Foreign.
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Thanks so much, and let's kick that podcast.
Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast.
Finally, we're back in the seat. I'm your host, Rob Zoles.
Hey, Robs. Jim Colby here. How you doing? You're looking sweet.
Doing damn fine.
I love that little shirt you have on there today.
Why, thank you.
What's it say?
Well, before we get there, I'd like to welcome our. Our third host.
I'm Adam the shire.
All right, now we can. Now we can do this. All right, now I'm wearing a T shirt that is. Is a test merch line. You like that? This one is bleach your balls.
I love it.
This is a throwback from one of our episodes back when they brought in moss balls from Ukraine and they came with zebra mussels. So this is a public service announcement that goes out to your homies, but I thought it was kind of cute. So we'll see if we were going to change up some test merch, see how it goes.
That makes total sense. You bleach your plants and then hopefully you don't kill them.
Bleach your balls. Your moss balls. That is today's episode. We're gonna do questions and answers. Just go over some emails, go over the Discord questions again, if you're not in our Discord, what's wrong with you? Go to aquariumguyspodcast.com, find the link at the bottom of webpage. Otherwise, it's in the show notes. Click it, join it. You can ask questions anytime, day or night. We have people in other countries taking care of the night shift, and of course, the America's taking care of the day shift. So get your questions answered and you might just find your question read on air.
Did you see the question that Justin Timberlake got yesterday?
I did not.
How many drinks have you had? Sir, I had one martini and he just got out of jail this afternoon.
He got a jail. Just one martini.
He just won a martini.
Did they post the video or.
No, haven't posted the video yet. They showed him coming out of jail on Entertainment Tonight and he didn't look happy. And he refused the breathalyzer not once, not twice, but three times. So already he screwed.
So yeah, they're just going to anyway throw the book at you probably.
Is that, Is that, is that a law federally that if you refuse it, you're fucked?
No, no, that's. That's pretty.
Every state have their own rules.
That's every state, they have that rule.
Yeah, I know. Minnesota has that rule. If you, if you refuse, you're basically guilty. But he was in New York area. I don't know.
They can't make you test, but if you're not going to attest, you're by default, you know, guilty until proven innocent.
For those of you who've ever gotten into UI being me, you've had one. I got one when I was about. And here's a sad story.
We can't go to Canada.
No, that's 500ft away from school thing.
No, seriously, Canada, you can't go to. Can't go there.
It's off my record now because I couldn't even. I couldn't even work for my company that I'm working for right now if I had a DUI.
Drop it.
It gets dropped after. After 10 years. So I was 21 years old. I went out for dinner with my mom and dad. Sad.
What a lame D you are.
My mom doesn't even drink. I sat there and drank with them and had dinner and then I drove home. And I was. Drove home 45 miles. I had two miles left. I get pulled over because I was in a two lane both ways and I didn't dim my lights for the cop and he pulled me over and I was 0.11. And at that time it was 0.10. And had I asked for a blood test because your body gets rid of 0.02 because I got to. I learned that in DUI class.
Excellent.
And so your body gets rid of 0.02 per hour. And so had I asked for a blood test and gotten to the hospital and got a blood test and I had to pay for it, but I probably would have been below 0.10 and not had a DUI.
Well, I am so glad we can share this with our audience.
Well, I just tell you people if you're getting picked up and you think you're on the border. Yeah.
Ask for blood tests.
Ask for a blood test and then don't do what I do. Don't offer a semen test. Don't do that. Hey, you want some semen too?
You know, we, we just to go over before we get to questions and answers, we got to go for a little bit of news. And we read all of our reviews and we get overwhelming reviews like Spotify. I think we're like 4.9 stars and we have quite a. Quite a few views. Oh yeah, we're, we're very well reviewed.
Adam. That's not a 50 stars. Adam. Apple.
Apple were not as well reviewed and that's only 4.6 stars that we're getting on average in Apple.
That's because Apple people have got. They're kind of snooty.
Well, they're, they have more money. Right. And here's part of the snoot. So my most recent review, or the negative review is a two star one saying sadly, unsubscribing. Weirdly, they put quack noises over the F bombs, but they've also thrown out the R slur a few times. And that word for me is a reason I just won't listen to. I love the people I love in my life have developmental or intellectual disabilities too much. They're subscribed. Seems like these guys are all genuinely hanging out talking fish. Great information. But you'll get the same information from Corey and the friends at the Aquarium Co op.
There you go.
So Corey and the Aquarium Co Op. I don't give a shit.
So hold on now. I'm just gonna say, well, that's retarded. Settle down.
Wait a minute. I think we need to elaborate. There's a difference between retarded as people doing dumb.
Right.
And people that are developmentally disabled. And I know developmentally disabled people. I have no problem with them.
Right.
In fact, in Deer river there was a guy who was developmentally disabled and the new kid made a picked on him. He didn't realize that he was part of the football team. And he fell down some two flights of stairs after meeting with the football team.
Sure.
Because he made that. They made the, the kid. Made the developmentally disabled kid cry in front of a football player.
We're not making fun of those folks.
Right.
We're talking, we're talking about normal people who are just stupid.
Right?
Yeah.
So.
But if it offends you that much, go ahead and listen.
Making fun of someone disabled is unacceptable on all levels. And I agree that that R word should never be used. But calling your friend retarded because he pissed in his own aquarium drunk. That is the, the term that we're going to continue using this podcast. So please unsubscribe. This place is not for you.
We'll give you your money back. Double, double your money back.
Absolutely. Corey would definitely the. The place to go for your content because it's very much family friendly. This is not going to.
Yeah. And, and we've got, we've got no qualms with Corey. He's family friendly and we've asked him to be on the show several times. He's not really wanted. You know, this is years, this was years ago. He's respectful, though.
This was years ago.
Right. I'm sure he hates us by now, like easily.
But you know, that's for our fans. They're to blame.
But you know, he, he, he's doing it for a living. Okay. Yeah, we're not, we're not.
I'm here. It's, it's a, it's a Tuesday night.
We're not making any money on this.
We're done with our day job and we already. I mean, Jesus, if you just, if you listen to the beta fighting episode and realize we're never gonna get a sponsor, I don't know what else can.
Yeah, there you go.
We're not doing this for money.
If you, if you don't know what Rob's talking about, we are. We have a, we just did a podcast that we haven't released yet about beta.
Oh, by the time they listen to this, it'll be released.
All right.
For sure. Yeah. Remember?
Oh, we're ahead.
Yeah, we're pre recording this. I forgot it's post listened to.
It's like this weekend when I went to Cincinnati. They're already know.
We're, we're all over the place now.
I hear your daughter screaming upstairs. Should I go upstairs and, and give her some more Xanax or what? What do you guys give her?
Xanax?
I don't know. I'm not a parent.
Christ. I don't think you give that to children.
Listen, I'm not a parent anymore.
You give, you give racist comedian Xanax. That's what you get.
Oh, really?
Yes, that's how it works. But particularly like, you know, fat middle aged Jewish ones that used to be on sitcoms.
Who would that be? Whiskey.
That's what you give children.
It's Roseanne Barr.
Roseanne Bar. I love Roseanne Barr for like 15 minutes of my life that I g.
All right, back to more fish things. So regardless, we do read all the reviews and we do want to let you know that even bad ones are red and we have an overwhelming response to positive ones as well. Thank you for those. They mean a lot to us. Even though I liked all the guys that weren't for you, the guy, the.
Guy that, that said, oh yeah, he doesn't like it.
So right here, right here, this is my favorite review and I did pull this up. I said I'd rather have Rob's tell a fart joke with some aquarium information mixed in than listen to Corey bitch about the cost of a movie mold to make a sponge filter and how expensive shipping is with some aquarium info mixed in. Not to on Corey, but apparently recently that's been a conversation of some of Bentley Pasco, his topics of the cost of products and the aquarium co op dropping their heater line and all kinds of different, different details. So check, check some of those out. And in, in all that mix, they.
Probably got rid of the heater line because the Department of Environmental bullshit probably wanted that cancel.
Okay, again, this is, this is a questions and answers. So we're gonna. This is more of a freeform podcast, so enjoy the discussion. Podcast. This is. So apparently the aquarium Co op, which does what I would like to call white labeling product lines, what they do is they'll take a product and some manufacturer will be out there, they'll make a couple small modifications that maybe someone else hasn't done to a product and then rebrand it in Shenzhen and then sell it with the, you know, green Aquarium Co op label, which works out. They're the ones supporting it, they're the ones selling it, they're the one warrantying it and they have a very good warranty and a reputation out there. Recently Corey came out and said that we're going to be stopping doing their heater line because it's reached their max failure threshold. And he publicly announced that his failure threshold for the product was 5%, which that's a high ass percent by the way, for those that are in the industry. But regardless, he was at least public about it. So good on him. He said it's 5%. I don't like that. Even though we warrantied them out, I don't like that much failure. So we're no longer going to offer this heater line. We're going to either redo it or not sell them. So good on him, you know, at least he takes it on the chin Take responsibility however it happened. You know, then there's arguments saying, well, it should have never happened. They should have done Q and A and research. And that's the debate out there in this. You know, Bentley does different reviews, talks about the industry, not just aquarium co op, but uses that as the public example of this. So that's been decent topics from that point of view. And I happen to see this, and I am a dear friend of Bentley's, so I took the opportunity.
Would Bentley say the same thing?
Bentley just wanted to talk about the discussion. We need to say that Bentley is a QA guy. He's a, he's a quality assurance guy.
He's a good guy.
He's a good egg. So I saw the, saw the YouTube videos he'd be doing. I thought they were quite good and decided that I was going to send him a gift because I figured this is a perfect time for him to talk to his audience about grounding probes.
Yes.
So I sent him a Aqua Top grounding probe since they're talking about heater failures. And now I'm getting ridiculed by people for having a exploded titanium heater in my tent. 10 gallon. I have nine 10 gallon tanks in Iraq and to this day I still use a blown up heater because the titanium grounding probe keeps my fish from getting electrocuted. If you're listening to this Bentley, I love you. This is not your fault. I sent you it. I told you the story. But for those listening and coming to the podcast to talk to me, I don't care. I'm going to continue using it. And if my house burns down, so be it.
I'd rather not be covered under your insurance.
You're too damn close to my house. I'd rather you not burn your house down.
Right. It's. That is me and mine. I don't recommend you do this. Kids that are listening, if your heater blows up, replace it. But me, I'm.
That's not what it's for. That's not what a grounding probe is for. It's for making sure that your L46 breeding pair and your goddamn dinner plate size discus don't all die.
You heard Adam right? And I'm going to say Adam's 100 correct. Do not use a titanium probe to bend it along a burnt out heater. But me, I'm going to continue doing it because I want to for science, not for the sake of me being cheap.
But you are cheap.
I just think it's fascinating. I've ran this Thing burnt out for like three years. Don't look at me like that. Don't look at me like that.
You are retarded.
See? Yeah, right there. That's the perfect use of that word. Proper use. We're teaching people grammatic uses of a word. There we go. We're offering a lot this podcast. Let's look at the.
Did I go on my rant?
Okay, your turn. What are we ranting about? Because I also have something to make you rant, so I'm excited.
Well, we'll get there.
Oh, before. Before we do this. Before we do this.
Adam's gonna have a heart attack. He just. You're gonna go. And his heart just dies.
How's ignition timing? Oh, okay. They're making fun of me in the chat more. Okay, nevermind. Go ahead, Adam.
They should make fun of you.
Go ahead, Adam. You're tartan.
Everybody, they're calling style keeper and a fish keeper. Basically, anybody that listens to this, get a hold of us Arc and what's that other. What's that pjak guy that comes on? Is it P Jack or what do they rename themselves now?
I'll look it up while you continue ranting.
Okay, get a hold of those guys. Get a hold of us Arc. Get a hold of Zoomed and get a hold of the P Jack people. Or if they're PJ or whatever the hell their name is. The US Department of Energy has banned zoomed basking lights and basically every light bulb, the 5.0s, the 7.0, the 10.0s, saying that they're not, quote, unquote, energy efficient. The Department of Energy can go themselves.
Okay, all right.
What's the highest mountain? So because they're getting rid of all my shit, this is. They did this to halogen shit last month or last year, and nobody said anything because they're like, oh, well, halogen makes kind of sense. The next thing that's going to happen is they're going to get rid of heaters and everything else, and we're all.
