GPAS Events/Speakers

April 12, 2026 @ 1200

Nick Bertrand will be giving the talk: Wild America: Western Fishes of the United States, Tall tales and Forgotten Gems.  This talk focuses on some of the oddities found in the aquatic parts of the American West.

Nick Bertrand is a supervisory fish biologist and Portland District Chief of Fisheries for the United States Army Corps of Engineers. When asked how he became a Fish Biologist, he always describes keeping aquariums in high school as the event that settled his many diverse scientific passions on the singular one that would never bore him, ichthyology. Aquariums entered Nick’s life when his father decided he wanted one like he had in his parents house. No one was prepared for where this would go. At some point during selecting fish for this tank and having it successfully cycle with Zebra Danios, Nick discovered the magazine Tropical Fish Hobbyist. At a time when internet communities were still at best forums and maybe myspace existed, he tore through every copy of TFH he could read and the love of fish behavior and many ways evolution shaped their forms would occupy him every after.

Being limited to only his own bedroom, Nick mastered the multiple 10 gallon planted tank set up. The space limitation and exceptionally hard water of San Antonio TX led him to many successes with Livebearers and eventually joining the American Livebearers Association. Membership in the ALA led to employment at the XIphophorus Genetic Stock Center and recruitment into graduate school at Texas A&M University. After Graduate School, Nick began working for the US Forest Service in Wyoming, then the University of California at Davis in a fish evolution lab. Then he would return to federal service with the US Fish and Wildlife in Roswell NM working with western desert fishes in a genetics lab and hatchery. He would then return to California to work for the Bureau of Reclamation as their lead Delta Smelt Hatchery Biologist. It was moving on from that position to Portland that led him to a Greater Portland Aquarium Society swap meet where upon learning he was a fish biologist, he was immediately recruited to speak.

At the conclusion of the presentation Nick will host a Q & A and will be available to talk during breaks as well.

March 8, 2026 @ 1200

Cameron Laufman will be speaking about catfish with a special focus on the weird, odd and unique varieties, collectively known as oddballs.

Attracted to the rare and exotic from the start, Cameron promptly got into the world of oddball species when he began keeping fish and never looked back.

An Indiana native, Cameron kept fish for many years in the harder waters of the Midwest, constantly seeking out the rare and exotic to add to his tanks. After graduating from Purdue University in 2016 with a degree in Fisheries & Aquatic Science, he was recruited to move to the PNW and Portland, Oregon to work at The Wet Spot Tropical Fish and manage their retail location, while caring for and maintaining not only their wide selection of fish, but his own ever-expanding personal collection as well.

Currently, Cameron work as the Chief Aquarist of The Cichlid Exchange and additionally maintains several dozen species of fish at home, with the goal of maintaining and breeding as many Catfish as he can, as well as spreading awareness of the many wonderful and obscure fish that occur in the aquarium hobby.

At the conclusion of the presentation Cameron will host a Q & A and will be available to talk during breaks as well.

Sunday February 15th @ 1200

Sam Fernald, owner and founder of Hillstream Kingdom, will be speaking about Hillstream Loaches and other fish from Indo-China in a presentation titled “Living Gems from Indo-China & Beyond”

Samuel Joseph Fernald is a lifelong aquarist from Down East, Maine. After many trips to Southeast Asia, he developed a passion for the Gastromyzontidae “Hillstream Loaches” and several other obscure lineages of freshwater fish. A former COVID-era epidemiologist, he also devotes some free time to consulting on a variety of public health topics.

Seizing an opportunity to enter the aquarium industry’s import business through importing Asian native fish, Sam and his business partners in Guangxi founded Hillstream Kingdom LLC in 2023; an import warehouse utilizing a network of friends and hunters from Myanmar to Papua––paying them fairly in USD to ethically source the rarest loaches, medakas and rainbowfish offered for sale in America.

At the conclusion of the presentation Sam will host a Q & A and will be available to talk during breaks as well.

Sam has also kindly supplies some of the articles he has written related to the fishkeeping hobby.  Topics covered are:  Hillstream Loachs pt1,  Hillstream Loaches pt2, Japanese Rice Fish, Lampeyes,  Halfbeaks, Spiny Eels, Dragon Loaches, and Pseudomugils.

The articles on Hillstream Loaches and Pseudomugils were particularly good.

Sunday January 11, 2026 @ 1200pm

Jebriel Houdroj, is a proud Lebanese American born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. He works at The Wetspot Tropical Fish in Portland, Oregon as a store manager and has been the plant specialist for 5 years.

He has been keeping aquariums on and off for over 12 years; though his love for aquatic flora didn’t start until about 7 years ago. In his free time outside of work, he cultivates and documents his process of (amateurly) dissecting species of bucephalandra and their inflorescences.

His interest in bucephalandra sp. started in 2018 due to finding out their endangered status and he has only grown since then.  His goal is to help stop the misinformation spread in the hobby about bucephalandra and other rheophytic plants, and also inform people on the importance of cultivation over exploitation

Jebriel’s talk will be titled “Algae in the aquarium” and will discuss how to how to properly balance aquariums to limit algae growth to a healthy level.  There will be some time focusing on different types of algae and methods or harness it.

