Tuesday Chum

The Father Fish and the Natural Aquarium. Well, by glory, some days are just too completely insane to try to make any sense of it. Today has been anti-tech day. Anti-tech day. Everything that could have gone wrong technologically has gone wrong and then gone wrong again and then gone wrong again to about the 10th. I finally wound up hiring a tech to come in and fix it all. He took two hours to fix it. It wasn't simple. It was a series of 25 different switches that had to be set in exactly the right sequence in order to get a microphone to work. And then, because I assumed the words, it looked like he disabled my live stream. So, okay, no problem. An hour ago, I created a new live stream and deleted the old one, except that I deleted the new one on StreamYard and the old one on YouTube. So then when I opened the new one on StreamYard, which I thought was the new one, but was actually the old one, it said that that live stream had been deleted on YouTube, which left me with no way to access the live stream on YouTube. So I deleted that one, and then I went back and deleted this one. And then I set up a new one, and you guys are utterly amazing. You've found, in spite of my best efforts to hide myself, you've found me 26 of you here. God bless you. God bless you. I had intended to open this video by reading the book. And it says here, fish foods, fish foods. Now, here's something really interesting. When you open a book on tropical fish and come to a section entitled fish foods, well, what do you expect? First, you expect there to be some attempt to discern what the very best prepared fish foods are, correct? I mean, there are all kinds of brands, and they make all kinds of foods. So let's read what it says in the Natural Aquarium about fish foods. The first word gives it away. Infusoria are the cornerstone of food web aquariums that seek to emulate the natural way fish hunt for their food. Oh, oh, oh, so this book is not about what fish food to buy, what company to support, what manufactured process is better than another manufactured process. Why, this book is about, it's about nature, and it's about the real world that fish live in. Let me continue for a bit. All the nutrients are sourced from animals and plants grown in the tank and are easily able to sustain the fish. Even in tanks not looking for this level of food independence, it is a beneficial complement to feeding because it has no bio load since it is produced from nutrients already present in the tank. In a breeding tank, smaller infusoria are ignored by adult fish but are critical for newborn fry, which can be sustained into adulthood by what is present in a mature and biodiverse tank. Aquarists may be surprised and wonder how a new fish suddenly appeared in their tanks since no fried food was ever supplied. It sustained itself on the infusoria in the aquarium. And it goes on, there's even a chart on food types. Low-quality dry food, high-quality dry food, chicken heart, blood worms, raw or frozen shrimp, leaf litter, and wood. Wood. Wood is a fish food. What is it safe? Almost entirely slow-rising carbohydrates that act as a substitute for the growth of plumescites and fungi, which may be eaten by microfauna to sustainably add energy to the system. Nominal nitrogen content. What book have you found that in? What book have you ever read? What video have you ever watched? What store have you ever visited that discusses in depth the details of how fish live in a natural environment and how that natural environment can be established in your little glass cup? This book does. This book is the beginning of a new venture in the hobby of fish keeping because it provides the means, the knowledge, The understanding of how we can completely divorce ourselves from chemicals, from trinkets, from magical devices, from all manner of expensive stuff, and create an environment that is happy and healthy and makes us joyless. you need to buy the book the book is going to change the hobby forever you wait, you see this is the beginning we have done it folks this book is utterly utterly magnificent there's nothing even vaguely comparable to it it is thorough it is complete it is easy to read easy to understand And profoundly, if you don't mind my using the word scientific, if by science you mean well-researched and based in reality, the natural aquarium, the natural aquarium, the natural aquarium based on the father's vision. Well, that's pretty exciting stuff. Pretty exciting stuff Let's see Let's get over here Where we have 16 comments And see who's saying what And why And who's here Diana Roach is here Yay, found it, good girl Thank you guys, you're amazing 31, 31 of the years There's one thumbs up Why is that? One thumbs up One, not two one who's the brave soul who clicked on the thumbs up one still only one who's this adam driving across texas listening to the father's voice in texas he is well welcome adam nice to have you with us always nice to have you with us by the way i do need to mention that for those of you who participated, and there were a few, we had our very first Delmarva Aquarium Club meeting. The Delmarva Aquarium Club meeting, it was held on Saturday, Saturday evening at 5.30. We had a dinner of fried chicken and potato salad, coleslaw, and lots of fixing salad