Going to be in the dark.
Watch.
So you're right about this one. So they have a bill to try to stop making inefficient garbage products because there's no reason that we need to have inefficient garbage products. For instance, there's no reason.
Can I get rid of the government for being garbage and inefficient.
Well, hold on. Let's. Let's be reasonable here. Let's. Let's talk about the other side of the coin here. Your grandmother. There's no reason your grandmother needs an incandescent bulb anymore. She can get an LED one that's going to be half the price. That's going to last, I don't know, seven times longer. That's going to use a ninth of the electricity. So that means that those incandescent bulbs that she was using, there's really no place for them. Right.
Do they even make them anymore?
They don't make a ton. They don't make a ton of them, but now they're having new rules to stop them from manufacturing and selling them. Right? That's the idea of these energy efficiencies, because people are still dumb because they'll go to the store, not give a crap what they grab. And this is done on a massive scale because, again, we're. We're sheep as consumers. So in the idea of trying to curb the energy that we're going to be using going forward, they're trying to control this. Now. There needs to be amendments, like Adam was saying. So we need to contact. And it's not Pjak anymore. It's the petadvocacy.org is the place to go. But the pet advocacy network, these are your pet advocates, and you need to contact these people about this to have an amendment made that we need specialty bulbs for our pets and reptiles. But there has to be exceptions made for those rulings for sure. Because when they made this law, they were thinking of how, you know, bad consumers are making lights in their home. Not once was that law thought of. Of how your reptile is going to get the correct type of light so it can live and exist in its terrarium.
I don't care. They need to. They need to get rid of the whole thing. They walk around Joe Biden, he doesn't even know what day it is every goddamn week. And to tell me everything's fine. The whole goddamn system.
Well, the good news.
Goddamn lights.
The good news is I just read an article before I came over here that we are about three or four months away from nuclear world war. So just. You just wait a few minutes. Just wait a little bit longer.
When did. When did this become a politics podcast?
I don't know. Adam just lost his.
No, he.
I give him back his life.
It's not politics. All I want is for people to leave me alone and not tell me what I need to do every day. I'm tired of the news telling me I need to vote for Joe Biden and need to worry about the environment. Need not. And worry about Ukraine. And all this other.
I just want to be left alone, you know? That's all I want to be. You know, in the eyes is my animals. In the eyes of telling you what to do. Could you stop at least wearing tighty whities and move on to boxer briefs like the rest of us?
I'm already in boxers because tighty whities don't handle my shit.
Somebody clipped that.
Yeah. I'm guessing the next thing for Adam's gonna be a straight jacket, and that's where they're gonna come and get him. But, you know, wait. Adam's right. I mean, he should be just like the Unabomber. Yeah, and hate the government and move out into Montana to be by himself. And he could just. From on time to time, you can just mail bombs to people.
I'm not doing that. That's not what I'm complaining about.
Adam.
God damn it. I'm proud already. They already think that I know this.
Adam. Adam. I'm sorry, buddy.
I'm sorry.
We're here. We're here. Like.
Like. All I want is for them to just leave my animals alone and leave me alone. I don't give a. What they want to do.
All right?
If they want to parade some old and tell them everybody that everything's great, and then some drunk lady and to say, oh, everything's awesome, and they want to lie to me every day, that's fine.
So I don't care. What's the difference?
Don't take my shit away.
The state of North Dakota just voted on term limitations and voting on the how old you could be to still be in the government in North Dakota. And you know what. What age they came up with? I think it was 82.
They need to be done at 60.
Exactly.
And they need to have term limits of two terms. That's it.
That's what we.
Because you want me to tell you what they do.
We do have term limits of two for the president. And. And Mr. Trump is already asking about his third term. So, you know, I mean, they're both. They're two years difference in age, and everybody's crazy.
I'm dialing this back.
No, we're not.
Yes.
No.
Yes. Cuz I need ice cream.
I am not paying for Adams.
I will get you. I will get you ice cream.
Excellent.
But all I'm saying is that.
Leave you alone.
Leave me. Leave me alone. Leave my alone and let me do what I want to do. As long as I'm not killing people, which they should be grateful. Happens every day.
Hey, Robbie, I finally got this figured out the whole Adam thing here, okay? You know what he's really worried about is his tanning bed because he's really the whitest guy we know, but he spends much time under that time. He's worried he's gonna take out his tanning bed light bulbs and he's not gonna be able to pretend he's half Egyptian anymore.
He's not half Egyptian. He was 25% the whole time. He's just been using that tanning.
That's right.
All right, I get it.
We finally figured it out.
I guess that's exactly it.
We're on you, Adam.
So let's.
Let's.
Let's dial this back, all right? Let's.
Let's go back to the aquarium podcast.
Let's. Let's go to a happy subject that won't make Adam rant. Oh, let's talk about. Let's talk about the. The revision change to the names of hundreds of the corydora category of fish, shall we?
Are you trying to give me a heart attack today?
They're changing, Robbie. They're changing the names of Cory, Dora. Somebody apparently has got too much time and too much money.
No, they. They've needed to do this for a long time. Opinion.
No, they didn't.
Yes, they did, because they. They've come and gone and they. They haven't like put a peg on. They've taken the name way a Brachius before and they took corydoras away and.
Then they put it back.
Right.
All they did was do exactly what they did 300 years ago, right?
And they put it back to where it should be. They. They finally cleaned it up and they took a lot of time and they polish it out and I believe that they finally did it right. So if you want to check it out, we will have a. Hopefully a link in the show notes. If not, check out the discord that we will definitely have the information there. But they have revised all of the corydoras and there's a whole Dora's species list with all the other sub names from the micro species of like what we can normally call pygmy Corydoras brachius, which are the monster Corydoras. Can we say fruit Corydoras?
Can we even say pygmy anymore?
Yes, we can.
Is that derogatory?
Excuse me? This is the. This is the podcast that we're holding on to retarded. So we're gonna say what? All of it. But check out the list. I personally saw the. The changes and I think it's been long overdue. I'm glad they did it.
Well, that sounds like you want me.
To tell you how to fix this.
What? What. What are we fixing? What are we fixing?
You know, how to fix the categories of fish and everything in general, like for science, so that these. Needle dick little. Quit renaming.
Holy. He is on a rampage.
Wow. We're taking. We're taking away your candy.
Here's how you fix it. You put the two things together and you say, does it. Do they can. Do they breed? If they breed and create viable progeny, it's a species. Done. That's all you need to know. Not, oh, there's one extra scale over here. And then this has got a half a centimeter of a tail fin. And then, oh, look, there's a goddamn extra spot in this line. Yeah, that's not what you need to do. If they can. And they can produce viable babies, that's all you need to do.
Done.
I fix science, their naming system and their. They do this shit just to get more goddamn money. That's all it is. It's all based on money.
Hey, Adam.
Holy. I just.
I just. I have one question.
I feel like the two star review is so validated, this podcast.
Oh, I wouldn't give it two stars. Yeah. Adam, have you had sex lately?
Yes, I have.
With a partner.
Like we're. We're all for putting in like for a pool to get you a bj, you know what I'm saying?
I. I think, I think he. First of all, he needs some. You need an emotional support hamster or something like that right here.
You should read the chat right now. Yeah, Adam Fix, the science editor's gonna be busy with this one. Did someone give Adam roids recently?
I think Adam's hemorrhoids are bothering him is what's going on.
After the podcast, I'll be worried about more of your Apple reviews.
So tomorrow morning, people, when you get up, the first thing you should just Google, was there any shooting. Was there some crazed man on top of a frickin building down in southern Minnesota and just see if Adam Elnishar shows up in your Google search?
No, no, I have more empathy for that, for the average human being than that.
Average.
You don't just go randomly shooting people. You have to have a reason.
This hate is strictly for the. In average human being, Adam.
Yeah, and I thought we're gonna find the people with the last podcast. But you know, this one, this one is right up there.
Have you had your red 40 today? That was. That's a great question.
How much red? 40.
I think Adam shoved a Red Bull up his ass before he came on here and just fired it.
No.
Okay. All right.
Everything. Like, why get rid of the corridor species? And then all of a sudden, oh, we're gonna put it right back together, and then we're gonna make revisions. Oh, it's just like, they constantly change the scientific names, and I have to go to Dr. Fosters and Smith to get the goddamn right name of fish anymore.
I mean, sorry that things change and we have to add species.
I am okay with change.
No, you know you're not.
No.
Yes, I am.
I bet you come home and your wife has moved the furniture around and you lose your shit. Oh, my God. The Lazy Boy recliner was over there before. Now it's here. And I.
Because it makes sense.
Oh, okay.
If you go and you have three fish that look identical each other and produce viable babies, how are they three different species? And explain that to me. It's not like. It's not like ducks where they have different genitals so they can literally only fornicate with that one kind. I'm trying to calm it down because Dalton's probably gonna be really pissed off about this.
Who is? Who's gonna be pissed off?
I don't know. Who the hell's our editor?
Oh, Dalton. Yes, Dalton.
That's what I said.
Here's what Dalton's gonna do. He's just gonna go delete. Just the whole thing, but delete Dalton.
I promise, it's like, when you get this far, there's gonna be a Red.
Lobster gift card waiting for you if they're still open.
When I was breeding.
I see what you did. That's my rant.
See what I did there?
Yeah. Yeah, we're gonna give.
When I was breeding leaf tail geckos.
Now, are you talking with other leaf tape geckos or yourself?
No, when I was breeding late leaf tail geckos.
Okay.
There is different genitals, and they have different tongues and everything, and that made sense.
Let's back up the truck here just one minute. Whoa, whoa. How does one know about the genitals and tongues of lizards? So, yeah, I mean, personally, how do you know this?
So the tongue part is easy because they open their mouths, and then some of them have, like, different colored tongues or different colored tips on their tongues, and those wouldn't breed together. That I know, is two different kind.
So does that require peanut butter, then, to get your tongue out?
No, this book I bought, the leaf tail Gecko. Oh.
So hold on.
And that's where they figured it out.
Pause right here.
Pause.
Give me one. One split second. Because I think there's a moment, you know, I'm saying, show me your genital. That's the song that immediately hit my brain when Adam's talking about you. You.
You're retarded. Adam's retarded. I can't believe I'm retarded for being here.
All right, all right.
Why am I the voice of reason all of a sudden? I don't get this.
Anyways, finish. Finish.
I'm had to be the voice of reason. All I'm saying is that if the animals won't breed together, then there are different species. But if they will breed together, then leave it alone.
In that case, there's some stuff in Mexico that's going on that donkey show that might need some.
How about that guy in Wisconsin that got caught making love to a dead deer in a ditch?
Oh, whoa.
And that has not happened once but twice.
Let's get back on the fish conversation. All right. Anything else, boys?
No. I'll calm down now.
Okay.
Hey, Adam, are you. Do you have any more things for me to go on a rant about?
I got two. I got two more things before we get questions.
Adam. All right, get off the ledge. Adam, get back in the house. Get off the ledge.
All right, Jimmy, you weren't here. I don't think Adam was here for this either. You see this jar here?
That's a beautiful green jar.
For those of you at home that don't get to see the jar because you're not part of the live audience, this jar that I have in my hand is a green glass jar with a lid.
It's a lead glass.
No, this is. Actually. I have to do a bunch of research on this one. I'm well versed because I collect these. It is exactly that, Adam. It is uranium glass. Now, for the kids at home that don't know what uranium glass is, before World War II in the. In that lovely time period when we figured out. And you probably watch Oppenheimer, hopefully you have.
I did see Oppenheimer.
It was a great movie. It was okay before we figured out that uranium was a good source of blowing up people, we didn't really have a ton of uses for uranium. So what we do is we use small amounts of uranium for things like, I don't know, the needles in your clock to make them glow. Right. Or we'd add it to glass to make it a pretty green hue. Right. And all of the glass that was made with uranium was made before World War II. Because after World War II, for obvious reasons, all the uranium sources were controlled by governments, so.
So before World War II, I can get uranium. There's so much. There's so much uranium laying around, people tripping over it. We gotta do something with this shit.
