Scavdog's 2006 MACNA Report

[scavdog]

First off: Kudo's to the Houston club, MARSH, for an outstanding event. From the Friday night reception to the well organized sessions, tastey GALA and exceptional tradeshow, it was a hobbyists vacation resort.

Day 1
Arriving Friday, I proceeded to register. The conference was held at the Westin Galleria in Houston. The hotel itself was located in what is allegedly the 2nd largest mall in the nation. With that said, there was plenty of things to keep my significant other busy while I geeked out at the show. That afternoon there were 5 presentations as well as a coral propagation workshop. Having just arrived at the show, the brunt of my time was consumed with catching up with hobbiyist friends from around the country.

Rick Beauregard, Larry Jackson and Yours truly

Next up: "The goods":
The trade show aspect of MACNA is always a treat. Vendors and manufacturers tend to debut their latest and greatest products at the event. This year was no different. PFO introduced their "Solaris Series". Allegedly the first fully programmable LED Illumination system. The 6' version on display was fairly impressive, with 5 grids consisting of 25 LED's. The visible output was not so impressive to the naked eye. However, for a fixture that boasts major output, it is very cool to the touch. And for a mere 3500.00 it can be yours. Gee, I'll take 2. You can see Dana Riddles review here.

Other items to mention were Tunze's mini-streams. They are compact and they appear to work well. Because the Tunze folks housed livestock in the system they were using for the demo, I was unable to really get a feel as to how effective they were. The looked nice tho...

Speaking of pumps, the BRS's own Scott and Pat made waves with their maxi-mods (AKA Ocean Flow), selling out within the 1st day. Kudo's guys. Other BRS folks who attended include John Simmons of Boston Aqua Farms. John and his wife set up camp at the frag exchange to showcase his aquaculture products and demonstrate fragging techniques.


Here are a few pics of the tradeshow:

Top left to right: Deltec's booth, sweet SPS, ORA's very expensive picasso clowns
Bottom left to right: zoos, vendor display, more misc frags for sale

Later that evening we attended the Reception on the 22nd floor of the Westin. Every one enjoyed a free drink ticket and plenty of good appetizers. I managed to score a couple more drink tickets . Lucky me!

continued

 

[scavdog]

Day 2
Slightly groggy from the night before (we closed the bar next to the hotel), I began my Saturday session later than expected. First off was a microfoods workshop with Frank Marini and Dr. Adelaide Rhodes. We were able to examine live copepods under a digital microscope. Although the session was pressed for time at a mere 1 hour, it was decent workshop. The Digital Blue QX5 microscope, which I have seen crop up time and again, is very affordable at around 85 bucks and plugs into a pc or mac via USB.



Other talks of interest were Charles Delbeek's: Husbandry of rare and unusual marinelife, where Charles elaborated on the captive care of such animals as the nautilus.

I ended the day by attending Sanjay Joshi's "Environmentally Conscious Lighting" seminar. A break from his usual routine, Sanjay took a very common sense approach with less hard-core data that he usually presents. In fact Sanjay boasts that most MH light bulbs can be used longer than one year if you incrementally lower them a couple of inches closer to the water as the bulbs age. See Sanjay's site for the PAR on your bulbs: www.reeflightinginfo.arvixe.com

Following the GALA dinner that night, Sanjay was presented with the MASNA award for outstanding contributions to the hobby. In addition Eric Borneman and James Wiseman took care of the key-note presentation with a video of Texas's own coral reef, AKA the Flower Garden. The texas BBQ they served was pretty darn good too.

Next up: back to the bar followed by an after-party in a penthouse appartment. More drinking and partying.

My s/o Jess at the after-partay

continued

 

[scavdog]

Day 3

Day 3

With barely a hint of a hangover, Sunday started out better than I could have hoped for.

James Wiseman presented on Photography in the aquarium and pros and cons of SLR and compact cameras in addition to highlighting technique.

