Speaker 1: This is Pet Life Radio. Let's talk pets. Welcome to
aquarium Mania.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, doctor Royanong, speaking to you from the
University of Florida IFIs Tropical Lacaculture Laboratory.
Speaker 3: Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2: Fish Medicine now mainstream became a recognized veterinary specialty through
the American Veterinary Medical Association in twenty twenty three, But
many decades ago, a few vets treated petfish and hobbyists
were on their own.
Speaker 3: My guest today, Doctor Greg Lubar was one.
Speaker 2: Of those vets, A foremost pioneer of aquarium fish medicine
and both an award winning veterinarian and author. Greg is
a professor at North Carolina State University and has been
my mentor and good friends.
Speaker 3: Since the eighties.
Speaker 2: Join us as Greg looks back on the early days
and forward to the future of phish medicine.
Speaker 3: We'll be right back after these messages.
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Speaker 2: Welcome back to Aquarium Manion Life Radio. My guest today
is doctor Greg Lubart, world renowned aquatic and exotic veterinarian, professor, researcher,
and author.
Speaker 3: Hey Greg, Hey Roy, how's it going good? Good?
Speaker 2: I kind of gave a little bit of a info
on how great you were in my intro earlier, but
we're going to kind of delve into all that a
little bit more. But before that, I wanted to get
a little personal, as I always do, talk a little
bit about.
Speaker 3: Your early years.
Speaker 2: Sure, so, what and who were some of your childhood
influences that got you interested in nature and aquatics?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I guess it was really my parents and my brothers,
my family. We spent from the time I was five
until I was in high school we spent part or
most of every summer in Maine vacationing. I was really lucky.
My dad was a physician and researcher steroid chemists, so
for about fifteen years he was on NSF funding, which
meant in the summer he could take off. And so
my brothers and I I'm oldest of four, we were
immersed in nature from an early age. It was mostly
in the mountains of Maine, but also once in a
while at the coast, and I was really drawn to
the marine environment. I think that is the big main
influencing factor on my interest in nature and animals. And
we weren't dog people, or we had a pet cat,
and I had a pet guinea pig, And when those
animals went to the veterinarian that made a big impact
on me too.
Speaker 2: But you took such good care of them that they
probably didn't go that often.
Speaker 3: I as soon.
Speaker 5: Oh, yeah, it was one hundred percent preventive care if
that included being hit by a car.
Speaker 2: So now tell us about your very first fish and
your very first aquarium.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so that's a little bit of a interesting topic.
I'm not a hobbyist, and when I was, you know,
probably eight or nine. I remember my mom got me
a quarry catfish and I had a Corey cat living
in a goldfish bowl for a while. I don't think
it was long. It was longer than a day and
less than a year. We had a few goldfish. But
I was never a hobbyist. I didn't keep aquariums. I
didn't raise fish, and I didn't have my own aquarium
until I was in veterinary school, and even then the
pretty modest couple fifteen gallon tanks. And I don't have
aquariums now. I have plenty of fish contact at work.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, understandable.
Speaker 2: So with that said, do you remember anything Did you
ever visit any aquarium stores back in the day or
when your mom was getting you these fish? Do you
remember anything at all about how fish keeping was back then?
Speaker 5: I do. I do. So this would have been in
the sixties, late sixties, so there weren't any chain pet stores.
I think there was Doctor's Pet which was kind of
a chain, but there weren't the large stores that they
are now, like the superstores. And I remember I grew
up in a town called Willingboro, New Jersey. It's a
Philadelphia suburb and sort of a bedroom community of Philadelphia,
and we had a mall called the Plaza, the Willingboro Plaza,
and my brothers and I would go every Saturday. My
mom would give us each a buck. Fifty cents was
the movie and popcorn, and then the rest we would
use at the mall for candy and things. But there
was a pet store, and we always went to the
pet store and looked at the fish and looked at
the mice and the birds, and I just remember that
pet stores were kind of what we call mom and
pop back then. And even when I was in veterinary
school in the mid to late eighties, I worked at
a little pet store in West Philadelphia after school and
on weekends. And that was also a small, privately owned
pet store, but the owner was really good about all
in and all out management and keeping fish healthy.
Speaker 3: So let's move forward a little bit. Now. You obviously
went to college.
Speaker 2: What did you study there and were there any experiences
during those years that influenced you.
Speaker 3: Kind of on the path that you ended up taking.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I was a biology major. I got a
BA in biology from Gettysburg College nineteen eighty one, and
really it was I wasn't the greatest student to start
out with, I was barely barely hovering above academic probation.
I never did dip into that area, but I could
see it from where I was, and I got more
serious about school. I wanted to be a veterinarian. I
knew I needed to kind of get my academic ducks
in a row, and I did slowly. But it was
really my invertebrate zoology course with doctor Robert Barnes that
I think it's the pivotal moment in my career. It
changed things completely for me because up until the fall
of my senior year, I was, you know, I was
getting by, I was doing better, but nothing had really
kind of lit my fire like invert zo And for
the first time in college, I was the student at
the top of the class. First and only time, I'll say,
And in those days, Roy they would post your name
and your grade out on a bulletin board with your
Social Security number for everybody to see. So I knew
I was at the top. I was at the top
because I loved it. I loved the professor, the way
he taught, I loved the subject matter.
