0:00:02.1 Speaker 1: Okay, first thing's first, I'm sorry about missing the vlog last week. I hope you missed that. I hope you were like, "Where's the vlog? We want the vlog," because I'm enjoying making them. And if you were missing it, that means you enjoy watching them, and that's really all I want. But we have a pretty good reason why we weren't able to do a vlog last week. We went on vacation, and we had this whole plan that we were going to vlog the vacation while also including a fish store tour, kind of like the week before. But we weren't able to do the fish store tour, which is unfortunate, and it's not really our fault. The guy was a little unsure as to whether or not he wanted some YouTuber that he'd never seen before to record a tour for that doggone social media. But I get it because the guy, he's old school, and he's just not into social media. So it is what it is. We ended up scrapping the whole vlog because we weren't just gonna do a vlog that was our vacation to celebrate our 12-year anniversary to Gettysburg. We just weren't gonna share that.
0:01:11.2 Speaker 1: Today, the bulk of this vlog is all about going to get fish for this tank. Super excited about it. We've had this tank set up for a couple of months now, and it's been fish-less because of the weather. It's nobody's fault. It's just the weather just decided to take a huge turn when it was time to get these fish, and it just didn't work out. But it worked out, and it's worked out well because they're actually at the airport as we speak. But we haven't gone down there to get them yet because we also ordered fish from another farm and we're gonna pick those up at the same time. These are bettas that we'll be selling on the website. So kind of go down there and kill two birds with one stone. It's gonna be really cool. We're gonna take you along for the whole ride.
0:01:55.1 S1: We're not getting these fish from a retailer, we're not getting them from a store. We're actually getting them direct from a farm, Florida Exotic Fish Sales down in Florida, shocker. This is a company that we used to work with a long time ago. If you've never heard of Florida Exotic Fish Sales, I get it because they won't sell to you. They sell to the fish stores who sell them to you. But that company was started by Rick and Andy Biro. If you don't know that name, you're probably not into African Cichlids. But if you're into African Cichlids, you know those names because they are pretty much responsible for African Cichlids being in this hobby. So look them up. Rick Biro is the one that runs the farm now, just type in Rick Biro into Google and you'll read all about him. The guy is a legend in this hobby. In fact, I hope that I've got some footage from them of catching the fish at the farm to send to us. He said he took the footage, and I haven't received it yet. But if I do get it, I'll put it right now.
0:02:57.4 Speaker 2: Okay, here's Rick with the gold lab.
0:03:00.6 Speaker 3: Tony and Glen.
0:03:03.4 Speaker 2: Tony and Glen.
0:03:04.0 Speaker 3: And these are the ones we're gonna send up to KG. Counting them out... Seven, eight, nine. That's probably good enough.
0:03:29.5 S1: Hopefully, you just saw that footage. I haven't received it yet, so I'm a little nervous. But hopefully, you saw that and it was very cool. I can't wait to go and pick these up. And when I acclimate them, we'll talk a little bit about cycling this tank. And then maybe next week's vlog, I'll go in depth of how I plan to cycle this. Right now, there's nothing. It's just, it's been running for a couple of months and there's nothing in it, so we'll go into detail about the cycle next week. Anyway, it'll make a whole lot more sense then. Today is not about the cycle, today is about getting the fish, getting the bettas that we'll... I'll show you how Lisa gets them into the tanks downstairs. We'll just have fun. I don't know. Let's see what happens. But it's time to go. I just gotta get up. Let's go.
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0:04:31.1 S1: Where are we gonna go eat?
0:04:33.7 Lisa: I wanna go somewhere good, somewhere with vegetables or Mexican food. I love Mexican food.
0:04:40.0 S1: Little Caesars?
0:04:42.4 Lisa: No, thank you.
0:04:43.4 S1: Marty's?
0:04:44.9 Lisa: No, thank you.
0:04:45.8 S1: Burger King?
0:04:48.2 Lisa: I'm starving. No, I don't want no Burger King.
0:04:49.3 S1: Popeyes?
0:04:50.0 Lisa: No. I want veggie pizza. We're getting veggie pizza.
[background conversation]
0:05:00.9 S1: So what, we're filming food? [chuckle]
0:05:04.2 Lisa: No. I got my veggie pizza. I'm excited.
0:05:09.7 S1: How many people do you know eat all the toppings first, and then eat the crust after that?
0:05:18.6 Lisa: Are you making fun of me?
[chuckle]
0:05:22.1 S1: Yeah. I don't think you can... I can't take the camera in there.
