Alright I'm down here in Lakeland, Florida at Imperial Tropicals
with Mike.
How you doing, Mike?
Hey, good.
Hey everyone.
So if you don't know about Imperial Tropicals they are a fish farm here in Florida
and they are unique because unlike a lot of these fish farms they actually sell direct
to the public.
So you can actually order fish from these guys
and I'll link to their website below, but
real quick Mike if you can just give a quick like, history
and some info about this place and what you guys do here.
Sure, so Imperial Tropicals, like Steve had said,
was primarily a wholesale facility where we bred fish for
distribution that went to pet shops.
But the last probably 10, 15 years a lot of independent stores
have gone out of business and now most of what's left are chain stores.
So a lot of the good fish market that used to be there's not there so
we started selling direct and we haven't looked back.
It's been good.
We love the fact that we're sending our fish straight to people's tanks and
they're taking good care of them.
And they appreciate the quality that we send out
but we specialize in all types of fish.
We breed Central American fish, South American fish,
African fish, probably about 200 different fish here that we breed at Imperial Tropicals.
So that's what we do is we breed fish.
Tell me a little bit about this facility,
and we're gonna show you guys all of this stuff here in a minute but,
I know you've got a bunch of ponds outside,
Yeah, so we have 20 acres of property that is primarily dedicated to fish.
And we have 157 outdoor ponds that are about 30,000 gallons each.
Six greenhouses, and these greenhouses have concrete tanks in them.
We have about 600 of those concrete tanks that are about roughly 200 gallons a tank.
And we have, what, three indoor buildings that are just stacked full of aquariums.
So we have lots of water and fish and tanks.
OK, let's look at some fish.
This is vat room number 3.
This is where we keep a lot of the African fish that we have for sale, so
let's go check some out.
You can't see the fish very well from the top,
so I'm gonna net up some for you.
But we have Turkish peacocks,
Yellow Blaze,
Demasoni.
These are a pretty good size.
The Demasoni are one of the most popular fish because they're one of the most colorful.
But they are very aggressive.
So we recommend when people get Demasoni to keep them species only,
with just Demasoni.
Like if you setup a 55 gallon tank and threw like 20 of these guys in it,
you'd have one of the nicest looking tanks out there, you know.
So that's the Demasoni.
I think we're sold out of the Sulfur Head peacocks
and orange black Lithobates but let me see if there's any big ones left.
There might be one or two left.
The orange black Lithobates is a new one that will be available later this summer.
But it's an incredible fish.
And we're getting almost daily requests for these fish because people know that we're
breeding them.
And then also the Sulfur Head peacock which is also another really nice one.
That is nice.
Those are just some extra males out of our breeding groups.
I guess I could tell everybody how we filter these tanks.
We have these big sponge filters that we make in house.
So it's like a big block of foam.
And then we have a pipe that goes through the middle of it
that pulls the water into the sponge and then out the top.
So that's how we filter our tanks.
And we get asked that a lot so I figured I'd go ahead and show you.
These are Electric Blue Texas cichlids.
Kind of a new fish.
One of the guys that was breeding the Electric Blue Jack Dempsey back in the day.
came up with this line.
We don't know really how he made the line but it's like a Texas Escondido
but it gets really blue when it gets full grown.
These are just kind of juvies right now.
They don't have a lot of blue on them but you'll start to seeing it come out on them.
But as adults I mean they're just really bright blue.
Got Sunshine peacocks, red shoulder peacocks,
albino sunshines, blue regal, lemon jakes.
These are nice, you can see these good from the top.
This is the Electric Blue Ahlis.
One of my favorite haps because they are not super aggressive
like some of the other, bigger haps.
They don't get huge, so the color on them are really popping.
Wow.
You can see how spectacular they look.
Those are really nice.
Really nice in an all male tank.
And that seems to be the most popular group of fish in our opinion
are the peacocks and haps because of the bright colors and they're not super aggressive.
Like this is another colorful one here.
This is the Red Nyererei but the downside with this fish is it's super aggressive
so you can't really mix it with peacocks and haps because of the aggression level.
We get people all the time asking, you know,
"hey, I want to get a Red Nyererei and put it in with my peacocks"
and we always tell them not to because of the high aggression.
That's one nice thing about the internet, is the information is out there
if people do their research.
I mean we've had people that's only been keeping fish for like a year
and they're already on such a high level of fishkeeping
and that's because they've been watching good informative videos about how to keep
these fish, you know properly.
So you do have success.
This is what the tanks look like when they're empty.
We put pipes in there to help lessen the aggression
so they can hide if they're getting beat up.
That's the dragonblood strain.
These are so nice.
I like it with the white in them, I think it makes
the red pop.
We have some nice Star Sapphires that are just now starting to get chips.
But this is another one that's really, really popular.
But everybody wants them already chipped out.
Actually I think the bigger ones are in this tank.
And it takes a long time to get them chipped out.
And when we do get them chipped they sell so fast that we never even get them up on
the website.
But what I tell people is, you know, your best bet is to buy one at 3 inch
and just grow it out because then you get to watch the transformation.
And that's pretty cool to watch itself you know.
But a lot of people wanna already get the chip.
Usually a little bit bigger than that they start getting chipped out.
But even when they don't have the sapphires on them, they still look really nice.
Like this ones starting to chip out a little bit.
But one of my favorites.
I think when they're full grown with the star sapphires all over them
I think they're one of the nicest looking fish.
So this is like an import room for us.
We've been bringing in a bunch of really cool fish from different breeders overseas.
