Re: [Killietalk] "Setting the hook"

[Wright Huntley <whuntley at inkmkr_com>]

Koran, David HQ02 wrote:
> If I told you all that this was research you might stop but keep this going
> on how you acquired this addiction, this is good stuff.  It would be nice
> hearing from some more of you newer folks.  There has only been a little
> about the influence of some of the current vehicles for information or fish.
> I know I am curious of just how many came by killies through non-AKA channels
> and I would expect other BOT members are as well.

I'm not one of those newer folks, exactly, but received a sort of unique 
view of the hobby because of my timing.

There was no AKA or BAKA when I first got involved, David. Looking back, 
I may have had killies before those first GUE from Stan W. I had 
collected desert fish and was keeping (not breeding) them in my tanks at 
college in 1955. Unfortunately the entire group of biologists at the 
Associated Colleges of Claremont showed a total ignorance of the 
ichthyologists right down the road in Los Angeles that were busy 
learning all about our native fishes at that very time, so I never was 
brought into contact with them. :-(

In the '50s, you had to make contact with someone in the academic world, 
or one of the scattered hobbyists keeping killies (often the same guy) 
to get started on them. We had many, many great fish stores in that era 
(I probably knew all of them, and their distributors, from Riverside to 
Santa Monica), but their stock in trade was chicklets, tetras, 
livebearers, catfish, goldfish, a few anabantoids, etc. and killies were 
not found in CA stores, AFAIK. Private communication, usually by snail 
mail, was how the hobby spread before AKA and local affiliates were 
organized. It was slow, inefficient, and most of what we "knew" was dead 
wrong. Thankfully the "kitchen breeders" of the Netherlands, Germany and 
Scandanavia were there to help get us straightened out and to learn to 
keep them going. Unfortunately the information channel was far too slow 
for it to be very effective. Most of our misinformation had to come from 
books. :-)

Dropping out of fish breeding to start a company and raise a son, I was 
shocked when I came back in to see how the AKA and BAKA had transformed 
the hobby. My first trip to a BAKA meeting in the basement of the 
Hayward pizza joint was a real shocker. Rows and rows of bags on the 
auction table were a stark contrast to the skimpy variety available just 
a few years earlier. By then, the San Francisco Aquarium Society, though 
well-endowed by some Artemia-processing patents, had lost contact with 
most of the academic community, and CA had environmental laws and 
unfriendly enforcement types that were busy driving the ichthyologists 
of Stanford and UC Berserkely to AZ and other places, where they could 
continue their research. That made the society far less useful than it 
had been in the late '50s, IMHO, so I rarely attended any more.

BAKA still, I think, tries to give a program a year on killies at the 
SFAS as well as maybe the Silicon Valley and Sacramento Aquarium 
Societies. That exposes them to lots of experienced fish breeders who 
are not afraid of a small challenge. I suspect that may be a more 
effective recruitment tool than the web, auction sites and mail lists, 
because those attendees often are more experienced at the husbandry side 
of the hobby. I guess that is called "skimming off the cream." ;-)

HTH

Wright
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