stuff and dessert and lots of drinks all non-alcoholic i'm like we had about 25 people for our very first meeting the program was really about feeder fish and kind of how it started and where it's gone and what the natural aquarium part of the hobby is all about how it has developed and emerged. And then we had an auction. And the auction was great fun. Not many people knew to bring stuff. There were a few. But we auctioned off things here in the store, and they went for really good prices. But some people got incredible deals. It was kind of amazing. And that was it. We started at 5.30. we were out by quarter to eight. We had children. There were, I don't remember, seven or eight children, and they all had a wonderful time. A number of them were young adults, young children, not young children, children like 10 to 12. They were just delighted to be here, fully involved. We have a large group of young people coming into the store who are just fascinated with the hobby and thoroughly enjoying doing a natural kind of system. It's pretty exciting stuff, and they're going to be a key part of our club, I'm sure. We also have a number of pretty serious hobbyists. There are probably 20 that have come into this store. Very serious hobbyists and good hobbyists who are breeding a lot of fish. Many of the fish we have here in the store are bred by some of our local hobbyists. So they're going to be an important part of this club too. But we're not going to leave you out, those of you who cannot make it here. The club will be, it will be online, it will be live streamed every month, the third Saturday of the month, and you will be able to participate in the auction. There are a couple of ways we can do this. We can bring you up on screen. We did that with Christian and Cinnamon Saturday, and they were both able to bid. Christian won a couple of things I think at auction so we're going to be able to do that I think we can have 10 people at a time come up so if there are more than that you can always call in or we'll have numbers available or you can post your bid the difficulty with that of course is there can be a lag you might miss out on the item so it's important to get your bid in early so we know you're interested and then we'll look for a follow-up bid from you. So all of that coming up every month now. We had our first in April. Next month will be May. We'll have it on the third Saturday of May. We have two coming up now. How wonderful. What else is here? Christian Hello, Christian. We received your rams today. They are magnificent. Christian just sent us 24 mature, that is, bigger than babies, bigger than adolescents, but sexually mature German blue rams, gorgeous, in perfect condition. Everything is doing well. We separated them into pairs. The top row here, which you can't see very well, it's up there. Each one of those tanks has a pair of rams in it. We have two pairs in our shrimp tank in the back. I think in two shrimp tanks, actually. So lots of rams all over. And we kept them separated in pairs. They tend to do better that way. If you put two males and a female together, you're really asking for trouble because one of those males is not going to make it. Once they get the pairing up, can you bar the door Oh, and we did have a special event here. We had a very pretty, large, male gold severum. He's huge. He's six inches at length. A really big one. And a small, green female about that size. Well, wouldn't you know it, love is such a strange thing. We now have about 50 eggs. They dug down until they hit the hardscape. Now, this is important to understand. When a fish is digging to make a nest, it's not digging to make a pit. It's digging to get down to something hard that they can lay their eggs on. Well, it found it, a stone about that big, about the size of the 50 cent piece. And they laid all their eggs on that tiny little stone. They finished laying them, and because it was in a community tank full of Oscars, among other things, and two big parrots out that we sold, I thought we were going to lose the eggs in the process of catching them out of the tank. But they held on, and we took the eggs out and set them up in a separate hatchery so that they won't get eaten. and those are very hardy eggs and we should be able to hatch them out with no difficulty so we're looking forward to that but we replaced that little tiny stone with a nice big stone that they'll be very happy to lay their eggs on so the next batch should be a lot more a lot more eggs, we'll see how it goes but really excited about having a pair of these absolutely wonderful fish I just love seven they're so pretty and there's so many of them one of the guys was asking what's going to come out of that well we don't know, we really don't know, the orange or gold is a recessive trait so unless the female is carrying a recessive trait we're not going to see any gold but there's a pretty good chance she is and a pretty good chance we will so it could be a mixed bag of a lot of different things and we will be looking for some other um um strains of to come out of that batch as well there are red shoulder there are blue there are a number of varieties of of these fish that well that we might just see in this batch we'll see how it goes very excited about that excited about