not something that's genetics, it happens. And typically all my life I always wanted like, perfect bars, perfect fins, straight bars, whatever. But there is some of that stuff happens in the wild with a lot of fish. And I guess in Europe is probably where they started. They get this marble pattern. I think it's kind of cool. It's different, but it's a tank strain fish. It's not a hybrid. Like parrot fish, cross with the Red devil and several whatever.
So 500 tanks. That's quite the outfit. You must outsource a wholesale fish to other stores. It's not just your store, correct?
No, I have a little bit in the past. I get inquiries here and there, but I don't have the time or the manpower. If anything, that's been my biggest challenge. And anybody I know is in business, not just this business. Getting reliable, dependable help has been a complete nightmare.
Is your family involved?
Pardon me?
Is your family involved at all with your business?
No, my son helps here and there. My 14 year old, like the oca stravaganza next weekend, so he's going to help me out. But he's looking forward to a steak dinner that evening. So that's one of the reasons he's going to help.
I will help you for a steak dinner.
I'll drive down, we go to hibachi, get some flamingon. There you go. Yeah, but no, it's me, and I have my right hand man. It's been with me for a few years. And I have a couple of other helpers. I'm looking to hopefully hire a couple more because this is a busy season for us. It kicks in with the bad weather, and so the next six months is busy prime time.
So where are you going to be next week? If people are listening, where will you be next week?
You said the Ohio Cigarette Association cyclist catfish extravaganza. It's held the first weekend before Thanksgiving every year, and it's at the Holiday Inn in strongsville, Ohio. This is the 25th year. It's probably one of the biggest, best cigarettes, freshwater shows in the United States. I've been a lot I belong to aca, and I've been around the country and out of the country, obviously. Australia, you name it around, and you got all the sellers. I mean, there's probably 300 people, 300 rooms selling fish and people in other rooms. It's crazy, right?
I've been to a lot of these shows, too, and it's hard for listeners, especially newbies. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you have all these different breeders that come from all over the United States, and they open up, basically, their hotel room door and they put the fish in a bag and put it on a table. Correct.
Yeah. Or I used to do it. Now I have more people come to my shop. I do tours of the hatcheries, so I get people from Canada all over Larry Johnson, which is I've gone with him to malawi, so everybody likes to come and see the shop. I used to set up the rooms like a damn fish store. Throw the bed to the side, throw the furniture off to the side of the wall, and just put 48 ten gallon tanks in a two by four rack, a whole wall, and basically open a fish door in the hotel. But that's a lot of work for three days. It's fun when you're younger or whatever. Now I'm getting old and tired, and I like, just people come to shop, spend their money, they go out the door, I'm done. Right.
You don't have to explain to the hotel why the floor is all wet.
Yeah, I mean, knock on wood. oca hasn't had any major issues. I know one aca convention in Cincinnati, I think it was. Someone had some half ass rack and it collapsed and the hotel was freaking out, the damage, the water damage and everything. But yeah, then they have a swap meet on Saturday, which I enjoy. It's like 2 hours of mayhem. There's a lot of people come for that swap meet.
Is that every Saturday?
No, it's the weekend before Thanksgiving every year. Right? This is the 25th year they've been doing it.
I thought you were talking about a different swap meet.
No, this is the oca. They have a swap meet on Saturday in the afternoon, like two to 430 or something. And you run a table or a couple of tables and people just put their stuff in and I bring stuff and put sick of posters in my shirt. I sell a bunch of my baby sicklet stuff. Actually. I sell doughnuts even. There's a local donut shop here called Jack Frost. It's like number one in the state for many years. I know the owners. I used to teach the kids at the crowd school and I sell donuts for like $2 apiece. Sometimes I make more money selling donuts than fish.
Whatever it takes. People come in the morning, they got to eat.
Write that down. I'm going to start doing that.
We're going to contact sandy's Donuts.
We have some friends that own a store in fargo, North Dakota. And they are known for their cyclists. And they have people that come down from Canada. They have people that come from all over the place and they're really into cyclists. And I know they've been there many, many times and stuff. And the last time Jeff and Nancy were up there, I said, hey, how was the show? He goes, I was in more hotels than any horror in that town in the last freaking 15 minutes.
He goes, wow.
He said I was in 30 rooms and 15 minutes to see what people had.
Awesome.
It's fun. It's crazy. I'm looking forward, I'm excited. And I have Jay Wilson, that's poplar on social media. He's with fritz. So we're doing like an open house on Thursday from two to five and I think we can get some pizza for customers, talk about the product, whatever, and give some stuff away. So it's fun. But by time, Sunday night, I'll be done and over, ready for Thanksgiving Day for a partial day off, I guess, because I still work on every holiday.
Yeah, we had a few weeks back, we had Steve ricky from Angels Plus and he said he can't remember the last time he's had a full day off. He's in the hatchery every single day, including Christmas, his birthday and New Year's.
We're picking on him that you have to milk the cows.
There's no day off in this business, not with the amount of stuff I have about money and livestock. It takes 2 hours to feed at the main shop and hatchery. Then I have another building a mile away from the shop that. I raised fish also so far.
Listers want to somehow get some fish from you. Do you sell through the Internet? Do you sell just through your shop? How can they reset their money?
Unfortunately, I have not shipped any fish this year back to the we've been busy, which is good retail wise. And then I'm a small operation. I'm big, but I'm not. But I don't have the during the Internet thing. And shipping is a whole other animal. I've shipped as far as Hawaii. I've shipped the United States multiple times. Livestock, dry goods, but just not enough time in a day right now. And people ask a million questions. What a million pictures? Sometimes they don't buy. Can you hold it for two weeks until I get my paycheck? No. It's like you got crazy customers locally. You just open up the can of worms of a billion crazy people in the United States and they just think you're open twenty four seven and then you're dealing with the postal service, whatever. You hear the horror stories or you dealt with it yourself. Either bringing fish in or shipping fish out. It's definitely I'm missing the boat. I know it would be a lot. I could sell everything I have in prior week because I'm well known. Everybody tells me and I get people asked from other countries. I've had Germany, Africa call me wanting to buy my fish. And it's like, holy crap. So it's back and forth about taking it to that level. But I want to go that big. Of course I want to make more money, but then do I want the more headaches? Am I going to have the people power? Because I'm only one person. There's only so much I could do.
