NJRC frag swap 2010 (w/ a bunch of pics)

So, today I spent the day at the NJRC frag swap. There was quite a bit going on, with tons of vendors. I took a few pictures as I was going around. I saw Gresham there, but didn't realize it until I left (duh! lol). If anyone else from 3reef was there, I was the one wearing the Go Slow shirt haha!



Christine Williams, giving her presentation on fish disease.


Christine Williams and Rick Ross demoing how to frag acros/SPS.


I thought I took a picture when Rick Ross gave his presentation on managing a large aquarium, but I don't see it on my phone .

I ended up walking out with more money than I expected, while still walking out with more corals than I expected haha!

Small bit of cyphastrea. Was fragged right in front of me, so it'll need to recover a bit before it gets back its color





The chalice here.

Zoas, not all opened yet. Slowest one to open of the three I got.

Just the pocillopora in this one.


Millepora and seriotopora

Seriotopora in these 2 pics



I won two corals and a fragging kit in the raffle, which was gigantic. It took nearly an hour to raffle everything off. There were over 80 buckets, and quite a few had multiples available.


I won two corals in the raffle! One is a Cherry Corals chalice, and the other is a Sexy Alligator Zoa.

 

Congrats on the adds and wins.
Thanks for sharing.

 

excellent account and images Blackraven1425
seems to be a lot going on there, and very well attended
how long where you there for?
looks like a great day out to me

nice score on the additions and raffle winnings

Steve

 

I was there all day, from 9ish till 420ish. I like getting to see all the presentations (first was at 10:30), and I just had to do the raffle, which was last at 3:30 haha. Once you account for time to check out all 20 of the vendor tanks packed to the brim with coral, and talking to everybody, there's no time left in the day!

If I had a pic of the raffle, you would see how well attended it was. There were double the number of chairs as there were during the presentation, with every one full, and a line of people standing shoulder to shoulder down the line where the raffle table was, and the back wall was full too.

 

sounds like a great experience, one that I hope Ill get the chance to have at some point

where there any 3 reef sponsors at this meet?

80 buckets in the raffle - so 80 prizes in total? , thats pretty sweet IMO

You did well to win 3 - 2 corals and a fragging kit

how many tickets did you purchase?

Steve

 

You scored, cool. Nice additions.

Looks like a good turn out. What presentations did you go to?

Ahh missed that part of the post too busy checking out the photos.

What can you share regarding the presentation on disease?

 

As it turns out, no 3Reef sponsors had booths set up at the swap. Here's the full floor plan. Booths of special note were Pacific East Aquaculture (with their massive 7" clams!), Cherry Corals, and Jason Fox. Marcorocks had an unusual booth, with only a gigantic pile of rocks on the floor. ;D It was probably a couple thousand pounds of rock on a blanket. Pnoyreefer and SMCooler had really nice booths setup, and I was impressed since they're not really in the "business" of reefs, just members of the local club.



For the raffle there was more participation from 3Reef supporters. Air, Water & Ice provided a RODI and a TDS meter, Red Sea provided a C-Skim 1800, TB Aquatics provided a Bubble Magus QQ skimmer and a BM NAC 3+ skimmer, and Seachem provided a RODI, coral dip and some Reef Fusion. There was quite a bit of other stuff too, including a full (55g?) tank setup (w/lights, sump, all the plumbing), 2 tanks + stands, 2 JBJ nanocubes (6 and 12g), 2 custom-shape nano aquariums by Coast-to-Coast (one with an angled front panel and one corner tank), 2 more RODI units, like 5 boxes of salt mix, about $700 worth of corals, and quite a bit more. The biggest stuff in the raffle for most people, though, were a Panasonic digital camera and a Panasonic 50" LCD TV!

I only purchased 20 tickets, so I feel really lucky to have won anything, especially such nice pieces haha! I think I put in 3 for the chalices, only one for the zoas, and two for the frag kit.

I was actually offered to take the full tank (it's the brown canopy one in the raffle pic) by the oddest combination of circumstances. I was standing in line to get my chalice frag, and I get a tap on the shoulder from the owner of Aquatic Obsessions. He asks, "You want this tank?". I'm totally in shock by the offer, but he goes to explain that the guy who won it didn't want it. His wife accidentally dropped a ticket in for it! Too bad I have a tiny, tiny car (Honda CR-Z), and they had a requirement at the raffle that all items are out of the building by 5PM, otherwise I would have had another tank in the living room right now!

I saw the presentation on fish disease and large-scale aquariums. There was another by Tony Vargas largely on coral growth forms, where he showed the differences he observed while diving, for example at 20 feet and 80 feet, and in captivity. He also showed lots of pictures of more unusual animals he's seen while diving. I didn't get to attend this whole presentation, though.

The fish disease presentation was very interesting. It took quite a bit of time going through not just "each" disease, but general categories. For example, bacterial diseases almost never show up as multiple spots on a fish; rather, they're localized to one area. Fungii are nearly never seen in marine aquaria. Karamycin is preferred over Maracyn (erythromycin) for the rare gram-positive bacterial infections. There were pictures to ID quite a few diseases, explanations on how to do gram stianing, fish scraping, petri dish growouts. There was also a section about not discounting problems in the tank causing disease symptoms. Included: a lionfish that got up close to a heater and burned itself, butterfly fish that looked like it had fin rot but was really just being bullied, etc.

One big point: Christine Williams is a marine biologist (from her bio: "Currently she is the head of the Industrial Marine Microbiology team for her division of a "very large international chemical company,""). She has tried this many times, and says definitively that garlic (along with anything else other than copper, hyposalinity and formalin) as an actual cure is not effective. All it does is help the fish recognize what you're feeding as food if they're trained to eat garlicky foods (which can be a benefit; she emphasized proper eating as being helpful). There is no antibiotic that works on ich, which discounts garlic as a cure. Garlic has antibiotic properties, but ich is not a bacteria, so it does not matter. No cure will work during the cyst and on-fish phases; they only kill ich when it's free swimming.

 

Congrats on the new additions! I saw a couple that are in my system. It was funny as I read through your thread...I had Shannon Sharpe leaning over my shoulder and he kept saying "C'mon man!" haha jj Jealous you got to attend a show and I didn't..I love those things!
Nice pick ups. I mean that

 

Thanks for going into detail Blackraven

it really does sound like a full days entertainment to me
that close to a full new set up, and so far away eh

3 prizes from 20 tickets is pretty good going

Steve

 

Congratulations on the wins and thanks for the information. I am glad you had a great time.