MACNA 2007 : Day 1

Well day one of MACNA is over and I gotta say I had a great time. The speakers were excellent, the exhibit hall is great, and the reception was well done, at least until they ran out of food. But the open bar made up for that.

Three of the four lectures I went to were informative and fun. The forth was pretty doom and gloom. According to Dr. Schimek, the reefs have until about 2050 and then the ocean just won't be able to support them anymore. And major changes to the planet will take place as the ocean changes to something we've never seen before. But I digress...

The exhibit hall has loads of great vendors and exhibitors. Some of my favorite companies were there including Deltec and Eco-Tech Marine. I got to talk to the Eco-Tech marine guys for a while about the Wireless Wave Driver which should be released soon. And I got to see them in action, and they are wild. Can't wait for mine to be delivered. I didn't get to talk to Doug from Deltec because he was always mobbed by people. Connecticut's own Aquactinics didn't make a good showing to start the show off as one of their lights was wired wrong at the factory and they had it torn apart and were trying to make field repairs to it. Hopefully their display, which is combined with MarcoRocks, will be up and better tomorrow.

There were particularly good display systems set up by ORA and at the combined Eco-Tech, Euro-Reef, Marine Depot, and Zero Edge Aquarium booth. The Zero Edge tanks are absolutely gorgeous. I really can't say enough about them, just gorgeous.

There were a few vendors who were selling corals and clams, some very nice ones too. I'm not sure I'm going to be buying any though, at least until Sunday. Hopefully they will lower their prices to move the goods they don't want to bring home.

There is free loot galour. I picked up a toy clown fish for my niece. For me, so far I've gotten some fish food, a few magazines, a nice insulated bag, and various snacks and drinks.

The raffle items weren't on display today as they were supposed to be. I guess they are going to open that up tomorrow.

I'm really bad estimating the number of people in a crowd, but I'd say there was at least a thousand at the reception tonight. ( knowing how I estimate though it could be 2 or 3 thousand, lol ) Dr. Bruce Carlson talked all about the Georgia Aquarium for almost two hours. The place looks amazing, and will be the site of next years MACNA. He shared details about their Whale Shark display with its more then 6 million gallon capacity, and their Coral Reef tank which holds 120+ thousand gallons, 1500+ fish of 100+ different species.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow starting with breakfast at 7 and a full day of lectures and exhibit hall roaming.

Arrived in Pittsburgh for MACNA

I made the drive down to Pittsburgh yesterday for this years MACNA convention. The drive went well for about 5 hours, then the road construction started. All in all it took about 8 and 1/2 hours, so not too bad.

I did a little exploring last night and took a look at the exhibition hall. Hopefully they were working through the night because it didn't seem ready then. The Monroeville Mall was as short walk across the street so I went there and got some dinner and a Blizzard. It must have been the guys first one because it took him about 10 minutes to make :)

So this morning I'm going out to do some more exploring and get my registration materials. I'll blog more about the show later this evening.

AquaIllumination on it's way

I just received mail from AquaIllumination saying that the lights will be shipped out next week. WOOOHHHOOOO! I'm freakin excited!

Two Month Anniversary

Tomorrow is the two month anniversary of adding everything to the big tank. Lots of changes in those two months.

Coraline algae have turned the stark white of the base rocks into a purplish color. Nitrates crept up and up but now seem to be going down as the refugium and deep sand bed start to do their jobs of keeping nitrates down. I've had to harvest calerpa and cheatomorpha out of the refugium twice already, and it appears I'll have to do it with increasing frequency soon.

I've noticed all sorts of life in the refugium, and the tank itself. The fuge has quite a population of stometella (sp?) snails, a small crab, many small bristle worms and the copepod population is on the rise. I've seen similar life in the tank, including a few small starfish, although I can't find them anymore.

I started feeding the fish without turning the VorTech pump off and it seems they love to chase the food around the tank. Perhaps I won't need the feed mode on the new controller after all. Unfortunately, news has been released that the controller will ship late due to some problems with getting FCC approval. Hope its not too long.

Above is a picture of one of the two colonies of Ricordea I have. I bought the top polyp and it split into the two in the picture. Hopefully more splits to come.

Anxiously awaiting news about the AquaIllumination release too :)

All is well

So all is going well as of late. About a week ago EcoTech Marine announced their wireless wave controller and I ordered one of them for my Vortch pump. It's already been charged to my credit card but isn't supposed to ship until the first week of September.

Hopefully my lights will be shipped that week too, if not sooner.

Here's a side shot of the tank, looks pretty neat. The coraline algae is growing in really well. It's still hard to get the fish to hold still long enough to get them in focus :)

Black and White Clownfish in QT

So my local reef club, CTARS, sponsored a group buy of Black and White clownfish from LiveAquaria. I purchased two and put them in quarantine on Friday.

Before putting them into quarantine, I gave them a quick dip in 1 gallon of fresh water mixed with Methylene Blue. This was to help knock any parasites and diseases off them.

Not long after getting the fish home, it was reported by other members that their fish had Brooklynella. Since others did it was a good bet mine did too, although they weren't showing any signs. Since showing signs is probably too late to start trying to save them, I decided to take some action.

Fortunately when I was setting up my quarantine tank, I bought a few medications just in case, one of them being Formalin. Formalin is a 37% solution of Formaldehyde and water. To treat the fish, I gave them a 'bath' in 1 gallon of seawater and 1 ml of Formalin with plenty of vigorous aeration. After 30 minutes they were returned to their tank.

It took a while for them to recover, the smaller of the two looked like he took it worse than the larger, but I'm happy to say that after 30 hours out of the bath, they appear very healthy, swim around the tank continuously, and eat heartily.

I harvested a bit of calerpa from the refugium and put it into the quarantine with them to allow them to graze on an copepods that might have come along for the ride. I'll be discarding of the calerpa soon so it doesn't foul the QTs water.

Vortech Pump

Been a while since I posted an update.

Last Sunday I installed my first Eco-Tech Marine Vortech pump. This picture is the driver/controller and the battery backup. The controller lets me set between 300 and 3000 gallons per hour of flow, and the battery backup will provide 30 hours of flow at 50% speed in case of a power failure.

So far I'm really liking the pump, but just this week they put the first batch of the wireless wave controllers up for sale and I was able to order one before they sold out.

With the wireless wave controller, I should be able to set it to provide random varying amounts of flow to simulate the wave motion on a reef. I can't wait. And if I were to get another pump and controller ( and I would like to ), I can set them on opposite sides of the tank either in sync or out of sync to provide some interesting flow effects.

The wireless controller also gives a 10 minute feed window which will be a massive improvement over having to unplug everything to feed the fish.

I also have some Black and White clown fish in quarantine right now. I'll take a picture tomorrow and blog about the efforts I went through to save them from Brooklynella. Fortunately, I think it is working.