I mean, they used it for stuff like this. So this is actually active uranium that I have in my hand, but it's such a low dose that it's supposed to be relatively safe for me to hold in.
Is this why you can't have Second Child?
I'm trying. I've been holding this and rubbing it against my testicles, but it's still. I'm still not sterile, but it glows in the dark.
That's kind of nice, right?
So the way you can test this is you can actually get a black light and make this thing glow. It's actually absolutely reactive to black lights.
You can do that to Monica Lewinsky's dress, too.
So I have found this. This was a very expensive piece. And if you find any green glass and it glows underneath the black light, it is worth a significant amount of money. Because for the obvious reason that all uranium glass was made before World War II and can never be manufactured again. And glass being as breakable as it is, these are rarer and rarer pieces every day.
So what's that piece worth?
So this piece, I'm assuming is going to be worth in the department of $150.
I'll give you 10 bucks right now.
Now, this will continue going up as we hold this, and time moves on. Now, I want to do this before it gets insanely expensive, and I would like to create a shrimp jar out of your medium glass just to see what happens. So I figured I'd put the. Put this out there. I talked about this a little bit with Chris Biggs when he was here when you guys were gone. So I figured I'd bring it up here on this questions and answer podcast and get your guys input.
I have never heard of such a thing. I mean, I knew that the green glass was made out of uranium, but I never even thought to the point where, you know, it glows under dark lights and you put shrimp in there and they grow to the size of Godzilla and they kill you in your sleep.
Well, I think the obvious answer is it's not going to do anything, or it might make the shrimp sterile, or who knows?
So you're right. With all three decisions, I don't know.
We'll find out what happens. But I figured it'd be a fun experiment.
You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to buy you one of those Globe Bettas and we'll put it in there and see what happens.
Yeah, because the Globe Bettas do glow underneath a black light.
That'd be kind of cool. What colors do they have now for the Globe Bettas?
Neon colors. I just green, blue, yellow, orange.
I just talked to somebody who said that the Globe Bettas was, was one of the biggest loss leaders that they had and it didn't fly. Nobody liked. I was talking to somebody at the big box stores.
No one cared about it and they.
Said nobody cared about the glow Bettas. Now they're all waiting for the glow.
Angels, huh Robbie, I'm voting on that. That'll give them superpowers.
Superpowers.
You know, you should do. Rather than make a shrimp ticket, you should get like a venomous spider. Because I'd rather be Spider man than, you know, I would too. Than Aquaman.
Excellent. I like these ideas. I think I need a rubber gasket for the lid to make sure I'm not Spider man because I could give a shit less about being Spider Man.
You know, you should do is is Robbie's has been talking about getting a vasectomy. And I'm thinking so after the vasectomy you take in your sample in that jar and just see what happens, you know, because they got to test to make sure all the swimmers are dead. So just saying truth.
Well, that's one. And then now the last piece that I haven't talked about to anybody. So I have a 10 gallon tank in my 9, 10 gallon tank rack. One of those tanks I've done an experiment with and I've tried a new biotope. So you're familiar with different types of famous biotopes, but I figured I wanted to make my own and we at the aquarium guys podcast have done. I have started a trend for many years that I purchased glass dildos and I put them into my friends aquariums as a joke before I leave. I've done this to many people. I've done this to the Ohio fish rescue. When I went to Ohio, I left it there. I've done this to my wife Jay. I've done this to Jay at in Chicago. I did this. The flowerhorn expert. I've done this to your wife. Absolutely. I did this to Phil and tamed waters in the cities. I've done this to a lot of people. It's Been. It's been a good gag. And then they take that dildo and they pass it on as another joke. So it's like a. It's like an old school chain mail, right. But I decided that I'm gonna make an entire biotope out of this. So I have an entire 10 gallon tank where I have nothing but glass dildos and butt plugs.
Oh, that's gonna beautiful.
So I got about six, seven, maybe eight of them in there. And they're a whole arrangement, so different shapes, sizes, and right in the center is just like a kind of a golden butt plug. It's a lot of fun. So I have it, well, overgrown with different mosses and free floating plants. Black sand. And I have the plant in there. A little bit of plants in there. Yep. And I also have a trio of apistogrammas in there. So it's worked out. I've had it running for over six months and it's been a nice biotope. So I'd like to encourage my findings and, you know, encourage you guys to go on Amazon. Find yourself an assortment of glass, specifically only glass, because it's nice and inert. Butt plugs and dildos. And if you're an adult, of course, and then put them in your aquarium and hide them in your botanical, you know, biotope. And then just when people are in your aquarium, it's so much fun when they're like, oh, what a nice aquarium. And they continually go in and they randomly see hidden treasures all across your aquarium. It really creates a unique experience that you can't trade anything.
I can't believe Amazonas hasn't called you and said, hey, we're doing this aquascaping, you know, competition, competition. We want you to, you know, come here and show people how to aquascape with glass. Adult toys.
Right. It did work with the, the pistegamas quite well because they have little territories.
Chicka chicka boing boing.
And they did claim one of the butt plugs is their own. It was quite nice.
So if you're raising a piste of gammas, what color butt plug would you suggest, Robbie?
You know, the clear ones. I thought they would backfire. They are harder to see. Completely crystal clear with no color. They still were, were used by the fish as a cover, ironically. But I prefer anything that's not blacked out. This has some clarity to it because it shines nicely with your light, especially in a low lit tank that with plants. So, you know, like I have, like I said, the golden one that's like a orange gold, clear glass, you know. That was a nice touch.
So I. Robbie, when you. When you. No, no.
When you get the cease and assist, Cease and desist.
No, that's not it either. When you get the uranium jar that you're gonna set up with shrimp, can you put the plant in it and see if the plant gets special superpowers from the uranium?
It will be in there as well.
Yes.
Okay.
I promise you.
I like that. So I have. I had some weird success here just recently.
Did you.
I purchased 24 gold white clouds because I keep reading about how easy they are to breed. And I threw them in a bottom tank in my house and it's full of hornwort. And I feed them. I don't look at them. The other day I put a flashlight in there to look because I don't have a light over that tank. I must have 150 babies. And those little gold white clouds are so damn cute. And I've given them no special attention. No. You know, I haven't been feeding them anything other than flake food and stuff. And I tell you what, I think I'm gonna put them outside now in a little pond in my. In my house. But the problem is here in Minnesota, we've been getting an inch and a half of rain every other day for the last two months. And I don't know if I can, you know, keep them from overflowing the outside tubs and stuff. Just talk to our friend Anthony from Dakota Tropicals.
Right.
And anyway, Daku Aquatics. And we're gonna have. We're have Anthony on next week, and he is raising 10, 12 varieties of rice fish. And if you've been following the news in the Miami area is where he's at. He's having a hell of a time trying to keep the fish in his ponds. He's got all these ponds outside and they're getting 4 inches of rain an hour for the last couple of weeks, every other day. And he's having. He's having the biggest problems trying to keep his damn fish in the. In the pond because it keeps overflowing the pond. But good problems to have. But, yeah. So, I mean, next week, listen, we will have Anthony on. He's gonna talk about his race fish. He's gonna talk about all the different colors of rams. He's. He's been doing, and he's been very, very successful. So it's gonna be a good podcast. It's probably gonna be one of our better ones because this one sucks.
I mean, I'm excited. All right, so are we ready to do some questions and answers, boys?
All right, let's start from December 1904.
Yeah, December 1904. Here's from last February.
Well, exactly. It's how much we suck.
Oh, my God. Bumping this open again didn't update it recently. Oh, no, no. This is a. This is a spam.
Oh, let's answer it.
Yeah, let's. Let's answer it.
Do you need Viagra? Yes.
No.
Well, Adam, you get to be my age, it just helps you from rolling out of bed.
All right, here we go. Kaylee says I haven't read into it a lot, but I've seen this going around. Do with it what you will. So let's pull this up. And this is a tick tock.
What?
The tick tock link is so old it's dead. Yep. The tank tock tick tock link is so old it's dead. I'm pretty sure this is the tick tock link that was. Was bombarded with by people during this time frame. About the Virgin Mary stingray that was at that zoo. You guys heard about the immaculate.
Oh, she'd not been committed to a male.
Correct. Which happens more than people think in the. Especially in the fish world. So I don't know how that ended up. That was a stillbirth or what she.
Actually, they found out that she has a very rare reproductive disease. It's some type of tumor.
Oh, well, how awful.
Did.
Yeah, I.
Did she get birth in.
No, she didn't give birth. They actually apparently ultrasounded her, I think, and then they figured out it was a tumor or something. There's a news article on it. I thought I sent it to you guys probably.
He doesn't mean it.
You guys just don't read my. Because you know that I'm going on some rant.
No, I think that I didn't read it because it was the 30th time I was sent it that week. I got. I was bombarded with that stuff. Like everybody heard about the immaculate stingray. Next question. Brown diatom algae.
Yuck.
Adelie says, hi guys. I've never had brown diatom algae probably in any of my tanks until now. Recently moved into adult pea puffer tank into a 20 gallon high. Got in another six juvenile peas in a 20 gallon high. Have terrible outbreak of diatoms. Everything says high nitrates will bring in, but nitrates in the tank both read 10 ppm. I have emerald quarries in for each blood worm cleanup crew. I have another 20 gallon high with white cloud, mountain minnows, tons of rams and a mixture of neo shrimp. So when we say tons of things in a 20 gallon high, you're already making me nervous.
This.
It's on the same spot the phosphates. Correct. It's on the shop or same shop light and is on for six hours a day on a timer. And they're always on the same time. Absolutely no algae issues of any kind of the tank. All the plants are left with some hefty Amazon swords spring sprinkling of crips. I'm afraid the crips are slow growers, but the brown diatom algae will shade out Amanos, but not sure how the puffers will react to them. I can clean the algae off the tanks, rubbing it off the plants, but does not seem to work. Rubbing it off is not what I meant. Jim, I'm at a loss.
I didn't want to say anything. I don't want to interrupt.
I'm at a loss of how to deal with this. Eventually it'll sort itself out with regular water changes. So to answer this, the water changes are what's continually feeding the diatom algae. You need to stop water changes and monitor your tank closely. In fact, what I'd recommend is starve out the tank. Right, Adam?
Either that or if you could put on a UV sterilizer. That works really good too. For whatever reason, up in the Northland we have this diatom algae. Always do not put a plecostomis or any type of algae eater. That diatom just shreds their stomach lining. And I see a lot of people buy it for that brown shit. And then they go, what did my algae eater die like three days later? Well, because you carved his stomach up with glass, you ass hat. That's the proper use of ass hat, by the way.
I'm just so glad. I'm so glad he just didn't go off on a rant on the emerald Cory. I thought for sure something was coming with the emerald.
Corey, No, I am trying to. God damn it. Do you want my help or not?
I do, I do, I do. Please continue.
What? She never said what type of food she was feeding, so just start.
Except for frozen bloodworms, that's all she lists. Yes.
Yeah, And I've found that certain types of flake food. Cause Wardley, flake food, if that's still made. That seems to really set off the tank with like algae blooms. But it does. It's not every jar. So it's like one jar will be awesome and then you, you get food six months later and then everything's. Everything's shit. And that's just the way that food, Food, the food is if there's no continuity in the food production. So, yeah, starve it or get a UV sterilizer, and that should help big time.
So another thing is diatom allergy is a type of. I believe it's phytoplankton. Don't quote me on this. And the.
I think so, yeah.
It's a silica algae. So their cell walls have to be built by fresh silica in the water line. So the longer that you leave the water alone without changing the water and adding fresh into it, the more you're going to starve out this type of phytoplankton of its silica that it's going to use to use and build its cells. So if you just leave your water alone, I know it's, it's completely, completely against normal recommendations to do water changes. If you have bad diatom brown algae, stop doing those water changes as long as you can because you're starving out the silica in the water.
And if you're using your tap water, and depending on if your tap water is good, bad or ugly, you know, maybe go to half RO water and that will actually help a little bit too.
That's only if you must. When you're having like an ammonia or nitrate nitrite issue. Only absolutely necessary if you have to.
Add any water or a gallon of bleach would work. Wonderful.
Now, this is only for a time until you see the diatom algae disappear. Then you are back to normal tank use. Normal water changes because you've killed essentially that diatom algae from the tank.