I totally understand because I've been in the wholesale business many years and I've dealt with the flipping airlines and I'm not going to bad multi airline.
It rhymes with schmelta.
It does. Okay, thanks for saying it.
I'm here for you.
Oh, man. And rob's and I were just went up to Schmelta on Monday and picked up a load of stuff.
So it was pretty cute. I went in there, right? They look at me and then they look at Jim and have a completely white face all of a sudden. And they call him by name, which no airline associate does. We'll get your package right away, sir. I'm like, what happened?
I had an instance here about three months ago. I got there, they said, well, the person that does cargo went home early and we can't give you stuff till tomorrow. And I'm sitting there with $3,000 worth of stuff. I lost my mind and I made her cry. I made her cry.
She deserved it.
Good. I made her cry. And then the manager came and then the security came and I told barney Fifth, the security agent, that he would get more help because I'm going to lose my F in mind.
Barney fife is old and small.
Yeah. And anyway, they finally got me my stuff, and now the last ten times I've been in there, they've got me out pretty darn quick.
First name basis.
Yes. And she doesn't cries me.
I know what you're talking about.
They don't care. They do not care.
I had about 25 boxes, and it looked like someone played hockey with the tow motors. I was so freaking pissed. And they give you the run around. I email, and you do all this stuff, and it's a long drawn out thing until you finally give up. I mean, I had, like, $6,700 in shipping and it was oh, man. Yeah, you don't get me started on that shit.
I picked up a box one time. You're going to back me up on this, Dave? I know you are. The fish that are dead are always the most expensive thing that you ordered every single time.
Murphy'S Law.
Yes. And I had a box with a hole in it, one side and out the other. And they go, yeah, it came in like that. And I said, that's funny. It matches your freaking forklift tine perfectly as I stood there and put the box up to the forklift tine. And this was back before 911, when I actually could go in the back of melta Airlines.
Not anymore.
Can't go back there anymore. And anyway, not unless you help them.
With a dead body.
Yeah. And son of a gun. If it didn't take me I'm not kidding you. It took me about 120 days to finally get paid and the one bag of fish, and it was about $180, and I wasn't going to let it go. I just became rabid at that point. And I thought, if I have to go out here and steal $180 worth of napkins from Schmelta Airlines, we tried.
To do the toilet paper, but they had those lot cases, so you just had to unroll it and then kind of put it in your bag.
I don't blame you. I'm still bitter before I die or I'm coming back. As karma.
As a death wish, we're just going to go in the front and leave a deuce, right?
Leave it on the weight where you drop the boxes, whatever. You weigh your boxes when you walk in. Just leave one right there and squat a pop there. You want to weigh out that turd there.
Am I overweight, ma'am? Go ahead and just take some off for me, why don't you?
You know what? We're going to do this because we've had so many people on this podcast that have absolutely just hate the airlines. So I'm going down there to take care of his person, and he's going to come up here to fargo. We're going to get Steve or vicky to go somewhere else to take we're all going to go over and just repay everybody's debt. If you're going to go in the news.
It's like some anonymous pack, but everybody's crap it on scales.
You don't want your face if you're from here, you don't want your face on the local news. But I don't care about Ohio letter rip. I don't care.
You're already on the Secret Service wise. Secret Service. You can't get worse.
That's another story that yeah, the Secret Service does not like me, right?
No, it was just so hilarious because I went in there and what did you say, barney? fivee? I said the guy told him he looked over and then saw me. Because you're what, five five eight on a good day. Right? I'm 6263. I'm not a small man either. So I'm towering above Jim and he comes in there and I wear shades. I have an eye condition. So I come in a big dude, big black coat, black shades next to the guy that made the gal behind the counter cry. They were definitely staring me up one side and the other.
Yeah, I wish you had a trench coat on because then we could have made the news again.
Yes.
Lord. That's why I don't visit you guys.
So off airlines and let's just talk about, like, fish again. Your favorite is African cichlids, is that correct?
Well, yeah. I mean, I like a lot of stuff, but my passion, I guess, would be the Riff Lake African Cichlids. Fritosis. Because that's a common question for years. What's your favorite fish day? What's your favorite? And I say fritosis. They get the big bump on their head. They're like big bulldogs, a lot of personality. Yeah, I love the fish. They're like a big bulldog to me, whatever. And I get good money out of them. That helps, like them more, breeding them and sell them babies. And I've gotten a reputation for them, so that helps. But I like a lot of things. I got stingrays, arijuana, tiger tatinoid. I just hold my Abbey puffer today and all kinds of stuff. I have plant tanks. I've had discus before. Discus were discus? Pretty much. So I killed more discus when I was 15 years old than I made.
Everybody goes in headphones with discus and seems to fail before they get the kinks run out. So that's a normal thing.
Yeah, I killed a while back then. So there was three discus. I was a discus. There was Brown heckle, which were my favorite, and green. And it was controversial. Blue or green, it was one of the two. But that was it. Nobody knew anything. I had tropical fish, hobbies magazine and encyclopedia. That was it.
He was reading it by candlelight. He's old like me.
Oh, is that right?
Yeah.
Hey, now.
Hey, I'm in the same boat as you.
Hey, just because it's a collective doesn't mean you can't still be offended, Jimmy.
Come on. When I was in high school, I used to take notes in high school and I used to just chip it with my mallet and my thing on the cave wall.
I didn't even have to make that joke.
It's so easy. I'm ahead of you tonight.
So just to go over African cichlids as a whole, we have a lot of new listeners, so let's just go over general care and maintenance of African cichlids. So if you're going to have someone start, what's the best variety to start with?
