This weekend I attended Next Wave, the Dallas/Fort Worth Aquarium Club's yearly conference. They held it last Saturday at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens. Their club presidency was very generous to me and gave me a lot of pointers on how to hold a conference, and what it takes to pull one off successfully. They also allowed me to hang out with them both before and after the conference and hob nob with the speakers. My thanks to many of their presidency and members, their president Matt and his first girlfriend Amy, Ryan, Rick, and Marc. I was also very pleased to spend some time with some of the speakers, Bruce Carlson, Bob Fenner and Jake Adams. They are all great guys to hang around with, listen to, and watch them drink beer.
I arrived in Dallas/Fort Worth Friday afternoon and had some free time to hang around the hotel and get some food and sleep. (In order to be able to go I had to spend many days working late into the night so I would be caught up on all my work.) Around 8:00 when the presidency was finally finished setting up of the next days events they picked up those of us who were from out of town and took us to a BBQ restaurant. Needless to say I over ate, but it was sooooo worth it. I don't get great Texas BBQ everyday. When the finally kicked us out of the place at 11:30 we returned to the hotel where most of the presidency had also gotten a room and hung around chatting in the lobby until about 1:30. (Knowing we all had to be up at 6:00 to make it to the meeting by 8:00 am I don't know why we couldn't be smarter and go to bed, but that seems to be how conferences work.)
The next day we were up bright and early, but not feeling fully awake yet. Since I had rented a car I followed Matt and the speakers to the convention location about 25 minutes from the hotel. We arrived right at 8:00 and almost immediately found out that some of the presidency, who hadn't stayed at the hotel, were running about 40 minutes late. That made the members happy since they now had more time to spend looking at, and purchasing the coral frags that were being offered by the vendors before the first talk stared. (More on the vendors later.)
Sitting: Bob Fenner, Standing Center: DWFS President Matt, Also sitting: DWFS First Girlfriend Amy.
When Bruce Carlson finally went on he gave a talk on fishes of the Indonesian Reefs. Bruce is the Science Officer at the Atlanta Aquarium and is the former director of the Waikiki aquarium. He said he has around 2000 hours of video footage of fish that somehow no one ever gets to see so he was going to share it with us. He had some amazing footage of many fish in their natural habitat. Many were unusual fish that we as hobbyists do not get to see often. Some was of fish that are fairly rare and many that are difficult to find in the wild. He had some cool footage of Garden Eels. He also had some footage that at first looked totally black. He joking told us that he meant to show us the black pictures and then after we had all had a good laugh he proceeded to show us the Black video footage and explain that what we were seeing was footage taken late at night of headlight fish. We soon began to see small streaks of light like shooting stars that were swimming by the camera. First some then more and more appeared. Toward the end of the 20-30 second footage a large fish whose eyes glow with light swam into the picture. He explained that bacteria in sacks under the fish's eyes create the light and that the fish can rotate those sacks so that the light shines out or so that the light cannot be seen. Very cool!
