Dr. Craig Bingman: A bit of chemistry, coral calcification and some reefkeeping history | MACNA 2019

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Dr. Craig Bingman is one of the earliest pioneers to the saltwater aquarium hobby and was recently honored with being the 2019 MASNA Award winner for his foundational role in understanding the chemical processes in aquariums.
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[@sdfilmfolks]

Craig is exactly this wonderful a person when you meet him. Brain the size of a small moon.

[@FranklinDattein]

The first half of the presentation is priceless, for those that were hobbyist in the 90's and can relate to it. Thanks for sharing it, legend.

[@Fish_Ventura]

This was great!

[@rentAscout]

I got admit the beginning was rough, rather chaotic delivery imo. But I think it’s worth the watch, he said some very interesting things that makes you question what we really know. I believe its great the hobby has a few serious scientifically minded individuals guiding us mere mortals around.

[@tfpjr]

I miss Gary and Christine too! Thanks for the talk Craig!

[@craigbingman5877]

Yes, they were an important and appreciated part of my week for a long time. There are many newer podcasts coming along though. Some of them are very much worth your time.

[@NTACvOS]

Typical KZbin commentators. LOL. Blame BRS for the lame title....misleading click-bait. It's not about chemistry, coral calcifacion and reef keeping history. It's about Craig getting MASNA's Aquarist of the Year award. (And maybe get a clue who Craig is....he and his contributions to the hobby pre-date the World Wide Web.)

[@PerfectEnemyDN]

bumpy start but good talk overall.

[@sdfilmfolks]

He has a hangover. Reef Respect.

[@tom-andrethomsen]

I took his arrogance as an inside joke, to the people that he was picking on. Being proud of our accomplishments, also in the public arena, should be accepted. It fuels the motivation for continuing to innovate. I agree that he had a bumpy start, but some of the information past the half-way point was great. I especially appreciated the bit about varying rates of decline of micro-elements in tanks with less vs. more coral coverage! I never thought about that. Makes me consider a close to 100% water change, as one of my candy cane corals and my chalice have as of late started to turn more and more pale, although there has been made no adjustments to lighting and SG/tp/alk/ca/mg are all being kept stable.

[@craigbingman5877]

Hi Tom-André. Joe and Rich are two of my oldest and most valued friendships in the hobby. The ribbing was 100% friendly, although it might have seemed a little rough from someone outside. Unless my recollection is flawed, they were both in the audience. The ribbing revolved around my request for samples from modern, very good reef systems to support a panel of measurements and analyses I made for my New Orleans MACNA presentation. I should have started on it earlier. Unfortunately when I was ready to start the experiment, Rich needed to go out of the country on work trip and didn't want to stick his tank sitters with all of the food measurements that were required. Joe made an understandable decision that the overhead in accumulating data in way I needed would a burden he didn't want to impose on his operation. I had hoped to get data on that system, for two reasons. One it is arguably one of the most successful reef systems in the world, and I think some people would be really interested in these biochemical performance numbers on the tank. Also, it is a several-fold larger in linear dimensions and a factor of 100 larger in volume than most of the other systems I was able to study. It would have been interesting to see if the calcification model scaled to larger systems, or I was doing something that worked for systems in the 10^2 gallon range, but broke when applied to systems in the 10^4 gallon range. The "I WON" slide might have been off-putting I suppose, but consider this: the first time a person who would later win the MASNA Award ventured out onto the information superhighway, I got flattened by a juggernaut of a flame war involving calcium and alkalinity. If you are a person starting out now, and you are getting roughed up in the forums, or whatever, if you have evidence behind your statements, stick to your guns. In twenty years you might be the person putting up the "I WON" slide.

[@bbieger2]

I won this award, and then I did this, and then me, and then I won, and then I did all these great things but I cant give a decent presentation

[@CalebChapman12]

Good talk, but I’m pretty sure being off by 50% will get you fired in most real world jobs...

[@craigbingman5877]

Hi Caleb. I think that depends on the job. Observed calcification rates for coral communities in the wild vary by a factor of two or so. Surely we wouldn't suggest that all of the scientists who have measured these rates should lose their jobs? Before you heard the talk or read my earlier work, would you have been able to estimate within a factor of two how much calcium carbonate a given reef tank will demand? Probably not. If you want to get closer than this, you need to fold in data on water flow, actual concentrations of alkalinity and calcium, light, structure and species present. It gets complicated really fast, and this simple model was an effort to make things, well, simple enough that people could get a rough estimate of calcium carbonate demand so they might know how to size their calcium carbonate reactors, decide if limewater was likely to cut it, and develop a rough budget for how much two-part supplement they were likely to use in a year.

[@wildlife3083]

Huge ego on this guy which makes it very difficult to sit through but there's some very good info here if you're patient

[@craigbingman5877]

