What's Coming ...

With the new larger space available to the Cichlid Research Home Page, I want to add several important new areas. I would like to do all of these eventually, but I would appreciate feedback on which of these people would find most useful (or even urgent).

Names

All of us are getting frustrated by names. For some time I have been working on cichlid names and hopefully will soon get something much more coherent and comprehensive to replace the existing material on the Cichlid Research Home Page.

My idea is some sort of searchable database that would allow both the novice and the expert to find that latest ideas about which name belongs with which fish.

Something I would very much like to do, but don't know if it is even possible at this point, is include a "soundex" type search. Soundex searching allows you to search for a word which sounds like the one you want. It is very useful in cases where people have the spelling close but not right, as is often the case with cichlid names.

Video

As soon as I have some time and can figure out the technical hurdles I want to post some of my video material on the site. At first this will likely just be available for download, ultimately it would be great to play the video from the site directly.

Literature

I believe that one of the key services that needs to be provided to both scientists and hobbyists is a coherent means of coordinating, sorting and making available literature. The scientific literature is the easiest kind to deal with -- there are large databases, they just aren't generally available to hobbyists. I hope to fix that soon.

A much more difficult issue is that of club publications. For example, there are a number of excellent local clubs around North America and around the world for that matter. How can we coordinate our information better so that a person in California can know what a person in Chicago has written in their local publication? In some cases, one club will reprint or review what is written in another's publication, but that only goes part of the way.

I propose a combined database of the publications of the local clubs. I'm not quite sure how to do this yet, but I'm thinking that a combined effort would be the way to go here in which a person from each club goes over their past publications and comes up with a list of useful articles. I am not saying that everything in a publication isn't useful, but what I am talking about are articles which offer specific information/advice/opinion on cichlids, keeping cichlids, breeding cichlids, equipment for cichlids etc. Things like club news would not be included.

In addition, perhaps each club could include a way for a person to get a copy of the articles that they are interested in (for some nominal fee to cover photocopying and postage).

If there is anyone interested in this, either from the point of view of helping or just that you would like to see this resource, let me know.

My Research

In the near future, hopefully you will be seeing a lot more about my own research, now that a number of key experiments are just about finished. Stay tuned...