Jake Adams spoke after Bruce was done. His talk was on water flow. Jake calls himself a practicing professional aquarist. He says that he is a professional, but is still always practicing in the hobby to become better. He professionally maintains only very high end tanks and actually does only two and half tanks professionally. I asked how that works and he told me that he takes care of one tank when the owner is out of town for 2 weeks each month. (I thought maybe he only took care of half the tank and let the other half go unmaintained.) I found his talk very interesting in that he goes against what many aquarists believe is correct water flow. The major difference is that he has scientifically studied his water flow ideas and has data to prove that it works the way he says it does. (Mark P. if you are reading this now is the time to take a moment to relax and take a few deep breaths before continuing.) Jake believes that water flow in a tank 5 feet long or more should have laminar flow from one corner of the tank across the length of the tank and mostly if not only at the surface of the water. You need to have enough water flow to create around 15 to 20 inches of movement per second. (So if you drop food in the tank for instance it will shoot across the tank 15 to 20 inches in 1 second. This will create enough water flow to create a gyro in the tank. (The toilet swirl effect.) With the water motion at this rate when the flow hits a surface, such as a coral, rock or tank wall it will create eddies that will swirl back around the coral and rock. This will help keep food in suspension to feed the coral and keep waste in suspension to help it get filtered out better than other types of flow. He advises that this flow should reverse direction after a while since a single direction flow will create strange looking corals that all grow the direction of the flow. He showed us some video of a 1200 gallon tank he maintains. This tank is 10 feet long 4 feet deep and 4 feet high. He has placed 8 Vortex power heads at one end of the tank, four in front and 4 in back. Four of these are on at any given time producing a stream of flow across the tank and circling around to the back and returning. After 15 or 20 minutes those shut off and the other 4 turn on to reverse the flow. The fish in the tank seemed to love playing in the water flow swimming directly into it. The video show him feeding flake food to the tank and it was amazing how fast the food shot across the tank with the fish following to get their meal. He showed a large clownfish hosting in a beautiful, huge, red, carpet anemone at the opposite end of the tank from the Vortexes. He said that in order to feed this fish pellets they had to be dropped in the tank 4 or 5 feet upstream or they would not fall far enough to come near the anemone before being blown half way across the tank.
After Jake answered a few questions it was time for lunch. Due to unavoidable complications lunch was not provided by the club. Instead everyone was on their own for lunch. The club had put together a 6 page list with maps of restaurants within just a few miles of the botanical gardens. Those that did not feel they needed lunch could stay and hang out with the vendors in the vendor hall learning about supplements that were being offered for sale, purchasing frags or hard goods and just generally chatting and having a good time. This was also a great time to buy raffle tickets and check out all the raffle items that were up for grabs. They had a lot of really cool raffle items. Everything from Supplements to Frag packs and hard goods such as RO/DI filters and photo boxes from Melev's Reef, a 29 gallon Oceanic Biocube, and a 60 gallon tank and stand from one of their LFS that was there as a vendor. Lunch was also a great time to check out the 90 gallon tank the Botanical Garden keeps. They had a nice looking reef with many of the same corals we keep, such as frogspawn, Kenya tree, etc. To us aquarist the corals looked kind of sad and not very well stocked. The fish on the other hand were absolutely beautiful. They had a Blue Tang, Yellow Tang, Royal Gramma, Scooter Blenny, a Dwarf Lionfish, 2 clowns in a rose bubble tipped anemone that had recently spawned and were caring for their eggs on the bottom of the tank, and 2 of the most beautiful Blue Spot Jawfish I have ever seen. Their fish were in absolutely perfect health. None of them had any blemishes on them and they were all very friendly active fish that did not go hide when the tank was approached. One of the blue spot Jawfish even hung out 6 or 8 inches from it's hidey-hole almost all the time without feeling the need to retreat to it. The other stayed in its hole, but kept watch with its head sticking out the whole time.
After lunch it was time for more speakers, this time Eric Borneman. His talk focused on the collection of corals and fish from Indonesia, Fiji, and Australia. He showed data on how many fish and corals were harvested from these areas each year and mentioned that almost 80% are shipped to the US for the aquarium trade market. The numbers show that reefs in the areas our livestock comes from are in great danger of being irreparably harmed. He also showed statistics that the reefs that have been opened up in Australia are in the same danger. Specifically corals that are highly desired by us aquarists, such at cataphylia sp. (Elegance Corals). He showed documentation that showed that 5000 were removed from the reefs last year and that the numbers were probably actually much higher than that. It seemed the premise of his talk was mostly to say that we should stop keeping corals and fish in our aquariums so that importation will stop, thus ending the collection of these species from the reefs.
