Dean tweeddale
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Dean Tweeddale is a master breeder with over 60 years of experience in the aquarium hobby. He began with guppies, advanced to discus, and has since bred countless species of freshwater fish—virtually any species he could get his hands on. Always an innovator, Dean has, throughout his fishkeeping career, built three in-house fish rooms and developed an incredible fry system. Some of his proudest moments in the hobby are developing a system to raise discus artificially, breeding many rare dwarf cichlids, continuous spawning of German blue rams, and spawning several L-number plecos. He has traveled to Peru on multiple occasions and bred many of the wild fish he collected. Dean is a familiar face in the online fishkeeping community, having appeared on numerous YouTube channels including Aquarium Co-Op, Tazawa Tanks, KeepingFishSimple, L.R. Bretz’s Aquatics, Steenfott Aquatics, Swhiskey, Aquarist Podcast, Bentley Pasco, Harlan Ford, Friday Fish Facts, and Dustin’s Fish Tanks. He has also shared his expertise as a featured speaker for aquarium clubs across the country. Dean is passionate about inspiring others to experiment, innovate, and become the best fishkeepers they can be.
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Mitchel started the hobby about 15 years ago as a stress relief from work. The angelfish he kept spawned, and he decided to attempt to raise them. That spiraled out of control and now he is a "Grand Master Breeder" having bred a few hundred different species. Mitchel generally focuses on smaller, less aggressive species, and most tend to be rare or endangered. He currently runs around 150 tanks mostly for rare corys, but also including other unusual species that catch his eye. Understanding "why" something works for breeding a fish is a central goal of his, and passing that knowledge on is part of what makes the hobby enjoyable.
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Jeff started out in the aquarium hobby through his dad who had a number of aquariums even before Jeff was born. The number of tanks grew as Jeff got older and took an active part in the hobby. Together they kept and spawned a huge variety of fish over the years reaching the level of Master Breeder with their local aquarium club. From this start Jeff found his passion to be dwarf cichlids, specifically those from South American and West Africa as well as aquascaping (before that was even a term).
The leap from hobbyist and basement fish breeder led Jeff down the path of working and eventually running the fish department at one of the biggest pet stores in the country. Along with the retail life came the beginning of providing aquarium maintenance, and that is what Jeff still does to this day. In addition to providing aquarium and pond maintenance he saw a need, based on his own frustration, to find access to fish that were making their way into overseas aquariums but that just weren’t available in the US. That desire led to the creation of www.aquaticclarity.com were he offers a wide selection of dwarf cichlids, tetras, catfish, and other seldom seen fish to other hobbyists.
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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 nearly 500 species representing 37 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. He is the top ranked breeder of all time in the Missouri Aquarium Society, Inc. (MASI) BAP, he was the top ranked aquatic horticulturist for over 30 years 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 of 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.
In the past four 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 well over 400 articles published in hobby publications around the world, including writing the Aquarium Fish International column, Adventures in Fish Breeding for over a decade, and his award winning column Minifins published in the Darter since the 1990s. 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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Mike Howe is the creator behind the YouTube Channel the Fish Tank Barn which focuses mainly on rare livebearers and Lake Tangyankian cichlids. He has been active in various aspects of the aquarium hobby since childhood, even trying to keep saltwater fish in the late 1980s. In 2007, Mike took his hobby to another level as he got more seriously involved in the saltwater aquarium hobby and reef keeping leading him to be actively involved in the Marinelife Aquarium Society of Michigan (MASM) and the Marine Breeding Initiative (MBI) which focused on learning about breeding and conservation of saltwater fish. During his time with the MBI, Mike was able to successfully breed the Ocellaris Clownfish. In 2017, Mike became more interested in the freshwater side of the aquarium hobby and was introduced to the world of rare livebearers at the American Livebearer Association Convention in Grand Rapids, MI in 2018. To date Mike has breed 58 different species of freshwater fish including 42 different species of livebearers and attained the level of Master Breeder from the Motor City Aquarium Society. Mike is currently the Vice President of the Motor City Aquarium Society.
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Sarah Walker has been an avid fish lover since childhood, inspired by her dad’s neon tetras. She started keeping her own tanks in college and focused on killifish about ten years ago after moving to Phoenix, Arizona. In 2020, her family relocated to a small hobby farm in Whitleyville, Tennessee, where she is currently working (always) on the fish room. Sarah’s main interests include killifish, wild bettas, and snails. She is a member of ARK, AKA, ALA, IBC, and several local clubs, and she has enjoyed guest speaking at various events, including SAKE in 2022. Sarah helped found the Music City Aquarium Society (MCAS) in 2021 in Nashville, TN. She is currently serving on the Board of Trustees for the American Killifish Association for her 7th year.
Professionally, Sarah works full-time as a Certified Public Accountant with a major insurance company and has a business degree from Tennessee Technological University. She works as a Forensic Accounting Manager during the day and Citizen Scientist by dark.
Sarah can't believe how long she overlooked the beauty of killifish; her passion drives her to share their wonders with others. With a dedicated array of approximately 75 fish tanks, primarily focused on killifish and Uruguay catfish, Sarah has strived to cultivate a thriving environment for these unique species. She cannot wait to tell you all about her exciting journey to Uruguay to collect annual killifish, marking a significant milestone as one of the first legal exports of these fish in over 20 years. Collaborating with Uruguay Fish Tours, Sarah is eager to contribute to the revival of this remarkable species, educating about what makes them special all while fostering sustainable practices in fish collection and export.