Cichlid Room Companion fellow 2012: Patrick Tawil

Patrick Tawil and Falbala, Oct 2011.

My wish for a happy and exciting new year to all of you, and my thankfulness for visiting us so often during the past year. We want your visits and support also for 2012. We will keep working hard to make the Cichlid Room Companion even better than it is today, with more and better organized information. There is no shortage of new projects in development for the site as we want to continue changing the way cichlid information is presented and made available to you, in the way we have done it for the last fifteen years—you won’t be disappointed!

We start the year by presenting you our new Cichlid Room Companion fellow: Patrick Tawil from Paris, France. Patrick is one of the most internationally respected Cichlid specialists (although cichlids is not his only specialty) and one of the pillars of the Cichlid Room Companion. This site is just what it is because of knowledgeable persons like Patrick. He has worked hard to improve our site by contributing his ample knowledge about cichlids from lakes Malawi and Tanganyika. Patrick is a diligent, passionate, humble, and extremely generous person. Being myself a Central American Cichlids specialist, I have found joy in learning about Lake Tanganyika cichlids through his many and very interesting species profiles found in the site’s catalog, and have really come to love and be fascinated by them. The more I learn through Patrick profiles, the more I love and get fascinated with cichlids. It was hard for me to wait for the moment I could give this small but for all of us in the Cichlid Room Companion meaningful recognition to his work and support for this site.

As many of you may know, Patrick is co-editor of L’an Cichlidé of the French Cichlid Association (Association Française des Cichlidophiles), the only surviving yearly publication about cichlids, for which we hope the eleventh edition will be released sometime this year. Patrick has been a member and contributor of the AFC since it was founded back in 1979. Although Patrick works with computers and lives in a metropolitan area, he has a passion for nature that one day, at the age of 13, took him to turn his grandmother’s flat into a city zoo, a project which he upheld for nine months till the neighbors found out.

Patrick then focused on a specialization that would fit into his home and also one that went along with his interests in evolution and taxonomic classification; he then fittingly chose cichlids. This selection went for the benefit of all of us, cichlid lovers. I wish I could tell you more about Patrick, but he is just too humble. It has been a while since I have been chasing him with an interview, which he is still reluctant to reply, but I hope that he soon will. What I can tell you about Patrick is that my understanding of cichlids and the Cichlid Room Companion as a whole are much better because of him.

Thank you Patrick!