MCA Speaker - Ian Fuller

Born in Birmingham in 1946, after leaving school at fifteen went into engineering and qualified as a precision toolmaker. After forty-seven in the trade I decided it was time to take life a little easier and retired from engineering and I now work part time for a tropical fish store in my area, a move I now wish I had made a lot sooner...

I started keeping tropical fish around 1970 after I was given a small unwanted eighteen-inch aquarium, starting with many of the standard species of the day, such as guppies, neon’s, platy’s and swordtails. However it was not very long before I graduated to a larger thirty-six inch tank, which was soon followed by a couple of four foot twin stands and tanks... I co-founded a tropical fish club in the small town of Rugeley, Staffordshire, England, where I then lived in 1973 and it was around this time when I first became hooked on Corys...

 when I bought a small group of C. pygmaeus that I had to keep in small jars for several days because the tank I had earmarked for them had become polluteddue to the demise of a couple of apple snails, which had gone unnoticed and needed to be completely cleaned out. The Corys were divided into three sweet jars while the tank was being readied and I am sure was the constant twice daily water changes in these jars that triggered the C. pygmaeus to spawn, that was it, I was hooked and have been ever since. I have to date successfully spawned over 110 species of Corydoradinae Catfish and hope to spawn many more. Some of the species I have bred were the first recorded spawning and with others I am probably the only one to have bred them. During the 1970’s and 80’s I was very active in the showing and judging scene founding member. In 1999 I was elected chairman of what is now the Catfish Study Group, which is now a fully international group but UK based. A great deal of my spare time is taken up with organizing CSG activities. I have written two books on Corys, the first “Breeding Corydoradinae Catfish” includes sixty five species spawning accounts was written, printed and self-published in 2001, the second “Identifying Corydoradinae Catfishes” was co-authored with Hans-Georg Evers and again self published on 2005. The breeding book is now out of print, but I am currently working on a second edition, which I am hoping will be completed by the end of 2009, this volume will be completely updated and will include at least one hundred and twenty five spawning logs. I also run a website dedicated to Corys called “Corydorasworld.com” The site originally started in 2002 under the name “Corycats.com”, which it remained as until March 2006 when the re-designed “Corydorasworld.com” was born. I am constantly working on the web site to keep information current and up to date, I find it very addictive and it would be very easy to loose myself completely in this work. I am very thankful for the Internet and its ability to shrink the world down to the size of a computer screen; it is because of this technology that I have been invited to many aquarium societies to talk about and spread the knowledge of my favorite fishes and to meet many wonderful fish people in the process.

Ian Fuller

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