And if you've decided that you don't have enough herpes in your tank with the diatom algae, you should go and take some Malaysian trumpet snails and throw those in as well, because they're about the only thing that I know of that eats it.
Yes, snail populations eat it well. And like Adam said, if you're gonna put plecos in there, especially young Playcos, it does shred their stomach. More mature plecos can handle a bit of diatom algae. It's not going to completely destroy them, but it's not good for them.
I'm gonna tell you one quick little story. I stopped by the big box store up in Fargo, North Dakota, and I purchased a bunch of two and a half gallon tanks. I was talking to the young guy that was working there, and he listens to the podcast. He Said something about, you know, we've got this outbreak of Malaysian trumpet snails. And he goes, I don't know what to do. And I said, well, you know, why don't you try this? Why don't you just start putting a small plate in there in the evening with a little bit of food on it, and then in the morning, you guys turn on the lights, just take that plate out and stuff. Seven pounds. They took out seven pounds of trumpet snails. He said, I ran into him about a month later, just like two days ago. 7lb trumpet snow snails that they took out of the tank. He goes, and that's just what we got so far.
Yeah.
He said, you go into their store and you can see there's 200 Malaysian trumpet snails on top of the sand or the gravel, but you just can't see the 2000 underneath it. And it was just amazing. And he said, yeah, I couldn't believe how much. He goes, I thought you were just full of crap. So we tried it in the one tank, so now they're doing like six tanks a night, going and bringing out these. And he goes, you know what? What? After you throw them in the garbage, what we learned. I said, what's that? You should take it outside. He goes, yeah, because it smells like Red Lobster. He says, After 2 o'clock in the afternoon, all these dead snails in the garbage.
Mmm, dad.
Well, they're not dead. They're just resting.
They're just taking a dump in your garbage.
Yeah, they're just resting until they hit fresh water and then they'll come back to life.
Pretty. Pretty accurate.
All right, next one. Aquarium Guys Podcast Still a Thing by Corey. Hi, aquarium guys. I'm emailing you wondering if the Aquarium Guy podcast is still happening, if there's new episodes will come out. If not, you can stop reading here. Well, thanks. Thanks, Corey. Though this podcast is not my favorite podcast when it comes to aquarium information, it's my go to podcast listening bickering idiots. When it comes to talking about aquarium, you're welcome, dipshit. He says, insults aside, I'm liking the parts of the show where you're informational and not just banter. I have to say, Adam's my favorite of the three, so stop picking on them. You all right? No kidding. Thanks. And keep up the good, good parts of your work, Corey. This guy's a harsh, harsh dude. P.S. i think I put a large catfish with an expensive arowana. Just wondering if Rob has experience on the topic. So.
Hey. Hey, Adam. Your neighbor Corey just sent us an Email.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks.
Go remotely who it is.
Yeah. So you say this is just Adam's secret email right here?
I think he just did it himself.
Well, I appreciate your email, Adam. All right, next one. We have a blank email that it does have a title. It says Mongoloid Guppy by Corey. That's all. A lot of people named Corey.
That's the same guy.
No, not, not this K. The last one was the C. Sure. I can't read last names, but you get the idea. So I'm gonna have to take a second download this movie file. Apparently they sent us a video.
A video?
Yes.
I hope it's not of Corey Catfish doing it. That'll just release Adam right out into the frickin woods.
Let's see, here it is in my downloads folder. And we have.
Am I gonna see this video?
I'm gonna try, you know where we do what we can around these parts. Do I have to download it again? Like what?
By the way, are you guys getting the rain that they got up north?
We got an inch and a half today. Yeah. And then up north they got 70 mile an hour winds for those of you who don't give a shit.
All right, gentlemen. So.
So in my neck of the woods they. The Highway 169 turned into a river.
Yeah, a lot of that's going on. What do you got? Rubs. So looks like guppies eating brain.
I know who did this. This is one of one of our wonderful Discord users named Red Roger. So I'm gonna post the video here in Discord if you want to see the video.
See that? He goes, hey, that's me.
There you go. So this is the mongoloid guppy. If you can see that video there, right here.
Oh my God, what is that?
This is a video of a guppy attached to a guppy.
Siamese twin.
Yeah, I mean, I feel like that's a racist term but you know, we see retarded, so we're those people.
Retarded sightings twin.
Okay, that, that's not the correct use. Oh, shame on you.
Sorry.
All right, what's happening is we have conjoined guppies. The guppy on top apparently is fully developed and the guppy in the bottom, that's still completely conjoined at the stomach is half developed, but still has fully featured fins and it's just upside down. So imagine a guppy connected belly to belly and they're both moving, both swimming, both breathing, but their organs are connected.
Oh my call Ripley's Believe it or not because they buy six legged cows and stuff. They'd buy that in a second.
So we've had.
Is one of them a male and the other one's a female?
I. It's hard to tell, you know. Mr. Red, Roger actually is in Discord live with us right now and he says they're both male. Interesting, the story of this. In fact, I'm gonna get Roger to invite to speak. You're welcome to join us. You don't have to join us to speak, but I did at least put the INV out there. Oh, well, joining us live on the podcast. Mr. Roger, welcome.
Hello.
How are you doing?
You're live on the air.
So we spoke about this before, Roger, and you had this guppy here and you asked questions about on the podcast. And I've seen this time or two, but I've never seen them live to full term. So this was sent to us and we talked about this in the discord. I'm gonna see the date of the email that you sent this to us. This was at March 1st. So now that it is June, middle of June, how is this conjoined guppy doing?
Yeah, he's. He's still alive. He's a lot bigger now. The bottom one has no head and like just the red part on the tail and like a little swollen body, you see, but it's a little front pectoral fins move around. It's pretty cool.
And how long has this guppy been living? Since birth. Ooh.
When did you say I sent that email to you?
March.
March 1st.
He was probably about three, four weeks old then, so.
So that by far has been the longest lasting conjoined guppy that I've ever seen. Like this. So good on you, man. And thanks for sharing that one.
Have you had anything else like that happen? Is it just this one one time?
No, that's actually the first one. And I don't know, man, I breed thousands of guppies. So. Jimmy, actually if you're interested in it, I've never shipped fish before, but you can gladly have it.
You know what? I would take it on the road like one of those traveling psycho show. What do you call those, those freak shows.
They don't do those anymore. Since 1910.
No, no, I. I will tell you that. I was.
You're gonna say Walmart then?
No, no, no, no. We were. We were in. My wife and I were on a road trip and we stopped at this, this little county fair because she wanted a corn dog and they actually had a freak show.
Are you Kidding me.
This is four years ago.
Wow.
And we went through there.
Still do freak shows.
Yes.
I'm just into midget wrestling. That's all I want to come back in our area. That's, that's my thing.
Your thing. But yeah, I tell you that's crazy. And so it's, it's two. So it's basically a headless bottom. Both males can conjoin fish, conjoined fish.
Now for those of you that have fish like this, especially in live bearers, I have seen premiums go for certain fish that have conjoined like maybe a tail sticking out of something and these anomalies generally are culled out. So if you're a professional breeder and you don't want bad genes to go through, you don't want those genes to, to continue. They just call them and move on. That's a mistake. And they rinse and repeat. There are shitty breeder.
Thanks.
No, no. I'm giving the information of like what like show people do because they don't want to have like a certain reputation of like intentionally breeding those things. So they, they do. I'm sure people will also take their.
Losers and throw them right in the fucking garbage.
I'm telling you not to do that.
Because I would keep that thing forever.
There's a group of people online that give you a high, high dollar for, for these anomalies if you can make sure they're stable. And what you've done here Roger, is you not only do you have an anomaly, but you have two near complete fish conjoined that have lived to full adulthood at this rate. So that's a very valuable fish. If you want to give it to Jimmy, that's one thing. But if you're listening and you guys are lucky enough to have a conjoined fish that's stable and it isn't living a rough life that's feeding that seems happy if it, if it's suffering, I wouldn't continue keeping a fish suffering. But if you have a fish that's healthy, feeding, active and it's fine, those can go. I've seen people, you know, pay a couple hundred dollars for an individual fish for an anomaly.
So that's wild. So we'll talk about the wire transfer later I guess or something.
Yeah, with small unmarked bills, non sequential. We'll send it right away clearly. But yeah, I definitely would. Would. I mean if the fish is happy just, I would just keep him and, but I would post it on, on Reddit and just see what people say and you're gonna find somebody out there who's gonna beg you for that thing.
Well, if you post on Reddit, you're gonna get a lot of people that are going to tell you you're. You're just a horrible person for keeping it. But I can see from this video that's healthy. It's healthy. Happy, you got a thing of feeding. They're both swimming perfectly fine. They both have gill movement. There's no signs of stress. That's full color. I would not consider this any type of a cull measure at all, my friend.
Yeah, I appreciate it. Like I said, he's still living. I keep him. That's a five and a half gallon there that I raised tiny fry in. I've kept him in there and just put several new batches through with him. He just kind of lives in that one tank now.
Now, I'm just guessing, but is he even able to breed? I'm guessing not. I don't.
So I don't think he's got a gonopodium.
Okay.
Is that what you call the fish penis?
So yeah, when you say it is the bottom half or the top fish, which does neither of them have a gym podium?
Neither.
I don't know. Interesting.
That'd be a great scientific study that maybe some scientists would, if it does.
Die, take pictures of the of it on like on a plate or something for. For all of us, for science.
On a plate. On a hefty Styrofoam.
I mean, think about it. You see those people like the, the vet, like an old school vet clinic and they have like, you know, cow fetuses. If you can join twins and like formaldehyde in a jar.
I mean, look at back in the.
Day, they used to put people in zoo.
Hey, hey, come on now. Come on.
You belong.
Cast it in acrylic. Putting on a cane.
My God, I would pay for a cool conjoined pimp cane. Guppy cane. I would pay a grand for that.
Oh, that would be cool. I never thought that. Yeah, yeah, Mr. What was that? Jurassic park where they had the mosquito and that is a great idea. Make sure it's dead before you do that though.
Don't kill it. Just let it pass away naturally.
Roger, you got any other questions?
My guy, he's like, he hung up on us already.
No, I'm still here. Okay, I can let you guys go.
Any other questions for us?
Nah, man. Pretty much it. Pleasure to talk with you guys. Good to talk with you for the first time. Jimmy and Adam, pleasure to meet y'all.
Yeah.
Any shout outs before you leave for your local people or for someone?
Yeah. Follow River Region Aquatics Club on Facebook. I'm the president of that aquatics club and we do lots of cool stuff. So follow us on Facebook.
Nice. What state are you in, Rod?
I'm from Montgomery, Alabama.
Sweet.
Wonderful. Thanks, buddy. And next email. Now we're on with another Corey question. So first one was the Corey with the C. We talk with Corey with a K. Now we're talking about a Corey question from 32dodger.
Let's just mute Adam right now before he loses his crap.
Hi. Hi, guys. Love the podcast. I've listened to every episode. I wish there were more. I have planted species, only 20 long of panda corys. And my local fish store said he does not have a breeder for those and would be willing to buy them if I breed them. My question is, what is a fair wholesale price? I have never sold a fish before. Anyways, I enjoy the show. Hope to hear more in the future. And he does give me permission to say his first name. Don.
Cool. Well, I tell you what, I've been wholesaling for years. If you're talking just regular panda corys, not long fin, you can get anywhere from. I mean, depending on size and stuff. Now you got to realize, here's what your local pet store will say. I mean, tell them you want two bucks, two and a half bucks a piece for him. And he goes, well, I can get them like that from my supplier and go, yeah, but you're paying shipping, right? So now you're getting free shipping because I'm dropping them off. So I would say two to two and a half dollars for a panda cory because they retail for $7.99 to $9.99 or else if you got long fins, add a dollar to that.
And that's for what we call semi grown, like full color, free swimming, full food, you know, inch and a half long.
Yeah, I'd say inch, inch and a half. I mean, people love little fish. I tell you what, the last show that we did that I brought corys to, everybody said, do you have anything smaller? Do you have anything smaller? Because we had some huge frickin corys that we had brought in from Florida.
Still kind of harder to find because I know that when I was in the doing this, they were like you. They were basically seasonal at that point.
Yeah, you know, people used to, we used to import them in portable import them. And finally now there's quite a few breeders out there that are getting them going and stuff. So the prices dropped.
