GSAS: Monthly Photo Contest

Kristina Yantzer

🏅Jayson Evans

Arwyn Smalley

Tamara Roth

Emily Austin

Leanne Schroeder

Heidi Crane

April 2025

Eli Cantrell

Cassandra John

🏅Sean Davison

Jayson Evans

Maia Hansen

March 2025

Terrance James

Arwyn Smalley

Emily Austin

Alyssa Bentley

Erik Olson

Eli Cantrell

James Lally

🏅Ryan Reamy

Roy Slettevold

Kristina Yantzer

Marina Dobbie

February 2025

Jennifer Dillon

Tamara Roth

Thomas Lai-Fook

Sean Davison

Dan Lyderson-Jackson

🏅Jordan Wilde

January 2025

Erik Olson

Arwyn Smalley

Jayson Evans

Jacob Tillman

Arwyn Smalley

Jayson Evans

Laura Starbird

Ian Yorker

Nero O'Reilly

Jordan Wilde

🏅James Lally

Megan Westcott

Shannon Gallardo

November 2024

James Lally

Jennifer Dillon

🏅Thomas Lai-Fook

Jayson Evans

Arwyn Smalley

Leslie Graves

October 2024

James Lally

Sean Davison

Jayson Evans

Megan Westcott

Cory McElroy

Jennifer Dillon

Jensen Tabangcura

Leslie Graves

Christine Shi

$Alex Williamson: The title of this photo is " Valencia Before the Flood" And is of one of my male Diamond Tetras endemic to Lake Valencia. This is A photo of one of my 6 Lake Valencia collection point diamond tetras, being Bred in the Lake Valencia Natural History Museum of Venezuala, as we speak! In order to RE-INTRODUCE these beautiful fish after 40 years of wild extinction from Venezuela ( all the diamond tetras in the hobby since the late 1980s are from introduced, feral populations in Colombia or Peru and genetically hail from small populations that were set loose in the 1950s and 60s, so that fish collectors could sell them without traveling to the isolated Lake Valencia Drainage Basin. Backstory: I have been working with Ivan Mikolji, Setting up a Non-Profit Organization we named "The Green Earth Alliance". We are raising funds and then distributing them as micro-grants in the developing world, to projects focused on freshwater ecology. Be it preservation, education or documentation, we have found that graduate students, professors and ichthyologists in places like Venezuela, Sierra Leone, Papua New Guinea, Laos or The D.P.R Congo- We find the most motivated and passionate locals, often even educated in western schools, and able to do important work at a fraction of the cost it would be to send a team of researchers from Europe or The US. ANYHOW- In the course of one of our first major projects, we have been working with the natural history museum of Valencia in Venezuela, and in 1986 a massive mud slide killed all the diamond tetras in lake Valencia and most of it's tributaries, via eutrophication, and hypoxic muddy waters during a once in a lifetime storm. Due to polution and illegal development, mining and logging, most their original endemic territory has been destroyed since the mudslides in the late 1980s. However, Ivan and I have worked together over the last two years, and with him on the ground, and me as public relations, and drumming up funding for the Non-Profit, we are now in the FINAL STAGE, of getting ready to reintroduce 1200 diamond tetras, with the most cohesive genetics, to those fish endemic to lake Valencia. We are using a few dozen acres of steams and working with 8 biologists from Venezuela, to document this project, and to release the first group of diamond tetras into a protected marsh, west of the main lake, and will be REINTRODUCING THE DIAMOND TETRA to it's endemic range, after nearly 40 years of wild extinction. This is a photo of one of the 6 Lake Valencia Diamond Tetra that come from the genetics of the original Valencia Tetras, and in my opinion- they shimmer with far more color and character than what is typically seen in the aquarium hobby. The original diamond tetras in the aquarium hobby only come from lake Valencia, and specifically a series of crystal clear marshes and creeks in the hills above the main lake. Into the early 2000s they persisted in pockets, but as of 2006 no one has seen any more diamond tetras in the wild, anywhere in Venezuela. The species has been introduced all over the Amazon, in Peru, Columbia and Brazil going all the way back to the 1960s, and this is the diamond tetra we know in the hobby... it has a mostly silver body and lots of glittering iridescent scales with a touch of violet or pink on the fins. **** This is a photo of one of the few diamond tetras from a lineage down in Venezuela, where the Valencia Natural History Museum and a local elderly aquarist have been spawning these beautiful fish in genetic isolation since the 1970s. More-over, they appear phenotypically different from most in the hobby, and genetically they are separated by at least 40 to 50 generations between the feral diamond tetras being sold in the hobby mostly out of Southern Colombia. Anyhow, that's a long story, but in case you were curious about what we have been up to at the GEA.org$
Alex Williamson

🏅Hassan Aijazi

Adeline Trafford

Monthly Photo Contest

Previous entries and Winners

May 2025

April 2025

March 2025

February 2025

January 2025

November 2024

October 2024

August 2024