Hey all,
My name is Tony Horos (Chip is a friend of mine). I was into fish as a kid, vicariously though my parents who kept a couple of 20Hs and a 55 with standard tropical fare. Growing up, I kept all sorts of critters - snakes (found local varieties as well as a couple constrictors), skinks, anoles, iguanas, turtles, frogs, crayfish, hampsters, guinea pigs and a chinchilla.
I went to college at Georgia Tech and again caught the fish bug when my next door neighbor had a 55 Malawi setup. I set up a small tank - 20H with some gouramis, a rainbowfish and a bunch of plants. When I moved back, I set up my parents' old 55 Metaframe and started up my own Malawi setup. Shortly after, my 20H planted tank became a 45H with CO2 and rainbowfish.
In about 2002, I got bitten by the saltwater bug and joined CMAS and WAMAS. I had two smaller reef tanks rolling - a desktop at work and a 26 bowfront at home with all the electronic bells and whistles.... 250W halide plus actinics, calcium dosing, refugium, skimmer, sump with auto-topoff, etc. Had a collection of healthy SPS, but it required daily testing, occasional overflows and "stocking resets" every 5-6 months when the power went out.
In 2007, my wife Maria and I moved from our smaller house in Rockville up to Gaithersburg and got our current place with a basement. I was getting tired of fussing with saltwater and returned to cichlids. I got involved in the CCA in 2008 and a lot has happened since then.
At one point, I had about 35 tanks set up, but have replaced a bunch of smaller ones with larger ones, so am down to a more manageable 25 or so. A few years back, I was almost entirely into Lake Malawi, having kept 7-8 different breeding groups of peacocks, 7 different Protomelas groups and a plethora of other haps and mbuna groups. Breeding-wise, I think I'm up to somewhere around 40 different species/variations of Malawi cichlids now.
As with many cichlid keepers, my interests have expanded over the last couple of years. I started keeping some Tangs - Tropheus, Altolamps and other rock-dwellers, shellies, some featherfins and Cyps. I've also gotten into some new world fish in the last year. My 45 planted tank has become a discus setup and my old 6' 150 all-male Malawi tank has become a SA eartheater setup. I also have some uncommon plecos, synos, a couple of cory groups, west Africans, Vics, some Parachromis and am about to put together a Central American mid-aggression community.... So yeah, I'm sort of all over the place.
When I'm not changing tank water, I am a construction manager for a large cast-in-place concrete construction company. My wife, Maria and I have two dogs - Elvis and Timmy. They are the two in my avatar and aren't really all that vicious, lol. I go shooting pretty regularly and we're both into volunteering for a dog-adoption group called K-9 Lifesavers (see my link below).
I love the CCA. Many of my best friends are those who I've met in the club over the last 4-5 years.