It's stable. It's. It's now a bread and butter fish. It's no longer that, like, little rare thing that you would occasionally. Unless.
Okay, I remember paying like six bucks wholesale for those little bastards. I didn't care. I bought them.
They dropped quite a bit.
Yeah. And the thing is, now there's the long fin ones. And that's kind of where everybody's leaning towards trying to get. Get those because you get a little bit more money.
Well, they've now started stabilizing the south. Was it the Venezuelan varieties like the Black Corridors and other things that are hard. Used to be.
Oh, those used to be expensive, possible.
To bring in because I know they were only wild. Nothing was acclimated to our waters. I remember getting them from like seagris list for wholesale rates of just ass.
Yeah, 20, 25 bucks.
That's when they stabilized first. When I first on the scene on the list, they were like 40 bucks for a single unit, for a single corridor. Wholesale.
Yeah.
And they'd be small and they'd be garbage small. And they would immediately die. They would just.
They usually would die in transport. You wouldn't even get to see them alive.
Yeah, you wouldn't get to see them live. And then by the time you put them in the tank, get a bag of sushi, they would just fuzz up immediately. They did not like our water. But now they're. Again, that's. That's the targeted fish. And they're farmed now, so they're actually stable. So if you see some of those Venezuelan. I believe they're Venezuelan corys. They're a bit more hardy than they used to be, that's for sure.
I mean, look at rams. A few years ago, you couldn't get a ram to live. That got brought in and stuff. But now there's so many good breeders out there like Anthony, and you get yourself rams, and they all live and breed like.
I just want to find female rams.
I tell you what, we got Anthony on next week, and he will tell you he's got some for you.
Sweet.
And I did confirm they are a Venezuelan Corys, by the way.
Well, unless we've changed the name recently, the names change.
They're still Venezuelan Corys.
Well, until Venezuela is not a country anymore, that you know that.
So. Okay, just so people are more interested, you can get orange cory doors like orange lasers. But then you can get orange Venezuelan corys, which are much more beautiful. Generally they retail for 50 bucks. That gives you an idea.
I Like the. When they named them laser quarries from like the. You know, remember when the line shark with freaking laser beams.
Laser beams. All right.
Do the green ones. Do they still have the green laser quarries or.
Yes, absolutely.
Okay.
All right. Love this channel. Isaac says hello. I've been keeping fish for less than a year. Wanted to stop by and say hi guys. Hey. Let me get through the workday. Especially Adam's rants to get. But this man gets more pussy. Why is he so mad at Okihan?
Exactly.
Wow. Wow. Just kidding. Just kidding. All jokes aside, I need some help with my 10 gallon. I've had algae boom for two months for sake. I can't get rid of all of it all. All the parameters are in order. I have eight female Betas, three tetras and one flame Grammy, bro, you have way too many, way too much in your 10 gallon. All right. Right there you have four plus eight 12 sizable fish and a 10 gallon. Stop it. You should be taking that and moving them to like a 30 gallon, 40 gallon easy. So I can tell you right there there's problem one. All right, moving on to the email. I realized that I may be a touch overstocked. Oh, good. But. Or fine for a few months and then the bloom hit. Well, yes, it's a planted tank with nearite snails. No, I don't have clown vomit, clown puke or for. Yeah, for substrate. I currently have a. Two one gallon tanks and a Wallstead. One Wallstead tank and one big box filter. One gallon tank. A 20 gallon with tall guppy. 20 gallon tall with guppies breeding 40 gallon breeder with Tetris Serpace snails. Dojo loach. A 55 gallon with three golden wonder Achilles. Holy hell. It just keeps on going forever. There's a whole list of shit. I'm. I'm passing it. I'm sorry, brother. He's. I got a quarantining fish with the problem, not jinx myself. Blah blah. Town gallon is the one that's kicking my ass. So all the other tanks are good. The one that's terribly overstocked that you're listing is the problem.
Take out half the fish, do a water change, continue on.
I guess my question is for the. For the aquarium guys. The smaller tanks are just harder to maintain. The bigger ones. Yes, yes. Yeah, you have yourself a smaller bio load. It's a delicate bioload. If you have like for instance, overfeed in that your bioload can't take even the smallest. Screw up a big tank, you can have three dead fish and bury them in your substrate like Father Fish wants you to and it's not going to matter. Whereas that 10 gallon tank, you put just a few extra flakes and it will crap out the whole tank. So smaller tanks are always going to be harder than bigger tanks, contrary to popular beginners belief. So immediately take out, I would put for your 10 gallon, just leave the three tetras, one flame gourami and get rid of all the beta.
I like that you mentioned Father Fish. I've been, I've been watching him a little bit and I like him because he's just a little bit like me, where he's just kind of lazy.
I love Father Fish to death.
He's just.
But I have to admit that people have to take him with a grain of salt. When you're going to talk to a person that's been doing fish their entire life. And how, how the oldest Father Fish, he's got to be what, in his 70s, probably getting close to 80. I don't know how old he is.
Well, if we're gonna find out he's 40 when he shows up in our front yard.
Well, he's doing terrible for 40. I love you Father Fish to death, but you're doing terrible for 40. But you have all this experience, you have a way that you're doing things because it's been the way that you do things, right? Trying to convey all the minute nuances that you've taken for granted for doing this your entire life. And teaching this to the broad audience doesn't work all the time. So if you're teaching this to advanced Aquarius and you're telling them, hey, you should put dead fish in your substrate for fertilizer, people like Adam, Jimmy and I can understand the nuances of putting dead fish in your substrate and going, yeah, it can work, but we automatically know that there's repercussions for that. We have to know our bio load, we have to know what the spikes are going to do. We have to know that we now have to feed accordingly. We have to know what that's going to do. Whereas novices are going to read that and be like Father Fish told me to do this. And the guy with eight betas, three tetras and a grommy is going to stick a dead fish in the bottom of his 10 gallon and wash it all shit out. Yeah.
And if you look at Father Fish's tanks, they're all beautiful, but they are all very heavily planted and understocked.
Yeah, all of them are under stocked.
And those plants Will eat that stuff up really quickly. But if you've got plastic plants, you're just asking for trouble if you got a small tank like that.
So if you're. If you haven't done this for at least five years, stick to aquarium co op content. Father. Father Fish is for. For us. It's been in this bucket for a while. You know, I'm saying.
You know, if I was listening to this podcast right now, I go, you know what? I'm just gonna quit listening to these guys. I'm gonna listen to like, a cat podcast, man.
Okay, Bentley pass. Bentley Pasco, Right? A dear buddy of mine, we spend a lot of time on the phone every time just to piss him off. What I'll do is I'll just. I'll. I'll tell them to, like. We'll say, like, hey, good night, man. I'll talk to you later. And then what I'll do to sign off is like, bury a dead fish in your tank. And he's like, you. Sorry, it's our meme. Because I do it works. But there's caveats. All right, moving on, Moving on.
Bury your dead fish out in your yard.
Yep, bury your dead fish in the yard. All right. Dario asked about new episodes.
Hello, this isn't Cory again.
No, no word. There's gonna be Cory's more. Don't worry. Coming. Hello, Rob's. Jim and Adam. My name is Dan and I'm in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
Yeehaw.
You poor guy.
Hey, beautiful there.
That is beautiful there. And he doesn't. He hasn't have to deal with our politics.
That's at Texas with dental. You know, I'm saying. All right, so I've been keeping fish for about 45 years, and I've recently found your podcast. Been binging and enjoying it. Wondering if you guys are doing any new episodes. Thanks, Dan. And I said, glad you're enjoying it. Our Patreon and paid Discord members have more unreleased episodes that are also unedited.
Also, you're trying to upsell them.
I did.
You're a dick.
So if you're listening to this and you want to listen to these podcasts unedited, uncut, and unfiltered, check our Patreon page or go to Discord. There's 299. Discord's cheaper than Patreon. I'm gonna let you know right off the. Off the get go. Because they take less from us. So go to Discord 2.99amonth and you have access to Our entire library of the unfiltered podcasts and unreleased podcasts. So if it's taking us a while to get the episodes out, you can listen to them before they're aired. So come check it out. And we're slowly getting back in the group.
This is the most stuff that we've done in the summer for a long time.
For us. Yeah.
I mean, here in Minnesota, it gets nice out for like 40 days and we go outside and just stare at the sun.
And honestly, this is the only way we support the podcast because Lord knows we're not gonna have sponsors ever again.
No, not after the beta podcast.
No. That's. We're over. So thank you for your patronage because you're the only reason we can keep in paying Dalton anything. For sure. Tate wants to know hello. First, let me say love the podcast. Found it. Digging while doing a podcast project. And love it. You're all very informative and Adam rants are great.
Adam got the whole neighborhood to write in. That's pretty cool.
Adam. Adam has a fan club. We don't get that, Jimmy. I have. I have a few for me and especially directed for my sister. So here we go. All right, first one I was asking.
For a friend is about.
Asking for friend is about Dragon fin tetras. And he also has the scientific name. I'm familiar with these. These fish are found in the book of Exotic aquarium fishes in the 19th revised edition by William T. Eins. This book is from 1939 and the most info on them I can find. Do you know anything about them or does Adam know if anyone can ship them in the United States?
You know a guy, he says legally.
Hang on, let me look these up.
What are they?
He has a scientific name from 1939. So this may have changed, but I'll post it in.
Oh, I guarantee you it's changed.
I'm gonna post it in the chat.
What's it called? What's he called? Dragon.
Dragon fin Tetras was the old school, common name. This is an old, old shit's. I've only seen this once and ironically, Jimmy, you brought them in when I was a kid.
What are those? Interesting.
You brought these in when I was a kid. This came to Benjamin. I know that.
I've seen these before.
Yeah, I've seen them.
I actually haven't seen them. I wonder what since then.
What do people call them other than that?
Show me a picture of them. Rob's cuz my Internet's shit.
Well, how am I gonna show you a picture when your Internet shit.
Well, I'm a phone, I'm trying to go, I'm trying to look them up on my phone.
Well, you can do it on your computer.
No, because then I.
Those are a beautiful fish there. This is a fair picture here, Jimmy. This is a fully bloomed male and they have more of the diamond tetra pattern with a kind of. It's like a cross between a diamond tetra and a hatchet fish. They have two dots on the back fins and they have more of the flag style on the top dorsal fin.
Take a picture of that. Send it to Adam.
I will copy the picture. This is a rough one because it's dried, unfortunately, because again, it's a very. It is a rare damn fish.
I'm just wondering if somebody has it in the US and it's under a different name.
Well, this is another case of fish getting lost in the hobby, you know.
You know they used to come in as long fin hatchet fish.
I think so.
Yeah, I've seen, remember ordering those. I've seen that name before as well. Yes.
And that's what I would say. So what you got to do is you got to wait till February because that's when the hatchet fish season is. Yes, February, March, it matches hatchet. Then they will come in.
They live in the same territory as hatch hatchet fish as well. So.
Yep.
For those that don't know, in South America, hatchet fish live in the hardest, fastest flowing rivers in the Amazon. So when you're seeing like the full on rapids that you're seeing, like when you watch Jeremy Wade for instance, a river monsters and he casts right in and gets a piranha in the harshest, harshest rapids. That's what these things swim against. They're insane. They school in it. They're crazy fish.
The quick note. So we were in Cincinnati over the weekend at the Cincinnati Zoo and they had a display of bluegills and crappies and this lady went up and said, those are the most beautiful piranha I've ever seen. And but anyway, my wife just grabbed me by the arm and said, let's go. Just leave it alone.
Just leave it alone.
Leave it alone.
Don't even, don't even go there. Most of these in old books were all handwritten pictures. So there's not a lot known about them. And it's because they're not, there's really no color to them. They're just a silver fish defining black dots. And when they go in bloom they do have those reflective scales like a diamond in tetra.
A little bit, a little bit of yellow in them.
Again he asked, where can we find them? Good luck. All right, you can tell your, your local fish store to keep your eye out. And like Adam said, long finned hatchet fish is probably another common name. You can find them on list.
I would just google where can I find this? And you might find some breeder in a basement somewhere that might have some. But I think that's gonna be your best, your best option because there's a lot of people that will bring in two, three times a year, they'll bring in a whole bunch of different oddball fish from frickin South America. And you might find somebody who's a breeder that has them down in their basement and you probably can buy them.