At the conclusion of the presentation Jebreil will host a Q & A and will be available to talk during breaks as well.

November 9, 2025 @ 1200

Maretta Zufuto will be speaking at GPAS in November on “The Selective Breeding in Betta Splendens”.  This talk will not only cover the breeding aspects of keeping bettas, but will  touch on betta standards, health and genetic considerations, choosing which fish to pair, conditioning, spawning, and raising them.  Maretta will also very briefly cover selling and breeding for profit since bettas produce soooooo many fish.

Maretta has been keeping fish since 2019, gradually expanding from small personal setups and posting on social media into breeding, importing and selling fish online.

Between 2021 and 2023, she focused on breeding both domestic and wild bettas, while also importing shrimp and other nano species for her website. In spring of 2023 her part time betta retail business began to grow and she was able to stop school run a full time business.

In July 2024, PNW Bettas opened a retail aquarium store in Corvallis, Oregon, where she have a full array of freshwater aquarium fish, inverts, and products. She stocks a lot more then just bettas, but focus on nano fish, and of course a larger betta selection.

At the conclusion of his presentation Eric will be available for a Q & A and will be available for questions during breaks as well.

Dr. Anthony Mazeroll has been keeping fish since the age of 8 and earned his Ph.D. in Zoology from Northern Arizona University. Dr. Mazeroll has spent decades studying fish around the world and is a Fulbright Research Fellowship recipient, which he used to conduct research in Jordan.

During his eight years as a professor of biology at West Texas A&M University he was honored with the West Texas A&M President’s Research Excellence Award and the President’s Teaching Excellence Award.

Dr. Mazeroll recently retired from Soka University of America in Aliso Viejo, CA. where he taught courses in sustainable aquaculture, fish biology, aquatic conservation, freshwater biology, and marine biology.

His research in the Amazon, which began in 2004, focuses on the impacts of invasive species on the aquatic ecosystem of the Amazon Basin in Peru.

He has been an invited lecturer in Japan, Cambodia, Peru, Costa Rica, Thailand, India, and throughout the United States.

September 14th 2025 @ 1200

Please join GPAS in welcoming Dr. Eric Thomas for his presentation: “When is a Species not a Species.”

Eric Thomas started keeping fish around 1970, at about 8 years old with his older brother Bill. From 1970-1978, they kept and bred mouth-brooding cichlids (Geophagus and several Lake Malawi mbuna including Labeotropheus trewavasae, Maylandia zebra and Melanochromis auratus), along with Steatocraneus casuarius…and convict cichlids (who doesn’t start with convicts?). Eric and Bill were members of the now-defunct Tri-City Aquarium Society of Southern California. In college, Eric studied captive husbandry of vertebrates; with his mentor Professor Rudolfo Ruibal at UC Riverside, in 1978 Eric was the first person to breed the Budgett’s frog Lepidobatrachus laevis in captivity. In Dr. Ruibal’s lab, Eric learned about and began studying skin glands and their function. Eric went on to earn a Ph.D. under Dr. Paul Licht at UC Berkeley, studying reproductive endocrinology and the influence of sex hormones on frog skin glands. Eric is an Associate Professor of Biology (and former Co-Chair and Director of Graduate Studies) for the Biological Sciences Department at University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Eric’s research is split between reproductive pheromone production Hymenochirus frogs, self-poisoning in cory catfishes, and recently he’s started studying Microglanis bumblebee catfishes in Peru.

At home, Eric’s interests are keeping and breeding catfish, including Corydoradinae, Loricariidae, Auchenipteridae, and Pseudopimelodidae (mostly Microglanis); Eric is perhaps best known for having bred some oddball catfish, including the South American banjo catfish Bunocephalus coracoideus, the African bumblebee catfish Microsynodontis sp. `Nigeria` and the marbled talking catfish, Amblydoras nauticus. Between home and work, Eric runs up to 35 aquaria and currently has over 40 species of catfish. Eric operates a YouTube Channel (Bekateen) and FaceBook page (Bekateen’s FishRoom) for sharing his knowledge and experiences with fellow fish keepers; he is also a moderator on PlanetCatfish.com, and he served seven years as the program coordinator for the Sacramento Aquarium Society.

At the conclusion of his presentation Eric will be available for a Q & A and will be available for questions during breaks as well.

Sunday August 10 2025 @ 1200

Please join GPAS in welcoming Lowell Dunnaway, the man behind the hit YouTube channel Lowell’s Fish Lab as he discusses “Practical Methods of Breeding Fish.”

Lowell has had a lifelong fascination with aquatic animals and kept both tropical and native Californian species throughout his childhood. As an adult, an unexpected spawn introduced him to breeding fish; a pursuit that now dominates his free time.

In 2020, Lowell created a YouTube channel (Lowell’s Fish Lab). The channel seeks to document the reproductive behaviors of species available in the aquarium hobby as well as methods that might be used to facilitate successful spawns.

In early 2022, he began development of a 3D printable, air-powered enclosure for safely housing larval and juvenile fish. After much testing and revision, the enclosure is now in use by fish breeders around the world.

Lowell will be available for question after his presentation and during breaks.  Please feel free to introduce yourself to him and ask away.