see why. I'm here with Rich. And Rich is...He....Well I'm gonna let Rich tell you exactly what this place is and...And what he does.
OK. How you doing. I'm Big Rich. This is my
fish rescue.
We save and rescue fish that grow too big
for your tanks that the pet stores shouldn't sell. Redtail cats, pacus, iridescent sharks. They're very cute this big but they can grow up to four foot, five foot and then there's nobody out there equipped to take them and the pet stores.... They're not equipped and the zoos and the aquariums around town that used to take them no longer take them no more so these fish are basically sentenced to death.
Eventually. So what I did was I started.... I started with a ten gallon tank and I wanted bigger, so I've finagled my way into some big tanks so now I can save
these big fish. Come on into my fishroom.
This here is our first tank. This me and my son Joshua built and it's 3,000
gallons. It's got an 11-foot window. It's 16 foot long, six and a half foot deep and 44 inches high.
And we've got some... Here's a hybrid between a redtail cat and
a tiger shovelnose. There's red tail cats down here, there's iridescent
sharks, pacus, there's a tiger shovelnose. We just filled it with water and moved the
fish in.
That's why you see some of these fish have
their fins are a little bit messed up. They got hurt in the transport from the other
tanks so it's going to take a month and two before all that grows out and they'll start looking good again. And we're just trying to make room for more
fish. Over here now this is our 450 gallon, It's a Dutch Aquarium System, DAS tank.
It got donated to us from Aquarium Authority
when they closed down and we use this for our hospital tank. All the new fish come in...Because all my tanks are all on one system, I can't have ich take over everything, and then treat 17,000 gallons of water. So we put them in the quarantine tank for
a month, treat them with all kinds of medicine... There's a new guy right here, a greater siren.
He's got two front legs, no hind legs, and he's more of an eel than a salamander But, you know the newer fish go in here. There's some stingrays. Over here this is the dog bone. I bought it at an auction when Aquarium Authority
closed down on Ridge Road.
This here I fill with fish that I can give
away. Because we take in fish for people and like if you have your son, little Joey names the fish, you know, spider
or...Bug bug. Whatever he names it, if you donate that fish
to us, We now because it has a name, we keep that fish forever and give it a forever
home. You can come back and visit your fish any
time.
But this here is fish like...A guy's house
caught on fire and he called us. Please come save these fish, take em. I don't have no place to put em. We can find them other homes.
So these are on the smaller scale that we
can give out to people and find them homes. So that's what this tanks about. Come on this way. This is our our thousand gallon.
This was...Way back at my last house this was my 'to end all' tank. I bought it for myself. I wanted it, I was just into fishkeeping at
the time. This is going to be my biggest tank ever.
I love it. I bought it from a place that was closing
down and got a good deal on it. $4,500, Brand new aquarium. They delivered, semi come up and this was
my tank.
But you know, now that I'm here at this house
we have upgraded and now we started the rescue. But this is basically an eclectic... A bunch of fish together that you wouldn't think could fit there, you know? There's South American cichlids, there's african arowanas, you got angelfish, you got a fly River turtle, you got a dorado out of the Amazon River. There's a bunch of clown loaches and flagtails, and look at the size of these bala sharks.
They're...I've never seen any that big but,
they're old. Come on this way. And don't get on me for my saltwater decor, but I happened to have them laying around. I'd gotten a deal at an auction once and I
didn't...
I don't have to go and buy driftwood for decorations. I had these laying around. So I do have a saltwater freshwater reef system
looking thing. But it gives the place...The fish places to
hide and stuff.
Over here we have the baby stingrays and there's
a couple... There's a fire eel and a spotted eel in there. And sometimes even people that get a 10 gallon
tank and buy little fish end up they want out of the hobby or something
so we take in them fish. They come over here this 50 gallon.
There's a little tire track eel, a little fire eel, some artedi knives, there's some little baby bala sharks, a baby peacock bass. Just stuff that, you know, when I find somebody and they're big enough where they are eating
good I can give these away too. This here is our pool full of just basically a bunch of different things. There's clown knives, pacus, we've got a bunch of oscars, tilapia, albino oscar here.
We have an albino clown knife over that corner. He's pretty big. There's a blue channel cat A julianus progarvus. I had to take him out of the 4400.
He was fin nipping the arowanas. And he don't bother nobody in here, but the big tank he was bothering the arowanas so we had to take him out and put him in here. Now over here are some big guys. Now I'm going to move them to the 3000 gallon
at the end over there but in the meantime for this weekend I've left them here for the fact that there's going to be a lot of people coming for the OCA show and this is kind of a neat thing but this is Big Papa.
