Eastern Iowa Aquarium Association
A non-profit organization to promote the Tropical and Marine Fish keeping hobby with an emphasis on education and fellowship.
Zoom Meeting Speaker
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Mike Hellweg
Tuesday , January 12, 2021 7:00 PM
EIAA Zoom Membership Meeting
Speaker: Mike Hellweg
Presentation: Culturing Live Foods
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 the miniature fishes, and has had successful spawns from various miniature fishes totaling over 450 species from 33 families of fish. He currently owns a small fish hatchery and maintains about 3,000 gallons divided into 100 tanks.
Mike 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 nearly 150 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 nearly 350 talks to classes, clubs, groups and conventions all over the USA and Canada, has documented many of his keeping and spawning successes in over 375 articles published in hobby publications around the world, and he has written two books on live foods published by TFH Publications.Culturing Live Foods
Mike’s description of his presentation: “This talk is based on my book Culturing Live Foods (TFH 2008) and covers all of the commonly available live food animals and their easiest culture and harvest methods—or at least, what works best for me. I also cover other methods that other hobbyists have found to work well for them. Even though the book is now over 10 years old, I update the talk before each talk with new methods and information, and sometimes even new culture critters. It includes things that are easy to culture and easy for the average hobbyist to find.”