So like we have a friend in Indonesia that actually goes to Papua New Guinea
and collects Rainbowfish.
So he's got some really outstanding Rainbows.
Of course these are the Bleher Rainbows.
This is a new one to us called the Price's Rainbow.
And they're just now getting color.
But a spectacular fish.
If you Google it, google "Price's Rainbow".
And it's just a phenomenal looking Rainbowfish.
Same thing with these Wapogas.
This is another new one.
And you can see that male starting to color up right there.
And they're just a phenomenal looking fish.
And these are Rainbowfish that are not very common in the US.
So we're super excited about getting some of these guys going.
One downside is when we bring in these Rainbows they're small.
They don't have color.
But what we do is we grow them up until they have color
and then we start selling them.
And then we also take good pictures of the fish.
These Millennium Rainbows are ours.
But those are not imported.
But again you can see the quality of them.
They're really nice.
They're a little difficult to ship,
which all Rainbowfish are
because they just stress out.
They're a high oxygen, high energy fish
that, they don't like being confined to a bag.
But we're still able to ship these fish successfully all over the country
with very few issues.
Some new tetras that we got.
This is a Phoenix Tetra.
We're growing them out cause they don't have a lot of color at this size.
But when they get a little bit bigger they look phenomenal.
This is one of my favorites.
It is the super blue kerri tetra.
And I know it doesn't have lighting on the tank.
I'm hoping that they can see the color on them but they're really, really nice.
So that's another one.
We're actually going to, we're growing some of these up for breeders.
So we're gonna breed them.
Cardinal tetras on the bottom.
Those are really nice.
In fact they're, I've got a really good supplier of these guys now and they're just phenomenal.
We haven't had any issues with them.
Cardinals can be a little bit sensitive.
So we're happy that we're able to find some tank raised ones that are really nice.
Next to us we've got the albino millenniums.
This is another one that we have a hard time keeping in stock because they're so popular.
It's just a little bit more difficult for us to breed.
The fry are really tiny and you have to really make up some really small cultures to be able
to feed them.
Like rainwater type stuff.
Alright, so this is our breeding room.
This is the new room that we're working on.
So right here we've got 40 gallon tanks.
We just built the racks.
We just put the tanks in yesterday.
We're gonna plumb all of it tomorrow.
Well maybe not all of it.
We're gonna start on it tomorrow.
But it's gonna, it's a big, big rack.
A total, I wanna say we got 48 40 gallon breeders on this row right here.
And what this is going to give us, is it's going to give us a lot more tank space
to breed really cool fish in.
And a lot of our tanks are 20 gallons and 30 gallon tanks.
And we really like the 40 gallon tanks because you can do a lot of, you know,
a little bit bigger fish in them, you can do group breeding in them.
It's gonna be really cool so we're super excited.
We went all the way down the left side and we're also redoing the walls.
We're putting foam insulation on the walls.
This will help in the wintertime when it gets cold
to keep the tanks a constant temperature.
But as you can see we've got some old systems down here.
We're gonna take all this stuff out and do another row
of like 125s.
And then we'll probably do a row of like 20s,
and then we'll probably do a row of 10s for fry.
But by the time we get done this room is gonna be pimped out.
It's gonna be nice.
That's one reason I really I like traveling the country to all these different fishrooms
is I get ideas on how other people were successful
you know maintaining their fishrooms and building their fishrooms.
And that's one thing I do a lot of is I tour a lot of fishrooms, you know.
Some more discus growing out, we've got some rummynose tetras in there growing out.
Some congos.
This is a really cool fish.
This is a herichthys minckleyi
It's a fish that's extinct in the wild so like, it's no longer found in the wild.
And you see that one right here really coloring up.
It's a fish that is pretty rare.
You can't find it.
We had a professor at one of the universities that was doing a research, you know paper on this
And basically he asked us to breed it and disperse it into the hobby.
And I told him I would love to do that.
So we're growing these guys up.
We really need to get them in a bigger tank though because they still get you know to
8, 10 inches probably at full grown.
But a really nice fish.
Got a pair of discus there.
Alright so we're out, out in the field right now.
This is one of our growout ponds.
This has got the dragonblood peacocks in it.
So it's starting to rain a little bit but you still should be able to see them come up and feed
And, they should come up to the surface here pretty soon.
But I don't know how well it's showing up on camera.
There you go.
You can see them.
Yeah.
They do really well in the ponds.
This pond's about 30,000 gallons so it's got plenty of, you know volume.
But what really they benefit from is the live foods, like the mosquito larvae in particular.
In Florida we have a ton of mosquitos.
So these guys are getting every day a steady diet of mosquito larvae and other types of
small
you know, bugs that they're eating.
Whether it's dragonfly larvae or glassworms.
There's all types of little microorganisms that they're feeding on.
So they get a really good diet.
And I think that's the key to growing good fish is a good diet and having an adequate
environment to grow them in.
And we have 157 of these ponds so.
Pretty awesome.
Yeah.
This is the net that we use to bring them in with right here.
The net is 30 feet long and four feet in depth.
And what we'll do is we'll pump the ponds down about, you know,
halfway and then we'll drag the net and catch em.
I've tried other methods but this seems to be the best.
It's all pretty amazing.
Yeah.
Well thanks Mike I appreciate you taking us around and show us everything.
And again guys you can buy fish from these guys.
Imperial Tropicals, I'll link it down in the description.
Be sure to check 'em out.
Good people, good fish.
Thank you.