He's a tiger shovelnose and he likes to be
petted. You can pet him and he'll swim away and he'll
come back and want to be petted some more he'll do a
big circle and he'll come back. There's an iridescent shark there, a big redtail, a niger cat. This here is Two Face.
He's a big redtail and here comes Papa back,
wants some more. I love it. Everybody. But we want to reiterate that you don't wanna,
like you might think this is cool watching him pet this fish but that doesn't mean you need to just go out and try and buy one without having a crazy setup to be able to support it.
They get really big and it's really rare for a fish that likes to be touched. You can have that in any kind. You might find a cichlid you might find a flowerhorn, but you know eventually there's certain fish that like to be touched. It ain't all tiger shovelnose.
But you know I don't want to send out the message everybody should you know get these fish. They actually shouldn't be sold at the pet
store because they do get so big and the fact is that they sell them at the pet stores and there's no place that you can give these fish to, so the pet stores are basically sentencing them to death. Eventually. It's a matter of time.
When they get this big who's got a...You know if you had him in a a 150 he'd destroy your
tank. He'd break it. That's why they're called tank busters. But you know I have the facility right now to where I'm able to help for a little bit but I'm gonna get overrun eventually and I don't know, you know I can't even give them to the zoos or the aquariums0 I've been trying.
But anyways here is our 750 tank. It's for the mini monsters. Now all these big guys are going into the three thousand. These guys here I'm going to take out the biggest four or
so and put them in the three thousand with the big guys and the rest of them.
I can add some more. I've got more in the pot here I can add up here and you got to feed them and grow them out for a while. And come on over this way. This here, he's a neat guy.
Oh I'm sorry. This guy here he's an aba knife fish. Some pet stores sell them as aba aba knives. He's a really neat fish but I can't keep him in with anything.
He will take bites out of other fish about
the size of my thumb. They've got really sharp teeth and if you don't kill the fish he'll come back later, take another bite out. And eventually gonna kill anything that he's put in with so I put him in this 500 gallon and we build a sand, underwater waterfall there out of sand and he's pretty neat. I'm waiting for the sand to clear up.
It made the water a little milky but you know it's a pretty neat setup. Then I can take all this extra filtration off of it and it won't look so hokey. And then over here we have the 550 and anyone out there wants to get into the fish hobby my suggestion is get your wife a tank you do some goldfish, some koi, something pretty. Discus.
Cichlid tank. And once she's into it you're free to get
into your hobby. Happy wife happy life. So this is the old lady's koi comet tank and then I.
Had to put some, I got some South American Lungfish in there and they were getting picked on in other tanks. Just because people will ask, you said it looks like they're starting to pick off these goldfish a little bit. Yeah there's a goldfish back there with his head missing. Well one of the lungfish got em and she was
upset about it.
I'm sure. I mean a comet is 50 cents at the pet store but Tracey's like 'look how long their tails are, they're so beautiful' She was about ready to cry when one of them
was gone. I understand that. Alright so...
Another little hint here. See how the bottom
is tiles? Everybody has to do the gravel in all the tanks, well I have so many tanks that I try and come up with ways to make it easier to take care of. I don't have to gravel clean in this tank. I don't have to do nothing.
The tiles are
there and with a bubble wall on the back wall it keeps the water rotating so no dirt accrues on the bottom and the filters are able to take it away. Makes life so much easier. Seriously. It don't look half bad.
So should we show them the big tank? Yeah, let's go around. So you guys might be thinking 'what are you
talking about? We've see all these big tanks.' Well you haven't seen the biggest tank. OK this is a 4,400 gallon aquarium built by Waterdog Products. It has a three inch thick acrylic window.
14 Foot long, 6 foot tall. It's 7 foot from front to back. This is something I ran across at an auction. I didn't go there to buy this and I put a jokingly bid on this and I ended up winning it.
Couldn't believe it but it was a 10 hour drive
away and we had to rent a pickup truck and a car trailer to set this on and bring it home in the middle of winter. This actually sat outside my house in the
snow for two years. Now the guy from Waterdog Products said that
if this window gets cold it would shrink more than a half an inch of 14-foot and it would pop the seams so for two years this had a heater inside. It had a camera from my house camera system, security system and then I.
Had a big thermostat on the wall and it was, this was covered with styrofoam and I had it shrink wrapped and covered in a tarp and then I could see inside and keep the temperature monitored. So this sat outside for two years and we bought this house, we put it in here, filled it up, never had a problem. Talk to me about some of these fish. OK this here is a gold iridescent shark.