Bob Fenner was the final speaker of the day. His topic was "Hitchhikers". He spoke about how they come in, which are good and which are bad, what we can do to keep them from getting in our tanks if indeed that is our goal, and threw in a few surprise thoughts that many were quite shocked at. One of his biggest admonishments was that we should keep quarantine tanks. He actually harped on this topic quite a bit. We found through raise of hands that of the 120 or so people there only about a dozen actually used quarantine tanks. Bob seemed quite surprised that there were so many. He said he actually expected far fewer. When questioned he admitted that there were a few species of fish that he believed did better without quarantine and specifically mentioned Anthias. He said he believed the 1 time shock of going into the final tank was less stressful on them than the shock of being moved one more time and he felt that they would usually be fed better in the final tank than in the quarantine tank and they are usually already starved for too long. One of the shocking things he mentioned in his talk was that crabs should not be put in our reef tanks. Everyone seemed to agree until he put up a picture of an Emerald Crab and a Blue-Leg Hermit Crab. The he said "I'm OK, I'm just a vegetarian" in a little Emerald Crab voice. He then said "Don't believe it." He said these little guys are omnivores and they will eat anything they can to get a meal. If we don't feed them enough they will eat other things including our corals. I later mentioned to him that headline article of the Reef Keeping magazine that was given away by Marc Levenson, the editor, was on how great Porcelain Crabs are in reef tanks. (This was while Marc was also listening in.) Immediately both Bob and Bruce said, almost in unison, "Porcelain Crabs aren't crabs, they're lobsters." Well, that put me in my place.
After all the talks were finished the raffle prizes were given away. There must have been 75-100 prizes total. They did things very similar to the way we do our December meetings where there is a bucket for each item and people put their tickets in for the prized they wish to win. Something they did differently was to have 2 different tickets. One cost $1 the other $5. $5 tickets were used for the higher end prizes such as the tanks, the Tunze Stream and the Vortex pumps. Needless to say a large percentage of participants left having won something and a few were very happy having won a great raffle prize.
I said I would mention the vendors later and it is now their turn. There were 4 vendors selling frags. They had anything from high end top dollar corals and frags such as Multicolored Acans and Fancy SPS in all kinds of colors to cheaper items such as finger leathers, small zoanthid frags, Mushrooms, and brown Montipora. It seemed that most of the vendors either sold out or nearly sold out except the local stores who kept sending people back to their stores to bring more as the best corals sold. There were also several vendors selling hard goods or touting their brand of additives. Brightwell was there as well as Seachem. Tunze was also showing off their product line. I was able to pick up some Aptasia X from Red Sea and a small frag of "Red People Eater" Zoanthids to bring home. I wasn't sure the frag would make it since it had to sit in a bag for almost 2 days, but after putting it in my tank late Sunday night it was fully open and looking happy Monday morning.
It was amazing to see how fast the vendors could pack up after the show was over.
Most of them that were selling corals had their tanks down and out of the building in less than half and hour.
While all this was happening a few of us out of towners were given a rare treat.
(Hold on to something Sukie.)
We loaded up in Marc Levenson's car and went to his place to see his awesome tank in person.
Here's a great picture of it...
http://melevsreef.com/ Marc's fish room is awesome and that gigantic umbrella leather is a site to see.
Makes me wish I had one.
One of the more interesting thinks Marc is doing with his tank is dosing Vodka.
He has little drip system he uses to dose it into his sump and he took the time while we were there to do it for the day.
He told us that he had a huge problem with Nitrates for a long time, but after dosing Vodka every day for several months he finally had them down to less than 20 ppm.
All I know is whatever he is doing his tank looks awesome!
Afterward many members, the presidency, the speakers and I met at a Tex Mex Place for dinner. The place was extremely busy, the food was good, the service was awful, and we spent the next 5 hours just chatting away about anything and everything that came to mind. All in all we had a great time.
From there we headed back to the hotel where Bob, Jake, Rick and I took an hour or so to relax and chat some more before heading to bed, again around 1:00 am. You can bet the hotel staff had to wake me up the next day at check out time or I would have slept right through the day.
This conference was awesome! I suggest that anyone who is able to attend a conference of this sort do so. Take the time to hang out with the speakers afterward and you'll probably have as great a time as I did.
Edited by Will Spencer - January 29 2009 at 9:48pm
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