0:05:26.2 Lisa: Oh.
0:05:27.3 S1: I think they will frown on that.
0:05:28.4 Lisa: Well, I'll just record you going in.
0:05:30.9 S1: It says hours of operation from 8:00 to 6:00.
0:05:33.9 Lisa: Uh-oh.
0:05:35.2 S1: That would not be good, but I was here after that last time.
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0:05:54.6 Lisa: Yay, fishes! Oh I guess I should have helped him open the door.
0:06:00.6 S1: Oh!
0:06:02.9 Lisa: Sorry.
0:06:03.2 S1: It's a big box.
0:06:05.5 Lisa: Which ones are those?
0:06:08.1 S1: These are the yellow labs.
0:06:10.2 Lisa: Yay!
0:06:11.4 S1: The bettas aren't here yet.
0:06:12.6 Lisa: What?
0:06:15.2 S1: The plane is on the ground, but it's not here yet. She said she'll come out and tell me when it's ready.
0:06:22.4 Lisa: Okay. I opened the door for you this time.
0:06:30.2 S1: Thank you.
0:06:31.3 Lisa: You're welcome.
0:06:33.1 S1: This one is twice the size, half the weight, and costs twice as much to ship.
0:06:39.5 Lisa: Wow!
0:06:39.6 S1: And came half the distance. Makes no sense. But we got them, so let's go home.
0:06:52.2 Lisa: Yay! So whose bright idea was to wait to get gas?
0:07:00.5 S1: I don't know what you're talking about.
0:07:02.1 Lisa: I hope we make it to a gas station.
0:07:05.1 S1: Don't worry. It'll be fine. Don't you worry about it.
0:07:10.6 Lisa: Yeah, he's pretty lucky we made it to a gas station 'cause I'm not so sure I would've forgiven him if we didn't, especially at like 10 o'clock at night, and we have fish in the car or in the truck. Yeah, I'm pretty sure he would've been sleeping on the couch, but we made it.
[noise]
0:07:38.6 S1: Shut up. [chuckle] Alright, I gotta be honest, I really did think we were gonna run out of gas on the way home. Thankfully, we didn't. It is almost 11:00 now. And we're back, finally, ready to do this. This is a moment that I have been waiting for for quite some time with this tank, and yeah, this is an exciting moment for me. I think I said it for the first time, probably a year and a half ago, that I wanted to do... And it might even be longer than that, that I wanted to do a blacked out tank full of yellow labs. And today, that comes true, and I'm so excited. And I'm also excited because these are from one of my absolute favorite sources of African Cichlids. I see them in here. They are swimming around. They're probably 2 inches or so, and there's a whole bunch of them, [chuckle] two giant bags. Oh my goodness. You probably can't see them in there, but there's a whole bunch of them. That's a rubber band, but yeah, they're in there. Oh they're so adorable. [chuckle]
0:09:22.3 S1: Let me tell you something, this is gonna be so much fun. Let me grab the camera and show you the fish as they are right now. I mean, they're just in the bag. I'm gonna acclimate these the exact same way I do any other fish, float them for 30 minutes or so. I'm gonna go downstairs, help Lisa a little bit with getting all of those bettas un-boxed, and then I'll come up here and let these out. They use methylene blue in the water. I wouldn't be putting the water into my tank anyway, but just another reason not to do that. The good thing about this is that the bags are so big, I can just open the bags up, scoop the fish out, and put them in the tank. So that's gonna be good. Anyway, I'm excited. Let me give you a closeup look, and then we'll go help Lisa.
0:10:10.7 S1: Here they are. Look how cute they are. They're every bit of 2, 2 1/2 inches, all of them. It's gonna have a hard time focusing on it because of the bag and everything else. But yeah, they look really good, really healthy, as I would expect from Florida Exotic. And I'm gonna guess, just by looking at it, there's probably 25 in each bag, maybe 20 in each bag. So yeah, this tank is going to be unbelievable. Yep, there's the focus problems. Okay, let's go help Lisa. So I've got the yellow labs acclimating. I thought maybe we would show you doing this, and talk about what you do when you get fish, when you get bettas.
0:11:05.8 Lisa: Well, I...
0:11:07.3 S1: Show them the bags that they come in. People wanna criticize. Look at that. [chuckle] That's how they come from overseas, that way.
0:11:18.8 Lisa: Yep.
0:11:20.3 S1: And that's not me being critical, that's just me saying that's how it's done. So a lot of times you might think that's cruel, but that's how it's done. I'm not saying it's right or it's wrong. I'm just saying, yeah, that's how they're shipped, little teeny bags like that.