We call him Schwarzenegger. These are some albino pacus. These are arowana fish here. There's four
of them in there.
This guy here is called Burt. He's well known around Ohio. He was at the Aquarium Authority forever. They were trying to sell him for like $300.
I ended up getting him and then this here.
He's got his own web page. There was a lady that donated him to me named Kimberly. His name is Sir Heisenberg von Fishface. That's it.
And like we said if anybody donates fish to us that has a name, their family pet, we keep them here forever and let them you know grow old eventually meet their death here. This is where they're going to stay, that way the people can come back and visit anytime they want so we've got a lot of fish that are named. The fish that are unnamed I can find other homes for, we know many people through the United States that have big tanks. But like we got a school of schomburgki here.
Them are actually silver dollars, they're
wide bar silver dollars. They're myleus schomburgki. Them are the biggest I've ever seen. They
get big.
So them are 15 inches, 14 inches they're big silver dollars. So let's see what else we got here. Oh yeah there's a bunch of clown knives. Now he's probably about 28 inches.
There's some speed 33 to 35 inch clown knives in the back behind this coral and they're back there. Their humps are about 4 inches wide, they're huge, I've never seen clown knives that big. But they hide all the time unless almost food comes out then they come out to eat and go back in there. Now I have a three and a half foot South American lungfish in here if I could get a
picture or show him.
He usually hides right back in here Nope, I don't see him. Yeah he comes up every 20 minutes to get some air and goes back down. That's a pearsei cichlid. Then here's another pacu and an iridescent
shark.
These are masheers. There's gold and blue. Oh that's an alligator gar back there. I don't know why he hides but he's back there.
We got long nose gars here. Oh this is a thin bar. He's pretty beat up,
he was pretty beat up when he came in but we got that thin bar there's another thin bar here there's a good good-lookin thin bar and then there's a fourth one right there. We actually read the thin bars and you look over here to the thousand gallon you have babies of them in here.
Here's one here there's like four or five in here now. It came from our our fish breeding naturally. I'm not trying to breed them but they did breed. Okay so let me ask you a couple questions.
Yes sir. So this tank here, how is this filtered? It has an out right there so we pump water in on that side to that big 2-inch PVC pipe and the water fills up the tank and overflows out and it comes back here. We have an 800 gallon filter here. Go back
in this way.
I'll continue talking but you can go in that
way. That is a sock table that I had Steve Shin
from Aquatica build for me and it's nine socks that are 100 micron apiece so the water comes in goes through these nine socks and then I have four foot of house plants here taking out nitrates. And the bottom of this 800 gallon tub is basically a settling chamber and you know once a year or so we got to clean the bottom of this off of slump. It's about six to eight inches thick.
And that keeps it from getting back into the
water. And then the water comes out into that through
this pipe here into our homemade biological filters. This is just the sock that I cut to keep the splashing
down. The water goes into the...
It was an old garbage
can that I. Drilled a bunch of holes in and that's full of bioballs and then it comes out on
the other side you see the waters rippling comes out that way so I had to use two garbage cans to split it up - there's too much water for one to handle so this is biological that's mechanical and that's how we filter it. I'm getting ready, I'm gonna have to upgrade
the filtration because I've got a 2200 gallon
tank outside right now with the heater in it and the cameras that we're gonna have to move in here and we're doing an addition now to be able to you know handle another tank. We have no room in here.
So we're doing the addition to get another tank out there so I'm gonna need more filtration. We're gonna have to revamp the whole thing and you know we're trying. Over here this tank someone gave us a set of breeding Jack Dempseys. They're in the back corner there and I.
Just have water run for the 750 and dripping down into here and some sponge filters in there but they breed every so often have a bunch of babies. So we give away a lot of fish and help out on the smaller items. The
bigger fish we keep here and basically give them a forever
home. So I won't make you talk any longer.
You've really shown us so much and we appreciate it. Let me just say running something like this cannot be cheap. I won't make you talk about exactly what it runs to maintain it but guys I'm going to work with Rich between now and when this video comes out. Hopefully we'll get some type of a way for you guys if you think what he's doing is a worthy cause to donate to which I think that definitely is, it's really cool what he's doing.
We're going to try and if you look down in the video description hopefully we'll have some type of a way for you to donate and help keep this keep this running. So thank you Rich so much for walking us around this is really awesome. Can't believe this is all just in your house here really awesome, appreciate it and thanks everyone for watching until next time have a good one..
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