I hail from almost the dead center of the US, in Saint Louis
Missouri. (It's cold now and there's 2 inches of snow on the
ground). I started keeping fish when I was 8/9 in the early sixties.
My grandmother had a 30 & 20 gallon tank. She told me that all of
the aquarium books were full of it and that your fish needed lots of
water changes. (At that time many suggested just topping off or
minimal changes). She really grew some big angels considering the
size of those tanks. I got a 5 gallon betta tank for Christmas about
a year later. When she grew tired of her setup I inherited that a
few years later. I had a few fishtanks all the way up to college
when they were drydocked for a few years. I obtained a BA in Biology
with a concentration on the technical end of things like Microbiology
and Biochemistry. They didn't have any Ichthyology courses
unfortunately. Not too long after college I started them up again
and then found that there was a local aquarium society - The Missouri
Aquarium Society. From then on the tank population grew. I bred
alot of fish and eventually became a grand master breeder in that
group, one of 8 or so in the history of the club. In early 1983
Jerry Allen's "Rainbowfishes of Australia & NG" was placed in my
hands. I scored my first group of exotic rainbows - M.
herbertaxelrodi from Ed Taylor that fall. I was also one of the
charter members of the American Rainbowfish Association (ARA),
started by killie great Wayland Lee that was started the same year.
The club didn't last too long due to the fact that there just weren't
many rainbows out there in the US. A few years later at one of the
annual spring show meetings I was bemoaning the fact that there
wasn't a club devoted to rainbowfish. A fellow imbiber suggested, no
dared me to quit grousing and do something about it. I think the bet
was a six pack or something. Anyway, with the old ARA addresses in
hand I sent out the "first" newsletter in the fall of '87 and the
Rainbowfish Study Group is still going strong. Never did collect
that six pack though. I currently am running some 70 tanks, over
1200 gallons not including the pond. Most of them are single species
rainbow tanks. In the process of producing a newsletter I ended up
learning fish photography which is quite a bit different than
shooting pictures of people. I think that rainbowfish are probably
the hardest fish of all to shoot as they are always moving. I really
wanted to resort to Herbert Axelrod techniques and stick them on
pins, more than once. I give talks on rainbows, usually 4-6 a year
to other aquarium clubs around the US. Most of my output from my
fishroom ends up at these meetings either as young fish or eggs. I
believe that when you put the fish with a group of people rather than
a single individual you'll have a much greater success. It's pretty
neat to come back 3-4 years later and find that some of your rainbows
are still floating around that club. Being around water comes
natural to an Aquarian so other interests include fishing (not trout)
and more recently scuba diving. I currently work for the Monsanto
Company as a biochemist where they let me play with all sorts of
expensive HPLC's and mass spectrometers.
Gary Lange
RSG Chairman
gwlange at stlnet.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~sbuckel/index.html