I don't know how rare these are, but I'm not thinking they're supposed to be that rare. They're just not that they're not common, they're not common in the trade. So if you know of someone that you can contact in the hobby that can import these, for instance, this would be a call to Scott from Project Paiba Pariba. Yeah, I always butchered the name. Say, hey, it'd be great to get these in because no one else is carrying them. Because you guys import these in. They probably exist, they're probably easy to get a hold of and in the season they could catch them. So. All right, here, here's Tate. I do have a question. Question of the, of the, of the year, buddy. Question of the year. We normally we have to deal with questions of like how do I cycle my tank, how do I deal with diatom algae? Right here. This is the question that makes us get sweaty for this podcast.
What are you saying, Adam?
I have a hypothesis and I'm not sure if it'll work. I'll have to try it out on something. But you know how there's a lot of silver fish and nobody ever knows why there's so many silver fish. But do you know how they, they realize that more stuff is starting to fluoresce under UV light, like mammals, birds, that type of stuff. I wonder if the silver fish fluoresce different patterns under UV light and nobody knows about it because we just put them under white light and then they, we just see the silver. I'm wondering if you put like a blue uv, you know, a UV light on them, kind of like the Glofish, if they would have different patterns and different spots and then we could actually see what the fish look like.
They've Done tests on this and showed cameras and watched a school of silvery minnow type guy fish like this go across. And it just shows the same reflections that would make from small waves above. So that's essentially what people think that they're trying to do is they're schooling and they're trying to mimic themselves from a fish below looking up, that they would just be camouflaged into the water line reflections. That's generally the tentative idea, but you're right, like what type of UVs, what type of lighting, what changes it in their natural environment. The things that we don't know because we do not fish and we don't look for it. Right. All right, this is not his only question, but damn, it was a good one. All right, second question. I'm setting up a 36 gallon bow front. I'm resealing this seam that exploded. Is it possible? And is this possible? And is one eba? I don't know what that means. Eba, yeah. Must be a type of fish. And is one Eba one to three sit on a sedanus catfish and one smaller pleco bristle nose perhaps. I think he's asking for fish recommendations. What the hell is an eba? Eba?
I have no idea. I've never heard of that shit.
Electric blue anaconda.
Oh, here it goes. Electric blue akara.
Akara. There we go. I was close, I was close.
All right, so he wants to know electric blue akara, big three sedona scat fish and a smaller pleco. All kosher for 36. Yeah, yeah. That doesn't seem terrible at all. I would not put just one black blue akara. I would put, you know, four in there, but they don't. I mean, that would be a maxed out tank, you know, canister filter because that's gonna be a decent bioload, especially with synonymous growing full size. Last one for my sister. In your opinion, what's the most beautiful freshwater fish in the hobby? If someone says endlers, can you punch them in the throat?
I will punch people right in the throat.
All right, Adam, you first.
I am partial to wild caught discus, like the greens, the blues, the browns. I like natural looking fish.
Yeah, you've been that way since I've known you. I mean, I remember you when you owned your pet store saying, can you get me this brown discus? I'm going, you're a dick. But yeah, I'll sell you one.
And I bought them and I was happy. Yeah, you also sold me the lionfish that almost killed me.
You know that's okay. I know we're over that now.
I mean, who's, who's, who's keeping track? All right, Jimmy, what about you?
You know, people are gonna hate me for saying this, but I am really into balloon rams. The different colored balloon rams that are being offered from overseas right now. There's gold ones, there's blue ones, there's four different colors. And the little short balloon rams I'm really liking right now. And it's something that I've never had any luck with rams period. And so when I bring in the balloon rams, I just consider look at them all night, especially the gold ones. I just think they're cute as hell.
Did you see them balloon body bristle noses that I sent? I put on the pot on the website, on Facebook. I don't know, what do you think of those?
Those are kind of cool. I just recently bought some. I have some balloon bodied swordtails that, that were fairly expensive and I bought them, I got six of them and they are the most burnt orange red color that you can imagine. And they've been doing very well.
I am biased. I think that the most beautiful fish in the freshwater spectrum are also the ones that live the shortest lifespans. They're all the annual killifish. So by far that you can't beat any of the colors that come out of anything but the annual killifish. So just pick one of my favorites that I've done on the top of my head is like the Gunther's blue Zanzibar killifish, the Nothos brachius. I'm trying gunthare. I'm butchering the shit out of that. But you can Gunther's killifish or Gunther's blue Zanzibar killifish, check them out. They're very easy to do, but again, they have extremely short lifespans. Like most of these, what I like to call annual killifish. You can't paint them as beautiful as they are in real life.
I love the way that they swim when they're trying to impress each other for breeding. They've got just the coolest little dance that they do. And I think they are gorgeous. I've never been, never really kept them to be honest. But I do have a friend down in southern Minnesota that used to raise a lot of them stuff. And you sit there and just watch them do their little dance to impress each other while they're breeding. And it was just something you would see in nature. But if you're not paying attention, you just totally miss it.
Next one By Blue old fish tank. Hey guys, my name is Blue. I'm from Saskatchewan, Canada. I've binged all your episodes this past year and got me into fish. You guys got me into fish and nothing is better for me than hearing you guys talk fish. I've been building collections of fish tanks and today I picked up a very old tank that looks like a stainless steel siding, an undergravel filter, a air pump made of brass, and the inner seal is crumbly chalky stuff. Since Rob fancies himself an old tank lover, I wonder if this would find interesting and maybe tell me what should put in it. This air pump is relatively his childhood air pump. Oh my God. Could the tank be old enough to contain lead? Is the. Is this cool or just meh? I'm looking forward to hearing you guys in a very far away podcast publication. Sincerely, Blue now. And now here's some.
Is that a slate bottom? Yes, it is.
It sure is. So this is a original slate bottom metal metaframe tank and it definitely has the lead. Lead oxide, linseed lead, blend in the tar lend blend seal in the side for sure.
That can be fixed up.
Let me copy these to see if I can get these sent into discord to share with our homies. Don't you know?
I would recommend removing that seal and resealing it with silicone.
You'd have to. Yeah.
He even has the original light. Boys, I'm excited to show you these pictures.
We just had one of those recently and I and Rob talked me out of it and I gave it to Rob.
I still got it. It's at the official store. We were gonna make a historic display out of it and we still are.
Yeah, I saw it at the fish store. I go, is that my old tank? And he goes, that's Rob's ago. That's my old tank.
Yeah, yeah, that's your old tank. Yeah, it's all there. We're gonna put white clouds and put a Bunsen burner below it to show what people did in the past dead. The only thing I'm missing right now for that tank is a choo choo train. Old school piston pump with the wheel. I need to find.
Why do you need a Bunsen burner for white clouds? They don't need the fucking heat.
We're not gonna turn it on. We're just gonna show them how they would have heated it. Heatin'heated. Up the tank. What's the word I'm looking for? English is hard.
English is hard. It's not his first language. People no, yeah, these tanks are. I do see them quite often at ebay. Anywhere from 40 to $75 and stuff.
And pick them up when you can, because you're not gonna find these forever.
And to get the. The top is quite good. And what I love about the tops is that they're razor sharp. Every time you handle them, you cut yourself because nobody ever ground them down back in the day.
Now, ironically, we do have a gentleman in the audience named Blue. It makes me wonder if that's the same blue from the email. Huh? Wink.
No, I don't think so.
Oh, different color. Blue.
Feeling blue.
That guy is. He breeds electric blue day geckos. He lives in Minnesota. This one is from Canada.
Oh, well, that's actually pretty awesome.
He also the Blue, and that's listening to our podcast. He bred some really cool rare lizard. I was very impressed.
All right, so now that I have the pictures uploaded so you can see them again, Adam. The pump he has is a relatively modern pump, but it does have a brass fixture on it. An old brass airline fixture, then I've.
Ever seen that before.
The. The light is definitely the original light. You can take the bulb mechanism out and actually just use the switch and put your own LED into that space if you wanted.
The best thing, a lot of work about those lights is that there was no. So in the light bulb. There's nothing protecting the light bulb from the water.
Yeah, it was a bit rough.
And so if you splash up on the light bulb and the black bulb was hot, it would burst. And they. They never, ever had any cover that I could see that was, you know, well, between the light bulb and the water surface.
I mean, I had some of those old, old bulbs, and they were actually decently thick.
Yeah, no, you're Talking like little 40 watt appliance bulbs that were pretty.
They were like. If I remember correctly, they were basically like old oven bulbs.
Yeah, that's what you need.
Yeah, it was kind of. You basically chose, do you want a thin one that broke, or did you want a thick one that baked your tank?
Pick your choice. And what I like about the. The picture he's showing us, there's a box of filter carbon in there from 1960, 65, or something like that.
Easy.
And it's probably still good.
That looks like the Brady Bunch.
Yep.
Right there.
And it's cat.
I wonder if that air pump would work.
Okay.
If it does. Doesn't work, I don't know where you'd ever get parts to try to get to go.
So you have a Couple different options of these metaframe aquariums. Again, the seals that you have in this specific slate. One, it looks like, I don't know if it's been resealed, but if it's original, it'll look like black tar. And you can press it with your fingers. It is a lead oxide mixed with like flaxseed oil mixed with a tar. It's gross stuff. You don't want to get it on your, your person use gloves. But you can essentially boil water and put it in a boiling water substance and it will reheat those seals and reseal them. I've seen it happen, seen guys do this. If you want to get real creative with it, you can also take a cooking torch that you use for like burning the frosting on a cake and you can gently, carefully heat up those edges to reseal those, those seals and it will work. Now mask gloves, that type of thing, and then wait for it to dry outside. Outside, right. Or you know, scrape as much as you can out with a putty knife and then simply reseal with correct silicone over it. Those are essentially your options. And when you do use 100% silicone, but you can use black silicone to completely cover it. It's completely your choice. Those reseal easy. Do not take the metal frame off of the tank if you can help it. If you do, you're going to have to reseal that back on and you're going to disassemble the tank. But you can seal over it. But you got to make sure to remove as much of that tar out of the meta frame as possible.
Now when you're buying silicone, you can go online and buy aquarium silicone. And you know, of course that's completely safe, but a lot of times one tube of that is ten twelve dollars.
Oh no, no. You can see them for like 35 bucks. That much for an aquarium branded one.
So I go to my local big box store and I buy the 100% silicone clear, like Robbie said, there's black.
Six to eight bucks.
Six to eight bucks. But here's the thing is there's so many silicones there. Do not buy a silicone with antibacterial or anti mold because that will kill your freaking fish. So you have to make sure it's a hundred percent silicone, period. And a lot of these ones you can read to will say, maybe in there. That safe for aquariums. But normally you don't see anything about aquariums in there. I hate those little tubes. I like the big caulking gun. And for seven bucks you can seal up the whole thing pretty quick and go on to the next one.
Alright, great question. Love finding your old finds. And yes, this is cool. If I were to see someone with an old actual slate bottom tank, the reason they had those slate bottoms is to remind you we made the joke about Bunsen burners, but they put slates, the actual stone slates in the bottom because they didn't have modern heaters that you put in with a coil that you plug into your wall. So how they would heat those specialty tanks, they have a small Bunsen burner below just like you have in your lab kits that you did in high school. And they would heat the tank with a little flame or even sometimes they'd use a candle if they want. Lower, more controlled flame. And that's how they would keep their tanks warm, especially in the evenings in a colder draft of your home.
My grandmother had one of those tanks and she had. And I can't tell you, I've never researched this and stuff if you even buy these anymore. But it looked like a little. I don't know if you're familiar with these little heating pads that you get to put in your nursery for your plants where you warm up the plants underneath. But that's how she heated her tank is she had a small, little thin piece of. I don't know what it was, it wasn't plastic, but it was. It sat underneath the tank and it was plugged in all the time. And that's what heated the tank through. Through the bottom of the tank. It was like a little heat pad. Kind of interesting. I don't know if that was something that came with the tank when she bought it. That's something she came up with.
There you go.
But it just kind of came to me as we were talking about that.
