Ted’s Fishroom

A Visit to

Rich and Laura Bireley’s

Fish House

July, 2007

I have been to paradise. Imagine if you will, acres of space in miles of open land. Peace, quiet, clean air… and a HUGE fish house. That basically sums up the Bireley home. I had a couple opportunities to visit this fish house while in Sacramento for the ACA 2007 convention. Have I mentioned lately that I really miss the West? Here is a view from the back porch…

The fish room is a free-standing metal building that has to be close to 2000 square feet. Here is a picture of it from outside. Disregard the clutter. Laura and Rich, beyond working jobs, they have been instrumental in the planning and running of the ACA 2007 convention, which takes a considerable amount of attention and time. AND on top of that they have a new baby! They also have horses, goats, dogs and numerous other things to keep them busy.

The first aquarium that you see as you walk in the door is a huge acrylic tank with a colony of large C. frontosa and a few other miscellaneous, but well grown, Lake Tanganyika cichlids. There is also an awesome royal pleco (Panaque nigroliniatus) in that tank.

  

The main area of aquariums is set up as rows of tanks, three or four high. There are various sizes and shapes of aquariums ranging from small 10 - 20 gallon tanks up to large tanks of 100+ gallons. The racks are primarily rabitted 2×4 construction. There are windows in the building which made for interesting photography lighting, but I did the best I could.

  

The Bireleys are also very creative aquarists. There is an interesting rack with two of what look like solid, white pond liners mounted into a wood frame. These containers are 8′ x 4′ with a depth of about 18″. The water level is lower than that, but the huge surface area makes an excellent aquarium… or pond… I don’t know what to call it. What is even better is the Rich has two of them, one mounted on a rack above the other one. The lower… pond/tank thing… has Tropheus moorei in it.

Those… containers…. are very cool, but they pale by comparison to what is behind them. This is a HUGE indoor pond made from a tomato truck liner. It measures 24′ long by at least 8′ wide, and the water level is about 2′ deep. Rich keeps large open water rift lake cichlids from both Lake Malawi and Lake Tanganyika in it. There are also a couple very large adonis plecos in there.

  

Most of the tanks in the house are filtered by air driven sponge filters. The Bireleys use a regenerative blower to provide the air. This room is large enough to need a big blower.

 Heat is controlled by two hanging industrial space heaters that are controlled with thermostats. The building, being metal, would conduct heat very well. In the Summer the room would become an oven (the temperatures in that part of California can rise over 100F), and in the Winter it would become a freezer when temperatures plunge below freezing. Even in the Summer the dry air drops in temperature significantly after sunset. The fish house is protected from these temperature shifts by a tick layer of spray in foam insulation in all of the walls and the ceiling.

   

The Bireleys are heavily into cichlids. They have visited Lake Tanganyika and have many species from that lake, but there are also a lot of fish from other regions of the world. Laura is interested in dwarf cichlids, and has several species from the Pelvicachromis and Apistogramma genera. Here are some of Laura’s dwarf cichlids.

  

Their Lake Tanganyika collection is diverse. Rich has several species of Tanganyikan mastacembelus-type eels, but they are difficult to get pictures of because they hide. Here are some of the fish they have from Lake Tanganyika.

  

There are three groups of Lake Tanganyika fish in this fish house that are my favorites. This first is a colony of Opthalmotilapia boops with a male that can turn his color on and off like a light switch.

The second is this group of Enantiopus melanogenys ‘Cholisa’ that would display endlessly, so long as the camera was on the other side of the room.

The third, and probably my favorite of all, is a colony of these classic O. ventralis. This is, in my opinion, and exceptional male, and I wish that Rich had entered him the the ACA 2007 show. Everytime I see nice featherfins like these I want to get rid of all my small tanks, buy a bunch of 125’s and collect these beautiful, but tempermental, beauties.

The Tanganyikan cichlids are all very nice, but they are probably not the most impressive group of species in the place. Rich has assembled a diverse collection of Malagasy cichlids as well. I suspect that Rich is probably one of about a dozen people in the country with this many different species of cichlids from Madagascar. One of the neatest is this smaller species, Ptychochromoides katria. I have a small collection of three different Madagascan Bedotia sp. rainbows, and I think that I might want to try to convert my 110 gallon West African tank into a Malagasy tank for them and this species of cichlid.

There is also an impressive group of Paretroplus maculatus in the fish house. One of the big cichlids was in spawning colors, which I have never seen before… a pretty fish even prettier. Getting these beauties to to spawn successfully usually requires a pond outside.

Here are a couple different Ptychochromis species, which have proven to be much easier to rasie in captivity, and are therefore much less expensive to obtain.

 

The genus Paratilapia is also well represented in the Bireleys’ fish house. Here is a picture of on of Rich’s larger specimens, and another of a smaller fish with an interesting yellow blotch on its side.

  

Laura and Rich’s fish house is a very cool set up. The only knock on it, and I think that they would agree, is that the well water on the property is of poor quality. They have to truck thier water in and store it in a large container outside. Now that is the definition of dedication!

Everything I have shown so far takes up about 2/3 of the space in the fish room. I would say that Rich has plenty of room to grow, except that he has a soft spot for monitor lizards. Yes… big, nasty (not all, but some), powerful, rat-eating monitor lizards. Rich rescues them from all around the area, and there are several in the building. Most are in large wire cages, except for this guy… the guard lizard. It is a blackthroat monitor that Rich says to too tame to bite, but it might whip you with its tail. I will take Rich’s word for it. This beast sleeps on top of a large lizard cage.. not in it. It is free to roam, but I think it may have only shifted position a little when I was there.

This monitor is nasty mean, and Rich warned me that it would launch itself at me if I opened the door. I pried the top of the door wide enough to get a clear picture, and it did not leap. It gave me the evil-eye though…

So, we have seen cool aquariums and ponds, awesome fish, and big lizards. I’m not done. Apparently one of the ‘family pets’ is a rattlesnake. I like rattler’s. They do not bother me as much as the big lizards do.

This is an awesome fish house, and I hope that I get the chance to visit it again sometime. Rich and Laura are ‘doers’, and I suspect that the next time I get out to the left coast I will see improvements and innovations they have not thought of yet. I hope they get another of those tomato truck liners for the big Paretroplus maculatus. That would be very cool!