Alright, we're here at uh...
well this place is crazy and you're about 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.