Oh, boy. Usually when someone gets an African cichlids, well, we'll take it one side. They get a negative view, because if you go into the chains or box stores and assorted, african cichlids are some of the worst cigarettes to own. The Kenya, the eratis, the johannis exasperatus, whatever chipoki those become. lucifers, because that's what it's double. And they want to kill everything. They want to kill you eat the neighbor cat. So that's usually and that usually gives a black eye to the whole family of African cichlids. So I avoid anything that's usually assorted cigarettes. So glow by any of that group is trouble. You have to pack those heavily to keep digression down and probably have no decoration or have that thing filled to the top and bottom with so much decor. So they each have their nook and cranny, but they're very aggressive. They're very pretty. That's one reason they sell them, because when they're babies, they're colorful. Right off the bat.
When you talk about packing them in, do you mean just solid numbers or stocking overstocking?
So like a 55 gallon. You put like 25 of those in there 30 of them.
And it's not 25 small. That's at size.
Yeah, I mean, most of those average three, four, six inches. Other than the crabo or the bumblebee sickle, which is labeled, that's a big bonus, which is a zebra group. The males are black, and they could get nine inches easy. Females are orange with the black stripes, but those get to be big. But most of those average four to six inches. But if you pack them, I use an example of customers. I said it's like, get in the alley with 50 dudes. You know what? This is a no win situation. I'm just going to join you.
That's a way to think about it.
Everybody has to take one punch and that's it, right?
It's like, okay, we'll just get along. They can't cover no territory. They're just too many. So unless you have a big tank, the bigger tank always makes it easier. The more surface area is always better. So it depends. But like a good starter. Africans, usually I'll just say the scenario. What we do with people starting a new cigarette tank like you are my customers coming in and asking this exact question.
Let's just pretend Mr. pickles walked in and he's 16 and he wants to do cyclists because I know he's listening.
All right, buddy, we're on. So 55. I prefer a 75 gallon tank. That footprint is great. So if it's just find a new tank. Budget is not too major. So we say 75 gallon. We get people to set it up. We're old school. Get it running for a couple of days, get the temperature up 75 to 80 degrees. We want you to over filter their tank. Do not skimp on a filter or a heater. Those are the central things that keep them alive. So why buy $300 for the fish and put the cheapest ass crap on there? That ass backwards, we call it. So you go with the biggest filter you can afford. You can put on a tank or as much filteration as possible. It just makes it everything better. Easier to maintain, better for the fish, better for you. So you get that running for two to three days, temperatures right, everything's right. And you put your normal prime water condition or whatever in there. And you come in, you get your starter fish. They're non African, so we sell a lot of them. Like Tiger barbs, Giant daniels, Black tetras. They're hardy, inexpensive fish. You throw ten of those in there and you let them run for about a week or so and that helps get the cycle naturally. And then you come in and get your first starter fish. We have a list. We have like a pamphlet at our counter. So we write the names down for the customer, especially they're new into the cigarettes, so we could help them and us keep track of their tanks. So when they come in, they don't come in. They have a blue one, orange one. They come in, they have a list, and then we know what they can go. Next to the tank, you put the least wimpiest, smallest cicle first in the tank. Anything you tend to like that's more aggressive or grows quicker should be last. You want them going into their tank. You don't want something in there that's going to be more aggressive off bat. And then try to put fish into their tank. That makes it more challenging. So like electric yellow, libidochromis, rusties, acis. As far as mabuna, slow size, those are probably my favorite mabuna. They're a good strain. I dove in Taiwan. Reef. I definitely fell in love with them even more after that. And females are bright orange, gold, males turn blue and black stripe. But they're not the aggressiveness of like a Kenya. So those are good mobunas. And then you move into peacocks. That's a popular one because of the colors. And then some of the Haps electroblues or ovatus, which is a zurich twos borley eyes. I mean, it's a vast majority to choose from, but yeah, if you do it in stages, you do it right, usually has success. If you follow our way of life of doing it, you have success.
So let's say that they started with some of the recommendations you had and they intentionally, just to make sure that any aggression issues were taken care of. They purposely overcrowded. So, number one, they have to have a really good filtration and you really stress that. But also, do you recommend using some sort of current generation in the tank?
I mean, you can those wave pumps I have, I like to definitely have aeration. That to me is like a backup system because any of us probably know it's been in it power failures. The canister filter, power filter doesn't kick back on 99% of the time, an air pump will go back on. So even just an airstone or a hidden sponge filter or something, it causes under tow less dead spots. Circulation helps the filters work better, but you could add that and it's in shallower waters around the reefs and islands. I dove, it gets choppy. I got caught in a curtain. The boat hands had to come and get me. One time I felt like I was on a treadmill 100 yards out. Now I wasn't going anywhere, so they had to come and rescue me on one dive. I got caught in a current at one island. That could definitely help. It's not a negative thing at all.
So because you're overcrowding, I'm assuming you keep decorations to a minimum. So I see a lot of cichlid users have a lot of rock formations where they have caves where they can get off of some current, but I don't see a lot of weeds because again, you want as much air space or swim space in the tank as possible. That's correct.
Well, it depends. Like your babuna species are typically like reef fish, so they're hovering around in three to 10 meters. 1030ft is like the islands, a lot of rocks, and that's where the mumbunas are typically at. Or like taking naked all the jeweles and lamps, hanging the rocks, your predator haps and stuff like that, they're going to be at the edges or the sand where they breathe, they dig their dunes. So you can do I tell people sometimes, depending on the species and the set up, either have sometimes no decoration or a lot of it, or you do one side, heavy stone, rock, wood, whatever, and then you have one, like, swimming area on one end of the tank, so it could vary depending on the species of the fish, too.
So any other specialty care needs or just make sure again, temperature wise, you want them 80 degrees.