0:11:36.2 Lisa: So the day before, I always get the water ready, and I stick just a little bit in the containers. Not a lot, not as much as I would normally keep them in, just a little bit. And the reason why I do that is because they are used to being in the little bags. So I just get them used to having a little bit more water. And the next day, I'll come in and I'll fill it up to here, so that way they just adjust slowly. I guess I could start off all the way with it being all the way up to there, but I find that this makes them happy. I'll come in tomorrow, I'll add more water, and by the end of the night, there'll be bubble nests. So it seems to work.
0:12:27.6 S1: There's 100... How many fish did you order?
0:12:34.8 Lisa: I didn't order a lot this time 'cause we're not selling as much 'cause of the shipping. So I only got about 120.
0:12:45.0 S1: But this is how they come from overseas. And again, I'm not saying this is bad. When you wanna be overly critical about tanks this size, look at the way they're shipped from overseas. [chuckle]
0:13:01.2 Lisa: Oh you want me to get those?
0:13:13.7 S1: So it's...
0:13:13.8 Lisa: These are the mustard gas.
0:13:15.3 S1: It's a process of cutting each one of these open, putting them in the net, and putting them in their own tanks, and doing that 150 times. [chuckle]
0:13:25.0 Lisa: Yep. And then I just organize it the next day, I label it correctly, saying exactly what they are, and re-arrange everything, so that they're in the right place. I just pretty much just put them in a tank that has water in it that I pre-treated the day before, and go with it, and then reorganize it the next day. 'Cause it's like 11 o'clock at night and I'm tired. [chuckle]
0:13:54.5 S1: Yeah. And so I'm gonna leave you to it because I know that I'm probably bothering you. So I'm gonna go...
0:13:58.1 Lisa: No, it's fine, it's fine.
0:14:00.6 S1: I'm gonna go do the yellow labs, and then I'll come back. And if you want me to help you...
0:14:03.3 Lisa: Awesome. I can't wait. I can't wait to see them. Yeah, I'll be in here for quite a while 'cause I still need to feed everybody too.
0:14:12.9 S1: Look how active they are now. They are ready to get out of these bags. They've been in there for about 45 minutes now, floating in the tank. They've been in the bags a whole lot longer than that, but they've been floating in here for about 45 minutes. The temperature should be about the same in the bags as it is in the tank. So what I'm gonna do is take the bags back out, I'm gonna put them back down into this cooler that I got them in, and I'm gonna scoop them out and put them up in there.
0:14:39.8 S1: I don't wanna put the water that's in the bags into the tank for two reasons. One, it's blue. And for two, it's blue because it has methylene blue in it. But for two, the water's nasty. They've been in there... There's... I counted. I tried to count. It's hard, but I think there's 25 in each bag. That's a lot of fish in these bags. They've been in there pooping and doing all of their stuff, so that water is pretty fouled up. I don't wanna put that into my tank. So for those two reasons, we're not gonna do that.
0:15:09.8 S1: It's something that no fish keeper should do. I don't care if they've only been in the bags for 10 minutes because they came from the fish store, just don't chance it. Just take the fish out of that water, put them into your tank. It's much safer that way. That's what I'm gonna do here. Even though I completely trust the source that they came from, there's methylene blue in it, so it's really not even an argument. I'm gonna stop talking about it and I'm just gonna do it.
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0:17:05.6 S1: This is why we put a mountain of rocks in mbuna tanks, because look at that. They've been in this tank for about three minutes and they're already all going through exploring, finding their spots. It is so much fun to watch all these little pieces of lava rock that have little holes in them. And look at him. There he goes, swimming through it. It's so much fun to watch. This is gonna be a blast. These fish are all over the place. Now, they're exploring, they're a little excited, they just got in here. And so they're kind of all over right now trying to figure out what's going on. But wow! This is exactly what I wanted, bright yellow fish in a blacked out tank. Could not have asked for any better. Now, I don't know if you noticed... Look at this little fella. Look at this little guy. Check him out. He's just moseying right along. He's a little teeny thing, and that is the best thing about a tank like this. There are males and females in here, and they're gonna have babies. Now, that is not a freshly spit yellow lab. That's been free swimming for quite some time, but he's a little fella and he's fitting right in with all these other fish. Kind of reminds me of Rob93.