Next up was a very anticipated presentation regarding the results of a salt study performed by Eric Borneman and Kim Lowe. 10 sea salts were tested over a period of 10 month, the 10th being natural sea water (the control).

Some of the results were truly shocking.

The preliminary results of the study:
Red Sea & Reef Crystal are sort of tied for best and Instant Ocean yielded the worst results out of the 10 tested....

The I/O tank

Check out more:

http://www.marshreef.com/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewforum&f=20

http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-09/eb/index.php

http://www.marshreef.com/modules.ph...lery&file=index&include=view_album.php&page=1


I could go on forever about the seminars but it would make for a better newsletter article.

Sunday would come to a close only after the famed MACNA raffle. Some raffle items included a trip to Jamaica, a fully stocked 75 corner system, a fully socked jellyfish display as well as 55 skimmers donated by Euro-Reef. Yes, you read that right: 55.

My winnings consisted of:

1 Euro-reef skimmer
1 ORA Rose Millipora
1 ORA Australian Delicate Stag
1 ORA Duncanopsammia axifuga (very rare in the trade)

Not a bad score.

Now I had to get the livestock home. What to do? After a little pow-wow with Larry Jackson I decided to do something I have pondered for years: Ship the coral damp, IE: without being submerged in water.

Bottom line is that even though I stayed in Houston until Monday afternoon, the corals shipped better than ever. I plan to write an article for the upcoming newsletter. Stay tuned!


Having been my 4th MACNA, I found the conference to be stronger than ever. With more vendors and elaborate displays, the conference has improved greatly since I attended Louisville in 2003. I believe the final number of attendees was around 1200. Kudo's to all involved.

Don't miss out on MACNA XIX in Pittsburg in September 2007! They are charging a mere $75.00 for pre-registration. Thats the 3 day conference with the gala included!



-Joe

 

[Moe_K]

Excellent! Thanks for the update.
Gotta check out that salt study; I use Instant Ocean.

 

[fanaglethebagle]

Yeah, what about I/O?
Isn't reef crysals supposed to be awful?

It was rigged

 

[Moe_K]

I just read the big thread (I'm sure it'll continue to grow enormously) over at RC about the MARSH salt study.
There are no hard results just yet.
As Frank Marini advised, I'll wait until the results are published (and maybe the experiment is duplicated?) to make any decisions about which salt is best.

Again, the experiment was conducted on 10g tanks with no skimming, and no supplements were used. Will that translate to the same results in my 125g tank with skimmer and Ca Mg and CO3 supplementation?


Edit: I suppose we'll have our own salt study discussion. Probably best not to gunk up ScavDog's nice report with what I'm sure will be a big discussion.

 

[Ray]

Very Good Joe! Thanks for the write up

 

[Chris L]

nice job joe. i hope to make it to my first macna next year. it looks like a blast

 

[MAReefer1]

Where is the next MACNA? Boston I hope

 

[PenMan]

Next year is Pittsburgh. We have not recovered from the last Macna here in Boston yet.

 

[OceanGuy]

Thanks Joe, It sounds as if it was an informative good time. I hope to go when it is in Pittsburgh. Maybe we can get a Boston Reefers bus to go down.
The events sounded interesting and there didn't seem like there was a really large crowd. The pics were great too.

Thanks again,

 

[ScottM]

....and there didn't seem like there was a really large crowd. .....
Thanks again,

there were almost a thousand people in attendance.

 

[denvig]

Great job Joe. But it just makes me sad that I did not go

 

[scavdog]

there were almost a thousand people in attendance.

Kim Lowe had said 1200... Maybe she spoke prematurely.

Anyhow, it was a well attended meet.


Tom, the pics I took did not do the show justice. Check out some of the pics on Reef Central. Most of my pics were pretty lame. I was too distracted most of the time to take pics.

At my first MACNA I could not put the damn camera down. I think I am getting lazy.

 

[Jocko]

For anyone who is definitely going to next year's, if you register by today its only $75 per person. Tomorrow it goes up to $100 and then slowly keeps rising as we get closer to next Sept.