Yeah, when I was diving, it was typically 78 degrees, the water temperatures. So we keep our 78, 80. Typically we try to get people every other week. If they get the bigger filteration, more filtration, go every other week, do about 25% water changes. We do add salt, basically marine salt or a sick of salt as a conditioner and a preventative mess. And basically diet is obviously important. We do not feed feeders. We do not feed, typically high protein diets. We feed extreme, that's our main food. And then some Norfolk Southern Saint Nikins, like the lamps, jewelry and stuff, we'll give them a treat of some bloodworms or something like that. They can handle the higher protein. But most of your malawians, we avoid the high protein, any high protein diets or stuff like that. In moderation people, that's one of the biggest issues in the hobby or my maintenance service is people tend to over feed fish. That's one of the biggest challenges, getting people to feed correctly to the amount of fish and the size fish they have in their tank.
So going over just again for food in the areas that we get a lot of African cichlids essentially come from what we'd say. What four lakes? tanganika, victoria malawi and Edward tanika.
Malawi is your dominant. Actually they're the riff lakes. Victoria is not really a riff lake, if I recall. What's the riff lake, Dave, that's formed by volcanic rifts. Okay, I'm no historian or scientist, but I mean, reading my old books and iconic, whatever they say, one time or another, maybe 1000 years ago, they were part of the ocean and then were separated at one point in history. And some don't believe that. But there's like sponges, there's jelly, freshwater jellyfish, I've seen them, I swam in them. There's eels, there's all kinds of weird stuff. And there's actually some sponge on some of these rocks that some of the fish actually graze on or whatever. So it's very similar. The water is very hard. They remind me of saltwater fish in a lot of ways are breeding behavior. I was drinking the water out in the middle of malawi. So there's still some untouched areas there. If you could go there, do it. It's experience of a lifetime.
So to go over a little bit of the history and background where these fish come from, I always like to mention Lake Victoria and some others. So in was it 1920 again, we'll just have Lake Victoria as the example because that's the one that's been most documented. As far as the devastation in 1920, the locals wanted to start a big fish market. It was mainly people from Europe that wanted to do this and they wanted game fish. So the idea is they wanted to bring in a species called the Nile perch. It is a massive size bass. These things get as big as a person, well over £100, £150, well over. These things get massive. And if you want to see these, you can actually Google on YouTube, river monsters. And he's got massive ones like these. But they're talking in the 1920s that they wanted to introduce these. They talked about it, it was a big debate for many years. And in 1950 they introduced tilapia to Lake Victoria and it was pretty devastating. It destroyed a few different species and it had an impact on the lake. But they went forward with it in 19, 62, 63. In that time zone, they introduced the nile perch. And that destroyed an estimation right away of 500 different cichlid species.
And what was the reason that they.
Introduced all these fish for a fish market? So they could harvest these for the locals and for game fish, for food fish.
Yeah, well if they eat, I mean, those people, I was there and they eat a lot. I mean, everything is about that lakes. So you see this hanging, whatever, those victorious, those now perch eat everything they could hit in their mouth. So all those indigenous species that did escape to the rocks areas and other parts of the lake were decimated. They were eaten. So they're gone from history. I never seen, I don't know whose toss it was. Even the Nile perch, they overfish so much, they don't even get them that big anymore. Right. It's crazy. And like in malawi, I've seen it like firsthand Bill Gates foundation and Linda Gates foundation, they donated mosquito nets for the locals, whatever, because of malaria and all that stuff. But these guys got smart and sewn mega, 100 yards, a mile long, giant fish net, which are the size of your brine shrimp nets, a real fine net. They catch everything. I've seen that stuff on beaches, in these fishing villages and just thousands and thousands of cigarettes and catfish babies, they catch everything. So they don't eat all of that stuff. What they do is they sun bake it and they feed it to the chickens and the goat as feed. So they don't realize they're just destroying their whole ecosystem and their food chain. And it's sad, it's scary because the future of a lot of these lakes and what inhabits them is going to be gone, probably pretty bleak.
So the decimation continued and they started seeing a species for the now perch. The numbers decline in the late 1990s and by 2010 they saw a massive devastation in the population. Though essentially the entire ecosystem is beginning to crash. The top predator doesn't have enough stuff to feed off of, so the numbers didn't continually decline and it's heavily fished. So before all this, well before the introduction, it was again, like you mentioned, a freshwater marine reef environment. It was incredible. And they had cichlids that were omnivores detrovores, meaning they would eat decaying scraps of anything, insectivores, planktivores. So they're literally just plankton feeders, sponge eaters. There's a huge diversity of different types of cyclists and cyclists needs and care. So yeah, you saying that it's not necessarily a high protein diet, really does resonate, that not every cichlids are the same and there used to be a ton more.
Oh yeah, it's a shame, it's sad, but unfortunately the world is a third world living.
I don't know, in the history of Lake Victoria specifically in 1980s, I believe, they introduced water hyacinth, which is known to just spread, especially if you're in a warm climate, spread and cover everything. So that made a lot of dead spots across the lake, but it did bring out some herbivore species around 1980 that thought were completely extinct. So there's been some documentation of it, but it's still a tragedy, I think gives a little background for the listeners.
I didn't know that one, but that makes sense, I guess.
So you have some experience going to these lakes, so describe that for the listeners. Number one, what encouraged you? I know you love fish. It was just that love. And you decided, I got to get this done.
Did you go with a group of people?
It's a dream. You only live once. And I was like, this is I live and breathe my entire life as a kid. And he always natural geographic, whatever. It's like, man, I can't believe it. And then I talked to, I don't know, I got odd connings, got me with Larry Johnson, which I'll see next week. Come good friends. And I just, how do I do this? What do I need to do? Blah, blah, blah gives you itinerary what you need to do. You have to get all these shots and pills and go crazy. And I flew out by myself, out to meet them somewhere in malawi. And that was then we had a lady from Australia, a couple of guy from Wales and UK, pete Barnes, which is a popular one over there. And then who else, Larry? There's like international group. I just got certified finally to die before I went down that trip. And I mean, I loved it was it was awesome. It was just experience. I just hate the traveling, all that flying. Oh my gosh, it's horrendous.
How long does it take you to get there?