Speaker 3: Barnes is a god, so that's amazing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and he taught at Gettysburg for probably forty years,
and it really changed my life. I went to the
Duke Marine Lab with him on a field trip with
a class. I went to Bermuda with a class. And
then that all happened when I was applying to veterinary school.
So my backup plan was to go to graduate school
and study marine biology, and that's what I did, and
my masters was focused on marine invertebrates and specifically a
little polykeep worm. But it was about that time, so
this would have been the early eighties, forty some years
ago that I saw fish as kind of an untapped
area of the profession. I volunteered at the New England
Aquarium while I was in Boston, and I learned a
scuba dive, and even though I've never had an ichthyology class,
I recognized fish as been pretty cool. And then when
I was in VET school and started working at the
pet store, mainly to learn more about aquariology.
Speaker 3: So key worms and then fish.
Speaker 2: Now you mentioned earlier, I guess that you had decided
to become a VET. Sounds like maybe grade school, is
that right, or let's go so.
Speaker 5: I really think when I was fourteen, I started volunteering
for a local veterinarian named doctor Bookman, and so between
fourteen and sixteen I volunteered, and when I was sixteen
he hired me. So for three all through high school,
I worked afternoons and on weekends at his clinic as
a We're talking almost fifty years ago and things were different.
So I would take out the trash, hold dogs, assistant surgery,
do fecals, whatever needed to be done.
Speaker 2: That's awesome, now, just really briefly, I guess what were
you looking at with that polykeep? I think we talked
about this here your major professor. I ended up taking
a class with many years later, I think Trish Morse, right, so,
which was kind of a coincidence before we kind of
knew each other.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what what did you study with this polykeet worm?
Speaker 5: My advisor was a guy named Doc Riiser, Nathan Riser,
and he and Trish Morse, who you mentioned, were fundamental
in starting the Marine Science Institute at in the Haunt
mass Northeastern's Marine Lab. So I studied mostly ultrastructure or
transmission and scanning electron microscopy anatomy of this little interstitial polykeep,
which means interstitial is an anim that's so small. It
lives between sand grains. So these these worms were maybe
five millimeters long and you know, one hundred microns wide.
And I was studying their head anatomy and some glandular
structures based on my advisor's ideas and hypotheses on these.
And I took malacology, the study of molluscs, with doctor Morse.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, we took the same class, probably because we
went on amazing quadty ahead and everything.
Speaker 3: So I guess fast forward now to veterinary school.
Speaker 2: What opportunities were there in vet school when you were
going through for fish medicine and did you want to
maybe mention any mentors you had at the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, quite a bit actually, And really the pen had
what they called the core Elective curriculum. So I started
in nineteen eighty four, so almost exactly forty years ago,
and we had a course that third years took called
Fish Diseases. It was an elective. Probably had it too.
I took that and then I went to Aquavet after
my second year at woods Hole, and my mentors then
were doctor Bill Medway, William Medway, and doctor Don apt
And it's funny because in the early eighties eighty two
eighty three, when I volunteered at the aquarium and I
was telling people I'm going to go to vet school
and I'm going to be an aquarium vet. And they said, well,
you need to track down three people, Joe Jarassi, Bill Medway,
and Don Appt, and they all had a connection to you. Penn,
Don and apt and doctor Garossi were graduates and Medway
was a professor there started in the late fifties, and
they all, especially Gerrasse and Medway, some of the early
veterinarians along with Sam Ridgeway, working on marine mammals. But
it was really hard to work with marine mammals and
to get your hands on them, to even do extern
ships or shadow as a student. So that's when I
took the fish disease class and thought, you know, I
don't really know a lot about fish. I need to learn,
and what better way to learn than to work at
a little pet store where I could see the species,
learn about water quality, life support systems, and the industry.
So I had some other mentors. Doctor Chuck Newton made
a big impact on me. An orthopedic surgeon Matti Hendrix,
who was a pathologist at Penn who would oversee the
fish course for a long time. Yeah, I'm glad you asked.
Speaker 2: So we're going to go even a little bit faster
forward to your first job, and I know it was
kind of a really cool thing. You were a fish
vet right out of that school. Can you tell us
a little bit about that.
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's fun to talk about it and look back
on it. So here I am. It's April of nineteen
eighty eight. I'm a month from graduating, and the only
prospect I had I was applying for a nihpost doc
at Woodshole with doctor Appt and doctor lou Leibovitz to
do horseshoe crew research. So I had submitted this NIH
postdoc proposal that was a three year, three year deal,
but it didn't get funded. But the pet store trade
winds still there, different ownership. I think the company that
sold them fish was called o'burn Tropical and a guy
named David o'byrn owned this operation. And thirty five forty
years ago, we didn't have pet cos and pet smarts.
