User:Quatermass

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How it started...

My name is Stuart Halliday, I'm a 45+ year old married man who works in the IT industry, trying to keep the company I work for up and running despite my Users trying the opposite! ;-)


I live in Livingston, Scotland, UK. But I'm really an Edinburgh lad at heart.

I've only been keeping Fish since Dec 2004. But I do however like to fully research any interests I have, so I did a lot of reading (my wife works in libraries!) and being a IT guy I popped into a lot of Yahoo, USENET and various web forums to gain knowledge of the hobby. I even visited the good (and bad) fish shops around Scotland.


I first got into the fish keeping via keeping 'Sea Monkeys'.
When I was a very young lad (1970s?) I used to buy American comics and in these were weird adverts for the Sea Monkeys product. Well these were not available to me obviously in Scotland so I could but dream of what they really were.


As time went past, I often remembered those crazy adverts and when I walked into a local toy shop in 2004, there on the shelf was a Sea Monkey kit.
After hatching them out, I was very disappointed in the experience. Of course for years I knew what they really were - Brine Shrimp. But there seemed to be little to get excited about in raising these tiny creatures. Even if they did put them in a fancy plastic 'tank'.


TRIOPS

Then I noticed a Triops packet in the local Toy Shop. I was curious as they seemed to be like Sea Monkeys, except that they grew big very fast and hey they reproduced!


Then a week later they were on the national news! Triops had been discovered in a nearby forest just 20 miles down the road!


This sparked off me finding out more about them and I got hooked on raising them and I even put up a central web site [1] as I found the Triops sites on the web were very fragmented.


So I started raising Triops in a 10 Litre and then 20L and finally into a 60 L tank that got me into keeping fish as well. I've now got a 250 Litre tank amongst others.


I've now got Triops, Fish, Shrimps, Frogs and Snails in my various tanks!


I'm a keen photographer as well and so I naturally put my pics of the Triops and fish on my web site.


Wiki

I liked the idea of the Wikipedia, providing free information to the people that anyone can edit is a very powerful tool in my opinion. Maybe more powerful than the invention of the wheel perhaps?


So I started editing the Wikipedia's fish pages and then Brian introduced himself on one of the mailing lists I was on and so I started adding pics and pages to this site.


Interests

My wife, Fish/shrimp/frog keeping, Photography, Science, Good Science Fiction television, Films, Doctor Who, Medicine, History, How things work or came into being and my four nephews. Not necessarily in that order!

External Links