Richard Ross, the 2014
MASNA Aquarist of the Year, is a Senior Biologist at the Steinhart Aquarium in the California Academy of Sciences where he cultures and cares for exotic cephalopods, fish & coral, participates in ongoing field work on coral spawning, animal collection & transport, and manages tropical saltwater displays including the 212,000 Philippine Coral Reef exhibit. He is a prolific writer and dynamic speaker, authoring academic papers and a catalogue of articles on aquarium and reef related educational topics including his Skeptical Reefkeeping series which focuses on critical thinking, responsibility and ethics of aquarium keeping. His work has been covered by mainstream media outlets including Scientific American, National Geographic, Penn’s Sunday School and Fox News.
Richard has kept saltwater animals for over 25 years, and has worked in aquarium maintenance, retail, wholesale and has consulted for a coral farm/fish collecting station in the South Pacific. Before working in the animal world was a professional Juggler and corporate presentation script writer. He is an avid underwater photographer/videographer and has been fortunate to scuba dive many of the worlds reefs. At home he cares for a 300 gallon reef system and a 250 gallon cephalopod/fish breeding system, a hairless dog, 2 hairless cats, 2 geckos and 6 chickens. When not doing all that stuff, he enjoys glass blowing, juggling, horseback riding, mixed martial arts, exercising his philosophy degree, spending time with his fabulous daughter and his incredibly generous, intelligent, gorgeous and patient wife.
Richard has done a bunch of other stuff as well, including being a stay at home dad, glass blowing, juggling, corporate presenting, newspaper layout and design and philosophy.
Juggling
Martial Arts
Improvisation
Glass Blowing
Why is there an octopus on Rich’s head?
While training divers on responsible and sustainable fish and coral collection in Tonga, we came across this octopus. As Tonga is mostly a substance culture, the divers we were training wanted to catch the octopus to help feed their families. One of them grabbed a claw hammer and proceeded to smash up several meters of coral while catching the octopus. On the boat I asked him ‘we just spent all day talking about how not to damage the reef, and there are easier ways to catch octopus, so why use a hammer?’. He answered ‘they bite’. ‘No they don’t’ I said, picking up the octopus and putting it on my head, where luckily it didn’t bite me, going on to discuss better ways to catch octopus. We then talked about how sustainable and responsible ideas applied to everything including fishing, and how respecting habitat means there will be creatures there for a long time to come.
Source: http://packedhead.net/about/
