If you come to a meeting, you might wonder “Who are these people?” Well, we might at one time have been that child collecting seaweed at the beach (most of us still are) or maybe that person carrying two five-gallon buckets of salt water to the car with the rusted trunk. Most of us have more PVC than Home Depot, and all of our Tupperware has at one time contained some sort of marine organism. We often have visions of turning that spare room into an aquarium so large we would need to don our scuba gear to clean it.
Although these are only a few of a marine hobbyist’s characteristics, we all have much more serious goals in common: the conservation, preservation, and propagation of our marine environment is the focus of our interests. The education of ourselves and others is what FMAS is about. — Alan Bickford, FMAS President 1994.