Thanks Capman

Thanks.

I always hope to show people much more than I accomplish at these meetings (and possibly more than what folks would want to sit still for anyway), and then I end up feeling like I ignored my guests because I'm fooling around with microscopes and such.

Maybe next time, if there is interest, I can show some more of the videos that I had misplaced this evening. I have some wonderful views of a live sponge pumpng water that I wanted to show, some fun closeup views of seastar feet in action, and a number of other cool things I'm forgetting.

By the way I apologize for forgetting to get the Aquatic Ecosystems catalog for you folks with the pipefish (sorry, I'm already forgetting a lot of the names from this evening, even though I do remember meeting many of you prior to this evening). You can find an online catalog and request a printed catalog at http://www.aquaticeco.com This is a great catalog, which, among other things, has a number of products for enriching live brine shrimp prior to feeding them to fish. You can also get SELCO from http://www.brineshrimpdirect.com/ I'm no expert on seahorses and pipefish, but my understanding is that enriching the nutritional value of brine shrimp is pretty important if you are feeding brineshrimp to your fish.

Also,
Jon H...I had meant to give you that urchin we had talked about. Sorry I forgot to do this before you left. Maybe another time (e.g. I you help move that tank we talked about, maybe that would be a good time).

Also,
David...I meant to get a good photo of those Acropora bugs for you. I think though that I'll have to sit and fiddle with the microscope a bit to get a better image. I should be able to get a much better view of it if I have more time to spend on it without distractions. If you want to drop some more off sometime (preferably afeter school starts...Ihave too much to do otherwise before then), I can get some video of them and some decent quality still photos at high magnification. I'm not an expert at identifying tiny crustaceans, but they really sort of looked like some sort of ostracods to me.

Thanks to everyone for coming.

And special thanks to Dirk and the other person (sorry about my bad memeory for names!!!...especially seeing as we stood and talked for awhile!) who solved the metal halide ballast problem! (and sorry Dirk for having you haul that extra ballast up here for nothing).

I had fun tonight and I'll try to host another one of these meetings next year.

Bill