CLS's Next Meeting is Sunday, December 1
Our club meets after the Chicago Cichlid Association swap meet from 2PM to 3:30PM. GCCA Swap Meets are a lot of fun to attend and we meet immediately afterward. | Swap Details from GCCA
Mike Hellweg speaks on "Breeding and Raising Livebearers – It’s Not Always Easy!"
This talk discusses the often ignored topic of how to breed and raise wild-type livebearers, with emphasis on ‘how I do it’. I cover breeding methods, breeding tanks, feeding, and raising the fry. I give several examples in each of 5 different families of livebearers, and encourage the audience to not be afraid to try new species and to participate in Species Maintenance
About the speaker
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 four decades plus he has specialized mainly in miniature fishes and has had successful spawns from various miniature fishes totaling nearly 450 species from 32 families of fish. 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 and the top ranked aquatic horticulturist of all time in MASI’s HAP with over 300 submissions from 50 families, including more than a dozen by seed. He is an ALA Century Breeder, with over 100 species of Livebearers spawned. He credits his success to large regular water changes, keeping live plants in every tank and culturing and feeding an assortment of live foods daily for feeding his breeding stock and for growing the fry of these diverse fish. Over the past three plus decades, Mike has given well over 325 talks to classes, clubs, groups and conventions all over the USA and Canada, has documented many of his keeping and spawning successes in over 300 articles published in hobby publications around the world, and he has had two books on live foods published by TFH Publications
Donations for our Table
The primary method we use to raise funds is through sales at the GCCA Swap Meet. We need your donations of fish and other goods to help raise money for the club. Please bring your items to the swap and the earlier the better!
We'd love to get any of the following:
- Popular livebearers such as Endler's, Swordtails, Guppies and Platies
- Plants
- Shrimp