Cichlid Room Companion fellow 2013: Florent de Gasperis

Starting this 2013 I want to wish you once more a very good year for you and your loved ones. In the Cichlid Room Companion this will be our 17th year online. We are full of energy and working every day on new exciting projects to make the site even better and to provide more and better organized cichlid information. We want to thank you, the author, curator, sponsor, subscriber, translator or visitor for your support. The site is what it is just because of you and your visits. Some nice utilities are in the process and should materialize in the coming months. I am sure you will like them.

We present in this our first year editorial our new Cichlid Room Companion fellow, Florent de Gasperis from Montpellier, France. As is previous year, we want to recognize the people that work hard to the improve site in this honorary fashion. Florent has been participating in the Cichlid Room Companion for many years in a tireless manner.

Florent is a biologist that has been working with fish all his life; he is member of the French Cichlid Association for a very long time and has put significant work for this association for many years. He is specialist in South American and West African cichlids. Florent is coauthor of the beautiful book "La Guyane Française et ses CICHLIDÉS", edited by the AFC.

Some of the help we have received from Florent in the Cichlid Room Companion includes the translation of over ten thousand picture captions to French, quite a task that required hundreds of hours of hard work. Florent has also translated many cichlid profiles. Not just that, in 2012 Florent made a complete updated of the status of each cichlid species in the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which included the addition of hundreds of new records for species added to the IUZN catalog, as well as the update of hundreds more. That is just some of the work Florent has done for the site. At the present time, Florent is in charge of a project to index all issues of the Revue Française des Cichlidophiles into the Cichlid Room Companion library, adding to each cichlid species bibliography the articles talking about them.

Thank you Florent!