Walmarts weren't selling fish. So a lot of those other
mom and pop pet stores I talk about would buy
their fish from wholesalers like o'burn's. So they would buy
boxes of fish from Asia and South America and Florida,
and then a pet store. I need twenty neons and
ten pleicos and twenty angel fish and they could buy them.
The whole saler would mark them up. And I remember
he was selling about six million dollars worth of fish
a year, and that was in the late nineteen eighties.
And so he heard there was this vet student a
trade Winds that was cutting up fish and diagnosing diseases.
And he asked me to look at some of his fish,
and I did, and then he said, I want to
take you out to dinner and make you a job offer,
and I thought, okay. So he took me to this
kind of fancy men's club in Philadelphia called the Vesper Club,
and you know, I was twenty eight years old, and
I remember having a couple jin martinis that were really good,
and he said, I want to offer you a job,
and he asked me what I wanted, and you know,
I had kind of prepped and talked to my lawyer
brother and friends are like, oh man, you got to
ask for a lot, you got to ask for I
don't know a lot of money back then, and he
didn't make me an offer. He said, well, what do
you want? So I gave him this really high number
and he didn't flinch, but he said, well, how about
if we start here and I give you a five
thousand dollar raise every six months, and if you're with
me in two years, you'll get to that number. And
I said sold, And so that was it. I started
in May, I graduated in May. I worked for him
for a little while, took a trip to Europe, and
then stayed with him for almost five years, including helping
open his quarantine and relay facility in Naples, Florida. It
was immersion, but I learned a lot.
Speaker 2: Oh, definitely, definitely, And uh yeah, for the listeners, this
is kind of when I met Gray after he just
started the job, as I was a vet student. So yeah,
it was kind of a classic time for us.
Speaker 5: I think, oh it was I, you know, Roy and
his buddy Howard Crumb called me on the phone. So
for the listeners, nineteen eighty eight, and you've heard this
if you're younger, from your parents or grandparents, but that's
you know, the phone rang and it was a landline
and with these two guys said, hey, we just started
at U Penn were first years. We heard you were
a fish vet. We want to be fish vets, we
want to visit you. And then it struck up what's
now a thirty six year relationship and ship. And I
remember we had I kind of assigned you guys some
pretty basic research projects like hey.
Speaker 3: Yes, I remember, I remember.
Speaker 5: Drop off of fins and see what it looks like,
and you know, we we build on that. Let's just say, oh, yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2: So you mentioned Naples and that was kind of my
next question was, which I thought was really exciting when
that happened and you told us about it, tell us
about why you moved down to Florida and Naples, and
a little bit about what you had to do to
kind of get that part of the business ro up
and running.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So Dave was a pretty entrepreneurial guy, as was your
boss for a while, Joe Diaz. They were good buddies.
And you know, these businesses, let's face it, they are
that so they've got to make money. They've got to
stay solvent. And Dave recognized that, you know, mortality really
cut into profits, right if you're paying to import fish
and they end up dying. It's a double loss because
you're paying to ship water around on Airplanes' expensive, it's heavy.
So I kind of set up some protocols in Philadelphia
that first year. I kind of wish I knew now
what I didn't know then, because I would have been
more proactive on preventive medicine and biosecurity and fish handling.
I was just new, right, I was naive, but I
think I helped some things there. And then Dave thought, well,
we're losing a lot of fish out of South America
because of the stress of shipment, crowding, disease. So he
had the idea, if I build a holding facility in
southern Florida, almost all those South American fish mainly out
of Columbia, Brazil, Peru. If those fish they almost all
fly into Miami. If I can get them at the
airport and rush them across the Everglades in two hours,
I'll have them swimming in water instead of another twelve
to twenty four hours being shipped around the country. And
so the idea was get the fish, reduce stress, manage
disease and problems, and then you'll have a much stronger
product to transship either supply by truck in other wholesalers
in Florida or ship by air. And that was the idea.
And early on I would travel down maybe for a
few days or a week, go back to Philly, and
by the end of nineteen eighty nine I was living
there and only coming up to Philly. You know every
couple few months.
Speaker 3: Now you left out the weird uh South American travel parts.
Speaker 5: Oh you mean like flying to South America. Yes, yes,
I went to Columbia once and it was interesting. I
had about we were working on how to Again, these
are businesses, right, of course, everybody wants live, healthy fish,
and so we wanted to find a way to increase
the pack more fish in a box, to make the
landed costs cheaper without sacrificing health. So I went down.
I brought MS to two two. I remember I brought
like a kei lo of MS two to two. So
I'm bringing a kilo of white powder to Columbia. And
they didn't care about that at all. It's like taking
sand to the beach, right. But what they did care
about was my microscope. They really scrutinized that and my
Swiss army knife. Now, younger people will be surprised, but
in the eighties and nineties you could fly with knives
with no problems. I had my Swiss army knife in
my pocket all the time. But when I got to Bogata,
one of the security guys looked at it and opened
it and kind of held it up to his neck
and made like a slashing sound or movement, like you
could still do that even with a small knife. But
they gave me my knife. And to tell you, I
love the truth. I loved Columbia and I felt very
safe there despite the reputation. So yeah, I think that's
my main South American story.
