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Re: [Killietalk] "Setting the hook"
My introduction into killies came from an assignment I was given in the 7th grade. My Language Arts teacher told us we had to make up a summary of a non-fiction magazine article. I went to a local bookstore and got an Aquarium Fish Magazine. It was the May 2001 issue and had two male T. Dolichopterus on the front. I summarized the main article (which was on killies) and later decided that I should get some.
I got my first ones from Ruth Warner, a pair of australe and a pair of blue gularis. The australe got eaten by the gularis, then the male jumped out of my 5 gallon tank. The female a few days later came down with fin rot and wiped out all the fish I had at the time. I then got some Fp. gardneri Misage (still my favorite garneri strain) and kept those a while. That fall, I joined the Michiana Aquarium Society. The first guy I met there was Bob McDonnell, a long time killie guy (an AKA life member) and we talked a bit on killies. The next February, I attended my first Killie Karnival, and I was officially "hooked". Since then, my 1 tank has turned into 7 tanks and numerous bowls with many different kinds of fish...funny how that happens...
This past year, I attended 5 killie shows in the midwest, and I'm considered a total fish nerd at school. But I suppose that does happen...
And that is my story.
Gary
Wright Huntley <whuntley at inkmkr_com> wrote:
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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