Going to MACNA 2012?

[Myka]

Well that was AWESOME!!!! I will definitely be going again next year. MACNA 2013 is in Miami, Florida at a sweet looking hotel/resort. There were 1400 people this year, and soooo many booths! I didn't even get to look at everything. On the last day when everyone was packing up you could get like 75% off on corals.

The Saturday night banquet dinner was done very well, and our speaker was JEAN-MICHEL COUSTEAU! His talk was at least 2 hours long where he showed new videos, old videos of his father, and talked a lot about preservation of the world's reefs. He was very impressed by the booths at MACNA and was really happy to see so many cultured corals and captive bred fish.

I came back with about 3 t-shirts, half a pound of various food samples, a MaxiJet 900, a bunch of Vertez media bags, and the entire AquaCraft supplement line which were all free from raffles or handouts.

I brought back 8 Zoa and Paly frags. I put them in my checked luggage with no heat packs, just wrapped them up in my clothing. Customs went through the suitcase en-route at some point, but they didn't inspect at customs in Saskatoon when I claimed my baggage and claimed that I had "non-CITES cultured coral in synthetic seawater mounted on synthetic plugs with no live rock". The frags were in bags for around 26 hours. I put a water bottle of hot water next to the frags overnight, but they didn't have any heat source in the cold plane cargo area. They have been in my tank for about an hour and half of them are open already.

I can't remember all the names (some didn't have names), but I did get Blue Agave and WOW Palys. Those are the only ones I remember. I will get pics once they all open.

I couldn't believe how many LEDs were at MACNA. I think Ushio was the only one there representing metal halides, and I think it was just Sunlight Supply and Aquatic Life representing T5s. There was also a huge array of LED styles, effects, prices, and colors. Some were very busy looking - what I call "the disco effect" which was awful to look at. This effect was seen in cheaper LEDs as well as some of the more expensive ones.

Sanjay Joshi had a great presentation on reef lighting. He's all for LEDs, but also pointed out that there is no "best" LED fixture, more that there are better options for different tanks. He also talked a lot about how PAR is measured, and that measuring PAR on LED light is very difficult and often inaccurate because LEDs often have as many hot spots as there are LEDs because LEDs are difficult to spread really evenly. So the spotlight effect will show very high PAR values in one spot where an inch away will be much lower. He talked about how depth of tank and fixture height plays a strong role in choosing complementary optics (and plays a significant role in the "disco effect"). From his presentation, my take from it was that Radions (and one other new brand I can't think of right now) are leading the way for PAR values. The PAR of these fixtures is so high that they can cause photo-inhibition in LPS (and even lower light) corals. From the data Sanjay provided it seems these high-PAR fixtures are best suited to SPS tanks.

Hans-Werner Balling spoke twice, once about basic balling method and one very in-depth talk about carbon dosing. There seemed to be a significant language barrier which made it a bit difficult to listen to, but his knowledge is outstanding. I felt bad for him when he didn't understand people's questions real well...it was tough for him. I only caught the carbon-dosing talk which was so in-depth he was talking about the atomic make up of different carbon sources. It was very interesting though.

Too much to tell all...!

The trip there was a disaster! The flight leaving Saskatoon was 2 hrs late because of network communication problems (several airlines were affected). This made me miss my connection in Minneapolis so I spent the night in the shoddy Ramada there (which Delta paid for), and had to get up at 5 am for the early flight to Dallas which was nice to get there fairly early. I was still a couple later than the grand opening which was annoying. Long story short, my luggage didn't arrive until Friday evening and after I still didn't have it at the hotel on Saturday morning I went to go to the airport to pick it up which cost me lack of sleep, $60, and 3 hrs. Very annoying.

I wish I would have taken more pictures of the Sheraton hotel, there were huge MACNA signs everywhere. It is a massive hotel with several towers of rooms and huge banquet/show rooms. None of my group left the hotel until Sunday evening when MACNA was over.