Jools Dignall

The man behind PlanetCatfish.com, the world's largest resource for catfish fans has been keeping catfish all his life. He's travelled habitats in South America, Southern Africa and India and frequently writes, talks and photographs all things catfish.

Julian, or Jools as most people know him, has been keeping fish since he first started getting pocket money. It alarms him to think how long ago that is now, but he's comforted that, for many other aquarists, this stage in their lives is even further in the past. After his first purchase of a goldfish and, soon thereafter, a tank to keep it in, he's proud to say that his next purchase was a book (albeit on fancy guppies). However, to his family's despair, nothing colourful was found to entertain him for long; more and more secretive and “dull” catfish arrived at his Edinburgh home.

After leaving school Jools followed a course in computing and worked in a local aquatic outlet. The later taught him much about the trade and, if pushed, he admits to learned a thing or two about fish too. Jools looks back on those shifts in very rosy terms although most of it was spent advising people that those lovely pimpictus were not a good idea with those neon tetras and that banjo catfish were really quite interesting if you just gave them a chance. At that time his favourites were all these new Loricariids that kept turning up. This was indeed an exciting time, when many other of the now common “L” numbers appeared for the first time.

Around this time Jools started playing around with the Internet. Given career and hobby the logical progression was to start up a web site dedicated to catfish. Work started on this project in 1996 and in November of that year a few web pages were unleashed to an unsuspecting online world. Actually if anyone was unsuspecting it was Jools.

Early 1998 the site moved to cope with the increased demand and at that time was christened Planet Catfish. “Planet” soon built up a regular following and a small army of contributors worldwide. Over nearly 9000 catfish images and hundreds of articles later and billions of “hits,” many contributors became good friends. The exposure also allowed Jools to join in a few collecting trips to the habitats of tropical catfishes.

Julian G. Dignall