Hello, newbie here.

Hi Everyone. I'm new to the PVAS and looking forward to participating and have fun, and hopefully meet some of you. I've been in the aquarium hobby since I was a kid, starting out with a freshwater tropical tank, and after High School, started keeping saltwater fish only tanks for about 15 years, and also kept a native fish tank for five years or so that I absolutely loved. Then, life got in the way and I kind of dropped out of the hobby for a while, although my interest, enthusiasm, love and dreams for the hobby never went away. Internet forums came along, and I joined to learn as much as I could, along with purchasing many great books.

In 2007, I started back into the hobby, mostly interested in keeping native fish, with the goal of building my dream tank, one full of local Chesapeake Bay blennies in an oyster reef biotope. Initially, my goal was to make the biotope to just keep the blennies happy and hopefully breed. I kept a couple 20g versions of this dream which satisfied me for a while. But, it wasn't enough.

Then, I started a Potomac River biotope tank, collected local fish species from the upper drainage. This was a complicated project that took almost a year to build. Once done, I didn't waste any time collecting fish locally for it. It's amazing how beautiful our fish are so close to home.

And last fall, I completed the build on my dream tank, a 100g Chesapeake Bay Oyster Reef Biotope Aquarium full of my favorite blennies and other fish, crabs, shrimp, and stuff collected locally. I also want to have a couple more local biotopes and am working on plans for those (a couple sunfish tanks, maybe another brackish marsh like tank too).

In addition to native fish, maybe once I retire, probably sooner than I can build them, I'd love to build a large Caribbean Biotope tank, another of my dream tanks, larger than 200g, with a queen angelfish as the centerpiece. Of course, I'd add some blennies from the Caribbean since I'm obsessed with blennies in general, maybe with some live gorgonians and sponges (placed where an angelfish could not get to them). It all depends if I move or not, because this project would be too big to move!

Anyway, I have a lot of reading on here to catch up, and hopefully I can meet many of you in person soon.

Thanks for having me!