Speaker 2: And I know I think you had mentioned before you
worked to get suppliers obviously out of there and did
some visiting of some of the areas.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, we visited. I worked with shippers, and I
went down to the gianos or the planes where the
fish were caught and held. I had some really interesting
experiences back in Naples. One guy I won't mention his name,
not that it would matter, probably, but he was in
the So what happens. I don't know how it is
now because I'm pretty far removed, but most of the
South American shippers of fish. These are family businesses, so
they'll have a family member in Miami, like a brother
or cousin or uncle or aunt or spouse, and they'll
handle the United States side of the business, and then
they have family in South America that handled the South
American side, and that seems to work really well well.
One guy disappeared from the equation for a couple of years,
and then he reappeared and I said, hey, where have
you been? He said, oh, I was at I spent
a couple of years at the university. And it turned
out that was a euphemism for in jail. So some
some South America American tropical fish, there were drug dealers
laundering money with tropical fish, so that's how they would
clean up the drug money. Not everybody, or maybe even many,
but some people did that and he got caught. And
the other thing that I never saw it happen, but
people would also smuggle drugs into the US, either inside
fish literally like little packets inside plecostomus, or more commonly
in the walls of the fish boxes, the styrofoam boxes.
So frequently when we picked up these boxes, our driver
in Miami that the customs people and the DEA would
puncture the styrofoam with blunt probes that they wouldn't puncture
the bags, but they would make sure that the styrofoam
walls were not hollow or filled with anything. So that was.
Speaker 3: Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I don't think I had heard that part.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah. And sometimes practical jokes are fun and funny,
and sometimes you cross the line. And I crossed the
line once. So my now wife, we weren't married. Then
she came down and decided to She was a veterinarians.
She was a class behind me. She was going to
move to Naples, and her mom drove her down. The
job came with a house on the property, so I've
been living there. And the people it was, they were
like people building the life support systems and working on
the building. So it's mostly guys living there, and so
it needed some cleaning up. And I remember Diane's mom
was there and our driver had found Sometimes the DEA
people would test the boxes with these color emetric test
kits looking for contraband like cocaine or heroin, and one time,
at least one time, one of these hits came back
in between a couple of boxes, so I had it
on my desk. Well, I'm from New Jersey, so this
ties in. I'm a Northern kid. So Diane's mom is
cleaning this kitchen and underneath the microwave she finds this
p of waxy paper with white powder in it, and
I'd never seen it, and she says, what is this?
And I said, oh, well, I have this cocaine tester here,
let's see. Well, her mom like lost it. She's like,
I'm bringing you back home. You're not staying here, and
I said no, no, I was kidding. I don't know
what it is. So the only way she wouldn't take
her daughter away is we had to go to the
Naples police station. So we here we go with this
wax paper with white powder, with no label or anything.
I bring it to the Naples police station. I say,
found this in my house. My mother in law to
be insists that you test it, and they tested it
and they said it's not any contraband, it's not an
illegal drug. And it wasn't until about five years later
and I was living in North Carolina and I learned
it was probably headache powder. That there's this stuff called
like goodies headache powder, b C powder. That's what it was.
Speaker 3: That's funny, that's hilarious.
Speaker 5: You can cut that out if you want.
Speaker 3: Oh no, no, that's great.
Speaker 2: Well let's take a short break and we'll continue our
discussion with Fish medicine pioneer and award winning author, doctor
Greg Blubart after these messages from our sponsors.
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Speaker 2: We're back and continuing our conversation with my guest, doctor
Greg Lubart, fish pet pioneer and award winning author based
at North Carolina State University.
Speaker 3: So, Greg, I want to move forward again.
Speaker 2: And I remember coming down working at five D for
a year and then you told me you were moving away,
So tell us about the next phase of your career.
Speaker 5: Then, yeah, well I knew there wasn't room in Florida
for both of us. Roya, so I knew I had
to kind of move north.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 5: You know, it's funny. Even when I took the job
at O Burn's, I thought, well, this is a job
working with fish as a vet, and they're going to
pay me. That's awesome. And one day I'd like to
be a public aquarium veterinarian. And you know, after a
few years, and I had a lot of loans. You know,
we went to an expensive vet school and I borrowed
a lot. So the job was good in that way,
and had I didn't have to pay rent, so that helped.
And I had a racehorse, and that's another story. But
my mom and I adopted a little standardbred fold that
was going to be euthanized, so that was a little
bit of a drain on the pocketbook. But anyway, you know,
I was content in Florida, and but I didn't think
I'd spend my whole career there. It was a little
bit of an academic vacuum. We loved it. We loved
that area of southwest Florida, but you know, I was
sort of looking at wan Ads now and again, and
then NC State was looking for a fish veterinarian in
the AVMA Journal, and I thought, well, there aren't many
of us out there, I'm going to apply. So even
though I was only not quite five years out of
that school, four years out of that school, really I
applied to NC State. It had a great reputation. I'd
never been here, but Michael Stoskop was here. Ednoga was here,
two of the leading fish veterinarians. And at the time,
those two guys Ruth Francis Floyd and Jack Grotzick of
the University of Georgia. And Jack Grotzick was also a
very important mentor for me. In fact, when I thought
about taking the job in Philadelphia, I called him and
doctor Don apt and both of them said, but you
should go for it. But at the time, I mean,
there were a lot of fish health people out there,
but most of them weren't veterinarians too. So with Noga
and Stoscope here and I was lucky to get an interview.