Malawi, I was 2014, I went and it's whatever, two and a half days. Two days. Oh my lord, it's long. And when I was coming back, I was wanting to break out the company card. That plane was so cool. I was like, I wanted business, whatever it cost, I didn't care. I couldn't get nothing. And it was like and when we were coming back, we went to some little airport. Gas fuel must have been cheap because it's like in a desert somewhere. It's kind of scary. And that's from adis, that was from long way to some desert. To ADAS abbas. ADAS abbas to Rome. Rome to dulles, Washington, and Washington to Cleveland. Coming back now. tang anika oh my gosh, it's about 36, 37 hours of flying, I think, or something.
So how long do you normally, I mean 36 hours that's I mean, I fly 3 hours of Florida and I want to kill people. Seriously.
Well, that's because you fly schmaltz.
Yeah, I fly schmilter.
Because I met Odd and pam chin, california and Chicago, because I kind of like want to be with them because they've been doing this for years. He's been going for 30 years. So I was like, they know what they're doing, where they're going, right, man, I flew with them and we went to God trying to remember him getting old. I know istanbul, like three different airports and then Tanzania, which was this little airport to get to the lodge in capilli, it was nine hour plus drive in a truck SUV. So it's three days, three and a half days. So it's a week of just traveling to get there. So two weeks of diving. We started in Tanzania, capilli, and worked our way down to zambia. And yeah, it was definitely an experience. I had so much footage and videos nobody's even seen yet. I just haven't had time to download. I have that Jimmy, I bartered with him, so hopefully I get some YouTube stuff down the road. I just got to get all that stuff to him and he could do his little computer magic.
So you got to have that as a subscriber goal. Once you get X subscribers, then you'll start leaking some of these amazing dives.
Yeah, because there's so much people don't. It's a different world. What you see in a tank. This is one thing, but seeing it live, it's awesome.
So this is like three weeks actual. I mean, you're gone about three weeks then. Really?
Oh, absolutely, yeah. When I went to South America was like two weeks. So that's much easier. But muddy and humid. I've been to Australia, I went to Great Barrier Reef there before on the rainforest in Australia.
So this must cost you three or $4,000 just in airfare.
Actually, tangonika was cheaper than malawi. This time last year I went to Tagunica, it was with the insurance, I think it was 1350. So it was a good deal.
Wow.
Flying. When I went to malawi, it was with insurance. Was 1750 really affordable?
Yeah, I was going to say that's not horrible. Other than the damn flight. So what's the insurance? What's the insurance?
Protection of baggage and whatever. When you're doing international flight, I think it's worth it just to have that extra coverage. What's another 100, $200? I mean, you're going that far, have some kind of peace of mind. So yeah, I just rather try to be as safe as possible and have some kind of backup. If you lose your luggage and your gopros and everything and you can ruin your trip, but at least you're getting paid at the end if something happens, I guess.
Or holton. You can find the African version of Best Buy.
No, they ain't shit. Amazon walmart. There's no Amazon with the malawi, I think I was like the medic because I'm like a survivalist. I over packed. I think if the airplane is going down, what am I going to do? How am I going to survive? I'm on island if I'm in the water, that's my mentality. I'm over and above, usually prepared for anything that's coming.
I think in my world, if the plane is going down, I'm storming the bar. That's. What I'm doing.
You're looking for the little bottles on the cart.
That is right. Get out of my way. I'm not going down sober.
Excuse me, sir, take your seat. Not until I get that Roman coke.
That's right. Yeah, but the dive trip, it was four grand because that includes the oxygen tanks. He did get like three meals a day and the boat and all that stuff. The boat hands malawi. It's about two grand. So it's less expensive to definitely go to malawi. As far as the two week diving and the lodging and all that stuff.
Is the lodging pretty primitive or how is it? And the food?
Well, the tagonika we camped out most of the time in little islands. So you don't sleep that good. I didn't sleep that good. They had tents for you. And I had a guy, lithuanian, we call them T bum. We just got this crazy name. He was a character. And so they set these tents for us, whatever, when we stayed, but hot, like dry hot heat, so it wasn't like the most comfortable. And the one island we stayed on, going there to zambia, then coming back and these stupid they're not monkeys. They have the big eyes like gizmo or something. Those stupid things screamed all holler monkey monkeys. No, holler monkeys are from south.
I was going to say that's. Not in the right country.
Baboons.
Bigfoot.
No, they're not baboons. They're like little mini things with big eyes. I can't remember their names.
Lemurs.
They have huge eyes at night. lemurs? No, they're like little gizmos. If you remember the movie gizmos, I.
Think you're thinking of eye. Eye. They're relatively small, giant, like big fat eyes.
Yeah, there's like one behind our campsite, like back in the mountain tree or somewhere, and the other one was on the other end. And those two screamed at each other all night long. I wanted to kill them.
Maybe they were looking for love.
Yeah, they're screaming like girly teenagers.
Yes, it's an eye. Eye. That was a pretty good impression right there.
Madagascar. I eyes are from madagascar.
Are they?
I thought they're from Africa as well.
They're not in Africa.
It's going to be a mystery forever.
I'm going with bigfoot.
No, I'm looking it up right now.
We have bigfoot ministers.
I said, I got to watch more National Geographic.
That's what it is.
Bush babies. You guys don't know nothing.
Bush babies.
This ain't National Geographic, boys.
These names are getting weird.
Bigfoot.
So what's some of the coolest stuff that you found while diving? I'm assuming you're just sitting there diving going, I know that species, I know that species.
Hey, somebody's car keys.
Oh, car keys. There's a dead person there.
