Fort Mason Center, Building C, Room C370

Collecting Rainbows in Irian Jaya (New Guinea)

This month we welcome back Gary Lange to the San Francisco Aquarium Society. Gary has been keeping fish since he was 10 and has been associated with the organized hobby for the last 27 years. He is a member of the Missouri Aquarium Society (MASI) and is active in the club. He is a grand master breeder in MASI, and has won "Best Fish In Show" on four different occasions, twice with rainbowfish.

He has been keeping rainbowfish since 1984. In the fall of 1987 he started the Rainbowfish Study Group of North America (RSG). He got in fish photography mainly because there weren't many quality pictures of rainbowfish. He has had his photos published in FAMA, TFH and AFM and has published several articles for the Aquarium Fish Magazine and TFH. In 2002 he was the first to import eight new rainbowfish from the world explorer, Heiko Bleher, including the Millennium rainbow, the Zigzag and the dwarf Parva rainbowfish. In 2003 he made his second trip to Australia and did some more collecting while there. In 2005 he took the rainbowfish collectors dream trip – collecting in Irian Jaya (New Guinea). He made another trip back in 2008 and brought back rainbowfish that have NEVER been in the hobby until now. He is currently running almost 100 tanks and keeping over 60 varieties of rainbows and blue-eyes.