And then when I got the job offer in August
of nineteen ninety two, even though I had to take
a pay cut, I thought, this window is going to
close for someone who didn't have a PhD. I had
a master's but no PhD. No board certification, I better
jump through that window. And that's how I ended up
in NC State.
Speaker 2: And you've done a ton obviously before and since then.
The next question I had for you was just kind
of about some of those early years at NC State
and maybe some of the holes you saw gaps in
fish medicine. What research, teaching, and or outreach efforts would
you say are kind of pivotal for you and your
career and are you most proud of Yeah.
Speaker 5: So probably the best thing about this environment for me
is the whole teamwork approach. You know, I'm not a
good surgeon. I'm sort of a generalist, and sometimes I
kind to say I'm like a manager, like I'll manage
a case, but I get a surgeon, and I get
a radiologist and an ophthalmologist or whatever's needed. So that
this academic environment was really good for me. And I'm
willing to say, hey, don't worry everybody, this is a fish,
but I can help you with the anatomy and the physiology,
the pre impost procedure care, those kinds of things. So
the students really drove a lot of what we did.
In particular Robert Bakol, who was a first year student
when I came here, and Robert was really fearless. I
knew him from an I Triple Am meeting even before
I came here, and he would say, let's do abdominal surgery,
Let's do an MRI, let's do a mileigram. I mean
things I would never have tried. And so I think
what I'm most proud of in that area is really
some pioneering work. And it's not me, it's really the
team here on fish anesthesia, fish imaging, and fish surge
and along with Craig Harms, who was a resident at
the time, and Craig is for sure my closest friend
and colleague here at Ency State, and we've been working
together for almost thirty two years, and so we just
I think pulled back the curtain on some of what
the limits were, or at least perceived to be. We
can take a cicklet and do abdominal surgery and take
part of it, swim bladder out, close it up and
it'll live, Or do microsurgery on a garami and do
cat scans on fish and things that are I'm not
saying we were the first people to do those. I'm
sure we weren't, but we were among the first to
write up and publish some of that work. So I
think I'm proud of looking at someone's pet fish, whether
it was a goldfish or a garami, and treating it
just like we would somebody's dog or horse.
Speaker 2: I had to add, and you did a lot of work,
you know, kind of looking at drugs and drug studies
as well, both you know, the kinetics and the you know,
just effectiveness. Do you want to maybe talk about that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So, you know, I had some great mentors once
I got here, and I don't know, I just mean,
you're in academia too. It's just magical in a lot
of ways. And some people who were more experienced and
were tenured said, hey, Greg, you can be a fish vet.
That's great. I know you love reptiles and you can
be a reptile vet. But you're going to need discipline
to kind of hang your hat on. If you're going
to get tenure in advance up the academic ladder, you're
really going to have to focus on some part of
fish medicine, so not just taxonomic work. And I thought, well,
pharmacokinetics is in pharmacology. I'm not a pharmacologist, but I
knew the challenges I had in the industry treating fish,
figuring out drugs and dosages and routes of administration, and
I thought, yeah, that's something I could work with, and
that's what I did, and we established a colony of paku.
I remember telling doctor stef I said, you know, I
worked with these fish in Florida and in the Amazon.
They're big, they're tough, they're resilient, and they're a good
model because they're related to tetras and a lot of
other popular tropical fish. So we had a colony of
paku here for about fifteen years that we did anesthesia
studies with pharmacokinetics studies and so yeah, that was if
I had an area that was a discipline, it was pharmacology.
Speaker 2: So you also did quite a bit on the teaching side,
and I remember you bringing students down here. I don't
know if that was early on or whether that was
a little bit later, but yeah, you want to maybe
touch on a little bit of the teaching side of that.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Thanks. You know, one thing that was great about
coming to NC State as a fish vedin area is
there really wasn't a roadmap for what I could do.
