Valley West's Balanced Aquarium celebrates 30 years

THIRTY YEARS OF BALANCE Matt and Debbie Walker. KLH | Union

Kevin H. Hoover
Mad River Union

VALLEY WEST – If you’re in the market for a home security vault, maybe a steamy spa for your deck and a tropical fish or even a slithering reptile, one-stop shopping is available at Balanced Aquarium, located in the Valley West Shopping Center.

Matt and Debbie Walker oversee the store full of wiggly, writhing and fetchingly scaly animals, and the insects they scarf.

The family-owned store is about to celebrate its 30th anniversary with a big sale, having been doing business in various locations at the center since 1986. It’s been a long journey since those early days. An album from the time holds photos of the couple setting up shop with bare-bones fixtures holding fish tanks.

“I couldn’t find a job, and didn’t want to work in a mall,” Matt said. “We didn’t have any money.”

Three decades later, while it now sells safes and spas, Balanced Aquarium’s primary purpose is still pets.

“We’re a pet store that specializes in fish and reptiles,” said Matt.

The front of the shop is dense with all manner of pet supplies, as long as that pet is a fish or reptile. While the side room is awash in spas and safes, it’s the back of the store that draws with Technicolor fascination.

That’s where aisles lined with dozens of illuminated fish tanks shimmer with tropical fish, ranging from schools of goldfish to more exotic pinstriped Royal plecos and garish, neon-hued cichlids. If you find keeping one or two fish tanks a chore, imagine dealing with a whole roomful of them.

“It’s a full-time job,” Matt said. “There’s something to do every day, seven days a week.”

Tank maintenance trips up a lot of new owners, and Walker has heard it all. His advice to neophytes: “Don’t overcrowd them. Know what you have and pick suitable tankmates.”

He discourages giving fish as gifts, since the giver is committing the recipient to extensive tank maintenance for which they might not be prepared. That’s why it’s best to let people make their own pet choices.

“We really try to push gift certificates,” he said.

Your fish – and friendships – may be at heightened risk when you go out of town. “The number one way to have problems with your fish is to let your friend take care of them,” Walker said, obviously from experience. Usually they are overfed, but the solution is brilliantly simple, Walker said, also from experience: “Leave premeasured food in Dixie cups.”

If in doubt, call the store for tech support. “We help a lot of people over the phone,” Debbie said.

The store’s other pet category – reptiles – has some customers wishing they could phone in their store visits, too. Ophidiophobics – those with fear of snakes – sometimes refuse to enter the store. “Some people are terrified,” Matt said. As a friend or family member shops, “they stand outside the door.”

Perhaps the store’s Pastave Ball Python isn’t, for some, an enticing feature. At the same time, it won’t kill you. “We don’t do anything poisonous,” Matt said.

Life and death issues do pertain, however. There are four containers of crickets in various stages of life development, with 10,000 per week destined for the tunny of someone’s reptile.

Significantly less frightening is the store’s line of spas, with bubbly refreshment beckoning from the side showroom. “We got into that at the end of 1998,” Matt said. “I was looking for one, but couldn’t find a good place to buy it.” So he found a brand he liked – Coleman, now rebranded as Maax – and started carrying them.

Still another seeming non-sequitur stock item is the shop’s line of Liberty home and office safes. Matt notes that unlike most of the Chinese-manufactured safes sold in Humboldt County, Libertys are American-made and backed by a lifetime warranty.

Balanced Aquarium isn’t just a store; it’s also a launching point for fish-related community services. Matt and Debbie are often found out in the field, maintaining a restaurant or hotel fish tank, donating goldfish to school carnivals or educating incoming Humboldt State students about care for fish in their residence hall rooms.

“We have care sheets for everything,” Matt said. “We have good rapport with our community.”

The store’s 30th anniversary is an occasion to pay back the community with a big sale. That gets underway Monday, March 21 and runs for 10 days. Check balancedaquarium.com and Facebook for deals.

Any time of the year, Balanced Aquarium can set you up with a grand aquarium loaded with exotic fish, or something smaller for $20. “You could get expensive quick,” Matt said. “Or just pick up a Betta in a bowl.”

Meanwhile, the two are celebrating an even sweeter anniversary – their 35 years of marriage. They met at Arcata High, where Matt was in the Class of ’77 and Debbie was Class of ’78. “We’re high school sweethearts,” she recalled.

Balanced Aquarium and Spa Center is open Monday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (707) 826-0154, balancedaquarium.com

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Valley West"s Balanced Aquarium celebrates 30 years

Va. Beach pet store closing after 39 years

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) – The king of the jungle is hanging up his vines.

Bob Hames says 39 years of owning and running the massive and unusual pet store Animal Jungle is enough. In the next four to six weeks, he said, he’s closing his doors at Holland Road and South Plaza Trail.

“A, I’m tired,” Hames said. Then there’s the way the market has changed, with competition from big-box pet stores and Internet sites. Hames said his two children aren’t interested in taking over the store, and he doesn’t want to sell it.

“This is a lot to take care of,” he said. “I grew into a store this size over 39 years.”

Hames started Animal Jungle at Pembroke Mall in 1976 when he was 20 years old. He had been an aquarium hobbyist since he was 10.

From the start, the store’s primary focus was aquatics. Hames said he traveled to Florida more than a dozen times a year to buy fish directly from commercial farms. It got him good pricing and a selection few other stores could boast, he said.

Today, the store on Holland Road has 40 to 45 employees, 26,000 square feet of floor space, 35,000 gallons of aquarium water and big selections of reptiles, small animals and birds.

It also has a few “display” animals, including Flapjack the stingray, Cookie the hyacinth macaw and Mikeeto the serval, an African cat that was born and raised by a private breeder in North Carolina.

He plans to find places for all of them. A staff member is planning to take Flapjack, and a few longtime customers are interested in Cookie. The Virginia Zoo in Norfolk is interested in taking Mikeeto and, if that doesn’t work out, Hames said he might take her to a cat rescue in Florida. She can’t legally be sold in Virginia to anyone who doesn’t have a special permit.

“I’m not taking any animal to the SPCA,” he said. “We have a moral obligation to find homes for all of our animals.”

The store announced the closing Dec. 18 on Facebook and said all inventory is 35 percent off. Nearly 300 people had commented on the post by the next day, lamenting the store’s close and sharing memories.

Chuck Doud was one of them. He said he started bringing his children to Animal Jungle years ago when they were 1 and 2, back when he had little money for entertainment. They’d feed the koi fish and maybe hold a cockatiel, and eventually got their first hermit crabs and betta fish there.

“I’m just heartbroken,” Doud said over the phone. “It’s such a shame, too, that an independent store like that doesn’t seem to be able to survive anymore.”

Bob Claffy said that when he was 14 and the store was at Pembroke Mall, Hames let him clean hamster cages in exchange for fish and fish food. Today Claffy has 30 to 40 aquariums.

“That shop is not like a normal pet shop,” he said. “It’s iconic on the East Coast…. For the hobbyists in Hampton Roads, that store and those people will be sorely missed.”

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Va. Beach pet store closing after 39 years