Thanks!

[AMEARNS@aol.com]

Dear Scott, Dave, Erik and Kathy

Just want to thank you for your hospitality at the meeting this week.  I 
promised Kathy and Erik I would email the board before the next meeting.  

I have been in and out of tropical fish raising for some 35 plus years, and 
also have a great intest in naitve fishes.  Currently have a culture of 
Cynelebia alexandrium sent to me by a Uruguayan scientist shortly after I 
traveled their on a major oil spill response (wich killed 5000 fur seals).  
On the low side now, fish-wise, but hope to do a little re-organizing and get 
back to raising killies and livebearers. Glad to now be a memeber.

I am also an ecologist, fishery biologst and Senior Staff Scientist with 
NOAA's Hazardous Materials Response and Assessments Division at Sand Point, 
have many associates and can probably identify some interesting speakers on 
subjects related to, but on the edge of fish keeping.  My recent activities 
involve supporting the Coast Guard during responses to oil and chemical 
spills around the US and, in some cases, abroad.   My team is beginning our 
tenth year monitoring the recovery of marine life in Prince William Sound 
following the Exxon Valdez oil spill and clean up.  Related workl includes 
tracking pollution trends in Puget Sound and around the US.   During the 
course of the year I travel to many coastal areas of the US and seek out 
streams and creeks during off hours.   

My last..but also continuing...exploits with native fishes invlve culturing 
the Olympic muudminnow, Novumbra hubssii.  This is a diminutive relative of 
pike, but they look and behave a lot like killies and are endemic only to the 
Chehalis River drainage in Washington.  So far, development in the Chehalis 
drainiage, including Grays harbor area, has been minimal, but the species 
could be threatened in the future.  NMFS fish early-life-history biologist 
Art Kendall and I published a paper several years ago describing the early 
life history. Someone ought to change their name so something more friendly 
(like drop the word "mud") and nominate them for State fish.  I should bring 
a pair to a meeting sometime. Also, Art Kendall here at NOAA/NMFS has many 
stories about coastal ichthyoplankton surveys in Alaska, and is chief of a 
longterm investigation of factors affecting the production of coastal fishery 
stocks in Alaska.

I am also now President of the Society for the Protection of Old Fishes, a 
group of over 100 scientists and lay people, around the world, dedicate to 
the protection and study of coelacanths.  The story of the coelacanth, the 
60-million year old living fossil fish discovered in the Comore islands, is 
amazing and full of considerable controversy.   Our last annual meeting was 
in October and I was able to get Dr. Roy Caldwell from UC Berkeley to come.  
His graduate student,  Mark Erdman, was on duty in Indonesia two years ago 
and discovered a new species of coeacanth in a Sulaweisi fish market.  mark 
remains there, attempting to fend off entrpreneurs from China and Japan 
determined to mine the population.  I don't know who will be at our next 
meeting next October, but I hope you will remind me to invite interested GSAS 
members!  Type "Coelacanth" into a search engine and you will quickly 
encouter appropriate websites.


May aquatic career began in southern California many years ago and I was 
captivated by the desert pupfish.  Did surveys in Imperial Valley and also 
cultured them.  My surveys yeilded a lot of non-native fish including platies 
and swordtails as well as the well-know mollies.  In the course of collecting 
I dioscovered a population of porthole livebearers, Poeciliopsis gracilis, 
holding out in an irrigation canal south of Indio.  Published on that with 
Carl Hubbs as a reviewer...quite an honored experience!

I have slides on all these subjects and more and would be available to talk, 
depending on whether you feel such peripheral subjects would be of interest 
and, indeed, if I am not on travel.  

Regardless, I enjoyed the meeting, very much enjoyed your guest speaker, 
Diane, and look forward to attending to the extent possible.

Thanks!

Alan Mearns