It was expected I would do research, teach, and see clinics,
but it really wasn't well defined, which fit well for
me because I tend to I don't know, so, I
tend to function pretty well in a minimally organized environment,
let's say. So I started looking at, well, what could
I do and what might meet the needs of the school,
and what would students like. So I think in nineteen
ninety four, i'd been here about a year. I started
an aquatic medicine rotation, a two week rotation, and you know,
let's face it, even now, we wouldn't have fish coming
in every day. So what I did is I thought, well,
I'll kind of run this like an experiential learning So
if I do have fish cases coming in and they're
not urgent or emergent, I'll try to hone them in
on these two week blocks. I did one in the spring,
one in the fall, and one in the winter, and
then we'll visit public aquariums, of which there are three
in the state. And at this time in the nineties
and early two thousands, there were no veterinarians working at
those aquariums. Now they're two full time bets. North Carolina
is the number two trout producer, number two or three
in the country way by Idaho, but there's a fairly
substantial rainbow trout industry in the mountains. So we would
go to the mountains and visit facilities, and we would
go to the coastal plain and visit hybrid stripe bass facilities,
and we'd go to pet stores and do rounds at
the pet store, and we'd go to Hoy farms in
the state. So it was a little bit of Greg
driving a big van around the state. But in the
winter there wasn't as much going on, especially with Hoy
ponds every fish and pretty dormant. So I thought, I'm
going to go to Florida and visit my friends there,
like Roy. So for probably eight or nine years, every
February we'd go to Florida for a week and I'd
visit Roy at five D when he was working there
and later at the Propical Coastural Facility, and we'd go
to Disney and go to Epcot, and then we'd go
to Sea World where we had friends and colleagues. And
one time I had an adventurous group. We went all
the way down to the Everglades and I rented up
pontoon boat and we went out for the day on
a pontoon boat. But that made for a really long
drive back. So that was a very popular block, and
I opened it up to students from other schools, particularly Pen,
because Penn already had you know, the aquaedet connection and
their fish disease course, and I maintained some adjunct status
there where I would teach in that course. So if
my block didn't fill with NC State students, I would
bless it out with Penn students and sometimes students from
other schools too, And I probably did that block for
about fifteen years. I don't do it anymore. I've got
more regular clinical duties, so it precludes me from doing
those big two week hunks.
Speaker 2: So that's a little bit of a segue before we
talk about writing in the book you and I put
together to your galapago's interests. Now, I know, really really
excited students that get to go there with you during
kind of scheduled visits.
Speaker 3: But you want to talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I do.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's such a great profession we're in, and
you know, opportunities pop up all the time, and sometimes
it's like a no brainer, you just like knee jerk. Yes,
I will do that. Sometimes maybe you need to think
about it and look at your schedule and look at
your priorities. And sometimes right out of the gate it's
like a hard no, like no, I'm not really I
don't have expertise in that area. So I started working
with a wonderful guy named Ken Lohman in nineteen ninety five.
Ken's a biologist at UNC Chapel Hill. Were the same vintage.
In fact, we both took invert zero with doctor Barnes.
He took it at Duke when he was an undergrad
at Duke, and I took it at Gettysburg. And he
studies marine animal navigation. His masters was at University of
Florida looking at lobster navigation. His PhD was on sam
and at University of Washington, and then he came to
UNC Chapel Hill around nineteen ninety one, and his research
he was looking that marine invertebrates like a sea slug
called tritonia, and he also was started working with sea turtles.
And when he had some sick tritonia, he called me
again telephone. Yeah, I hear you might be someone who
can help me with these sick molluscs. And I met him,
and it's all about relationships, right Roy, you know, going
over there at least trying showing interest and some passion.
I brought Andy Stamper with me. Actually Andy was a
resident then, and so that tracks it to around nineteen
ninety five nineteen ninety six. I'm not sure we helped him,
but we had a relationship. And then two thousand and three,
it's twenty one years old, he started bringing juvenile sea
turtles into his lap to study navigation in a non
invasive way using magnetic fields and little harnesses. And I'd
always had an interest in reptiles and amphibians, and hence
he state allowed me to pursue that, and so when
he needed a vent for his sea turtles, I became
that person. So once or twice a year I would
go to Chapel Hill bring students to physicals and these
he would keep these turtles for a year. It was
sort of a combo head starting program and research program.
And this went on for eight or nine years. We'd
have lunch, how's the family, And around twenty eleven he said, hey,
I've been going to the Galopagos, and my ears kind
of perked up and I said, oh, what's happening there?
He said, well, we're building a science center with a
school in Kito. I said, well, if you ever need
a VET he said okay. And then twenty twelve he said, hey, Greg,
this stuff you're doing with my sea turtles, physicals, vital signs,
collecting blood, could you do that with wild sea turtles
and the Galopagos. I'm trying to get some research off
the ground. And that was like a knee jerk, no brainer.
He didn't even have to finish the question, and before
I even thought how I would do it, I said yes.
So I made my first trip there in twenty thirteen,
and Roy, you were there this year. I mean, I
don't think anybody that goes to the Galopagos is disappointed
and doesn't want to find it, doesn't want to find
a way to go back. And so I've been there
twenty eight times now and very modest beginning going with
Ken that just the two of us we did our
sea turtle research, but I started to establish some relationships
with the Galopagos National Park and other scientists, and now
I think I've worked on twenty five species there. Our
NC State team and colleagues have published about forty papers,
and truth funniest thing, the only thing I've done with
fish in the Galapagos is eat them. Well, I'm involved
in some fish projects, but I've not been hands on
because of either the pandemic or I've been needed to
work on sea lions or seabirds or tortoises. So and
I tell my students I didn't even go to the
Galapagos for the first time till I was fifty four
years old. So that's what's great about this career. You
don't know where it's going to take you, but if
you work hard at relationships in a sincere and transparent manner,
it's going to take you to cool places. And I
think you found that this year year. And one other thing,
I think it came at a great time for me
because I've been at NC State for twenty years and
I won't say I was getting bored, but I think
I was sort of looking for something a little different,
and the Galoppogo's kind of dropped in my lap. And then,
as you mentioned, I've taken about one hundred and forty
students there. Every spring break, I bring between twenty and
thirty to third year VET students. And not only do
we go it's very intense. We're only there on the
ground about seven days, but we do field research too.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I've definitely heard about it from some of your students,
and uh, yeah, that the Galapagos is special. I thought,
you know, Greg hasn't done fish, so maybe I need
to do some fish there.
