It was a warm March day at Lackland Air Force Base, and I was in the basement of our building in the Mail Room where I was in charge of sorting mail. It was just after lunch and I had just finished off a ham sandwich. I was alone in the Mail room for a few minutes, since my assigned help generally worked early and late and so would not arrive for an hour or so. So, I could get all of the other Airmen's Mail up and leave at 2:00 for tennis practice. It was only 12:30 and so I had some time to spare when I finished before I would have my helpers bopping in. As I sorted the mail into different piles I uncovered my new May issue of Scientific American. Since I was almost through sorting mail, I set it aside and finished putting up the rest of the mail, then I grabbed a coke from the fridge and picked up the Magazine, opened it to the table of contents, and leaned back in my chair, put my feet up on my desk and begin my trip through the new issue. I had become addicted to reading Scientific American at around the age of 13 when I ran across it in the school Library. At first when I read it I understood only a few things, but I looked up any words that I did not understand and after a couple of years I began to understand more and more, although in some subject areas I am still as stupid as ever. I began reading, and immediately noticed an article titled The Cultivation of Tilapia. As I had a strong interest at the time in growing herbs and learning about each one as I grew it. I was eager to learn about new herbs and how to grow them and I thought this might be an interesting article to read. Of course when I turned to the article, having a quick mind, I realized it was not about plants, but was about fish, but as I had not yet been involved in growing fish, now, I was curious and began to read the article. The article told about the search for the best fish in the World to grow to help to solve the problems of providing a good protein diet to countries where people did not have enough protein even to avoid diseases associated with inadequate dietary protein. The author of the article, Dr. C.F. Hickling described the history leading up to the selection of Tilapia as the best fish to solve the problem with and then told the story of how his team of researchers had discovered that the hybrid cross between two species collected from two different places in Africa produced a hybrid all male tilapia that he felt would solve the problem of too little protein or at least had the best chance of doing so. He described how the tilapia could eat almost anything as food and could filter feed algae as they breathed or processed water through their gills. The algae could be grown for less than one cent per pound of fish, by fertilizing the water with Triple Superphosphate. He discussed how the tilapia could breed year round and how it was resistant to low oxygen conditions that would kill most other types of fish and how tilapia were resistant to almost all diseases. He also explained that the major problem with tilapia was that when a few fish were stocked in a pond at an ounce or more that they begin breeding within a few weeks at very small sizes and produced a large number of babies which the mother protected from harm by holding them in her mouth while they were developing and letting them out to swim and feed after they were about a week old when danger approached. The problem was that from just a few fish hundreds of thousands could be in a one acre lake within just a couple of months using up all of the food and oxygen and that then none of the fish would grow. The solution he had discovered was that when the male fish from Zanzibar was bred with the female fish from mossambica that all of the hybrids were male. This all male hybrid then could be stocked in known quantities in a pond of known size and then the right amount of fertilizer could be used to grow the algae from them and a crop of 3,000 to 5000 one pound fish could be grown in each acre of water in under one year. In other words the all male tilapia gives control of the resources to the grower whereas breeding tilapia loose in a pond took away all control from the grower. I knew from reading other articles over the previous couple of years that other forms of agriculture were more expensive in terms of energy and cost per acre needed to produce a pound of protein. When compared with the cost of production of other forms of protein including soybeans, the cost per pound of protein was the lowest known. I grew up fishing, fishing with my father who when I was born actually fished for a living by going out in small boats and catching fish on hooks. He loved to fish and some of my first memories were sitting in the boat with him while we waited for fish to bite on the line. I never seemed to have the patience for it and hardly ever really caught anything. My father however always caught fish and as I grew up we were always going somewhere every weekend to fish. But as the years went by I remember him showing me the articles of how many fish he used to catch. Some of them showed large fish he called JewFish which weighed as much as 300 to 400 pounds, in fact he had 4 or 5 whole scrapbooks full of pictures or newspaper articles of big fish like that that he had caught as well as many articles with pictures showing large numbers of