severum severum are not an easy fish to to be able to care at all they tend to be an expensive fish don't really know why they're pretty easy to spawn but they're awfully expensive to to buy and to be able to get out there so if this works out we're going to have a lot of severum and they'll be pretty good prey another fish that we have been breeding and i want to try to show you this this tank alongside me has a lot of babies in it some of which are, ta-da, uaru. There's one coming up front now. That's a uaru. There's a severum, a little severum. And there are other small fish in here. I think they're mostly African cichlids from Tanganyika, which you can see the uaru. A couple of different sizes. Some are bigger than others. They're all from the same batch. So it demonstrates what's common with fish that have large numbers of fish in the spawn. Some will grow quickly, some will grow more slowly. And that happens because very often the environment that the fish are living in, once they're beginning to grow and separate out in size, the larger fish could be picked off the larger young ones which will leave more of the young to more of the smaller ones to kind of take hold of that that hatching the food supply may drop precipitously and suddenly leaving the larger fish hungry and and very often starving but the big the big the littler fish will be able to survive because well because they don't need as much there's a fish i don't know what that is see that down the bottom with the black spots on it the black blotches that looks i don't know what that is i don't know that fish home we'll see if bryce knows what it is when he gets in in the morning this tank you can see is a little dank it's got a lot of mold in it a lot of fish in it a lot of young fish they're all really healthy doing really well um but it tends to get kind of overdone overgrown not overgrown overworked i should say um because there's so many fish there's a lot of waste and a lot more than the deep substrate is able to manage so we'll need to get in here clean this out soon but not really worried about it at all because the fish are all doing so well all right let's see if this camera backed up and turned around is it going to want to look at me it doesn't want to look at me this camera doesn't like to look there hi there how are you are you gonna be good are you gonna turn around look at the wall or the fish or something their cameras all night it has it has its own mind oh let's see where are we at dean seiler set up a new aquarium with your method two weeks ago and it's do it. Amazing. Wonderful. Later, dear. Dylan, honey. Hello, Father Fish. Do you have any tips regarding calling guppies other than usual that's fine? It really depends on what you want to do with guppies. Guppies are the very first fish. Well, that's not true. I was going to say the very first fish that was designed, but that's not true. The very first fish that was designed was, well, actually it was even before the betta. It was the goldfish. The goldfish and probably before that or in the same time frame were the koi. A koi were for well over a thousand years unavailable to anyone who was not in the royal family in China. Punishable by death to own a koi outside the royal family. But then when all that broke down suddenly these utterly magnificent fish found their way onto the market and had become just incredibly popular. At the same time the fancy goldfish were being developed. In my word, it's amazing the variety that has come from that silly little carp one would think the most worthless uninteresting dull and common fish there possibly could be has become through selective breeding utterly magnificent and varied to the point that there is no limit to the variation to the coloration to the finish, to the size to the body shape, and on and on and on. It is astounding. So, to answer the question about calling guppy, it really depends entirely on what you're trying to do. So, if you are trying to develop a certain characteristic, larger fins, certain color patterns, size, whatever the issue is, Then you need to be separating the males from the females as quickly as it's possible. You look carefully every day at all of the young, and you pick out those where the fin is beginning to thicken. The ventral fin, the bottom fin, bottom central fin, all of the babies will be born with a full flat fin. And as they mature, that fin will begin to thicken. When it does, that's going to be a male. You need to remove it so that you can keep all of the female's virgin. Very important, because as you do selective breeding, you want to be able to put a male that you have selected for certain characteristics with that virgin female. Now, it can be from the same batch. That doesn't matter. You don't want to breed father-to-daughter or son-to-daughter more than five generations, or you will begin to get some breakdown in genetics. You'll begin to get that bent spine and other kinds of problems. So it becomes important routinely to bring new genetics into that strain. that's a little more complicated than down the road but for now if you will separate the males as they begin to develop into their own separate tank you put them all in together it's just fine they're happy together they're not in a squabble they'll do just