Speaker 5: And it's great you're doing it. I hope you're. Are
you going back this year?
Speaker 2: Yeah, going back in actually July August, and then again
in January. So yeah, we're not going to overlap, unfortunately, but.
Speaker 5: Oh maybe in July.
Speaker 3: Well it'll be any July. You said you're going to
be mid July.
Speaker 5: I think right, yeah, fifteenth, about twenty third.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Well, like I said, I mean, there's not room
like Florida, there's not room for us either.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm getting that kind of sense, which makes me sad.
But you know, yeah, what about the book. Yeah, the book.
Let's talk about the book.
Speaker 2: So before we talk about the Querenfish Medicine Handbook that
Greg and I co author that just came out, I
did want to at least reference the fact that Greg
is an award winning author as well as a veterinarian
and pioneer and has done a lot to forward the profession,
including you know, his pretty influential and important Invertebrate Medicine book,
which I think is on its third edition right now, right.
Speaker 3: So I was.
Speaker 2: Honored when Greg asked me to co write this book.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, we'll talk about the Queranfish Medicine Handbook, Greg.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I'd love to. So we talk about pioneers. I
mentioned some names, and Greg and Linda Harrison are really
pioneers in the area of what we call exotic animal
medicine or non domestic or companion zoo animal. They wrote
avan medicine textbooks going I think the first edition was
in the mid eighties. And then they started a company
called the Zoological Education Network, and this would have been
in the nineties. It was a big deal. They had
their own conference every year in southern Florida, and they
put out a journal called Exotic DVM Magazine. Exotic DVM
Magazine was a very clinically focused journal. There was some
peer review, but it was really practical. Hey, I'm a
busy clinician, and you know, this is before the Internet
was big, and so it really helped to have these
one pager articles sometimes with nuts and bolts, how do
I hold it? How do I get blood out of it?
What are the drugs and dosages? And they actually had
this handbook series which was like a multi ring binder,
and you could buy these little inserts, fifty sixty page
inserts and put them in this handbook. I have a
couple on my shelf. So it's probably twenty years ago.
Linda reached out and said, hey, how would you like
to put together a little handbook of ornamental fish for
our series. It doesn't have to be big and involved,
just something that a veterin airan could have quickly turned to,
like between clients, how much ms two two two? Or
how do I get a skin boxy? And so I
did it. It was very modest about I think it was
fifty four pages. I looked at it the other day,
and you know, the years went by and the Zoological
Education Network, I mean, there have been some other kind
of groups and things that have replaced it as are
part of the profession has developed. Exotic animals, amphibians and
reptiles and small mammals and even fish all have their
own boards now, so you can be an American Board
of Veterinary Practitioner specialist. So things have changed and evolved.
And then I don't know, it's probably I don't remember
Roy it was three years ago. Does that sound about right?
I definitely sure.
Speaker 3: Let's let's go with three years ago.
Speaker 5: Let's go with free. It could have been a tick more. Yeah,
But CRC Press reached out to me, and I guess
they knew about the handbook and they said, hey, how
would you like to revise that handbook? And I've edited
a number of textbooks and it's a lot of work,
and I thought, to really bring this handbook up to
current standards with the information we have now is going
to be a pretty big task. And I reached out
to the Harrisons and they're so generous and they said, Greg,
you just take that thing and do whatever you want
with it. You know, you don't have to pay for
the rights because I didn't, you know, usually publishers own
the rights. They said you can just use it, and
it was very nice of them. And then I thought, Okay,
I don't think I can do this justice by myself.
It really needs it needs a clean up hitter. You
need that the home run hitter of Ornamental Fish and
none other than Roy. And I reached out to Roy
and I said, Roy, how would you like to co
author this handbook with me? And I think I probably
sent you the handbook and we looked it over and
Roy really made it what it is. I'm as co author,
but I really should be like subscript co author because
the amount of work he put into it.
Speaker 3: But I'm through at all.
Speaker 5: I'm really proud of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, I'm not through it all. Greg.
Speaker 2: Obviously you did a ton of work, and uh, yeah,
I know. I'm proud of it as well. I guess
maybe talk about when you did kind of the outline
many many years ago, and the you know, the Harrison
and Harrison format and kind of the changes. Maybe you
want to talk a little bit about some of the
differences in some of the maybe editions.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So originally it was pretty minimal, black and white,
no color. I think there were just a couple diagrams.
