Master Level Ph Control - Andres Ryan

Andres, we had donations from me. We had donations from Seagrest, Five D, and Gulfstream Tropical. And we did over. These were yeah. Everything in the auction was a donation. We did over five hundred dollars, which was. Pretty good. This month, our fish of the month will be cardinal tetras. I won't say much about them, but we've got several bags of six each, and there's one bag that's got five in there. I've had them for. About half of them for a month, and the other half for a little over a week, and they're they're doing well. They were skinny, few little things, and now they're chunky and happy. So. They'll be part of the auction. If you ate, there's a you can put your five dollar. Towards the meal, over in the bucket. I also have T-shirts, small size to double X. And those are twenty each. And. See anyone with them? There's two different, like in large. There's two different colors. So the golden rod and then lighter yellow. That's got our club angelfish on it. And then this month we start collecting our twelve-dollar annual membership. So, it helps support having people like Andres and other great programs. Help support the meals and help purchase the AV equipment that we had an issue with. I've learned a lesson. Never update stuff the day of the programs. All right. You want to talk, cardinal matters, and then okay. So who's gonna do the fishing amount? How many? So did you get a selection of people doing that, or yeah, we'll go with the middle of. Yeah, we'll go with the middle of. I mean, how many bags? How many people? How many people are interested in doing this? Well, the fish of the month, I've got. Seven bags of six and one bag of five. And what's the what's the project? So the so so this is an opportunity for people to start with a small school of cardinal tetras and try them out. What does that mean? Put them in a tank and look at them. We don't eat them. Great for unless he'll tell you how to put them in a tank and breed them, but you might need more than six. You can do it six. The question is water. Water is a tricky. So, oh, they're breeders. It's a fish that continuously breeds every day. So, but in order to There are gang spawners, so they like to breed in the group, not as pairs. And they don't need brushers or anything like that. They're just schooling fish. So in the morning, first light, they. Female will lay out ten, twenty eggs, fifty eggs, fifty day. You know, they don't. They're not a. A single pair spawner like a neon neon tetra, tetra, they breed as a pair. And lays all the eggs at once. Cardinals don't do that. All right, and a bag of six. At a pet store, you're probably looking fifteen to twenty bucks for wild ones. So. These fish are from a thing called Project Kiaba. Which is a a program. Where folks in in South America are are catching these fish in a sustainable manner, so that. You value the forest. You value the rivers. Because it's producing something that can support families, so. That's an important project, and these fish come through that that program where. Money goes towards the folks that are doing doing this fishery. The fisheries in the Rio Negro, which is black water, part of the Amazon, is one of the tributaries. So it's basically fisheries management. They teach people to not overcatch the stuff. Take records of how many fish they're getting and how many all the time, and then it can manage. Resource instead of going in there and take everything and there's nothing for a while and then you know so. Managing resources. That's the future of the industry when it comes to. The Amazon and all that—they're starting to realize a lot of time they went in and took everything, and then it doesn't come back. So they have to just say, "Okay, leave some back," and so that's what this is about. And we protect stuff that we value, unfortunately, so. We value those fish, and thousands of them come to the U.S. Probably daily, thousands of, millions, millions per year, but thousands daily. No, it's a good fish. It's just it's a tricky fish because the problem is it comes to a pH of four and a half. Five. And what happened is it. People here don't have time to acclimate them, so they put them straight in hard water, and they get sick real easy. But if you, when you get wild ones, the kit, the key is to bring them at five, four and a half. They do great, and then you slowly bring them to the hard water. Slowly be meaning what? A week. All right, did the hard work. Yeah, that's the thing with those is you know because that's the thing with cardinals. People like oh they die all the walls because you they haven't had time to acclimate, and cardinals don't. Yeah, when you put them in a pH of four or five, nothing lives in there. There's no bacteria. There's no bugs. There's nothing. Egg doesn't live in there, so it's pretty much like a sterile environment. And as soon as you get them in and you put them in hard water, they get sick. If you want to get them unsick, you bring them in. pH down, and they