1. Started keeping fish in 1964. My inspiration was the diversity of species to be discovered near our summer house in Montauk, LI, NY. The family's property was smack in the middle of both the LI sound via FT Pond Bay and the Altantic. We were a few hundred feet from FT Pond Lake with 7 farm pond on our property. My entire family will swear in court that I never had dry sneakers until college.
2. No preference. I enjoy oddballs from all environments. I currently have more freshwater than saltwater systems due to the simple logistics that I no longer live on the beach like I did in San Diego. Back then, I kept mainly SW systems, including a shark/ray pond.
3. Currently, I'm in a dry period with only 3 tanks running. In my previous hatchery I kept over 4k in fish (not counting fry) and up to half a million red-claw crayfish. The total system was around 33k gallons in 125+/- continuous running tanks. I currently have only 22 fish (10 Geo. steindachneri; 10 EB acaras; 2 yellow banana dwarf moray eels)
4. Same as above.
5. Biggest disaster has been having to part out my hatchery due to a combination of job lay-off and medical issues. Biggest fish disaster, ...take your pick; A tornado killed my 8 x 4 360 gal tank; blown out 400, 650, 285, 350, and too many others; Rampant septicemia taking out $3k in fish in a week; loss of my albino P. aethiopicus during a relocation; loss of my +3ft AUL; loss of my 3+ft afaro; forced to sell my 12 year old FRT; being raided by F&W where I lost $4k in fish and $$$$$$$$$$$ in legal fees to get the situation resolved in my favor in court.
6. Biggest close call was a tornado side-band taking my reef frag tank and not my house. Or, looking at jail time for illegal species. Or, a 285gal blowing out while I was standing next to it. Or, being swiped by a barracuda while diving for leopard sharks for my SW pond. Or, being bitten by a 6ft moray while spear-fishing off Catalina Island. Or, grabbing a rope at the last second in a fall off the 180 ft mud cliffs of Clallum Bay on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Or, a bunch more.
7. Now, it's easy with only 3 tanks. Used to be an aisle a day in the hatchery of the same maintenance everyone performs. Plus, taking/filling orders, purging, packing/stacking and shipping. Moving berried females to solitary and crawlers to raceway tanks, juvies to grow-out tanks, and sub-adults to large grow-out tanks (150lbs of stock per tank). Culling fry tanks, moving fry to grow-out bins. Verifying water draws from cisterns to buried tank to filtered warming tanks. Back-flushing the giant bead filters and separators. Cleaning the skimmer towers. Refilling many 30lb auto feeders and feeding out pounds of flake, sticks, pellet, and wet foods daily. Feeding the feeder bins and transferring Q-tank feeders to feed-out bins. Cleaning the hatchery floors, resorting the freezers (new to back/older to front), cleaning the office. And on, and on, and on. Then, there's the house work, landscaping, and my job.
8. Would have to be finally getting a dwarf FW sawfish and experiencing it dying during shipping. I've never been able to find another one.
9. As stated above, Had a major outbreak of Bacterial septicemia that nearly wiped me out. The UV system turned out to be too small for the increasing size of my hatchery. And, medications nearly wiped out my bank accounts and proved ineffective until too late for most of the specimens infected.
10. At my age, I no longer have a 'dream tank', ...I've already owned them (the realistic ones). Due to my age and medical status, the wife wants me to restrict myself to only 3-5 tank. However, she's looking forward to the 4600gal we're planning on buying. The remaining few tanks will be 450+gals with the exception of the wife's 300 half-cylinder (which does NOT count towards my restrictions). The stock will, of course, be oddballs to include species that have yet to be bred in captivity or, more simply, by myself.