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Gerald Pottern speaking at Bucks County Aquarium Society Meeting July 5th


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Posted 05 July 2012 - 10:33 AM

Gerald Pottern will be speaking at the July 5th meeting of the Bucks County Aquarium Society. The meeting will be held at the Churchville Nature Center in Churchville, PA (http://www.churchvil...turecenter.org/). The meeting will be preceded by our annual picnic. The club will provide hot dogs, pulled pork and drinks. Everything else is pot luck so bring a dish! The picnic starts at 6 pm and the meeting starts at 7:30.

Gerald will be presenting

"Jewels in the Darkness: Blackwater Dwarf Sunfish (Enneacanthus) and Pygmy Sunfish
(Elassoma)"


The beautiful Dwarf Sunfishes (Bluespotted, Banded, and Blackbanded Sunfish) of the eastern USA are
the native equivalent of South American and West African blackwater dwarf cichlids, with gold, green and blue iridescent spangles that glow in the tea-colored water of their native habitats. In the early days of aquarium keeping the Blackbanded Sunfish was the "Poor Man's Angelfish" based on its similar appearance and behavior. Collectively the Dwarf Sunfishes range from NH to MS, and the acidic swamps of southern New Jersey are home to all three species. The Pygmy Sunfishes (genus Elassoma, seven species), famous for their diminutive size and wild fin-fluttering dance, occur from NC to TX and are reminiscent of Cynolebias killifish and Badis. The Dwarf Sunfishes and Pygmy Sunfishes are all great aquarium fish, tolerate temperatures from 40 to 85 F, and breed readily in captivity. Gerald Pottern of the
Raleigh Aquarium Society (RAS) and North American Native Fishes Association (NANFA) will discuss the natural history and aquarium care and breeding of these little beauties at the BCAS meeting on Thursday, and then show us how to safely catch, identify and safely transport them and other native fishes on our collecting trips on July 6th and 7th.

Gerald Pottern has kept aquariums since age 6 in Springfield MA, where he was a member of the Pioneer Valley Aquarium Society as a kid during the 1970s. He moved to NC to attend college where he received a BS from Duke and MS from NCSU in Biology, and joined the Raleigh Aquarium Society in the early 1980s. Native fish soon started invading Gerald's tropical tanks when Bob Goldstein, Todd Wenzel and others taught him the joys of seining and dipnetting. Today he keeps and breeds a mix of small freshwater and brackish tropicals and native fish including dwarf cichlids, dwarf and pygmy sunfish, characins, danios, barbs, shiners, dace, darters, killifish, wild-type bettas and gouramis, badis, catfish, hillstream loaches, and others. Gerald works for Bob Goldstein's environmental consulting firm, where he does biological field studies and mapping, endangered species surveys, environmental impact reports, wetland permit applications and mitigation plans. Because his consulting job doesn't involve nearly enough fish time, he also leads stream ecology and native fish field trips for Aquarium Societies, North American Native Fishes Association (NANFA), Virginia Nature Camp, Land Conservancies, and anyone else who offers an excuse to muck around in a creek or swamp.



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