nice and clean again, and then you bring them back up. So that's the way to treat cardinals. It's not medication; it's the water. And these guys are used to Sarasota County water. Good to go. I only gave you five. You gave me five. Seven for five. Okay. Did you want? Yeah, I can flick that stuff. You know. It's. You want me to start at the top? Well, if. You know it's a bunch of videos of fish. So guys that do a fish, some stuff is some stuff I did today. So I didn't even look at it. So. Cichlids. You know what cichlids are. There's Africans. There's African, Central American, South Americans. You know all kinds of stuff. South from Africa, South America. You know so. The the industry produces a lot of common cichlids, you know, and then there's other guys to do, but the stuff that really been produced a lot that's very popular is the African. Because they got color. Behavior is pretty much the same. They're all mouthbrooders. Just the color changes a lot, so. I I've read a lot of different ones, and you know I'm. Like I say, I do Africans, I do Central America, and I do angels. I do cardinal tetras. You know, I play with. 500 different species, so I've got plenty, and I'm always looking for new stuff. So does this one work? You can play anything right now. So I don't know if this is gonna look pretty good. This is Red Point Convex. I got some here actually. A little pair. Let's see what that is. There's a pair right there. So that's a wild fish, but they're not. Those are not wild. These are F1s from the wild. And so this is when I breed them. I fill up a bag, and then I slowly get rid of them, and then I breed something else. So, use a cremodes. I don't know if you're familiar with that. South American, a Central American fish gets pretty good size, nice and colorful. But the little ones don't look like much, but they get bigger. Do your kids know you use their cell phone like this? No, that's not a cell phone. So it's just to show a little bit the cichlids when you put them in tank and grow them up, and you know you can see. I use a good sponge filter, but I got big filters on the tanks. These are like three hundred, two fifty, two seventy-five. You can just leave it there for a minute. So there's different ways of breeding and growing fish. I tend to breed stuff indoors, and then some guys breed out in the ponds. And so there's many different things to do. Cichlids, you know. So later on, we'll show you pond stuff. But so, but you can pass it on. You see what a red point convicts. It's a. South American fish. They call it convict, but it's not as mean. It's more like a sahika, so it's very peaceful. These are the. That's a pair. Pretty much. Yeah, they do okay with it. So this is wild salvini's. So I got a lot of those. Oh, that's one. So the salvini's I got, I got a group of those. The male gets really, really red. Not like the stuff that you get locally. These are like really bright. But these are little ones. So you see, when you breed those guys, they produce a lot, but they need to get bigger colors. Like I say, I. How many inches would an adult be? Uh, three to four. Play with endlers too for fun. So these are, I don't know if you've seen the red chested endlers. So they get nice and red. There's a cherry shrimp in there, but yeah. So I play with stuff like that and grow plants at the same time because cichlids will tend to tear up all the plants. I say. This is the one that you buy. When you they're just doing a sample of angelfish, so. So I breed a lot of stuff indoors, and then I just grow them up, and then I handpick the colors. So here's some. You can pause that for a second. Can you pause that? Not that good, AV guy. Yeah, koi angels. I got two chuck there. So I've been trying to grow, and I'm breeding pretty good. And so this is a strain I came up with. It's a platinum marble. And they got blue on them and all that, so that's coming up pretty nice. And I just got to work with it, trying to get the pearl scales, because I like to see that as the pearl scale. And so, selective breeding, and I like the the pattern. You know, so I like the the broken pattern like that, not so much like dirty pattern. So I like the clean pattern. So I try to select breed for certain things. takes a little more time, but you got a you come up with a much nicer fish. So you could you probably throw away a lot. You just get rid of it. You just keep. Call them Dalmatians. Kids would buy them. There you go. Yeah. Keep your arm displayed. So it's just a sample of a little bit of the hatchery I got here. I got tanks like that where it's like certain fish. Try and go quick. So we got the blacks. It was called double blacks. And then I got a decent amount of those long frame blacks, and some blacks again. So it's a little quick there. Little guys again, little angels. So I do 50% water change every two days on these guys, and then do vacuum so they grow faster and they get more even when they grow. If you don't do water change, the fish don't grow evenly. To show you, in order to