27th to 29th of November 2009 in Hannover, Germany
http://www.l-wels-tage.de/en/
The first International L-Number-Days event will take place from the 27th to 29th of November 2009 in Hannover, Germany.
We came up with the idea to organize such an event while visiting the All Aquarium Catfish Convention in Maryland in the USA last October. Bringing aquarists and scientists from all over the world together at one meeting and offering them an interesting schedule of events turned out to be a big success. That´s the reason why we wanted to offer such an event to aquarists in Germany too.
We had a significant problem in that the events in the USA were mainly financed by big auctions on the final day, but similar sources of income were unfortunately not at our disposal. Luckily however, we found some important sponsors, that have greatly supported us so that we were able to realize this project in the end.
Why L-Number-Days?
Because of the restrictions in the import of l-numbers that we have had to live with in the last months, , the workgroup L-Numbers (AG L-Welse) was founded within the International Society ”Barben Salmler Schmerlen Welse” (IG BSSW). The job of the new workgroup is to preserve those species for the hobby, that are not or only rarely imported, by breeding them.
We thought it would be a good idea to support the work of our workgroup by organizing such an event as the L-Number-Days.
What is international about this event?
When similar events took place in other countries in the past, we’ve always learned that the hobby of keeping fishes can connect people from different nations.
As the interest in L-Numbers has even increased in the countries neighbouring Germany in the last years, we thought it would be a good idea to organize such an event in two languages. Some of the speakers come from abroad anyway, so we would have had to translate their talks into German anyway.
But we have planned even to translate the German talks into English language simultaneously and by doing this we hope to find many participants from other countries, too.
L-Number-Days, a one-day wonder?
If this event becomes a success, which we really think it will become because of the reaction we’ve got so far, we will try to organize a similar event every two years.
We already have several ideas for the second International L-Number-Days, so that we would certainly be able to organize a second event with the same topic.
But if the interests of the aquarists will change in the next years, we could probably even organize the first International Corydoras-Days or an event under a different name in the future.