[home]
Growing up as a kid, my father was deathly allergic to pretty much all the other pets that most kids my age might have. This meant that I was never allowed to have a cat, a dog, a parrot, or anything of the sort. I mean, we briefly had a guinea pig but that didn't go well, either. So when I was very young, my parents got me a goldfish and a goldfish bowl.
I think that I killed the first goldfish within about 48 hours. I knew that he needed a "water change" but I didn't know what that meant. So roughly at the age of five, I carried the goldfish bowl into the bathroom and dumped the contents into the sink, fish and all. I filled up the bowl with cold tap water. When the fish started to head for the drain, I really quick closed the drain and caught his fin in the process. When I picked the fish up, the fin tore. I think the fish lived another day, maybe two. What a disaster!
Luckily that was not the end of my experience. I ended up getting a small aquarium, too big to carry! And I learned how to properly care for my fish over the years. I had become so engrossed in this hobby that by the time I was in high school, I had a special "independent study" science class for one period a day (every day) just to maintain a coral reef aquarium for the school. The student paper wrote up a nice article about my work on this, which I hope to someday get around to scanning and posting here.
My love for keeping fish continued, and it wasn't long before I was working at the local pet store. I think every penny I made must have gone back into the store, thanks to my generous employee discount. My bedroom was wall-to-wall aquariums, and I met the love of my life (and future mother of my children) at the pet shop.
Fast forward 30 years. I married that girl that I met at the pet shop, and I now have three kids. One of them seems to have picked up the "critter bug" just like her father before her, and now has a number of reptiles of her own. She's excited to see me set up some fish for her.
Until about 2005, I had quite a lot of tanks set up in our home in the Philadelphia area. I was supplying captive bred angelfish to many of the area pet stores. It was a bit boring, though, to focus all of my efforts and resources at just one species. Though it was very educational. We had our angelfish producing like a well oiled machine, with very low mortality rates, and very high quality. None of the troubles plagued us once we got the system figured out.
From 2006 through 2007 I moved around a bit and was without any aquariums set up. I began clearing out some space in a spare bedroom in December 2007 to start setting my tanks up again.
The new setup will focus exclusively on native fishes, primarily from North Carolina. I've kept natives many times over the years, but now I want to give them an exclusive focus and work on perfecting captive breeding of a few species.
| [Maintained by Magnus Hedemark] [Last updated January 10 2008 09:55:43.] | |
| Copyright 2009 |