Kate Withers
If you look inside Aaron Young’s home you could be forgiven for mistaking his lounge room for a marine museum.
The plethora of fish in his aquamarine-haven look like the loot of a lifelong enthusiast, but the Traralgon resident insists he “didn’t grow up some kind of fish guy”.
“I wasn’t some kind of a fish guy from birth. I’d never had fish,” Mr Young said.
“In our previous house we had some friends over one day and I said ‘wouldn’t it be cool to have a fish tank between two rooms?’ So I went and built it.”
However, when Mr Young and his family moved houses three years ago he couldn’t bear to leave the aquarium behind so his new Traralgon home was purpose-built around the gigantic reef tank.
“The foundations of the house were poured extra thick to handle the weight of the tank, which is about five-and-a-half tonnes,” he said.
Then, when Aaron took his family on a trip to the Sydney Aquarium, his wife and daughters developed a particular fondness for puffer fish.
However, the blowies couldn’t be housed in Aaron’s pre-existing coral tank so, naturally, he decided to build another one.
He now boasts one of the largest private salt water aquariums in Australia.
The newer “predator tank” – with blue spot stingrays, Epaulette sharks, parrot fish, rare king and queen angel fish and puffer fish – also doubles as a television cabinet.
The rainbow reef tank contains cleaner wrasse, yellow tangs, purple tangs, dory, clownfish, Anthias, harlequin tusks and starfish.
Each of the 2500-litre tanks would typically require hundreds of hours worth of upkeep, but Mr Young has meticulously engineered a “maintenance room” to cut out most of the work.
“I like to do everything really comprehensively so when I decided I was going to do this marine thing I thought – ‘there’s heaps of people around the world keeping these fish, why don’t I do a heap of research and learn from all the mistakes they’ve made?’ he said.
“I didn’t want to have the hassle of having to maintain two tanks and I wanted it to be one system that I’m dealing with, so they’re linked.”
In the maintenance room, two pumps generate 20,000 litres of salt water per hour, which service both tanks.
The salt water – which Mr Young concocts himself to mimic ocean water using filtered tap water and minerals – runs through a refugium.
“Imagine an area of the system that you specifically design to grow weeds and all the stuff you don’t want everywhere else – that’s a refugium,” he said. “The purpose of growing the weeds is that they extract fish waste out of the water.”
He also has a “hospital tank” where damaged corals – which he grows – and sick fish are nursed back to health and new fish are acclimatised.
Each tank is serviced by specially-designed lights which dim and brighten throughout the day to mirror sunlight hitting the ocean.
“I wanted to design lighting for the system specifically for the coral,” he said.
“I basically borrowed a bunch of research from marine biologists as to what sunlight looks like in water and have these lights built to the specifications to replicate sunlight at one-metre deep in the Great Barrier Reef.”
Mr Young amazing aquarium attracts its fair share of onlookers, so he opens it to the public twice a year to raise funds for charity.
He said his pet project was “a good way of giving something back to the community”.
“I supposed it’s something a bit different to having a dog,” he said.