make a living, you got a lot of fish. The flatworms again. You got platins in there, and you got platinum marbles. I'm trying to work with panda, dalmatian. These guys are seven five. I got the nice sheen on them. It look better if I had a light on top. You know, if you put them under a light, then they they look like they're metallic way. Should I skip to what's next? Uh, yeah, you can keep going. Okay, so there's a. Core angels, black angels. Okay. This is a new one. Stop. Go back. It's not a great video because I kind of just did it. So these are these are what they call red dragons. So I got those going pretty good. I got some spawns on. Trying to work the color. They're a different body shape. They're like really round, real high body. They got a little beak. And I'm not even, you know, if I they were outside, they'd probably even be redder. Right now they're inside and. Those I got through. They're not from Czech. I think those I got from Germany. Why? Why would they be redder if they were outside? I. The sunlight, the algae, all that stuff they can eat, helps with the with the assimilation of pigments. So you can grow fish inside and get a pretty red, but if you go outside, it even more intensified. Vitamin D and all that kind of stuff. It helps really bring the color. So you keep the fish inside; they do great. You put them outside, it's like. Can you move down a little? Thank you. Really. Play with Rams too. Rams a good nano fish. So. I got a bunch of those. Check. Five hundred. So what variety is that? That's the the blue one. Electric blues. And so, this is like a close-up video. It's not great there, but it gives you even. You see pairs setting up already. I put tanks. You know, when I get them, fish going, I put them in a nice natural tank and acclimate him, quarantine him, make sure he's good for a while, and then I separate the best ones, the best colors. What temperature do you find? Oh, the the room's a little hotter. 86 would be really good for this. But they do softer water, so a neutral, like a six five seven, is about right for me. But it's heat, mostly heat. A lot of these cichlids, they like heat. You know, they're not hard to breed. Anybody can breed them. It's just the heat gets the faster metabolism, and if the water's too cool. The eggs don't develop right, and then they die. I don't know if you're familiar with that. Is so you got to get them. You don't want to get them too fast, and you don't want too slow. So because you want them to grow, right? So you got to get that temperature in the 80s, you know, 80, 82. What are you feeding those babies? What are you feeding the babies? I do real well with micro worms on these guys. It's easy to do, and I get my supply from Chris there. Whenever they dry up or whatever. Yeah, no, that there's other food out there. You know, it's just. You want to do something that's pretty quick and handy. You can start right away. And then the problem with Intusoria and all that is that you can have you know what Intusoria is the green water, it's pretty good. But some days you get oh it's all dead or it just it crashed on you and you don't have any. It's real hard to maintain, you know. And if you put too much fertilizer, then you get the microorganism. You can Mosquitoes and all you get all kinds of other stuff, but I don't feed a lot of live food. I mean, the only two live food I feed would be microorganisms. And and brine shrimp. That's it. The reason why is because I've seen too many deaths from bad food. Because you can't control where it comes from, you know, and you don't know how old it is, and it's been sitting in the refrigerator too long, you know, like those worms and all that. And even if you wash them, you're not taking the bacteria out. So I see too many problems: too breeders and hobbyists that they feed the live food and they get the bloat, or they get hop eye, or they get some kind of disease and. So, ever since I got rid of live food, I don't lose fish. I do real well, and then to prepare food, they're so good now. They're so good. The repachi is real good, and get all kinds of frozen food. It's really good, and pellets. It's so high quality. I get a lot of my food from Japan right now. And I find the stuff is amazing, and it doesn't pollute the water. It's a little pricey, but conditions the fish really well. So you, the prepared food already are so good right now. It's it's not even worth using live food. I mean, I I've bred pretty much every fish without it. So a lot of people really get into the live food. It's okay, but the problem that I have with live food also is that when a fish gets addicted to live food, he won't eat anything. You know, he's just like. I love this stuff, you know. But and then you go to Pelis, he looks at you like, yeah, what the hell am I supposed to do with that? So it gets the fish get picky, so you have to do different kinds of. Diet, you know, like a little bit of treat for life food, and then pellets and flakes, and you know, figure stuff out, you know. But variety