Word: axelrod
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...Cheirodon axelrodi. Among the most expensive is the brown Discus, or Symphysodon aequifasciata axelrodi, for which hobbyists pay $300 for a breeding pair. Both of these, as well as about two dozen other varieties of tropical fish, are named for a burly, sometimes surly, businessman-scientist named Herbert R. Axelrod. At 39, Dr. Axelrod has been the supreme sage on tropical fish for so long that many people imagine he is in his 70s. As the largest breeder and seller of tropical fish in the world, he has amassed a personal fortune that makes him several times a millionaire...
Spiked Worms. The unlikely spawning ground for this thriving enterprise is an Axelrod-designed three-story building in industrial Jersey City, not far from the polluted waters of upper New York Bay. It houses the presses of Axelrod's T.F.H. Publications, named for Tropical Fish Hobbyist, a monthly magazine (circ. 130,000) that Axelrod launched when he was a 25-year-old New York University graduate student. Since then, T.F.H. has turned out more than 460 books and pamphlets on fish-along with dozens of popular treatises on the care and upbringing of dogs, cats and birds...
...Bayonne high school math teacher, Axelrod is fluent in seven languages, holds degrees in mathematics and biology. He reveres the late General Motors Wizard Alfred P. Sloan in the way that most naturalists regard Charles Darwin. At a pet-business convention in Manhattan last week, Axelrod showed off fish food that would have intrigued Darwin. This was Tubifex Worms-ordinary sewer-variety worms spiked with a tasty, Axelrod-discovered fish-blood extract, and dry-frozen. Axelrod, always confident, expects that the new product will capture most of the fish-food market...
...Eaters. Breeding and survival rates among fish impose the only major limit on T.F.H.'s sales growth, and this is a problem that even the multifaceted Dr. Axelrod has not yet solved. Until he does, Axelrod compensates by prodding chiefs of his 14 subsidiaries; he insists that "even if we didn't do anything," sales should grow 22% a year. He awards Cadillacs to those whose sales grow 50%, makes it clear that anyone whose gain falls below 22% "gets canned...
...Axelrod undertakes yearly expeditions to the tropics. In the Amazon jungle, his favorite fish-finding territory, he delights in swimming in piranha-infested rivers just to prove that piranhas (which he sells for $50) are not man-eaters. In fact, about the only place he finds hazardous is the U.S., where he lives in an expensive, theoretically bombproof, glass-and-concrete house on the Jersey shore. There, with unlisted phone numbers and safe from advice-seeking laymen and other "bores," Axelrod can, and does, toss off as many as four T.F.H. booklets over a weekend...