Parts 1, 2, 3

The MACNA X Conference

The Conference that outdoes all others!

There is no doubt that this 10th Macna conference is one of the largest ever and that if offers more speakers, on more topics, than any other conference organized up to this date. I have attended many and have been a guest speaker at quite a few, including this one, and can only say that Macna X features speakers on more topics dealing with reef aquariums than any one that I have ever been privileged to attend.

With over 35 speakers the information exchange should top anything that has been organized from the hobby so far.

With over 50 exhibitors showing tanks and equipment from small to super large, the hobbyist should have a real feast for the eyes and have a great learning experience. Many of the exhibitors have gone far beyond what I have seen in the past and are showing aquariums and wares for every taste and pocketbook.

Over 550 participants are expected at this conference, more than at any previous MACNA conference. When I arrived many that had not preregistered were arriving and getting their tickets for the 3 day conference. A real success for sure for the Marine Aquarium Society here that is organizing it, and for its President Jim Stime and his organizing committee.

Speakers from all over the world are present and we are all sure to get some top quality information.

One thing I noticed is that this conference has a great number of speakers that have not been scheduled at conferences before. Hopefully that will bring hobbyists a lot of new information. In fact, I am quite sure it will.v

All your favorite speakers are here, Charles, Julian, Martin (may not make it due to the Hurricane in FL), Eric, Daniel, and so on, plus a large number that are not so commonly seen or heard (Check the Macna Web Site for more details.

The conference starts on Friday and I am looking forward to it. I will try to report on the more interesting facts in this document as time goes on.

Out of the morning talks after the official opening the one that was really interesting was the one by Jim Fox on Information Trickle. This talk outlined in a very interesting manner the differences between and the vast amount of information that is available and how it eventually ends up in the hobbyists hands in some form or another.

Jim pointed out that there is an emormous amount of scientific information out there, not all of it available to the hobbyist and that what reaches the hobbyist may not always be as useful in practical terms as one would expect it to be.

There are of course a whole number of reasons for this.

Researchers, Educators, Authors, and other who have this information all have different agendas, many of which do fit the ones the hobbyist has. What may be of interest to a scientist is not necessarily of use to the scientist, and vice versa.

The more scientific it gets the less practical value it usually has at the hobbyist level, or the more such information becomes diluted it may become.

As such what may be a real discovery or something really significant may not be practical. It all depends on the perspective one takes.

Very general concepts may loose some of their value as they become attenuated as they travel the information path. Of course the manner in which and by whom the information gets disseminated plays a role here to. If someone reads scientific data but does not know how to simplify the explanation for more general consumption, the hobbyist may not benefit from it as much as if it were indeed well presented in a succinct and to the point manner, explained in ways that the average hobbyist can understand.

The messenger so to speak is more important in this respect than one thinks. Informat presentation that is highly technical needs to be presented in ways that the intended audience can understand. A problem indeed for many authors who may sometimes loose sight of the fact that their readers need more explanations than are being given so that they can understand the ideas and information. Textbook approaches do not reach the layman in clearly understandable manners, and this seems to be the case in many cases.

Books for the layman should not necessarily present raw scientific data but should rephraze them in language the layman can understand. The concepts should also be presented in real life scenarios than technical and scientific generalzitions. What most hobbyits want is information they can use immediately and in a useful manner on their aquariums.

Although some hobbyists may be interested in the full scientific text, the majority are actually not and are only interested in how the theory can be applied, so the practical side of it, so says Jim.

This was the main theme of this interesting talk and it does make some real good points indeed. I agree that the material conveyed is often too technical for the majority of hobbyists and only benefits a real small percentage of the total number.

This is not unlike what happens to other knowledge in the hobby. We often forget that 0ver 90 percent of hobbyists are not on the Net and can thus not benefit from all the exchanges on one hand, and often do not even know about all the latest techniques that are in vogue. In fact, if all members of all the reef mailing lists on the net are totalled one only finds about 5000 names and that is without even removing the duplicates (hobbyists who are on a number of mailing lists). If this was done, the number would be even smaller.

Getting the info that we who are on the net have is the next challenge for the hobby and the retailer of course and would bring about another information revolution in the hobby. Hopefully this will happen soon.

There were several other presentations today on which I will report more from ATL when I get back. They were heavy in slides and hard to comment on.

I have taken and am taking as many notes as I can so I can report more upon my return as writing from here is not really working out as I had hoped. The sessions are running till about 8 PM, and with 800 plus attendants (as of Saturday) and the number of people who want to ask questions, little time is left to write and report. Last nite in fact, with the banquet following the talks, we did not wrap up till about 10 PM, and I think most of us were exhausted.

