User:Quatermass

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 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!