|
|
Prelude To IMAC 2007
By: Dennis Gallagher
|
A History of IMAC
For years I had been an officer in MASNA and I was involved in planning for several MACNAs. Unfortunately, in 2002, I had a dispute with the then president and I had to leave. In 2003, MACNA was to be held in Dallas but I learned from their website that, due to financial problems, there would be no MACNA that year. Since I felt that an annual conference was very important to the hobby, it was then that I decided to put on an IMAC (International Marine Aquarium Conference).
Preparations were going well and then the Dallas-Ft. Worth Club decided that they could host a MACNA after all; but I had already signed a contract with a hotel so it was too late to cancel IMAC. That first year we had a small attendance (just over 200) but all the attendees seemed to have a good time and, although I personally lost a lot of money on it, we thought we would try it again, to recoup some of the money we lost.
| Figure 1: | 
Figure 1: Attendee's enjoy some friendly talk at the banquet. |
In 2004, our attendance increased to about 350 and we had a great list of speakers:
Adam Blundell, “Locomotive Patterns of Reef Fishes”
Eric Borneman, “Coral Culture for Disease Research and Restoration”
Anthony Calfo, “Coral Farming-At Home and Under the Sun”
Tullio Dell Aquilla, “Natural Reef Aquariums”
Bob Fenner, “History of Captive Rearing”
Paul Holthus, “MAC Certification Forum for Hobbyists”
Dr. Tim Hovanec, “Marine Aquarium Microbiology”
Dr. Sanjay Joshi, “ Reef Lighting”
Marc Lamont, “Captive Breeding Seahorses”
Allen LaPointe, “Dissolved Gasses in Aquaculture Facilities and Aquariums”
Dr. Charles Mazel, “Undersea Fluorescence”
Dr. David Meyer, “Feather Stars and Sea Lillie’s in the Wild”
Scott Michael, “My Favorite Fishes”
Jeff Mitchell , “Diseases in Hippocampus”
Beth Ann Panocha, “Dressing Your Seahorses for Success”
Randy Reed, “Culturing Rotifers and Copopods”
Steve Robinson, “Converting Cyanide Fishermen into Netsmen”
Mark Schick, “Live Foods in the Marine Aquarium”
Dr. Ron Shimek, “Myth-takes About Sand Beds”
Walt Smith, “What do we Grow, How do we do it, Who Cares?”
Dr. Clyde Tamaru, “A Practical Approach for Marine Aquarium Fish Culture”
| Figure 2: | 
Figure 2: Anthony Calfo gives a fragging demonstration for the guests. |
We still lost money but not as much as in our first year. We also learned how to cut costs more, while keeping up the quality of the conference. And, we kept IMAC in the Spring to avoid competing with MACNA. Since we never learned where MACNA would be held early enough to schedule IMAC in a distant city, we decided to hold IMAC in Chicago every year, so at least MASNA would know where IMAC would be and could schedule MACNA accordingly. Our goal was a high quality conference aimed at hobbyists who could not afford to attend other marine aquarium conferences.
In 2005, our attendance was over 500 and we just about broke even. Our success was primarily due to the dedicated volunteers who worked IMAC: Kim Vladic who ran the Registration Desk, Dale Vladic who helped with the Exhibitors and made a couple of runs to the Shedd Aquarium for salt water, Joel Ostrow and Bob Sosolik who helped manage the attendees and helped out with speaker introductions. C.J. Scheppers, Jamie and Britta Logan (not volunteers, but this was the 5th conference they worked) did a great job with the A/V.
For 2006, we are hoping to exceed an attendance of 600 and maybe finish a little in the black. We have increased the Exhibit Room enough to hold about 70 Booths and we are getting close to filling all of them.
Again, we have an impressive list of speakers:
Jake Adams, “Water Flow Speed is Critical in Our Aquaria”
Adam Blundell, “Filtration Methods in a Natural Reef Aquarium”
Eric Borneman
Bob Fenner, “Organism Selection for the Saltwater Aquarist”
Anthony Calfo, “A Call to Farms. More Efficient Coral Propagation Techniques”
Tullio Dell Aquilla, “Advanced Lighting Technologies for Aquariums”
Todd Gardner, “Seahorse Nutrition in Aquaculture”
Dr. Sanjay Joshi, “Designing Reef Aquarium Systems – Thwarting Murphy’s Laws”
John Kelly, “Goniopora – A New Beginning”
Allen LaPointe, “Water Quality Monitoring and Data Interpretation”
Mike Paletta, “Setting Up a LARGE Aquarium”
Steven Pro, “Recent Experiments with ‘Reef Safe’ Treatments”
Dr. Adelaide Rhodes , “The Role of Copopods in Marine Reefreeping”
Dana Riddle, “Tide Pools of Kahalu’u Hawaii. What they tell us about Reef Aquaria”
Zack Schwartz, “K-12 Education and the Science Behind it”
Walt Smith (Banquet Speaker)
Julian Sprung “Invasive Species”
And, we have solved the problem that occurs at other big conferences with a lot of speakers. People like the large number of speakers but, in order to get them all in during a weekend conference, the organizers have to schedule 3 or 4 speakers at the same time in different rooms, and attendees often have difficulty deciding which one to see. So, this year we are trying something new. Although we will have 2 speaker rooms, we are staggering the speakers so it will be possible to see ALL of them. You may have to slip out of one room during the Q&A to go to see another speaker, but at least you can see them all.
| Figure 3: | 
Figure 3: A snapshot of the exhibit hall where guests can not only browse, but shop as well! |
Of course, the IMAC Raffle is always a high point of the conference. There are always a lot of items being raffled off and most people win something. This year the Grand Prize is a 9 day trip for 2 to Fiji, donated by Walt Smith International. The First Prize is a fully equipped 76-gallon tank, with stand, canopy, lights, live rock, corals, fish, etc. from Oceanic Systems. There are also MH lights, protein skimmers, additives and other goodies.
You can also go home with coral frags because there will be 2 coral fragging workshops conducted by Eric Borneman, Anthony Calfo and Steven Pro with the frags being given away and the FragExchange.com booth will be giving frags away all weekend. You will want to bring some extra cash with you because there are always “Show Specials” in the Vendor area, especially on Sunday afternoon when they are packing up to go home. Some of them would rather sell something at a great discount instead of having to ship it home.
If you have never attended a major conference I would strongly suggest that you try a (relatively) inexpensive IMAC. You will learn a great deal, not only from the speaker presentations, but also by talking with the speakers afterwards (maybe having a drink with them in the bar). You can get more info from the IMAC website http://www.theimac.org.
|
|
|