trout or snook he had caught. When he was a young man in his early 20's he found it possible to fish for a living using fishing poles from a small motor boat. The many books he had full of pictures indeed showed that for him, fish were easy to catch and could be caught in large quantity. I also remembered that as I grew older that he caught less and less fish and that my father was very concerned about what was happening to the fishing. By the time I reached college age it was common knowledge that ocean fishing was declining and that there were no signs of this trend changing for the better. As I read more of the Scientific American article I found myself more and more entranced with the idea that here was a way to begin to solve the problem of feeding people and at the same time maybe even reduce the need to bring fish from the oceans and continue the destruction. I read the article again and immediately got out some paper and wrote to Dr. Hickling in care of Scientific American and asked him how I could become involved in working with these fish and helping to save the World and mailed the letter before I went to tennis practice. We left the next day for a tournament at another Air Force Base, and I subsequently forgot about the article for some time. I left the Air Force late in 1963 to attend the University of Florida where I majored in Agriculture. Approximately a year went by while I was absorbed in studying for my degree and I was beginning to really enjoy being in college. One day when I got home, I discover a foreign Air Mail envelope addressed to me that had been forwarded several times. The return address was to Dr. C. Hickling and in all it had taken a year and a half to reach me counting the time since I had sent the original letter to Dr. Hickling. Even after this length of time the article came flooding back to my memory and I excitedly opened the envelope to read what he had sent me. The letter was very brief and described how he had become more and more convinced that the f-1 hybrid tilapia he had discovered would be the solution to many poor nutrition problems, and told me how he had seen them at four to six pounds after a little over a year of growth. Dr. Hickling suggested in his letter that I try writing to several people in the US who could give me more help in finding the species of tilapia needed to begin in this area. I immediately took the letter to my Major Professor, Dr. G. and read it to him and explained why I was so excited to have received it. He suggested that I write the people listed in the letter and that I could use his office as the source of the inquiry so that the people would take my letters seriously. I then wrote the letters and went on with my college activities. When I got the letter (1969) I was majoring in Fruit Crops at the University of Florida, with a minor in Minor Tropical Fruits, but by the time I got back some answers nearly another year had gone by and I had graduated in Agricultural Extension, and by then I was in graduate school with a major in Biological Insect Control. I then sent out more letters as the people who had answered the first letters had given me new references about where to try to find the fish. While I was waiting for more information I got the opportunity to go to California and Work with a company which had pioneered Biological Insect Control with production of its own biological material such as parasitic wasp and predatory mites which could be used to control many of the pest on both green house crops, and on field crops. When I returned to Florida I went to Mr. G, my major professor and told him of what I had learned about controlling insects and how I thought if I could build a suitable insect hatchery I could set up a business in Florida and begin offering a service controlling insects Biologically. He offered to help by investing some capitol and we agreed to be partners. My mother also agreed to help by giving me the down payment to buy a piece of property in Archer just outside of Gainesville. We began to build the insectory together and while we were getting ready to clear the area where the buildings were to go I got a letter back from one of the sources and was told that in a few months I might be able to get some of the brood stocks. So, I went to Dr. G. and proposed that while we were getting the land cleared that we ask the bulldozer operator, who was clearing the land, to dig us a small pond, and Dr. G. agreed. I had the pond dug 150 long and 20 feet wide and placed it alongside where two of the buildings were to be that we were going to produce insects in. The bulldozer ran into a clay layer at about six feet and so he used the clay to spread over and coat the whole pond, which meant that we could hold water even thought we were digging in an area know for sand. We also had three greenhouses we built to produce predatory mites which we used to control spider mites on various crops such as strawberries and okra, and in greenhouses. In late November of that year, while we were still constructing the insectory on my property in Archer, I received word that I would receive live tilapia from Theopholis D. Insley from a hatchery he was running in Tishimingo Arizona that had been one of the first to recieve shipments of tilapia hornorum from Dr. Hickling in Malaysia. Read The Next Chapter | 