More as the conference progresses today, if I can as I am giving my second talk and then have to do onlin work for the conference via the Compuserve live chat.

What has been different at this conference is that so many of thet talks have been very visually intensive, using many many slides and videp tapes that it is far more difficult to report on the individual talks but I will sure try after I return to Atlanta.

MACNA X

Now that Macna X is over, it is a good time to reflect on what all happened in Los Angeles. First and most importantly a lot of compliments to the organizers (Masla) and in particular Jim Stime, the Club's President for organizing such a high quality conference.

It was as smooth running as any conference I have seen and I have attended just about all of them. Their organization did a tremendous job at ensuring that this major event, with over 800 participants I was told, ran without a glitch. In my opinion it is definitely the best one I have attended so far. Kudos to all who were involved in and with it.

The weather was the only problem, not in LA but in FL and resulted in several speakers having to cancel their participation (Julian Sprung, Martin Moe, and the Herndons). Professor Jaubert, who was to speak as well, was taken ill and could not make it to the conference.

Besides that though all went as planned and with so many speakers scheduled the amount of information made available was larger than what I have seen in the past. The number of scheduled speakers alone should easily convince you of that. Even with a few that had to drop out because of the hurricane in the Gulf, the amount of speakers still exceeded 30. Quite unheard of, and another first by the Masla Club.

Of course, depending on your level of expertise you may have learned more, or less. As over 1/3 of the participants were new hobbyists or hobbyists who had never attended a Macna, I surmize that most of them were able to learn quite a lot. In fact talking to some of them confirmed my suspicion. Many were in awe at the amount of new material and all the information they were able to glean from the talks and presentations.

Even advanced hobbyists will have picked up new information from the many and varied talks by experts and authors from around the world. I sure did and managed to get even more out of the conference thanks to the talks I had with many a hobbyist. It was also rewarding to be able to answer many questions they had and help or try to help them along with their tanks.

I was glad to be there, not only to give two talks but also to exchange ideas with the many hobbyists and speakers.

What makes it difficult for me to report, in detail, on this conference is two-fold:

- The conference was video taped and all tapes are available from Masla for sale at very reasonable prices. Giving the information away for free is kind of unfair to them in a way especially since they need all the money they can get to break even. I was told that it cost well over $120.000 to organize this conference. Not a small amount! Hopefully the large attendance and the fact that there were many exhibitors will have allowed them to recoup their expenses. I sure hope so, as I would not want to see the Club having to foot the bill for losses. If you really want to know what was presented and want the full presentations I strongly suggest you order the tapes from Masla.

- The speaker presented highly slide or presentation Powerpoint oriented talks. In fact, just about every speaker used either slides or a Powerpoint overhead approach. This makes it difficult to report on these talks as, without the visuals, it is hard to describe what was presented. I would also not have had the time to write it all down anyway. Moreover, giving you all the details would not be fair to the organizers, in my opinion anyway. Without income there would not be any Macna Conference to begin with. In the days that follow, after I return from Chicago where I am going next, I will try to give some brief overviews of some of the presentations. To get the full details if you wish to hear and see the speakers and the presentations, get the videotapes.

You can order them from http://www.masla.com

Personally I spoke on mangroves and their benefit for the aquarium. You can find most if not all of that information on our site. Just use the search feature and mangrove as the keyword and you will get a full listing of all the articles on mangroves that reside on our site. The URL for the search is http://www.athiel.com/search.htm

I gave a second talk, well more of a hands-on demo on how to propagate (although that may not be the correct word) LPS or large polyped stony corals, using a Catalaphyllia one to do the demo. Using a Dremel tool and a v-shaped drill I split a medium sized one in two. The Elegance coral was donated by one of the exhibitors: Coral Technology of California.

The whole demo was videotaped so anyone who gets the tapes can follow the directions quite easily.

The two pieces were then sold to hobbyists who wanted them. That is perhaps another interesting feature of this conference. There were well over 50 exhibitors and their booths were quite busy throughout the entire conference.

Does that mean that attendees were not going to the talks? No, not at all. In fact quite the contrary. Jim and and his crew had a professional firm take care of the audio visual setups. TV monitors on which the speakers could be seen and heard were placed all around the conference area and in the exhibitor rooms. In fact, this was a first as well for this conference and certainly a good one at that.

I do want to mention Mike Paletta's talk at this point. He gave a really thorough and very well documented talk on the history of the hobby, focusing on reef keeping. Mike did some super research for this and had slides to back it all up. The tape of that talk is probably the one item that will forever document the origins of reefkeeping. It is the first in depth one that I have ever seen and, because of all the material it contains, I do not think that much can be added to it.