is the best, except that on the Kongloches, variety doesn't work. The Kongloches is the same thing. If you change the food, you change their breeding cycles. So you just they have to eat the same thing every day for years. They don't like change. So it's a weird fish, like that. Any questions, you guys? You make your own brine shrimp? Well, just newly hatched stuff, and I'm start. I'm I'm building a little system right now so I can grow it up bigger. So basically, you grow it up in salt water. You can hatch it and. Rock salt, but it doesn't live, right? The rock salt will make it hatch, like everybody use that, but it doesn't last. After a couple of days, dead. So the only way to keep that going is to do, you know, the instant ocean or something like that, the sea salt. So if you want to grow brine shrimp, you got to use sea salt. You will not do it with rock. Then what do you feed them? Well, that's easy. Brine shrimp is yeast. So, sea monkeys. Bread trip for you. Yeah, see my yeast and asparagina powder. Those are two big things. Spirulina is another one to. A lot of people get into spirulina, but I've I've never seen fish assimilate spirulina really well. It's just a high protein, really hard on filtration. It doesn't digest well. I've only dealt with the brine shrimp itself. Will eat. Spirulina, and I've only had one fish. All the years that could eat brine shrimp, spirulina flakes really well and assimilate it, and spirulina powder, is Razbora vatteri flores, which is a flame razbora, which is not in the market right now. So, but all the spirulina stuff, spirulina pellets and flakes, to me is to me is garbage because it. The fish will eat it, but doesn't get anything out of it. It fills them up. Clogs up the filter because it's real high protein, and it's a protein that the biological filtration has a hard time processing. So I don't know if you guys know that if you feed a lot of spirulina, and your water chemistry goes out of whack, it's it's a problem. So spirulina is okay, I guess, sporadically, but it's it's. So the fish actually metabolizes it, or is it just get excreted? It just goes right through. It's a weird protein. It's something that they don't process really well. I don't know any fish that do that. Maybe koi can eat that, but even that. It's like I say. I've never had luck with spirulina flakes, spirulina pellets, anything like that, with any. It's good to fill them up. They fill up, but they don't get anything out. It just creates more waste, and your filter just goes. Another way to starve the even playfish to death. I pretty much well zebra pleco is not it's not an algae eater it's a carnivore oh omnivore omnivore. Oh, you can keep it. So little rhymes a popular fish for little tanks, and it's real. You know, it doesn't get big. Good for planted tanks. I guess I I don't know what I got on this video. So I just I just keep them. All right, so I went to farm today. It was a Like a phenakylus, I don't know if we've learned that. So it's it's went to Imperial Tropical. Is that yeah Imperial, yeah. And so I so these guys are already selected all the males out, but they got big bats, you know, and they feed a lot and. Outside with the light and the sun, so the water gets real crowded and real dirty, and they keep changing water. But it's the thing is that's farming. It's not clear water. So these guys grow stuff in that. These are colony, hobby peacocks. There's a couple males that'll come out there and. These are colonies. You know the females are holding. You know they get the. Then you go in there physically, take the fish out, open their mouth, pull the eggs out, put them back in. Every every week you go every two every twelve days they go through all the tanks and take take all the babies out of their mouth. The males are colorful, you know, and then the females are like a bland color. Holden. How do you make water acidic? Okay. That's a good one. Easy. Well, okay. If, in nature. Water will adapt to the environment it's in. Right, rocks. The light that becomes the material that is decomposing, the food, whatever's in there, right? The sunlight, the algae, whatever grows in there. But. If you're trying to breed something, if you want to think, if you start playing a chemist. Nothing's going to work. So you cannot change the chemistry of the water. Because if you start doing that, you're putting everything out of whack. So it's like you know so. Like rainwater is one thing. And then well water is another, seawater is another. So, for me. So let's say in a rainforest, right? Let's say the pH of rain is like six. So. But the cardinals live in a four and a half, the four, you know. So what makes that do is basically the environment, right? So, but there's nothing in marine water. There's no minerals. There's no buffers. There's no calcium. So. Anything that decomposes in the water naturally will change the chemistry of the water. So, do you guys understand the conductivity? What conductivity is? Like of water, so sea water is like 2500, and then if