Roger Brousseau

I currently live in Lincoln, California (near Sacramento), I am married to my beautiful wife of 16 years, Adriana, who was born in Brazil and I have one wonderful daughter, Ashley, who is 14 years old. I work for the State of California as a Network Engineer dealing with routers, switches, firewalls, etc. I started keeping killifish in 1979 at the age of 18 and joined the AKA in 1980. I first started out breeding Aphyosemion species in 1979 but I wasn’t very good at it. I really liked killifish, so I didn’t give up, I kept trying with different species and different techniques. I got a lot better breeding non-annual fishes over these few years but I wanted to try something different. Then, in 1983, I decided to start with annual killifish species. So I bought some eggs from an annual species from Africa, Nothobranchius, I was successful and I really liked it. Then one year later I started breeding annuals from
South America. In 1984 I won Best in Show for my Simpsonichthys boitonei and I was hooked on annuals from South America ever since. I went on my first collecting trip outside of the USA in 1987 to Venezuela. This was a great adventure for me and started my passion for collecting wild annual fishes in South America. Since then, I have traveled in search of killifish in Venezuela (4 times), Colombia (3), Brazil (16) and most recently in Bolivia (9). I wrote a book on South American Killifish, entitled: A Hobbyist’s Guide to South American Annual Killifish the first time in 1991 and updated it until 2007.

Most recently, I have co-authored four new species of killifish and I have found many new species, so there are more names to be described and many new ones to be discovered as well. I was fortunate to have found a new species in 2008 and in 2013 it was described after me by Dalton Nielson, Spectrolebias brousseaui and in 2014, a new species I collected in 2011 was named after my daughter, Papiliolebias ashleyae. In my fish room, I keep only South American annual fishes, and even though it isn’t very big (55 aquariums), it keeps me busy. I really enjoy collecting and breeding South America annual killifish and I hope to inspire you as well!