All right, next question is actually from the chat. Just make sure that I'm not missing any here, says Robs. Please tell Jimmy that I might have a solution for his patio ponds overflowing. I can drill dozens of his 8th inch holes in a couple inches below the rim to let excess water drain slowly out of the container. Drill the holes in a line to basically set the water level. It keeps up with up to monsoon levels of rain. Lots of holes are the key.
Yeah, I agree. I do have a tank with an overflow that I use, but it can't keep up. I have one tank that's probably 2 foot by 4 foot, 18 inches tall. And it came in. It was used as a base what do you call that when you, when you have your sub pump your sump. It was made for sump pump anyway.
Okay.
But it's not enough. And so yeah, that's a great idea to have plenty of drilled holes and they'd have to be pretty small because if you're trying to breed fish, you don't want babies to be flying out of there either.
Yeah, you can put, you know, some filters on there, you know, screens, you know, there's things to do regardless. Another question.
Thank you.
Andrea says my target barbs keep dying. That's title that email. Hi guys. Love your podcast. Learned a lot. About a month ago, bought six emerald tiger barbs from a great fish store in Framingham, Massachusetts. Massachusetts, thank you, Massachusetts, not Petco or petsmart. They were great for about two weeks and then one died and then another one died. So they started dying one by one. So I waited and did my usual water changes and went to Petco this time bought six of the regular tiger barbs. Same thing, great for two weeks. Then they start dying one by one again. My tank is a 55 gallon tank. Two hang in the back filters, a big air stone. And I had it established for years. Tested water each time. Everything is in range. Current inhabitants, two bronze Corydoras, six black skirt tetras that are full grown. One bristle nose. I change 10% of my water then in two weeks then I do a 30 water percent change. Why are my fish dying? Hard to tell you. I love pictures. There's no pictures included. I mean I have an idea. Food, two weeks food would start hitting them. Could be worms.
I'm thinking bad. So what do you think Adam, what do you got?
I'm thinking, well, first of all, green moss tiger barbs. The green tiger barbs are always a little more delicate than the regular ones.
Correct.
I've always found that. But if you have full sized adult black skirt tetras and you only have six tiger barbs, the black skirt tetras are pounding the shit out of them them during the night.
You think so?
Absolutely.
That's what it is because they're killing one off at a time. So they're killing the straggler and there's not enough tiger barbs in there. Tiger barbs do really good if you start with six, but like 12 to 12 or more or better they have such if they're full size are killing them.
It's a 55 gallon tank and it's extremely understocked. Right. So she has 6 supposedly 12 total barbs. When she Started, but they keep disappearing out. So I'm assuming that there's no hides at all in that tank.
Well, there's got to be plants, but that's not enough. And I'm just thinking that the black skirts are vicious bastards.
Don't you think tiger barbs are vicious too?
Plants wouldn't be enough for hides. You'd have to have full hides for these at nighttime, like you're saying.
Yeah, well, tiger barbs are vicious. But if you're buying tiger barbs, the average tiger barb at a store is the size of your thumbnail. Yeah, I mean, nobody buys the big tiger barbs because tiger barbs when they get big are what, three, four inches? I mean, I've seen them that big.
They get big and they get aggressive.
Yeah, because she's little babies.
We've had questions on this, on this podcast too, where people are saying, like, I got, you know, one tiger barb and he's, he's chasing everybody around. Well, if you put six or eight of them, they chase, you know, then they kind of school and chase each other around and leave everybody else alone. But I think, I think you guys are onto something. Maybe if she takes out the black skirt tetras and restocks and see what happens.
Have you ever seen a full old grandpa black skirt tiger barb in a 55 gallon tank? Those are three inch bitches. You know I'm saying. Yeah, those are big bitches.
You know the thing. Yeah. And then you're saying that they've been there forever. They're probably pretty territorial. That's the one thing I do. I would, I would take them out or maybe buy your, your six tiger bars, put them in a different tank and just see if you can get them past two weeks or else you're getting just bad stock. But tiger barbs normally are pretty much bulletproof.
All right, recommendation one, rotate your food. That's just, just, just to rule it out. Right. As a possibility. Recommendation two, get some hides. Not plants, hides. You're gonna want stuff where they can actually swim into that when they're small, that when they're chased, they have a place to be safe at. And then two, get yourself some angelfish. Even if it's just a pair, that's enough to calm down the aggression of black skirt tetras.
I don't know about angelfish because the black skirts will tear the fins in the end.
It's gotta be. They gotta be sizable angelfish. You can't get like equal size. You got to get bigger than the black Skirts. And then you'll be fine.
So let me get this right. If I have a lion eating my dog and then I should get.
You get a tiger.
Get a tiger.
Cute. That's what you do.
And then I get an elephant to eat the tiger. You're just adding more.
You need something. What she needs is like at least a dozen tigers. Barbs that are bigger or even a couple of clown loaches. Something needs to be in there because those tight. Those, Those. Those black skirt tetras are pain in the ass.
The black skirt tetras is. If they're left alone, they will become the dominant source of the tank and they will be aggressive. If you put an angelfish in there, angelfish won't necessarily chase the barbs around, but they will stop. The black skirts will being freeing. So dominant. Give it a go, see what happens. Otherwise, just take those damn things out and put them in a different tank for now and see how that.
Yeah, I would just bring in your tiger bar. And some people try.
Put that like a. Put a screen or a divider and just put them in timeout land.
Rob, that's called.
You know what you have to segregate your shit cribs.
You know what would really work is like maybe six red breasted piranhas. And that will take care of all your problems.
Yes, that will fix.
And then a year from now, you'll have one big rested. One big piranha left. That's it. With one eye.
Jimmy got lost and about breasted, so forgive him.
I. I said breast and I just lost my.
That was just gone after that moment.
What else you got? Rob's.
Hold on. I think I deleted our last one by mistake.
You're a dick.
I'm. I'm a dum dum. I need gum, gum dum dum. I did delete it by mistake. Oops.
God damn it, Robbie.
Yep, I'm pulling it back up. So here's the problem, boys. That's the question.
Holy crap.
Holy shit balls. This is our last one of the night. That's what this is.
It's gonna take longer than that.
This is what we call the finisher.
The finisher.
This one says it's for Dr. Fish. Should we say it for Dr. Fish or do you.
I would save it for Dr. Oh, my God.
We have a 5, 000 gallon display pond. Oh, my Lord.
Wait, hold on. This is from March and he has a cell number in here. And it's from a nursery. I better. We better answer this. We want to bring it back to Dr. Fish. All right, let's get it done. Phil wants to know hello guys, I'm a fan of your podcast. Been working through your backlog for a while now. I've heard several Dr. Fish episodes by now and figured I could ask you guys for help. I work in a nursery at a water garden department and we sell live koi. Goldfish have had major problems for the last two years. Our system consists of two segments nine outdoor tanks, four indoor tanks. The tanks are approximately 100 gallon plastic blue floor drains and a 250 gallon pump with water through a Lugana canister filter to the back. This guys, this is going to be a long one. I'm going to try to do my best. Each has an air stone equipped. I'm going to see if we can burn through a little bit of these. So he's giving us all of the the specs of these tanks use the same nets, blah blah blah stocking levels. The problem started in 2002 when we would have a fish begin to randomly develop gaping ulcers. The two and the two inside tanks we treated with salt mellow fix, formaldehyde, malachite, green chloride, crystal clear whiteout. Note some of the chemicals are part of medications, not just the raw ingredients. The point is the only thing that helped is the occasional melafix treatment.
Really.
We ended up losing the fish.
Water change is awesome.
We ended up losing the fish water changes. Both heavy and light extra salt turning off the water system all had no results. We eventually led a sudden shutting down because the kid became a death trap. Last winter we flipped the tanks out, removed the brass floor drains. Both have been fine for years. They were corroded pretty bad on the inside since the source has been in the issue plaster steel. Last year we had our worst die off yet. The inside tank still had issues even with the new floor drains. We ended up draining leaving the empty. Most of the summer the outdoor tanks had still major problems. Fish would randomly start falling and one tank can be dead in three days. Oh, poor guy.
These guys have had tough tough luck.
Suddenly whenever a good tank was hit but stop affecting others. Symptoms would vary widely from tank to tank. Some would have terrible ulcers, intense dropsy, fin rot, blisters, redness of the skin, mouth deformation, no symptoms at all. Then suddenly they'd be floating. Attach one or more disturbing photos. Be sure to look at a Be warned, you might throw up a couple procedures to mention we've become we give an all incoming fish potassium permanganate bath for 15 to 20 minutes. When they first come in, we attempt to dip the fish. Minimal success, not zero. We do cycle each tank cleaning ammonia and bottled pond bacteria. He's got like super herpes. What the hell is going on here? So he goes in lists of all the shit he did.
It is amazing. They've. These guys have thrown everything, the whole entire book at them.
It's pay, it's paragraphs of guys, paragraphs of.
Do you see anywhere in there where they have uv?
No, hold on, let me go back to this.
I don't see any uv. I would UV these guys forever. All day long cold water.
I see nothing about it. Okay, continuing on. I'm at my wits end. I don't know what to do. Any guys information would be appreciated. I've been Aquarius since I was 7 years old. I only hire staff who are aquarists. We already down the basics down genuine concern for the fish's well being. We use proper hygiene procedures. We use morton salt and 25 or 50 pound bags. Oh, this poor guy. I love the podcast and listening off in the car. Keep up the good work. Thank you for your time.
What are the fish look like?
I'm getting there. Please keep my last name out and our nursery confidential. Of course. We did that from the beginning, buddy. Or and of course his contact number. Okay, so now here's. Jesus.
These poor fish.
Alright, so for those that don't see that, we'll pull. We'll pull the pictures up here. I'm downloading them right now. But you know that like stress ball, squeaky toy where you squeeze the thing and the dude's eyeballs come out?
That's what this looks like.
That's what he's looking like he's doing to the fish. But it's not, it's just. That's how the fish are. It's just insane. So let me post a couple pictures. He's got to the discord.
The. When I import, when I first started importing, bringing in goldfish and stuff. The. The ones that have come from overseas are in completely different water than they are around here. So I first of all I would suggest getting somebody and maybe you already are getting it somewhere local. There's several good goldfish people in the United States. Second thing is at 11, diseases can be controlled in goldfish by the use of salt.
He's using a lot of it.
And anyway, two to three teaspoons per gallon is where you probably should be at third. I would UV the living crud out of this, these tanks and then Second, thirdly, I would disconnect. It's not like the tanks are connected. I would probably discontinue connecting the tanks and try to run them all individually because you have less option of failure. Because if they're all together and somebody comes in with some sort of weird herpes, it's just going to go from tank to tank to tank to tank.
It sounds like these tanks are disconnected, but there's a lot of water systems and there's a lot of details. So after the podcast, I'm going to have to actually fine tune through all these notes, but I'm going to give you a call, buddy. You're going to know this before the podcast comes out, of course. But, yeah. Holy hell.
You know what that might be? It might be like a poisoning of. It sounds stupid, but I'm just wondering if it's like a fertilizer poisoning.
To give you an idea right now in the audience, we have one of the administrators of Fish Wiki that's a really big fish community, and they deal with a lot of different people, a lot of different information. And when we have the community owner and leader of that saying, oh, God, when we post the pictures, you know, it's bad. So certainly come to our discord to check this out.
Yeah, let's ask the community to jump in and try to help out this guy. Because, people, everybody has had a certain amount of experience that nobody else has had. So let's see if we can find somebody to help this guy. But, man, UV sterilization would be a great, great start.
Yeah, sterilize everything 24 hours a day, all the time, on every tank.
Yeah, because there's nothing more frustrating than when you're trying to run a business and you're having such problems. And it's out there for everybody in the world to see when you're struggling.
And Adam had a point here. He just typed into the chat so the eyes are bulged out like you're squeezing the fish out. And then on the sides of its mouth, you'll see these mucus blobs that look like an abscess. That's actually right where the whiskers are for the koi.
I've never seen that. The only thing I can think of is that it's some type of toxicity.
It absolutely looks like some sort of infectious disease, but I've never seen anything like it.
You know, there was one of our. One of the big, major goldfish people here in United States were closed up for three years because they got some sort of Fish herpes. When they imported some goldfish and the USDA shut them down until they got it under control, I might reach out to those folks and just see what they had to do. But it took them several years to get this out of their system. I mean, they almost went out of business.