you get the rain water, it's zero. There's no minerals in there to conduct the water, the electricity, so. In a cardinal tetra, like okay, so well water here is about 600 to 700 microsiemens. So that's well water. That's pretty hard. A lot of minerals. Rainwater is zero. Brie Cardinal, it's thirty, thirty to forty micrometers. So it's basically. You have a gallon of water, and you probably put half a cup of well water. And that would be your water. So you haven't done chemistry. You're just mixing stuff up. Natural water. The minerals go with that, but the best way to acidify water. To answer you guys' questions. Is the natural way. Not with chemicals, not with acid, not with peat moss and all that kind of stuff. The way is, that's why it'd be nice to have that chalkboard, but. You guys have done. Let's say you have a. Fish tank, right? And your pH is. Seven five, and you you haven't changed water in a while, but you got a lot of fish. Suddenly you come in, and the fish aren't looking right, and you're like, I need a water change. You change the water. Have you guys ever checked the pH? Of a tank that you have, and you haven't. Check the check the pH. Let's say you you set up you do a water change, you don't change the water for a month. And then check the pH before you do water change. I guarantee you it went down. Bacteria, biological filtration, right? Sponge filters, you know. Wet dries whatever you guys anything that's biological. Do you guys understand biological filtration? Right. Okay. Do you guys know how it works? What does the bacteria consume? About yeah. It's a byproduct. Okay, so you got ammonia being produced, but ammonia there's a bacteria doing that. You know, it's rotting stuff is rotting and. So, but in order for the ammonia to go from ammonia to nitrite, nitrate. Bacteria needs something, right? Needs something. It it needs oxygen, right? Sponge filters. Bubbling fan, water current, oxygen, right? Okay, but what it really needs to do that conversion. Is carbonates. Carbon, not calcium carbonate, but carbonates. So carbonates. What happens is that carbonates are being transferred from like as ammonia is being converted to nitrates. The carbonates. Are being eaten by the bacteria and converted to carbonic acid. Okay, but it's very minimal. So if you have a. pH of eight or seven five of high alkalinity, you're not going to see the change, but. If you take a. RO to a tank of soft water, like RO, like the the rain water. Biological filtration will work, and. And RO water, pure water. Most people don't believe it, but it does. The only thing you need is an addition of carbonates, right? So the little baking hammer. So let's say I have a 200 gallon system with cardinals. That's what my breeding systems are. And it's all RO. My I put a little bit of. Well, water very little, but what happened is the biological filtration will kick in. And the pH will go down. Naturally, it'll take time, but it'll go down. It'll go down. It'll go down to about 3.8. At 3.8, there ain't no more carbonates left, so the pH will go back up. Why does the pH go back up? You guys tell me. Ammonia. Ammonium ion, because the bacteria stops working, ammonia raises the pH. So there's a that's that's the this is the dilemma. So as the pH goes up, and you got ammonia, but you need to put carbonates in there. Carbonates will increase pH, so you got to be very careful how much carbonates you put in. So in a two hundred gallon system, and I put let's say a couple of thousand carbonates. I put probably. A tenth of a teaspoon of carbonates in the system to do all the biological filtration of the tank. And the pH, I can keep it a pH with a pH controller. So I have a little bucket. Little valve, a little solenoid valve, and I put a gallon of I put pure water. And I put like a teaspoon of carbonates in there, diluted, and then there's a drip. And what happens is, if the pH goes down to a certain level, like if my pH goes down to like four. 4.2, that valve turns off, into the sump. And drips drips carbonates until the pH goes back up to where I want it, but it's minimal. It's it's like you probably a couple of teaspoons of this water in the system to get that pH back up because there is no buffer, right? You got pure water in there, so that's how I do carbonates. You have to get them down to 4.5, 4.8. Eighty-two, eighty degree, and they'll breed every all the time, and you can keep that system going. All the time, and you can do that with rare bettas if you want to do bettas that are at four. Those giant bettas, you guys remember them? The big guys, the people who want to breed them, they're spectacular, but they're like, oh, it's acidic water, and they're out there putting acid in the water, and you don't want to do that. So you want to do all this stuff naturally. Very few people do that, but they don't understand biological filtration, and that's how it works. But so, you can take a. A tank of RO water, and you put your cardinals in there. You take a sponge filter from your. Cichlid tank or