At the start of September, the 20th MACNA (Marine Aquarium Conference of North America) was held in Atlanta, Georgia.  The conference always combines excellent speakers on the hobby and scientific research with a trade show where vendors can show off their new equipment.  This was the first time Anna and I have gone, and my mom went along, too.  We had such a good time we signed up to go to MACNA XXI in Atlantic City next year!

My favorite display at the trade show was the Zero Edge Aquarium display by ORA.  ORA produces aqua-cultured corals and mari-cultured fish from captive bred stock to lessen the demand on wild caught livestock.  At the end of they show, they raffled off all of the fish, coral, and clams in the tank!  I only put a ticket in for a clam, but sadly, I did not win.

Another excellent display was the Drs. Foster and Smith booth.  They had two tanks setup.  The first was a smaller all-in-one cube style tank with tons of beautiful ricordea and the other was an incredible three-tiered zero edge style tank.  The first level contained a refugium and mangroves while the other two tiers contained live rock, corals, and fish.  The clever part of the display was each level had several frogfish that you could only see if you were looking carefully!

All of the vendors brought neat equipment.  I saw a direct comparison of the PFO Solaris against metal halides using meters for light output and power consumption.  LED technology is amazing and they are brighter and use less power than metal halides, but their initial cost is astounding.  Someday I would like to have an LED fixture, but the cost is putting them out of reach.  Reef Nutrition had a booth showing their live copepod product called Tigger Pods and their foods.  I bought some Tigger Pods and Phytofeast and put the pods into my refugium when I got home!  My Reef Creations had a huge display with plenty of skimmers, sumps, and reactors.  The parent company for Kent, Coralife, Oceanic, etc also had a large booth and gave full-sized samples of Marine C and a buffering solution!  Fin’s Reef had a monster skimmer from H&S and Seachill had a chiller cooling the lemonade they were handing out!  Finally, the Tunze display had all of their major products on display and a few new things as well.

There were some incredible corals and clams for sale, but I decided prior to going to MACNA that I was not going to bring back any livestock.  That worked out well because much of the coral I wanted were priced well into the hundreds of dollars!  One giant clam was initially priced at $650 but dropped to $450 on Sunday, but it was a beautiful clam!

Finally, I did buy some things that I really liked.  I bought 3 Deep Water Rock-Mags from Aqua-Mags.  These are fake rocks they have made and have magnets in them so they can be suspended along the walls of an aquarium.  I also bought Anthony Calfo’s Coral Propagation book and he signed it for me.  In the raffle, I won a collection of his “C The Journal” magazines and a four pack of Ocean’s Blend supplements for calcium, strontium, magnesium, and iodide.  I also bought a bunch of Coral magazines as I cannot find them anywhere in the Cincinnati area.  As you can see, we had a great time.  You can see the rest of the pictures here.

I will add pictures from the Georgia Aquarium at a later date.