Shaq's Windermere home to appear on 'Tanked'

The Animal Planet show features celebrities' custom aquariums.

By Catherine Kerr
| 5:10 a.m. November 19, 2015

Shaquille Oâ€™Neal had a second custom aquarium installed last month.

Southwest Orange
News

Shaquille O’Neal had a second custom aquarium installed last month.

There’s something fishy going on at Shaquille O’Neal’s $10 million mansion in the Isleworth community.

O’Neal wanted to convert his billiards room into an Egyptian-themed cigar bar with an aquarium that would make a statement. So he turned to his friends at Acrylic Tank Manufacturing, the team that designs and builds custom aquariums for celebrities on Animal Planet’s show “Tanked.”

O’Neal had an aquarium at his home in Los Angeles, but because it was built into the wall, he had to leave it behind when he was traded to the Miami Heat.

Last year, he called on Wayde King, Brett Raymer and the rest of the ATM team to build a new tank in his Windermere home. The aquarium’s facade is part of a real diesel truck, and it is filled with tangs, a grouper, a puffer and other fish and corals. Looking Glass Aquariums, an Orlando-area company that partners locally with ATM, maintains the tank.

Flying Fish

When Shaquille O’Neal requested a bumblebee grouper, the ATM team knew just where to find one. A bumblebee grouper had been waiting in ATM’s Las Vegas warehouse for about seven years.

The fish was shipped Oct. 9 on a plane from Las Vegas to Orlando International Airport, where Bill Hamel of Looking Glass Aquariums picked it up. He drove the unopened crate to the Orlando Science Center, where he and OSC staff prepared a temporary holding tank for the fish.

Tension was high before the crate was opened because the status of the fish was unknown. When the team opened the crate and discovered the grouper had survived the journey, they spent more than an hour acclimating it to the temperature, chemical levels and salinity of the holding tank.

OSC personnel cared for the grouper for five days, until the tank at O’Neal’s house was complete and the fish could be transported there.

Bill Hamel, center, and OSC employees Michael Cullen and Zakary Shafer

But one tank wasn’t enough. O’Neal decided he wanted to install a second tank in his home this year that would feature one highly prized fish: the bumblebee grouper, one of the biggest types of fish found around coral reefs.

“Shaq knew he wanted this fish, and we designed what else could go around it safely,” said Bill Hamel, owner of Looking Glass Aquariums and a former resident of Windermere.

Other fish in the new tank include a three-foot eel and some smaller groupers.

O’Neal’s grouper is currently about 2 feet long and weighs 30 pounds, but it is nowhere near fully grown. The species can get up to about 8 feet long and weigh about 800 pounds.

When the fish outgrows O’Neal’s 800-gallon tank, it will be relocated to SEA LIFE Aquarium

Orlando.

“He’s pretty good in Shaq’s tank for maybe two years,” Hamel said.

The tank that now houses the grouper is triangular and can be viewed from anywhere in the room. Its facade features Sphinx-like figures and O’Neal’s career nicknames, such as Diesel and Superman, in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

To see the tank and O’Neal’s reaction to its reveal, watch “Tanked” at 10 p.m. Friday, Nov. 20, on Animal Planet.