0:18:35.4 S1: But anyway, [chuckle] before anybody gives me a hard time for all of this hair algae on the rocks, I know it's there. And guess what I also know? These fish will eat it, so I'm not worried about it. They'll clean it off. They might not 'cause I'm gonna feed them well. I'm gonna give them plenty of Xtreme peewee and Xtreme flakes and stuff like that, which is exactly what they're used to 'cause they were born and raised at the farm where that formula was created. So they're used to that, they love it, and so I'll be feeding them a lot of that. But they'll clean that algae off of there. That's not gonna be a problem. And if they don't, hey, it looks natural. I'm not gonna make a big deal out of it. I'm fine with it. So anyway, I could sit here and talk all day long about these fish, but I'll tell you what? I've been messing with the camera, I've been messing with all of this, and I haven't had any time to just sit here and enjoy the fish. So that's what I'm gonna do now, and I'll talk to you in the morning.
0:19:43.3 S1: Alright, so it's not the next morning. It's actually three days later, I think, but I've just been letting these fish settle in, and they are settling in quite nicely. They look magnificent in here. I could not be happier. I'm just absolutely blown away, and I'm so particular about these fish. People walk by, and they scurry off. If I move like this, you'll see, they'll just all... Well, of course, they're not gonna do it 'cause they're on camera. But if I was to get up and walk away, they would all scurry into the rocks. And it's actually adorable, but it's also like they're scared, and that's why they're doing that. So they are still a little bit skittish, and that's okay.
0:20:23.7 S1: That's also why you see, we're going through the dreaded diatom algae phase in this tank. And I haven't gone in there with a sponge and cleaned it off because I don't wanna freak them out because they're my little babies, and I don't wanna... [chuckle] Anyway, they're getting spoiled. But I will get in there and clean off the diatoms soon, but I'm gonna put some close-up footage of the fish over top of me while I'm talking here. You can see they already did clear off the rocks for the most part of all of that hair algae and stuff like that. I told you they were gonna do it, and they did it. So yes, they're eating like pigs, they are settling in quite nicely.
0:21:04.0 S1: And we do have the one little teeny guy that I showed you in the previous footage... I don't know where he is now. I don't know where he went. He's in there somewhere, the little teeny fella. And Lisa came out here, when I showed her that fish for the first time, she's like, "His name is Dude." I don't know. I don't know where that name came from. But apparently, his name is Dude. And even now, the kids are coming out here, and they're like, "Oh look, it's Dude. He's so cute." So I don't know where he is. It's kind of... He's in there. I just saw him like two seconds ago, but I don't know. No reason to be alarmed. He's okay. I just don't know where he is. He's figured out his place, and he just hangs out, and he doesn't bother anybody, and they don't bother him.
0:21:54.2 S1: Anyway, we've got so many plans with this. I might add some more rocks to it, and I'm also gonna add another tank in this room that's gonna be specifically to house yellow lab fry because it's gonna happen in this tank. No matter what we do, it's gonna happen. There's males and females in there, they're gonna breed, there's gonna be fry, and we're gonna need somewhere to put them. It's possible we could end up getting over-run with these fish. I don't know, but we're thinking about setting up maybe like a 29-gallon tank, which will serve as a nice backdrop for the new types of videos that we're putting up on Sundays. I don't know. It's just wide open. It's a lot of fun. I don't know that we'll even be able to catch the fish. If there are fry in here, we'd have to take all the rocks apart to get... I don't know. We're just gonna have to see. It would be almost impossible to net a holding female in a tank like this 'cause she'll just run off and be hiding in the rocks. So I don't even know if the extra fry tank makes sense, but you know what? We could put something else in there. Who knows? We need something better for the backdrop of those videos.
0:23:03.9 S1: So anyway, I'm running my mouth way too much. You can tell I'm super excited about these fish. I hope you enjoyed the journey of getting these fish. As I said in the opening to this video, I am gonna do some cycling videos on this, how I'm gonna be doing it, how that whole thing is gonna be handled, and explain the cycling process in depth with this tank. I don't know if that's gonna be a Sunday video or a Tuesday video. I don't know what it's gonna be. Maybe you should subscribe, that way you'll get a notification when that video comes out, if that's something that you wanna see. I'm still looking for Dude. I know he's in here, but I don't know. I would love to say, Dude will become our new Bubbles. But let's face it, in a month, we're not gonna be able to tell which one is Dude and which one's not. But anyway, this has been fun. I hope you can tell I'm enjoying myself here. I'm gonna go ahead and cut it off because if I don't, I'm just gonna sit here and run my mouth all day. So that's it. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.
