melev

On April 16, 2011 I attended and spoke at the 4th Annual Reef Conference hosted by the Southwest Florida Marine Aquarium Society. It was located at the Clarion Hotel, providing plenty of space, parking and overall comfort. To start off the day, I was the first speaker and since I was going to talk about sumps and safety, I had to look the part.



From left to right: Marc Levenson, Vince Rado of AlgaGen, Kevin Gaines of the Coral Restoration Project

The Reef Conference is a combination education, frag swap and raffle. For the educational element, I spoke about sumps and how to set them up correctly, Vince spoke about copepods in a reef aquarium as well as for marine ornamental fish breeding, and Kevin's presentation was about the Coral Restoration project in the Florida Keys and coral nurseries.

The sellers of frags were both hobbyists and businesses. And everyone has their own way of displaying and distributing their items.




I liked this next tank because the light was hidden in a palm tree. I must have come back to this one 10 times that day, and purchased a few of their frags.




Look at how the corals are mounted on clear acrylic rod, and its name is affixed to the base. What a great way to keep track of what's what when you get home, especially if you are new to the hobby. The O-ring kept it from sliding too far through the shelf.





Jason was present with a variety of chalices.




The Frag Farmer is based in Florida; I've seen him on Facebook. He was selling vivid rock anemones in addition to the stuff you'd expect to find.


Plugfun was the only vendor to have a bunch of Florida ricordea. So I bought a dozen.




They also had this particular zoanthid that was gorgeous from above, but putting two polyps in a 400g seems dumb. A picture lasts forever though.


The drygoods raffle tables were in the center of the room. Tickets were affordable, 30 for $20.


Reefaholics was selling livestock as well as LED light fixtures.




This was a hobbyists frag tank.


Another hobbyist. When I got to this tank, this stunning chalice on a Mag(netic) rock was already sold! I got a frag of it though.




I also got this deepwater coral.


This was my favorite spot that day, at the Gulf Coast Ecosystem booth. It felt like Florida with all the cool livestock he had on hand. All kinds of gorgonians, at least 10 kinds of macro algae, cucumbers, snails, starfish and more... I ended up buying a huge purple gorgonian, some sea grass, and got a piece of C. barbata for my refugium.












Reeflo was there to showcase their new pumps.


The new BloHole pump. Read all about it here: http://www.reefaddicts.com/content.p...e-little-tanks


The Hybrid Dart-Snapper pump


NextReef had their reactors on display. They make sumps and check out their new protein skimmer to the far right.


This is the one I use for the NP biopellets.




This is all livegoods raffle prizes. People won corals and I think a few fish.


This is what I ended up winning:



And this is what I brought home and immediately put in quarantine:



Yesterday's blog shows all the items in detail: http://www.reefaddicts.com/entry.php...s-from-Florida

The entire day was enjoyable. It didn't feel rushed or crowded, and you had plenty of time to peruse the tanks to find the corals you wanted and enter for the prizes you wanted to win. Then again, I was a guest and didn't have to work the event, but it seemed to flow nicely.

While I was in Florida, I got to see Jeff D'huyvetter's beautiful Solar-powered reef. He has three Sola-Tubes that bring in natural sunlight into his tank each day, and has 20,000K MH for the evenings. His tank is 8' long. By the time I flew in to town, we were down to MH lighting, thus lots of blue in these images. The fishroom behind has a large frag tank full of corals. I bought a few from him on the spot.

Left


Middle


Right


This is a very interesting growth pattern. The acropora completely encrusted the area before it finally began to sprout tips.


Jeff's favorite starfish is the Harlequin Star. He has 12 in his tank, and whenever he's out collecting tries to find more. I wish I could have gotten a shot of own out in the open, but they were deep in the rockwork.


His clownfish use a clam's shell to spawn their eggs.