Especially in zambia. There was a lot of illegal fishing and he found these fuel net and just all kinds of cigarettes stuck in these deep nets going 50ft, 100ft. Did you save any catfish? Oh, no, I mean, I got video of it and they're dead. Most everything is dead already. It's been there if they put them in for days, just leave them down there and catch whatever. But seeing some fish that were huge, you didn't realize they can get that big, even, like some Julia Chromos. I wanted to take so many fish home. I was like, oh, my God, this is the most beautiful cylindrical I've ever seen. And what was surprising was the shell dwellers, which are very popular now in the hobby, you have to go 50ft to 100ft to see shell dwellers. I thought they would be more shallow and no, they are deep fish. I was hitting 50, 60ft to see shell dwellers and see, like, a multifaceted, thousands of them, like a 20 by 20 foot area, just a graveyard of shells and just a million little multi fascia shell drawers everywhere. It was so cool. So and then the eels like oddball stuff, you know, you see crabs and catfish. But the eels, I have, like, I have a big fire on my display tank, the shop that's about 30 inches, but seeing, like, black ones, leopard looking ones, and striped ones and brown ones and different sizes. It was like, wow, I never knew that was so many variations of these types of eels for integrity nica, that I don't see those shipped in to the Hobby harley ever.
So how do they get permits to see if they could even for just research purposes or protecting a species like making, to take them out of the lake and try to do capture breeding, I think.
Well, there was toby. I can't remember his last name. He had a place in zambia. He's one of the first original exporters. And there was an accident. He got partially paralyzed, I guess, and moved back to Europe or something. There was a college young guy was monitoring the island, and there was a couple of colleges, and they had come like, a couple of times a year. They had their own boats there, and they had some breeding programs like the trophy's mazwa, and they're, like, extinct in the wild from overfishing collecting and stuff. And they had, like, pools, like ponds, four or five of them, and they were absolutely gorgeous. So there's some effort, reintroducing, repopulating certain areas of stuff that's been overfished. In Tanzania, it's definitely more controlled. You didn't see so many fishermen under Chris halsey that owns lakeshore Lodge. That's who our host was. And tanzanian has been more proactive in stopping illegal fishing and stuff like that. And illegal trade populations are rebounding coming back. So there's some effort, but technique is the second largest, fifth deepest lake in the world. It's hard to imagine. So you're there. How big how big these lakes, rip lakes are. They're massive.
And they're very deep, right?
Oh, super deep. I mean, I didn't I got earaches twice, which sucked. So that kind of slowed me down. I know matia, the tie in guy and T Bone, I think one of them went 150 deep. I know Ad was getting 120ft. That's crazy deep down there. And they only got five minutes of time pretty much before your tank spent. So you go down there and you start. I didn't have big fancy camera work like those guys do, and they're coming out with pictures of ganathicromis, chromalaxolaris, bushiri, certain stuff that I did not see at 60ft, whatever. You had to go really deep to see some of these species.
Much further than that, you have to use trimics for diving.
Yeah, it's getting serious. I'm not advanced dive or anything, but, yeah, they were done once they did one dive, we do two, three dives sometimes in a day. But when they did a couple of those times, they went hit. That 100ft plus they were spent for the day. They couldn't be going down anymore.
How'S the clarity of the lake?
It depends. Most of the time wasn't bad. It was nice when the sunlight was really out because it gives that shimmering off the rocks. There were some beautiful spots then if it was like windy, obviously it was stirred up a little bit more murky, so it varied from location to location. One fish I did see, that fritosis was my main ones, and the next one will be the bullish chromos microlepsis, or the emperor sickle, which is the largest sickle in the world. Got the 40 inches and £30. And I've been keeping raising those fish for about 19 years, I guess. So it's great to see those fish in the wild. Definitely.
So, not to get off the subject, because this is fascinating, I would be absolutely screamed at by our listeners if we didn't get a bit into breeding. So clearly you have a variety or attempted to raise at least as many African cichlids as you can. So what are the different forms of breeding that some of these African cichlids handle?
Well, on the malai side, they do a good portion of the work for you because they're mouth brooders, and when the females you could have a male, like peacock or hat or like mobuna, they can have multiple females to a male, which is ideal. So there's not singular aggression toward one female because some of these fish can be definitely high in domestic violence. Male is typically always ready and he gets the female and she's ready. They do their love shack, shimmy, I call it, and they'll breed on a flat surface rock or angled rock or a sand pit. And she'll lay a number of eggs and pick them up and she'll go near his analphin, which they have oso egg spots, and they're like dummy eggs, and he melts, fertilizes the eggs within the mouth, and then she can hold them up to four weeks before she totally releases them. They're free swimming fry and then they're on their own. Then he gets to the technicians. You have some mouth brewers, like frontosis petralis trophies and stuff like that. Those are mouth bruters. Then you get into the lampardotus, auto lampardotus calvis. Some of them are like shell dwellers, cave spawners, and it's usually more of a bonded pair on some species. And male, female, they dig their cave or their pot or whatever, and they lay their eggs and then they hatch in a few days. And most of them are usually good parents. And they'll tend to the Fry. It's like a big family thing and chase everybody else away and they'll raise the Fry. Sometimes they eat them, makes it challenging. Then I have to take them out and raise them myself because the parents are not being good parents or whatever the case is.
And that matches like some of our native sunfish, if I'm correct.
I'm not a native fish expert, but I used to go fishing a lot and I always looked I used to go and watch actually fish, bond, bass, whatever. I used to keep data fish actually in my tanks. I've had northern pikes and you name it, I've had just about everything. And it's interesting because I consider them cichlids, basically their behavior, colors and very similar to cigarettes in general.
That precedes the question, have you ever had a sunfish with cichlits?
Personally, I don't think so. I probably had a blue gill. I pumped sea sunfish before. I had small mop bath. I had large mop baths. Yeah. I don't think I mixed my native with too much. I mean, when I was younger, my teens, I might have knowing me, I've always did because I only had so many tanks. I had 33 tanks set up my parents basement before they kicked me out.
And you're twelve when they kicked out?
No, I was later, but I ended up with 33 tanks in my parents'basement. So I was breeding fish frittos. I was wholesaling sick gluts based on my basement because back in the day there was a pet store every 5 sq mi. So you know, first it was just to pay for the hobby and next thing you know I was making money pimping my fish.
