Aquarium Connection: Exotic-Fish Emporium Makes Waves

I could listen to fish stories all day. Like how the silver arowana lurks in the Amazon rainforest and gobbles up small rodents or birds that fall into the water. (This now in: Fish eats bird!) Or how the endangered Red Asian arowana has a fondness for a cricket or baby-frog snack. Or how the octopus is a talented escape artist, able to ooze through the smallest spaces, so make sure to tie down the tank cover tightly or it'll go out hunting for dinner at night and wind up splayed out on the kitchen floor by morning, a desiccated mess. Or how different jelly species will battle to the death in a tank, yet you can't put in so much as a sunken toy pirate ship because it will rip their tissue to shreds. Or how Bunya-Ananta knows locals who have raised piranhas and snakeheads, which are illegal in California, because petrified owners dump them into the local rivers, where they wreak havoc on the local ecosystem. The snakeheads get as big as golf bags, can walk on land, live out of the water for days ... and eat rats (yes, rats).

The ornamental-fish hobby has a murky reputation because of how the fish are acquired and what that does to the places they're taken from, so the guys won't buy fish that have been caught with the "stun 'em with poison," sodium-cyanide method. Which should make you feel better about relishing the dynamics of life in the tank; namely, who in fish society will kill whom, and who will love whom ... and when. For instance, as long as you keep the reef sharks fat and happy with squid chunks and anchovies, they won't eat their tank mates (or each other). The store has a family of docile frontosas for sale ($400, party of seven) who must go together or they'll get sad. Other fish make you glad to be human, like the venomous lionfish, which eats any fish he can get his lips around. Or the mean undulated trigger — bane of scuba divers and lionfish alike — which are the Charles Mansons of the ornamental-fish hobby.

Jessica Miller

Jessica Miller

Jessica Miller

More About

• Andrew Bunya-Ananta
• Keith Amador
• Thousand Oaks
• Jennifer Lopez
• Brandon McConnell

It's one thing to turn your bedroom wall into a see-through tank, but how do you keep it from becoming a watery graveyard? With that in mind, Bunya-Ananta can set you up with all manner of high-tech gear, such as a pager that will beep you if you're out at a business meeting, say, and you need to haul ass to get home because the temperature in your tank dropped 2 degrees, or the water chemistry is going wonky. Or you can hire his crew to come in once a week and take care of your livestock. Amador is a fish "life-support specialist." He once got called in by a rival aquarium store to help cure a malfunctioning tank system that killed every fish the store's staff stuck into it; they'd nicknamed it the "Death System."

"Well, for one, you can't call it the Death System," scowls Amador, who has wild, intense eyes and a braided goatee. "But I was like a fish god walking in."

Never mind the gigs with National Geographic Channel, IMAX, MTV and the Discovery Channel; the eels he raised for Jennifer Lopez to wade through in The Cell; the fish food and vitamins and water conditioners he helped to develop that now line aquarists' shelves. Or the Mars tanks he designed for the terrified fish in pet stores nationwide; the filtration systems he set up for the Cabrillo Beach and Monterey Bay aquariums; the industry connections (Amador's father-in-law, for instance, invented the lobster tanks you see in restaurants like Red Lobster); even the revolutionary jelliquariums. The story that says the most about Keith Amador is this: A man once showed up at Amador's home in the middle of the night. The man's pet fish had died. He held the fish up to Amador, weeping. "Why did it die? Can you save it? Is there something you can do?"

Amador, who is known as the ultimate "green fin" (as opposed to green thumb), put his arm around the man consolingly. "It was a good fish." They said a few words for it, and buried it.

So great are the guys' reputations for fish compassion that people have recently been leaving buckets of unwanted fish — overgrown $1.99 Petco oscars, usually — in their parking lot, like kittens on a doorstep. I screamed when Bunya-Ananta fed one of these orphans (you can hear them gulping in the store's lower tanks) and it flippered up like a beast from below, its meaty mouth agape.

Fish, of course, are easy come, easy go. An egret recently flew away with one of Bunya-Ananta's koi. "Well," he groaned, "there goes $1,500."

Aquarium Connection, 3200 E. Thousand Oaks Blvd., Thousand Oaks, (805) 497-3444 or www.theaquariumconnection.com.