I know one was a tube feet in a fish
that I had a biological illustrator. Do you know what
had references? The sort of references of the time, I
think it well, I know it came out in two
thousand and six, right, so that's eighteen years ago, and
really it means I probably was based on information that's
twenty years old. So it was fairly basic in terms
of it. Think about an outline, like a notes outline
you might get in that school or at a CE conference,
you know, bullet points, a few paragraphs. But now it's
really what Roy did exceeded any expectations I ever had
for the handbook. Now it's almost three hundred pages. It's
got a formulary, a detailed formulary. Before I think my
formulary was one table on one little page. It's richly
illustrated with color. Most of those images are from Roy
and his contacts in the Florida tropical fish industry. We've
got pretty detailed sections on diagnostics, including imaging like radiology,
cet ultrasound, and really really detailed sections on surgery infectious diseases,
complete with images of all the major parasites. So I
sort of thought it would end up being like a
little handbook, like I have little hands that you could
put in my little but it's really I mean, I
think not that I'm boasting, but man, this thing really
came together as a like a full blown comprehensive fish textbook.
And there's some great books out there, with Michael Stoskoff's book,
Ed Noga's book, Steve Smith, Helen Roberts, Hatfield and Clayton
and they all have their strengths, and you know, most
fish bets have them all on their shelf. Nick Stane Eern.
But the way this thing came together, and I think
the best part of it is and I'm not sure
how CRC did it, but you can buy for about
forty bucks the softcover, so it's richly illustrated in color.
And I have to have a shout out to my
wife Diane, who really helped design the cover.
Speaker 3: Definitely, definitely thank you Diane.
Speaker 5: Yeah, she helped with the images and the color pattern
and everything. She's really good at that. In fact, she
helped design the covers of at least two of the
Invertebrate Medicine books, so that really helped. But yeah, I mean,
I'm ragging on it partly because it's mostly Roy's book,
but it's really good and I'm even buying extra copies
to give away.
Speaker 2: Definitely mine in Greg's book. And yeah, I've told Greg
already as well. I think we've got plans for the
second edition, but I think the first edition will hopefully
have a pretty good run. And I think there's you know,
I think one of the goals we had was definitely
keeping it as much detail as we could, but short
enough that you didn't have to kind of wade through
too much to get basic information that you would need
whether you're you know, maybe an advanced hobbyist or aquarist
or a veterinarian who's going to be working with, you know,
with these folks.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I think that's kind of one of the
strengths of the book.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think one thing that keeps it detailed
but concise is that we really focus on ornamental fish.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 5: So it's focused freshwater and marine but you know at
the public aqurime level, the hobbyist level, the aquaculture level,
but we really don't kind of spread out into salmanas
or tilapia or catfish or anything like that. We stay
focused on ornamental's tropicals displayfish, and I think that's one
of the strengths of the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Speaker 2: Well, unfortunately we're out of time. Definitely want to thank
our guest doctor Greg Loubard, my very very good close
friend and mentor for making the time.
Speaker 3: Greg appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Wow, this is really special, Roy, and hey man, anytime
I can spend an hour with you is a happy day.
Speaker 3: Dido, diddo.
Speaker 2: I want to thank our producer, Mark Winner for making
the show possible.
Speaker 3: Greg.
Speaker 2: I did mention that I might ask you for some
words of wisdom for people, maybe those interested in working
with aquarium fish or aquatic animals as a career.
Speaker 3: You know, husbandry, or you know even health. Do you
have any any words of wisdom for those folks?
Speaker 5: Absolutely? I do. So don't be intimidated by the breadth
of species or the different kinds of life support systems
and environments. If you have an interest and you're willing
to work hard, you're enthusiastic, and you communicate well with people,
then there will be lots of opportunities for you. Where
fish veterinarians as a group are very inclusive, we're fun.
There's so much work to be done that people there
aren't really like turfs and things like that. We really
love mentoring younger people, and I would say, get your
hands wet. I've never had a chology. I'm not a hobbyist,
but I made it a point to try to learn
through hands on, through connecting with people, experts, taking ce opportunities,
and just teaching myself things. So I would say, you know,
we've had almost any major aquarium now has at least
two veterinarians. I had a student, a former student last
week who's an er doctor and she's pretty amazing, and
she reached out to me because she was working with
an elasma brank and she had never done that, but
she said, I'm willing to try. Can you help me?
And I did. I face timed with her and helped
her get a sample and help her to get help
her get blood, and that kind of stuff is good
for everybody, and she probably has a whole new level
of confidence working with fish after just one case. So
I think if you have the interest and the will,
people like Roy and myself and our other colleagues are
willing to nurture that interest.
Speaker 3: Very true, Very true. Thanks Greg.
Speaker 2: Please be sure to check out Greg's weblinks, which will
be found on his aquarium Mania episode page. If you
have any questions, comments, or ideas for a show, email
me at doctor Roy at.
Speaker 3: Petlife Radio dot com.
Speaker 2: That's d R Roi at Petlife Radio dot com. Until
next time, please visit your local aquariance stores and keep
your tanks clean and your fish healthy. And definitely check
out Gregg and my newly released guide, The Aquariumfish Medicine Handbook,
which is available at most online bookstores.
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