whatever, you put it in there, and you throw a pinch of carbonates in there. Literally every couple of days. And at that, ultra the biological filtration works perfectly, and you can have a pH down to five or whatever. You can do that for planted tanks. It's the same thing. What do you use for carbonates? Big hammer. Okay, that's what I thought. Just I got a little jar that big, and it lasts me a year. You know, but if I don't use that, then I have all these problems, and if my pH crashes to three five or three point eight. Then that means the bacteria is still there, but it's shut down, and so then you have ammonia going up. So, if you want to get the filtration started again, you got to slowly put. A little bit of bicarb's in there, but you don't want it because if you put too much bicarb, that pH will skyrocket, and then your fish will go. Especially cardinals that you know that the pH goes up to six five, that ammonia gets toxic. And then they're like. So you want to keep that pH at five, but it's get really tricky. So you don't want to get it down too low when you do these systems. You just So what are carbonates again? What are the carbonates you said? Carbonates like a bacon hammer. So in an African tank, you use calcium carbonate. Crushed corals, all that stuff. That's calcium carbonate, and it. In an African tank, the pH will always be high because you've got the calcium and the carbonates to make the pH up. And that is getting eaten up by bacteria, to process the biological filtration. So you're talking baking soda, a little little orange carbon hammer box by the baking powder ones. So you don't need a lot. If you want to work at cityify your water, that's what you need because, when the pH goes down. It creates carbonic acid. You need the carbonates to make the carbonic acid, right? Yeah. So that's like you don't do chemistry; you just naturally do with the bacteria and the system, and you can do any pH. And if you want to do more minerals, then you just put more minerals in the tank, calcium and magnesium, you know stuff like that. Potassium and magnesium and stuff like that, not calcium. Because calcium will bound and make carbonates. What you do, potassium, like Epsom salt. The no salt. Put the minerals in there to get higher minerals. Because the cardinals don't need a lot of minerals. They're like at thirty microsiemens. So. A two hundred gallon system, you probably put like a half teaspoon. Any more than that, then the eggs don't develop. Any else? Any questions? You guys understand it? It's a little complicated, but a lot of practice. Would you do the baking soda before the water change? Instead of jumping right to the water change. If your pH crashes. Okay, well you got to be careful, right? That's what I'm saying. So you got to check. You got a bunch of test kits. The two, the number one killer is what? And fish. There we go. Okay, so. That's number one thing you check is ammonia, right? So if you have ammonia, don't put baking soda in there. Don't put any because you're gonna skyrocket it, and then that ammonia is gonna turn into ammonium, and it's gonna. Rip the gills off the fish, and your fish are gonna go like, and matter of seconds. So gotta be careful. But and the cardinals are pretty neat because they they can tolerate ammonia as long as the pH doesn't go up to seven. They can do, for some reason, I've had I've had cardinals breeding with ammonia through the roof, with a pH of four and a half, and they were breeding fine, but. If. If the filter doesn't work well, if that if you take then what do you do with the eggs? You gotta can't put them anywhere. You gotta throw your kind of stuff. So. So you got to keep that biological filtration, and the way to keep that filter going is to put a little bit of bicarb in there just to. We're talking minimum amounts. How are you collecting the eggs? You said they breed every morning. Yeah, so I breed cardinals. I breed in a cage. So I just move, okay, because the eggs fall through. Oh, okay. You know, so I just take the cage and. The next angle over. I don't, you know, I just lift the cage, put it in, you know. So it's a little, little. I got a bunch of cages, you know. The screen on the bottom. And so they just breed in there every day. The eggs fall through, and then after a while, you get like four or five thousand eggs at the bottom of the tank. You just put the tank and put it over, and you can turn that tank off the system and do whatever. Most of the time, I was vacuuming the eggs into another system, you know, so I'd have a system underneath. And then I just vacuumed the eggs into the system underneath, and that had its own water. It's the same water, but it was, you know, without other fish swimming around and all that. Because they hatched in twelve, eighteen hours. They swim up and down the column, and so if there's fish in there, they get taken care of. Keep playing. Basically, so I went to the farm and just trying to take a little video. This really nice camera that's 20 megapixel doesn't do.