fine and then keep those females separate and if you see certain females you really like separate them out now you can see by doing all of this separating, you wind up with more and more tanks. Breeding guppies is a process of creating, establishing, maintaining. The average guppy breeder has about 20 tanks. Now, they're not big tanks, none of them. They're small tanks, 10-gallon tanks. A 10-gallon tank is a perfect size to raise guppies. You can raise an entire brood to maturity in a 10-gallon tank. It's perfectly fine. But you need to be able to separate the pregnant female. She goes in her own tank and has babies. And then you select out from that what you like. Now, you may put her in a tank with other females or with other babies. If they're from the same class, that would be okay to do. The important thing, and probably the most important, is to keep records. You need to write it all down so you know who's in what tank and where they came from. And you will learn genetics. It's a wonderful hobby and a wonderful study. And the deeper you go, the deeper you go. And you can create utterly beautiful fish that no one has ever seen before. That's the real joy of selective breeding. Let's see what else is here. Living in Texas doing the same, says PM. A big smile from Strange Enterprise. Catherine Hay says, you did good with the live stream, Father Fish. Kudos. I don't know. It's been a struggle today. What book is that, says Dina Seiler. What book is that? That book, which will be available in about two weeks through Amazon and through all the major booksellers. It'll be in Barnes & Noble, all the big bookstores. This is published by a major publisher. It is our book. We have written the book. A group of five authors, Ryan Smith, Maeve Sakashi, Hart, Kami Denda, Tisha Distra, and Patrick Marshall wrote this book. I wrote a little bit for it and maybe 10 pages is mine. No more than that. Just kind of little section separators where I stuck my nose in. But I tried really hard not to do that because these are all pretty sophisticated hobbyists and researchers. They know what they're looking at and they know what they're doing. And that's what I wanted. I wanted a fully professional review of the system I've been working on all these years. And that's what they have produced. It is a thorough review of the father fish system. and it is a knockout it is unbelievable it makes it possible now we know this we've seen it hundreds of times people buying our substrate or mixing it themselves putting it together sand capping it filling it with with water and adding plants and and fish and growing just wonderful wonderful aquariums that are beautiful adding a food web to it and creating something long last that's what this book explains in detail thoroughly completely 400 pages worth of research here's one on biochemical, just flipping on oxygen demand, biotic and abiotic influences are present during the oxygenation of water. An aquatic system decomposers create a biochemical oxygen demand, which is the measured amount of oxygen required to break down organic material By adding leaves or uneven, uneaten food in the aquarium, the established food web is fed, increasing the biochemical oxygen demand. There's a research note from Hans in 1974. The oxygen dissolved in the water is lowered through the action of organisms performing respiration to break down the food, leaving less for the fish. It is important not to overload a natural system with an abundance of leaves, food, and other organic material all at once. In nature, the fall season and areas containing large deposits of leaf litter can form an oxygen sag curve. This curve can be plotted on a graph by measuring the dissolved oxygen along several points in a stream. The result shows a dip in the amount of dissolved oxygen at the points where a significant quantity of leaves have collected. The eventual return to previous dissolved oxygen levels will be found further downstream. Since aquariums do not have a stream supplying a continuing flow of oxygenated water, the effects can be magnified. Attention should be paid to the frequency and quantity of leaf litter added. In personal testing by this author, various leaf species and seed pods were used to confirm the previous research cited and provide guidance on the frequency and quantity of leaf litter and can be added safely. There is a direct correlation between the mass of dried leaf litter and the total decrease in dissolved oxygen in the water. Put simply, more leaves mean less oxygen. There are fluctuations in this effect among distinct species of foliage. Not enough varieties were tested in the author's trial for a definitive claim to be made as to which characteristics led to increased dissolved salts. During testing, it was noted that leaves with less density broke down faster in a natural setting and increased the dissolved oxygen by a greater degree when compared to equal mass with other types of dry foliage. And it goes on for another few pages about the impact of that. Oxygen and temperature, water movement, it's important. These are section titles. Humic substances and black water, tannic substances and black water. Black water environments are unique. Black water is not rich in tannins. Fish, biochemical signals. So, everything you