Reef Stock – Denver Colorado – March 10, 2012

ReefStock 2012 happens on March 10, 2012 at the Denver Downtown Aquarium (700 Water Street
Denver, CO 80211). The ReefStock speakers are Colin Foord, Ret Talbot and Tony Vargas. We will have several industry leading vendors, and new corals for purchase. Tickets are $10 and Limited Edition T-shirts are $20. The doors open at 10am and close at 6pm. See you there!

ReefStock 2011 was an amazing reef show which attracted a huge crowd from the local area and visitors from coast to coast. The speakers gave ground breaking talks and the coral vendors had more coral than you can shake a frag at. The manufacturers utilized this ReefBuilders event to show off some awesome, bleeding-edge aquarium products and the raffle was populated by exciting products for marine and reef keeping needs.

Among the participants of ReefStock, Mark Callahan of Mr. Saltwater Tank joined the fray for warm-up activities, the set up of the show and the actual event. Since we had our hands full running the event and live blogging all of the new products, it was a real treat to have the Mr. Saltwater Tank film crew report on ReefStock 2011 from a unique perspective. We still have a lot of ReefStock pictures to sort through but in the meantime, enjoy this great video production of ReefStock 2011 by Mr. Saltwater Tank.

We’re just one week away from hosting the fourth ReefStock marine aquarium conference at the Denver Downtown Aquarium and the raffle has become so large, we’ve had to split it, twice! Due to the generosity of all the movers and shakers in the aquarium world who support Reef Builders and the ReefStock conference, the attendees of the March 12th event are going to be nearly overwhelmed at the mountain of raffle prizes to pick from. To simplify the raffle playing field, we’ve produced three collages which depict most of the raffle prizes based on the drawing time but we’ll be adding more prizes and some of them will be very grand. The full tentative and growing list of raffle prizes is after the break.

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The Aiptasia Zapper is ghetto, but it remains to be seen if it is also fabulous. Sometimes electricity can melt your sump, but it is now being harnessed by the Aiptasia Zapper to discombobulate unwanted cnidarians. At two feet the Aiptasia Zapper is really too long, and it looks like it was hit by the ugly stick, i.e. another Aiptasia Zapper. And at $75 is a little expensive for something that looks like it was built by a hastily trained monkey. But who cares because as soon as you start zapping ‘tazias and majano’s you’ll instantly think of all the times you could have gotten all medieval on their manuses. Elite Reef has received a small shipment of the Aiptasia Zappers and they are shipping these although it’s not yet listed on their website. ReefStock attendees will get a chance at winning one of these in the ReefStock Raffle.

ReefStock is a fun aquarium conference held in Denver Colorado, at the Denver Downtown Aquarium. One month from today, on March 12th, the 4th annual ReefStock will go down once again, featuring some of the best livestock, hottest new products, and the brightest minds in the reef aquarium world. Following up on speakers like Joshi, Kohen, Yaiullo and Karl is hard, but we believe this year’s lineup does justice to ReefStock’s tradition of having only the most stimulating speaker presentations. This year’s speakers will be Sharon Ram of Israel, Matt Wandell from San Francisco and Julian Sprung from Miami Florida.

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Mark your calendars because the fourth annual ReefStock conference is happening at the Denver Downtown Aquarium once again next year. As usual we’ll have great speakers, great vendors and live corals, an amazing raffle of great reef aquarium gear, and a few surprises that we’ll be announcing later on. If you can’t make it to the great reef aquarium party that is ReefStock, you can count on ReefBuilders to be blogging all the new products en force. See you there!

Unless you were one of the few dozen captive bred fish brought to ReefStock, chances are you didn’t get to see the show from a fisheye lens. The tight crowds made it difficult to capture how densely packed the floor was with people. corals and exhibits but ReefStock photograper Adam Knudson of Devo Photography brought his trusty fisheye lens so we could all take in the view like a fish. Many more pictures after the break.

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With over 30 aquarium LED products showed off by more than 15 companies at this year’s ReefStock, were going to go ahead a call it: The future is now and LED lighting has truly arrived to the aquarium world. Spotlights, Striplights, moonlights, twilights, power lights and all form of DIY lights used LEDs to light up the ReefStock conference at the Denver Downtown Aquarium last weekend. In addition to the predominantly LED-using coral frag vendors, the LED lighting demonstration featured lights from Japan, Hong Kong, England and especially the United States. Despite some nefarious restrictions there is no way to hold back the floodgates of aquarium LED lighting anymore and the pictures below demonstrate just how much is available now. Follow the break to see what the future of aquarium lighting will look like. Huge thanks to Adam Knudson of Devo Photography for working very hard to get us all these pictures.

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With 60-70 participants and about 400 attendees the third ReefStock was the best show yet. The crowd came early and it stayed late for the ReefScape competition, the talks and the raffle. While we were doing all we could to oil the gears of the show, we had the great fortune to get in touch with avid ReefBuilders reader Adam Knudson who volunteered for extreme photography duty. The images you will see over the next couple days are mostly his and we thank him from the bottom of our tropical saltwater heart for documenting every square inch of this show. Continue reading for the first onslaught of pictorial inundation.

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One of the big attractions at this weekend’s ReefStock is the first public viewing of the production level Seashine lights from Stray Light Optical. As we hustle to finalize all the last minute details of ReefStock, we still had time to fire up the final Beta level Seashine light that we are beginning to review. This post is just about throwing light on a wall but for all the nitty gritty details of this light, see our previous coverage. Hit the read link for our raw first impressions of the Seashine lighting up a wall.

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