Another thing you can do is if you're in an area with a university, like a biology university.
God, yes.
You can freeze this and then have this sent into your biology university and you can pay them to test the fish, to test the carcass of the fish. It. Especially when you're having such long term issues and they can find out again if it is a carp herpes. If it's something like that. Car herpes does not display like this. I can tell you that this bulging, this pattern, this issues, this is something beyond car herpes. But if you're worried about certain diseases and it's continuing like this, utilize your research, especially if it's business, because there is resources at hand. Like even with reptiles, I have friends that worried about certain diseases. You can send those into reptile vets with a dead body and they will test certain diseases to make sure that's not going to spread to the rest of your pets.
And I can't remember what state it is and it doesn't matter. But if you're looking for somebody who knows fish, you might want to contact Florida because they have more people down there that know about tropical fish than anywhere else in the United States.
I'll be in touch with you. This is, this is a big one. And hopefully we'll have some sort of follow through, at least vaguely on the podcast to let you know what we found.
But anybody out there listening, throw, throw your best 10 cents into this thing and let's see if we can get this, get some help for these guys.
All right, let's go to a warm.
What Dr. Fish would even say. He'd probably go, holy.
Honestly, I'm gonna get this sent to him. We gotta, we gotta queue up a Dr. Fish episode soon anyway. It's been a while since we've done one, but that's because we've done, what was it, six episodes. And I mean, there's a point where we're just gonna be redundant on some questions. This is not a redundant question right here. This is where we can collect a bunch of these questions and bring Dr. Fish back on for another episode.
So, I mean, this might be kind of a thing. Remember when, when guppies were just. You couldn't get a good guppy and then they found out it was, you know, a gram positive and gram negative bacterial infection combined. You know, this might, this might be one of those deals too where, you know, are these imported fish? I don't know, are they local?
Oh, imagine how horrible this is for them. You know, they're fish experts. He hires fix experts and it's out.
Of his business, money out.
And now his employees are putting on a condom when they go to work. You know what I'm saying? Just.
This is sad.
It is. Let's grab this here. This is our chat where we ask questions directly in the podcast chat where you can get answered day or night. So it's called the ask for help section. So I'm going to have you go through any of these. Jimmy, what looks good?
Well, I see 1 from 5 days ago talking about the gourami gender on the dwarf Grammys and stuff.
All right, dwarf gourami, they're asking is this a female? And of course, I don't know. It's a what they call powder blue dwarf gourami. And from what I see, I don't know how to sex grommies that well. So I just put male because I know they as a common.
I believe it's a female just looking at it.
Copy image send to Adam.
The usually a male has a longer dorsal fin. I mean we've only got one angle of the fish and stuff. She seems to be rounded on the bottom.
I'm going to just message Adam so he sees the post.
What do people think? Send it out to the people.
I put mail as a.
So I'm guessing female, but it's a question. You know, I got an idea that I'm we.
We did 50 50.
One of us is right.
One of us is right somewhere. If you have issues IDing a fish. Sexing a fish. We do that here in the podcast as well. We have plenty enough people to give you a good hive.
Where the hell are my messages?
You'll see a little notification of a new message there, bud. Well, I'll let him find that. But continuing on, let's, let's go with a. Oh, Oscar advice, shall we? Don't Furbo da squid wants to know. I'm not necessarily new to fish keeping, but I raised my grandma raised by my grandma. And she has multiple 55 gallon tanks, including some saltwater and brackish aquariums at one point. So I'm aware of the work that goes into it. But reading articles and Reddit leaves me a lot to be desired and it's impossible to get straight answers. That's true. With that being said, my first question, is 75 gallons suitable for a single Oscar or not? If you can't get that answer in Reddit. Reddit. What the F, man?
75 gallon tank is fine.
75 gallon for a pair of Oscars is just fine. You can do that at bare minimum and a 55 with two. But it's. I mean, Oscars get really big and territorial. So 75 is bare minimum. What I could put bare minimum for the entire lifespan to death. And they can breed in them bare minimum space. Because you have to think Oscars get sometimes over a foot. Like you can get a monstrous Oscar when they breed.
If they spawn once for you, you're going to have Oscars forever.
Right. So 75 is a good one. Yeah, there you go. There's a pair Oscar saying. Some article saying a 55 is bare minimum. While there say it's 125 is bare minimum. Others say 75. Money isn't necessarily an issue as I'm patient to save money, but I don't really want to have the space for an overly massive aquarium in the house. I'm looking at the sweet spot for saving money and the safety of the fish. If 75 is okay, what kind of substrate? Filters, lights, decor. That's the making healthy habitat for an Oscar.
All right, Oscar's 75 gallon. No substrate, no decor.
Done well, whatever substrate that you want moved from one end of the tank to the other every other day.
I was gonna, I was gonna add in there that if you want them to breed, put some put end substrate. If you want sand, gravel, it doesn't matter. But they will treat it like a sunfish and they will make a nest in it. Especially if you have a pair in there, they will make a bowl out of it. And they will, even if it's a thin layer, they will carve out whatever you have in there.
A football size hole.
And they will make, yeah, I don't know, a food plate, a football, whatever measurement you want. And that will be their nest. So other than that, they don't care. Yeah, they're just kind of dopey dummy fish. They, they are more into you than. They're very personable decor. When they're young, they like a little cover, but when they're old, they just don't give crap what's there. They're just looking for you and the pellet.
Just to give you an, an idea. And I know I've said this on this podcast before about how they Commercially raise Oscars down in Florida, I had the opportunity to go into a greenhouse and the entire greenhouse, which was probably 50 by 75 foot, was made for breeding Oscars. And what they had for breeding Oscars is they took a huge, huge, huge pond liner and made one pond in the entire, you know, let's say if it was 50 foot wide, they have a 40 foot. So you have maybe 5 foot on each side and they have 18 inches of water. And what they've done is they've take this pond and they'll put bricks in a square with a kind of a doorway so a pair can go in there, lay their eggs on the slate and then protect it from the other Oscars. And they might, I think they probably had a hundred Oscars in this pond. And what they did is they walked the pond every day and they had these, you know, they called them bedrooms, which was probably two and a half foot by two and a half foot where these fish would go and breed and lay their eggs. And they actually had a big piece of slate with a wire on it with the wire sticking out of the water because they didn't want to put their hands in there because they were very protective of their eggs. And every day they would walk this and they would pull the eggs and then take them down. And they had 55 gallon tanks where they drop them in, dropped in the eggs and then they developed in there. But I mean you're probably talking 5,6000 gallons of water with maybe 40 pair of Oscars. Yep. And, but that's. And they said that they could supply half the United States with 40 pairs of Oscars because they produce so many babies.
Next quick question. Curved spine. Lauren wants to know. One second, Adam. I noticed yesterday one of my porthole live bearers had a curved spine and her belly was sunken in. I did some googling and the prognosis was not good. And euthanasia was suggested euthanized her. Earlier today I noticed that one of my golden killifish looks the same. Should I do euthanizer? Are all my fish going to get whatever this should I treat somehow? Please help. I'm sad and worried about my fish. So unfortunately if I'm guessing correctly, I'm with the chat on this one. The sign especially if it's spreading the curved spine on top of it, it sounds like columnaris. So if you haven't dealt with columnaris before, that's where you would treat with like a prazi pro. There's a bunch of different antibiotics on there and you, you try to even you could treat the tank, but the problem is you need it into the fish. So it's, it's kind of a gamble. So you take the, take the fish out, you quarantine the tank to make sure that the tank isn't touched for like let's say a month. Right. You put the fish into a smaller area and you, if you treat the water. But the best method is if you can get it in the food. So if you do pellets, that's probably going to be your best method, like using micro pellets. You know, find like a new lifestyle spectrum extreme, something small. Soak those pellets in the Prazi Pro. Any type of the antibiotics you're using to get rid of it. And that is going to be your best bet to get them get it in your system. If a fish like this had something like a columnaris or any type of other thing that you would, you'd treat like that. You could do an injection, but the fish are too small to inject and you have a higher chance of killing your fish by even trying. You can't inject, you know, something into a fish that's anything under like a six inch fish. So get into the system by food, otherwise you have to treat the water and then it's a gamble. So best of luck to you. If you're looking for the non brand names, Metro Dye, Metro Dazzle, they don't sell it anymore. They do. You can get them on chewy.com you can find it. Oh, otherwise the Prazi Quintel is the Prazi Pro. The Prazi Pro is one of those brands that has it in it.
So the, the other thing I like to do is take frozen brine shrimp or frozen baby brine shrimp or frozen bloodworms, thaw them out in a little beta cup or whatever little cup. Put the medicine in there with the live food and give it three or four minutes for the, you gotta have the soak going. Yep. Let it go in there for three or four minutes. You have to realize as soon as it hits the water it starts dissolving. So these fish have to ingest it very quickly. So just a very small amount and try to direct it right to the fish. But I had great luck with that with angelfish by putting it into their bloodworms. This fish of course, much smaller. You probably want to use baby brine shrimp or something.
But it's still a mixed bag because when you use the frozen and you thought it's a wet product so it's not Going to soak as much in. So if you can use a freeze dried blood worm and then you can crush it up so that it still is almost like you're feeding a flake. And that freeze dried bloodworm is dried out and will soak in that medication a little bit better. But because it's not that frozen food, it's still harder for them to hit it. So, you know, you try what you can get done and you get lucky. Stick with it.
Garlic guard.
You are a garlic guard guy.
It works.
Also, also, that gourami is a male. I'll guarantee it.
I think.
So it's got the new. Yeah, it's got the nuchal hump. And then also, I've never seen any female gouramis like that that have that much color. Usually the front half of them are silver or even that belly, they'll have that silvery sheen and then the back half will be whatever color. So if they're honey dwarfs or the orange ones, they'll be like a yellow or an orange or even a blue, but it'll be very, very pale. And it'll be. So they'll be mostly silver. They kind of don't. It's like Grammys are just like Bettas. They look just like Bettas. So they're male. So you think that one's a male?
You think? Yeah, I agree. I think it's a male. Because I know after talking some of the gourami breeders down in Florida, they use the same color female gourami with a different color. You know, the flame reds, the powder blues and the striated. They're all using the same females with the. So they're using the specialized males with regular females. And all the females are pretty drab.
All right, so in the chat here, just want to do it before we wrap this up. We have Yogurt that disagrees us plainly with the Oscar comments saying that decorate your tank, make sure that you have a natural foliage and you know, do it have plants, have tannins, have a log in there. But I'm telling you that your Oscar doesn't give a shit about what's in there. Yeah, it's good to have plants. Yeah, good to have plants. It's good to have tenants. It's good to have things. But your Oscar gives zero shits, brother.
The thing with those guiding things is they rearrange their tank all day long here.
Yogurt says she dug a pit in the corner. Elsewhere is fine. Yeah, because it's. That's what they do. All they do is nesting. If you removed all the plants, all the logs, all the beautiful decor, which, by the way, your tank looks great.
Beautiful.
They'd still just dig a nest. They don't give a shit about what you have in there. Although I'm happy you have plants because it removes the ammonia, the nitrates.
I. I wonder how much maintenance is with that tank of keeping the plants planted. Probably not a lot.
Actually. It's probably a lot less. You know, he's got one Oscar in there.
Yeah, I don't think there's.
I mean, if it's one, but if.
You get a pair of them, then that whole thing.
Let's put it this way, the plants help them do less water changes.
Yeah. You know, are they alive or are they plastic?
Oh, they're alive. That's live.
I like driftwood in there.
Yeah.
So I like the pothos out of.
The top right there. He said that she messed with a few plants at the start and then stopped and now doesn't mess with plants at all. So it acclimated the plants.
Put a male in there and see how much fun that is.
There you go.
It'd be a rock orgy.
Well, guys, you got questions, you know where to find us. Discord, Email us. And emails apparently take six months for us to answer. So do Discord.
Discord, don't be offended.
Don't be offended. Discord's faster. But if we will get the emails. We are now caught up on emails again. We'll see you in the next podcast, guys. Kisses. 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.
I'm already in boxers because tighty whities don't handle my shit.
Adam, have you had sex lately? Yes, I am with a partner, making love to a dead deer in a ditch.