need to know, and everything you didn't know you needed to know, things you may never need to know, but it's all here in this absolutely extraordinary book, The Natural Aquarium. It is available right now at a $10 savings in our Shopify store. Delivery will be in two to three weeks. The book will, well, at the same time, that's when we'll be receiving our personal order. The book will also be available on Amazon. It will be available in all major booksellers and other places where books are sold. It will be shown at the national and international bookshops all around the world. it will be available through Amazon in the EU uh immediately within by the time it's the first copies are published in about two weeks so the book is going to be available to you you'll be able to get it either directly from us or you'll be able to get it online if you get it from us you'll pay a little extra and get it signed by all of you all. My thanks in that book says Matt C.C. A lot of our Discord friends' thanks are in the book. A lot of them. Hundreds, actually. Pictures of hobbyists who have put together these natural aquariums have pictures of their aquariums in the book. Pictures that they posted in our Discord and we tried to contact i believe we did contact everyone we used and gave them full credit so we're excited to be able to provide that as well this is chew hi there hey ruth what can i do for parasites on my Neocaridina oh that's a real serious problem parasites on Neocaridina remove them remove them into separate tank you should be able to remove the parasite it'll be large enough to bore a hole through the shell with a pair of tweezers you should be able to remove the parasites I'll leave them in a hospital tank until they fully heal and then you can put them back it is important to remove them when you see them, because you don't want more of the parasites breeding in your shrimp tank. It takes some discipline and some observation, but it is controllable. You just have to persevere to control that. And you can remove the parasites. You might need to get a set of glasses. I sell them in my store. They should be listed. A pair of lenses, if you have eyes like mine, that can't even see ich on a fish. that will magnify about, I don't know, 20 times, I think, big enough to be able to see them. So you want to do that. Sergio, hello, Sergio. Where can we purchase the book? You can purchase the book in Shopify, in our online store. It's available right now for advanced order in our online store. What's your thoughts on the doctors stealing money from the Cichlid Foundation? I think it's dreadful. It's not unheard of. There are any number of clubs that have had this kind of thing happen. Really not very many. I should not say any many, any number. That's really not true. There have been a few. I'm aware of a few. The difficulty is that small clubs rarely have the kind of money that becomes an issue, although over years it can develop, nor do they have the kind of support that allows for a group of people to manage the books. I know when I managed an agency, it was impossible for money to be handled by one person. There were always two or more people involved. Checks required two signatures. Approval for checks required a dual signature form to approve those checks. A third person and a fourth person wrote the check. It's difficult to have that kind of complexity in a little club or even a bigger club. And too often, one person winds up being trusted over the long haul, and tragedy can strike. Things can happen. Money can be borrowed and then not able to be repaid. And that's more often than not what happens. somebody gets in crisis and they rather than go to the club and say I've got a really serious problem. Can I make a loan from the club's coffers? That would be an easy thing for a board to deal with and something that an organization the size of the one that is under discussion would have been able to handle. They had hundreds of thousands of dollars in their account, they could have easily done that and set up a workable payment plan. That would have been a wonderful thing to be able to do. It's sad they didn't consider that possibility. I don't know that that's what happened, but that would be an expected reason for such a thing to have happened. Certainly the man was not a thief. He wasn't doing it to break the bank. And obviously something happened in his life and his family that created a crisis. And that was an opportunity. Sad that he did not bring that to the table and discuss it with them and find a way. Well, it's sad. It's sad. It's very unfortunate what has happened. it is important to maintain control of these things in a way that that allows not just one person to be in constant control of every dollar it seems simple at first and not very important because there's too few dollars involved right now air club is set up as a as a store club so any money that flows in is going to go directly into the store as the membership develops the membership may decide to have that club independent of the store. They certainly can do that if they choose to. I've done it that way because I started clubs before as a store owner and found that the store was damaged by the club because the club became so popular that people were saving their fish dollars