A fish enthusiast for amphibians and reptiles: Julia Bindl joined the CC team in April 2025 to help with species management and to assist in managing the ever-growing number of participants.

With over 250 CC participants, most of whom currently keep and breed amphibians, it was time to bring in reinforcements for the CC team. So, in autumn 2024, we published a job advertisement for a species manager, which promptly attracted a whole host of highly qualified and enthusiastic applicants. However, since the German term for species is ‚Art‘, we were searching for an ‚Artmanager‘ in the German job advertisement. Amusingly was that there were also art enthusiasts who hoped to be able to manage an art exhibition. Now, we do attach great importance to aesthetics, and our animal illustrations can certainly compete with Van Gogh and Rembrandt (wink), but we still understand the German term ‚Artmanagement‘ to mean something else. So we decided on an applicant who is more interested in animal species than art.

The choice fell on Julia Bindl, who studied biochemistry in Munich and has been enthusiastic about everything that crawls and flies through the world on more or less than two legs since she was a child. Julia has been an aquarist for 23 years and describes herself as a hardcore goby freak. We should soon find out exactly what that means… She is particularly fond of freshwater gobies from the Indo-Pacific region, which is why she has explored their biotopes in Southeast Asia several times and did not shy away from trying a grilled goby, which she had previously only known from her own aquarium. This encouraged her even more to keep the fish and start breeding experiments instead of consuming them…

Julia gained professional experience at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries in Berlin, where she worked as a technical assistant in the laboratory. The perfect preparation for mastering Excel spreadsheets and multitasking around scaly or slimy animals!

Of course, Julia doesn’t just have fish on her mind: she also enjoys searching for amphibians in nature, especially toads (the more bizarre the better). And maybe one day there will be a harlequin toad terrarium among her eight aquariums.

Since you shouldn’t focus on just one thing in life and should also think outside the box, there is another hobby in Julia’s life, namely macro photography. And photography is ultimately also an art form, which brings us back to the ‚Artmanager‘. And what does Julia like to photograph most? That’s right, fish.