Goodeid newbies were indoctrinated with gifts of Skiffia multipunctata at the annual Goodeid Working Group meeting. Shown here, a male S. multipunctata from the Tangancicuaro population courtesy GWG, copyright Michael Koeck.

via John Lyons, Ph.D. & the Goodeid Working Group

The dust has settled from the ALA convention, and I wanted to catch everyone up about North American Goodeid Working Group (NAGWG) activities.

2019 ALA Convention: The convention, held May 23-26, 2019, in Louisville, KY, was a lot of fun. Many thanks to the Louisville Tropical Fish Fanciers club for putting together an excellent slate of activities, talks, and social events and for making sure everything ran smoothly.

As usual, we held our annual NAGWG Meeting and fund-raising auction on Friday evening (May 24) of the convention. We had 52 attendees, 21 new to NAGWG, 52 bags of donated fish, and 32 different buyers of the fish. We raised a record amount, $1,752, for goodeid conservation.

Auctioneer Part Hartman leads the 2019 North American Goodeid Working Group fundraising auction to record revenues for goodeid conservation efforts. Image credit: John Lyons

As is our custom, we also gave away goodeids for free to four “newbies” to goodeid-keeping, in this case, Skiffia multipunctata kindly donated by Pat Hartman. Pat was also the auctioneer while Angie Lavoy and Rich Serva kept track of who was buying what and handled the money. Many thanks to them, and all who donated and purchased fish for making the auction such a success.

Next year’s ALA Convention and NAGWG Meeting will be in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, during the first weekend in June 2020. Stay tuned for details.

Goodeids Buying Opportunities

Your next opportunity to see and perhaps obtain a large variety of goodeids will be Sunday, October 6, 2019, at the Chicago Livebearers Society’s (CLS) annual Rare Fish Auction. This will be held as part of the Greater Chicago Cichlid Association Swap Meet, which typically has over 90 vendor tables. The event is held at the Marriot Hoffman Estates Hotel in Hoffman Estates, IL, on the northwest side of the Chicago suburbs, right off of I-90.

The CLS expects about 100 bags of fish, including many different goodeids and other livebearers. I highly encourage you to participate, not only because it’s a really fun event, but also because a portion of the proceeds is donated to NAGWG. Last year CLS donated $1,000. See www.chicagolivebearer.com for more information.

Goodeid Funding

The NAGWG sub-account within the ALA account now stands at $5,137.56. It’s important that we put this money to work for goodeid conservation in the coming months. I will be contacting Mexican colleagues to solicit proposals for support of conservation projects in Mexico. If any of you have ideas for conservation projects dealing with goodeid captive maintenance here in the U.S. or Canada, please let me know.

Great to see many of you in Louisville. I hope your fish are all doing well. Have a great summer.

John Lyons, Ph.D.
Chair, North American Goodeid Working Group
Goodeid Coordinator, CARES
Curator of Fishes

University of Wisconsin Zoological Museum
https://uwzm.integrativebiology.wisc.edu/
jdlyons@wisc.edu

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