for the auction every month and not spending them in the store. so in this way the store will get a cut of the auction and we'll be able to put its items in the auction for sale and be able to receive both sides of the income I might add that we put a $49 fish in the auction Saturday and sold it for $15 and we're thrilled to do so so we lost a little money on that but that's okay that's to be expected The point is, we were able to break even on our food, so that was good. These are difficult situations to know quite how to deal with. Obviously, that kind of theft needs to be dealt with in a very firm and a very clear way, with perhaps an understanding of why it occurred as a consideration, but nevertheless, it was a major effect and a terrible tragedy for a fine organization. Right. So here's a link to the book. You can pre-order books on my Shopify sign. You run sign, right, run the same. Make it to Barnes & Noble. How do I get a sign? You only get a sign from us. You're not going to get a signed copy unless they go to the local Barnes & Noble and sit there and sign books one Saturday afternoon, which I may very well do. If I do, I'll promote that event heavily so that there will be folks there who will be there to get a signed copy. But we do have signed copies available in the store. You can buy one signed or unsigned. The signed costs a little more because we have to send labels and mail all over the world in order to get this done. And it's pretty expensive. So we have to charge for that. I have hydra in my pygmy sunfish tank with fry. Oh, dear. Is there a way to get rid of the hydra so it won't harm the fry? I can't starve them out because they eat the same thing. Yeah, that's right. Put the parents back in. The parents will eat the hydra. and they won't eat their own fish. That's really the best solution. Hydra or a scourge in a baby fish tank. One thing you can do is remove the fry into a new tank. The hydra are not free swimming. They're attached. So if you can do that with a siphon, a little turkey baster, something little along it, I know it's ridiculous because they're so tiny. But, you know, people do stranger things. It's a serious problem because the hydra will eat the babies. No question about it. And the brine shrimp or infusoria that you're feeding is what's keeping the hydra going. So you need to find a way to do that. Any medication you put in there is going to kill the babies as well as the hydra. You really can't get away with that. I would try to get as many out as you can with a turkey baster. Siphon them out and put them in a new container. You can probably get most all of them if you're patient and take your time and put your magnifying specs on. You can't imagine, folks, how tiny these babies are. They're almost microscopic. When they're first born, they really are small. They're just so tiny. I spawned the Everglade eye, Elysium Everglade eye, which is comparable in size and in body structure to very similar things. I spawned them in peat moss and got babies. And I could see them, but not with the naked eye. They were pretty tiny. There was a link to a post, a Christian post of that thing. Is it Hydra planaria, I'm sure it's Hydra. let's see my rainbow stick lays two to three hundred eggs so excited I can't wait to see babies that is wonderful they're really easy to hatch out they hatch out well you want to feed them infusoria, baby brine they will take baby brine they'll also take microworms they take a very long time to grow it takes about a year to get them to maturity if you can set a pond outside for the summer they will grow much more quickly you can put some out there i wouldn't put them all out but put maybe half or two-thirds of them out there they'll grow much more quickly outdoors where they will get a lot more infusoria nice work collecting those eggs they they there are a number of ways to do that i used to use java moss i had two bundles of java moss two little balls of java and put it in, and then a day or two later, take it out and put the other one in. Now put that in a separate container, wait a day or two for the eggs to hatch, and then switch it again. And I got hundreds of rainbows doing that. Let's see. Nice work, Ray. All right, we've hit bottom, and we've hit the end of the hour. It's just great to be with you guys. Wonderful to be here. We're at 48 people. That's wonderful. Almost there. We have to wait around till We get to fifty Forty-eight, two more, similar, similar, similar Now it's done, 43. Oh, well, we trust you. Delighted to be with you. God bless you all. Wonderful evening. So good to be here. I really want to be able to start that morning stream again. I keep talking about it. It's just such a commitment to do it. My mornings are usually busy with phone and email and trying to figure out the bank account and all of that. So it's a bit of a problem, but maybe for just a minute, maybe just an hour, like 9 to 10 o'clock or something. We'll see if I can't figure out how to do that. It would be fun. And then those of you who are available during the day will enjoy it. And the great joy of it is we can have people from all over the world involved. It's just really wonderful. Well, good evening to all of you. God bless you. Wonderful to be with you. Love you all, and bye for now.