Wild Livebearers: More than just the Retail “Big Four”
Presented by: Mike Hellweg
Talk Description: This talk introduces the audience to the wonderful world of wild livebearers, the American Livebearer Association, and hopefully expands their thinking about this amazing group of fish beyond the Retail “Big Four” – Swordtails, Platies, Mollies, and Guppies.
Speaker Bio: Mike has been fascinated by fishes all his life and has had various fishes as pets since he could barely reach the top of the goldfish bowl; he has been successfully breeding and trading fish with local shops since he was 9 years old. Over the past five decades plus he has specialized mainly in miniature fishes and has had successful spawns from over 475 species representing 33 families of fish. He was recently named a Fellow of the Missouri Aquarium Society in recognition to his decades of service to the Society and to the Hobby. He currently owns a small fish hatchery and maintains about 3000 gallons divided into 100 tanks. With nearly 500 species spawned from 35 families, he is the top ranked breeder of all time in the Missouri Aquarium Society, Inc. (MASI) BAP, the top ranked aquatic horticulturist of all time in MASI’s HAP with over 320 submissions from 50 families, including more than a dozen by seed, and he is an ALA Century Breeder, with nearly 150 species of Livebearers spawned. He credits all these successes to large regular water changes, keeping live plants in every tank and culturing and feeding an assortment of live foods daily for both his breeding stock and for growing the fry of these diverse fish.
Over the past three plus decades, Mike has given over 400 talks to classes, clubs, groups and conventions all over the USA and Canada, has documented many of his keeping and spawning successes in over 400 articles published in hobby publications around the world. He has had two books on live foods published by TFH Publications and has written a very popular booklet on shipping fish. An updated live foods book and a book on breeding fish will be coming out soon, with more to follow.
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