And it's a lot easier to make money when you're in your mom and dad's basement not paying the electricity bill and not paying your rent, right? My recommendation to everybody is, even if you're 30 years old, go back to your parents house, do it there, let them pay for the electricity, water, sewer and all that.
So on the mouth brooder side, because I see people that actually mouth brood eggs. Do you ever take the eggs out and put them in a hopper?
I personally do not use egg tumblers. I actually have a couple I use the regular spec jars and typically when I strip the females, it's usually ten to 14 days. I noticed on the tank when I noticed the mouthfuls and we strip them ten to 14 days. And usually heads and tails, they're almost like popcorn. That's usually the ideal time to strip them because if they're just eggs, like I pulled a Cocoma fritosa last week, I had three females. One they're eggs. And I'm like, that's a pain that I use, like methylene blue. Highly aerate them with the airstone and hatch them. But that's not always successful. If they're heads and tails, it's the easiest to get them out of the mob mouth. If you pull them late, they're already free swimming. A lot of times a fryer trying to swim back up in the mouth or back of the throat. So it makes it challenging. It's more stress on the fish and I'm cussing more trying to get the fry out of her mouth. So 1014 days is usually my mark, unless it's something more challenging. Like, I have a rare pindu, stone Patilla pindu from crater Lakes. And I don't know, they're not doing well. They're not holding the fry. Like three or four days are gone. So I might actually have to start yanking the females and doing it myself. Have to try to raise their egg, use a tumbler to get some successful spawns out of them.
So how do you get egg or fry out of one's mouth? What's the process? Pick them up, open their mouth?
I usually have the containers ready and I go to the floor. From experience, you don't want to do it at the top of the tank because she slips out of your hand, boom, hits the floor. Then you get price flattered all over the floor. It's all messy. And so I get all my containers. If it's multiple females, I'll have a small bucket ready with the tank water and I'll go through each female look in the mouth. If they look like their heads and tails, I strip them. If they have eggs and she's not a spitter, I throw her back into the main tank. But usually I throw all the females in the bucket, go through them and get all my containers. And then I go to a top of tank or I have a rack and we use paint marker and we mark the tanks and clip the air. And once they're free swimming, it's basically assembly line every week. So I just move stuff today. So they go into a 510 gallon tank, and when they start growing out, then they move into 29 gallon tank or 75 gallon tank. And depending on the supply and demand, I'll move them into my other building. My biggest growth is 450 gallons, 350 gallons, and lots of just pump them. They're just getting moved tank to tank, whatever. And then once they're sellable size, they go right back to the retail store and it never ends.
So what do you feed Fried? Because some cigarettes can be a little bit larger. You still do brine shrimp, that whole.
Method no, don't do any brine. I'm allergic to brine shrimp, so I avoid it.
You're what? Allergic. Oh, I've heard that before.
Yeah, definitely. I don't yeah, I'm allergic to seafood shellfish. So, yeah, avoid it. I make my own blend of fried food. I've used, like, New Life in the past, but I actually go through a coffee grinder. I sell the food because people keep asking when I feed. I get, like, the shake from the krill. I have, like, the cans, like, free dried krill. And I'll use the leftovers of that and, like, the extreme monster pellets that you have the powder. And I use, like, some I use everybody's stuff. I mix it onto a thing and put it through a coffee grinder and I make it into a fine powder.
See, that a fraud. Works for other fish because I've never seen a whole lot for smaller fish. That works because it's kind of getting in your mouth. But if you're doing to a powder, you always see, like, that hakari baby powder. It really doesn't. It's hit and miss. It works for feeder guppies, but feeder.
Guppies andler any guppies but endless are.
Their own thing, I suppose. But no, I'll have to give that a try. I've never said I use barlena flakes.
I use some of the North End vegetable and I'll use extreme. I actually throw catfish scrapers in there. I just make this big I put a big hop thing and then I start putting it through the espresso coffee grinder. And I make my own fine powder fish food.
So not to get away from the food and babies, but another thing on the list is PH. So generally, I've heard that a lot of African cichlids can stand really high PH conditions. I'm assuming that's not correct for all fish, all African cichlids, right?
Well, as far as I know, I think positive technique can be like 9.2 or something. That's ridiculous.
Battery acid?
Yeah, it's like liquid calcium or something. I don't know. Cleveland tap water here is naturally on the hard side around 7.67.8. So I don't test water. I hardly ever test. I test people's water and usually I ask them questions and figure it out before I even test the water. Like, I've been doing it so long, I can touch water and tell you what the temperature is.
I can do the same.
Yes, you've been doing it like electrician knows every color, wire, whatever. It's like this is your trade, how fish are acting and stuff like that. Over feeding, over populating. Not enough maintenance, water drinks or whatever. So I don't test. I mean, I like using SEACAMS or not sea. chem. Caribbean sea. ivory coast. Cigarette? Sand. And that is actually very close to what the riff Lakes puts in the riff Lakes. I mean, it's so identical because I brought some of the sand back at different beaches. I grabbed a handful, put in a ziploc bag as just as a reference at certain places and just seeing the greatest sand and what it looked like and the colors. So I use most of that. And that's like a coral based sand part of it. So that's going to be a natural buffer. And then if you use toothpaste rock, coral rock, other things in there will contribute to the water quality. Whatever.
Well, any other recommendations for listeners for sick of the care? I really want to cater because we've had a few different questions from beginners. So just evaluate. Make sure you maintain heat, you over filter and you overpopulate to handle a lot of the aggression cyclists can offer you make sure to have a lot of swimming space, especially when you're over populating. Some cyclists require more of a rock reef environment, so have places for them to accommodate. And you recommend sand?
Yeah, I mean, they could do gravel cichlids. That's one thing about citizens. Africans, they're hardy. They're just a hearty easier in general fish than like discus or saltwater. You can make it look like a saltwater reef tank. I've done for football players and stuff like that, and offices, hospitals, whatever. And people don't know the difference. They see all these bright blues and oranges and yellows and peacocks and stuff like that. So they're all around a great fish you could have for the rest of your life.
