The Cichlid Room Companion

The Cichlid Room Companion (CRC), and its sister web site The Freshwater Fishes of Mexico (FFM), are non-scientific in the sense of non-peer-reviewed, membership-based webpages, dedicated to the fishes of the Cichlid family and the freshwater fishes of Mexico respectively. The site offers one of the most comprehensive, non-authoritative, but —regrettably— outdated (see criticism section below) catalogues of cichlids in the web, which is illustrated with more than 13.655 photographs and 243 videos of cichlids and their habitats. It also “offers access to information about 124 full genera and 825 full species profiles”, a discussion forum, as well as various articles about fishkeeping, field accounts and collecting expeditions; mostly written by citizen scientists, personalities of the fish trade, researchers and aquarists in the cichlid hobby. The site is administered by its creator and editor, Juan Miguel Artigas-Azas, a naturalist, whom is also an aquarist and a notorious nature photographer. He is also the “curator” of most of the fish summaries that appear in the profiles of both sites. In 2008, the American Cichlid Association (ACA) awarded Artigas-Azas the Guy Jordan Retrospective Award, which is the maximum honor that association gives to people who have done extensive contributions to the International Cichlid Hobby.

According to FreeWebsiteReport.org, the CRC has been in business since 05-Sep-1996. As of November, 2014, it received 1.019 daily page views. The page is most popular in the United States, with 47.3% of its users from that country. It has an Alexa World Rank #1,079,009 and Google Pagerank 4/10.

In the past decade, the Internet has fundamentally transformed the relationships between the scientific community and society as a whole, as the boundaries between public and private, professionals and hobbyists fade away; allowing for a wider range of participants to engage with science in unprecedented ways. The educational and citizens science task of the CRC has been acknowledged in the formal scientific literature, both as source of data, information and awareness among fish hobbyists about topics like the threat of releases of invasive species from domestic aquaria, as well as promoting ethical behavior in the fish hobby. Furthermore, while for the most part, the CRC is a popular resource, a number of articles in it have some academic value, and have been cited as primary sources in the scholarly literature.

Over the years, the CRC has received several recognitions. On January 5, 1999, it was recognized by the Project Cool Home Page as inspirational, for its effective use of the web as a medium that in some ways shows off the web's potential. Furthermore, on January 10, 2010, “TheReefTank” awarded the CRC with the “Recommended Reading” recognition. The CRC has also been awarded “the Cichlid Mania Site of the Week” by Mike Hanlon’s Cichlid mania home page, among other recognitions.

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