HISTORY OF WOMEN IN AQUARIUM HOBBY

Greetings SFAS Aquarists,

We are excited to announce that SFAS will be hosting Caroline Estes for September meeting. We will talk about HISTORY OF WOMEN IN AQUARIUM HOBBY.

Caroline Estes has been in the aquarium hobby for over 42 years and a member of the American Cichlid Association since 1987. She is a Fellow of the ACA. She co-founded Babes in the Cichlid Hobby (BITCH) in 1994, which has raised well over $200,000 for cichlid conservation and research through raffles, a women run late night auction for cool fish at the Babes live auction and silent auctions of donated fish stuff. Caroline owned Amazonia Aquariums in Austin, Texas, for 20 years; a cichlid specialty store with 500 tanks that stressed conservation and breeding.  She likes to get her feet wet and she has collected fish all over Texas and Mexico. Caroline also spent two weeks on Lake Tanganyika with Ad Konigs and fellow BITCHes. She is returning to lake tanganykia with the babes in Oct.  Now she’s happily retired from retail, and spends her time being in a band, going to see live music, working on local political issues at the state capitol and collecting folk art, all the while thrilled to death to be out of the retail grind and back to enjoying cichlids as a hobby, and not as livelihood.