Well, perfect. I want to leave listeners with one of fun facts I found in doing homework to making sure I can buff up for this interview. And one of the things I found, which I really didn't know I was called, this is the cuckoo sedantis, or cuckoo catfish sedantis.
Multiponcatus.
There you go. You even have the full on name. You can look on videos on YouTube. You can certainly just type in the cuckoo catfish. And National Geographic even has an old video of what's happening. I'll let you tell the story.
Oh, it's great. Yes, joel's of the riff. That's a great video. You can still find it online. And what it is, they also call it like the paracetic catfish. And what it does. These catfish, when they pair in the females ready with egg, they found a mouth brooding cichlet and they follow them. And when the mouth, brooding, sick with the female, deposits her eggs. She's frantically picking up her eggs and the catfish, I mean, it's quick. And they go in and heat fertilize and drops her eggs right in the middle of the spawning of the mouthful cichlid. And she's frantically picking them up all these eggs, not realizing she's pricking up a foreign fish's eggs as well. And so she's harboring these eggs and she's protecting them within her mouth, not realizing she has a parasitic catfish. And the catfish develop very quickly within her mouth and they start eating the eggs or the baby cigarettes within the mouth. And she's raising these catfish up as her own. She's like a Serenget mother. When I first time I bred them in, the was, like, shocked. It was so cool, though. It was very interesting.
So the crazy part of this is the mother does not care. Even when they're growing and all her normal babies are gone, there's no differentiating between the catfish and her babies. So even when they're brooding and they're free swimming, if something comes close, she'll put them back in her mouth. She'll protect them as their own through the entire process.
And they don't harm the mother at all?
Not until they get big enough where they can try to nip. But no.
Are you listening, Adam? You've got four kids. You should just drop them off somewhere and then pick them up in ten years.
There you go.
Save some money.
How that works?
Basically, when they're picking them up from a soccer field, you have to swap minivans so they take their kids with yours.
That's right. Stick some soccer mom with your four kids, and then that'll save you a lot of money raising them up and then just pick them up ten years from now.
Okay, I'm just trying to help out. So the species, according to wikipedia, because wikipedia may be wrong, was 1898 when the cuckoo species was discovered, and they found that to be the trait. So I'm assuming that the cuckoo name came from the cuckoo bird, which did the same thing. It just again, stole all the eggs from the nest, put her eggs in, and the bird raised the eggs for them. It's a crazy feat of nature.
Certainly.
Check out the videos online.
That sounds really cool.
Yeah, that's cool.
Well, is there anything else that you have for us that we think we missed?
Not at this point in time.
All right, Adam, you got any questions for him?
Yeah, what would be a cyclist that you would recommend that there needs to be more of? Either, because it doesn't have very much following in the hobby. It's got like a good behavior, kind of like a trophy fish.
Where the hidden gem?
Yeah, hidden gem type diamond in the rough.
Oh, boy. That's a good question. Interesting question.
And it's not the parrot fish.
It's more cuckoo gatfish or the hopacara specificus. The two parrot cyclist. I have those also. That's a nice fish. Well, you know what? I still have convicts, actually. Old tried and true.
I bet you have more than one.
Absolutely. I got a few. They're good ditherfish for the big mean fish. Well, I mean, like burundi, Fritosas, they kind of like falling to the wayside. They're like kind of the originals. And everybody jumps on this bandwagon. What's new? What's the hip fish? What's the rare fish? I think part of it is because people think it's dollar signs and they think they're going to breed the fish and be millionaires. But some of the old tried and true fish, give them a break. They're just as good and nice as some of the newer fish. It's like, don't forget them. That's kind of one of those things. I love. All pertosis, but burundi, you can get them cheap. I sell them for $10 a piece all day long in the store. So a starter frontosa technique that lives a good long time. And it's like having a pet dog. Some people trade them to eat out of their hands. There's a lot I mean, there's so much endless. I mean, there's a lot of rare stuff that like to see people breed, like the Gnathicromis prolon Axellaris on my third attempt trying to breed them over the years. And so far I haven't had success.
Well, I appreciate the info, and we'll have listeners certainly look that up. But if they want to look you up again, your website is something fishyinc. Net certainly go on there and apply for a job. You have upcoming postings.
Yeah, Facebook is something fishyinc.net, too, so that's usually my go to social media. I do have instagram. It's one aquapies. Yeah, live show. YouTube, it's something fishyinc. Also net. There's, like, two of them, but the one that has the most subscribers go to that one. I can't transfer. I'm not a technology buff, but I can't move one to the other, I guess. So the one I'm building up, I'm at 152 right now, but I do some, like, videos. I just posted one from a maintenance yesterday. Just a little clip of me on the maintenance account I do. So I'll do stuff with the hatcheries here and there and pick out a fish or Pacific and talk about that. Sometimes I do show and tells on the Facebook. I do live on tuesdays, usually afternoons and Saturday mornings. I do rants. I want to start my own show, just rants. People seem to like my rants about business or hobby sometimes start with the Schmelta episode.
It works every time. Also, to remind them, meet you up at the Cleveland swamp. More information on that Ohio association, look.
It up on just Google it. oca. Ohio sickle association. They have obviously, like, a Facebook page. And Friday, saturday and Sunday. Next weekend, the weekend before Thanksgiving.
Excellent. Well, I appreciate all your time, Dave. It was quite kind of you doing this last minute, and we'll probably have you back on the show if we can sneak you away.
Okay. All right, guys.
All right. Well, just to remind everybody, certainly subscribe to this to get a push notification to your phone. And above all else, share this with a friend and buy a T shirt so I can humiliate myself online publicly.
Oh, yeah, we need to see that.
Oh, so much. All right, let's kick that out. Show. 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 in asleep.
Can I listen to it in my treehouse?
In your tree house, in your fish room. Even alone at work.
What about my man cave?
Especially your man cave. Yeah, only if adam's there no with feeder guppy.
No, they're endlessly.
It's you magic loving, Frank sucking, mother Frank.
Well, I guess we'll see you next time. Later.