MAS 2025 EXPO (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter Willie
- Start date
What a show!
I indeed was involved, but this was set up almost entirely by my former student Sequoia (Kayla) Cross and her husband', and when visitors were in the lab looking at things through the microscopes they were the people overseeing and facilitating that, helping people with the microscopes, telling them stories about the animals, etc (they even moved stools around so that small kids could look through the microscopes, and helped the kids). They were really great! I was busy talking to visitors nearly non-stop (Sequoia's husband went out to Chipotle to get some food, and pretty much forced me to take a break to eat my burrito), so I certainly would not have had the bandwidth to deal with the microscope thing (which I think was about 10 microscopes!).
Plus, my current student Joscelin who helps take care of the lab and our Berghia culturing was the slug wrangler, who kept nice happy active frisky Berghia on the fancy scope with the camera, being displayed on the two video displays. I was blown away by the first one that Jocelyn got up there, an adult that was eating at the time. Not only could we see the heart beating clearly, but we could see the food moving from the mouth into the digestive tract, which branches out into the cerata (the gills), and we could see movement into that cerata happening clearly on the big HD screens. I was practically jumping up and down to try to get people to look, because I had never seen this before (I certainly could have, but I guess never got around to trying before). I should try to get some good video of this.
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Good!
I certainly could have improved the talk in various ways, but I think I put more time, effort, and anxiety into preparing that talk than any presentation I've done since my job seminar years ago when I was interviewing for my job at Augsburg.
I had a very large amount to say, with limited time to say it all (which of course is always the case with presentations).
I'm thinking of putting together one or maybe a series of YouTube videos, focusing at the very least on the portions of that talk dealing with the rationale, function, and design of those rearing tub systems. When I was getting started I didn't find anything of this sort available anywhere, and didn't really fully figure out how to design and build our system until I visited Tim Morrissey at the Omaha Zoo, who invited me down to see their larval rearing setup.
We had counters at the door and recorded 2,050 attendees between 9 - 6, not including all the members and volunteers staffing the various functions. Two television crews came to film the event. This makes Aquarium EXPO 2025 easily the biggest aquarium show in North America!