Sometimes people mistake confidence, accomplishment and pride in what one has done for ego. On this occasion I have exactly ZERO apologies to make for it being obvious that I am proud of this body of work. This is the text of my prepared acceptance speech for the MASNA Award the previous night, which I expected to be recorded but apparently was not. Otherwise it would have been in the into for this talk. _______________________________________ Thank you, Julian for your very generous introduction. It is with great happiness that I share this evening with all of you. My parents were able to attend my first MACNA talk, in 1996, in Kansas City. Unfortunately, my mother and father cannot be here tonight, as my father has advanced Alzheimer’s disease. I love you, miss you and am grateful that you saw me speak in Kansas City. It is both an honor and privilege to be here tonight, sharing this stage with many of my heroes, my friends and my collaborators. Some of you are all three. When I started in the marine aquarium hobby in the 1970s and early 1980s, I had absolutely no inkling that my personal arc would lead me to this point, tonight. Like all of you, I was mesmerized by the beauty, splendor and mystery of organisms that had been brought from coral reefs to local aquarium stores. I grew up in Kansas, but had sadly missed, by tens of millions of years, the great Western Interior Sea that filled the Great Plains states. Also, my father would have gotten an A++ for working hard, but a big fat F for taking his family on vacations. So, going to the ocean to visit them firsthand as a young person was not an option for me. This is true for a great many children today. Then, as now, they are most likely to encounter marine life in either a pet store, or if they are fortunate as to live in a larger urban area, possibly a public aquarium. My window to the sea was the front pane of aquariums in local fish stores. From these encounters, I understood the beauty of marine life in a way that cannot be conveyed in a book or video, and I also came to care about them in a way that can only be inspired by close encounters with representatives from this briny realm. It has been written many times that we are only inspired to protect that which we know, and in those encounters I came to care much more about the oceans than I did before I walked through the door of those shops. I was very curious about this world, and the depth of my understanding increased in parallel with my progress through my education in Science. There were many books on the shelves of aquarium stores, and I would leaf through them until I was driven off by the scowls of the shopkeeper. I was a college student the first time I picked up a book by Martin Moe. It did not take me very long to realize that there was something qualitatively different about it, compared to all the other books I had perused to that point. This book was product of a keen and insightful intellect. To paraphrase a comment by Einstein, these words were the product of both inspiration and a great deal of perspiration. Martin’s labors of course included breeding many fish, including ones that produced planktonic larvae. This work echoes through our hobby to this day. The recent success in producing tangs using living food produced entirely in vitro would have never happened without Martin’s work, using harvested plankton. It is said that the most important thing that Soviet scientists learned from the US’s atomic bomb program was that it was possible to make an atomic bomb. What we learned from Martin and his colleagues was that an ocean was not needed for the survival of planktonic fish larvae, it was possible to accomplish this with human-scale vessels, if the appropriate food could be provided. I cannot find the words to express what an honor it is to share this stage with you tonight. I could clearly see the science behind the hobby through Martin’s books. But it was only later, reading the USENET aquarium newsgroups as a graduate student, that I realized that I could and should apply my domain knowledge of chemistry to my marine aquarium hobby. People were having a difficult time maintaining calcium and alkalinity in reef aquariums. Imagine that! I count this as one of the greatest epiphanies of my life. While the moment in the Matrix movie where Neo sees the underlying digital code that created his world might have been more visually stunning, the personal impact of my realization was similar. I would argue that it was in these moments that I truly became a Scientist, rather than merely a student of Science. This was when I realized and completely internalized that my toolkit for understanding the world didn’t only work in the classroom or laboratory. I fully realized that what I knew, and the process by which this knowledge was gained worked anywhere, and everywhere. That the scope of my endeavors and inquiries was limited only by my courage and imagination. My hope for everyone in the audience tonight: that you too have such a moment in your life, and that you can bring your unique domain knowledge and experience to bear not only on your aquarium hobby, but everywhere in your life. It was also about this time that I came to know, through internet correspondence, Charles Delbeek and Julian Sprung. They apparently were writing a book of their own, and wondered if I might read through the chemistry section for them. I did so gladly, and they were so gracious as to acknowledge me in their book. This was the first time my name had been associated with the hobby in print. I was, and still am, incredibly honored to have been asked to do that. I believe the first time I met two rockstars of the hobby in person was when they visited the Brooklyn Aquarium Society to promote their book. Julian, it is a great honor to be here with you tonight. Also, in New York, and at about the same time, I read about a new aquarium magazine, called “Aquarium Frontiers” which was being produced by Julian Sprung, his business partner Danny Ramirez, and Terry Siegel. The magazine had an odd skinny format, was black and white only, and had an odd format. But I knew that if Julian was involved, it would be something special. Terry was a serial entrepreneur, and he had been involved in several periodicals in the past. Terry brought that experience, his really substantial personal experience as a marine aquarist, and also his a great talent for finding potential writers to the magazine. Through Aquarium Frontiers, Terry Siegel provided a platform for many of the MASNA award winners on stage tonight to be recognized. It could be said that he provided the first step for many past winners to ascend the stage tonight. Terry, thank you for your patience with me as I wrote not one, but two articles for the Summer 1995 edition of Aquarium Frontiers. The first on the effect of activated carbon treatment on light transmission through aquarium water, and the second laying out the hypothesis that many of the molecules responsible for coral autofluorescence were related to green fluorescent protein. Thank you, Terry, for your insights, your help and your friendship. I might not be here at all tonight without them. (Improvised recognition of audience members from my years in New York, Michelle and Kai.) Another thought occurs to me, as I look at the past MASNA award winners. That we are, plus or minus a fraction of a Sanjay, a bunch of white guys. While I’m pleased to have slipped in here while the award was going to middle-aged white dudes, and I would not suggest that anyone here was in any way unworthy of this award, I would challenge all of us to find future nominees and award winners with more gender, chromosomal and pigment diversity. I extend this challenge to everyone in the audience tonight as well. This award only goes to people who are nominated, and anyone who is a MASNA member can nominate whomever they see worthy. So hopefully in the future the MASNA award winners will more closely resemble our diverse and vibrant reef aquarium hobby community. Thank you all very much.

[@Brad.Hobbies]

@@craigbingman5877 Thank you for your contribution, I thought this was full of character and truly appreciated your studies.

[@hotdroper]

Kind of a disorganized talk unfortunately. It’s clear that this guy has some fascinating and useful knowledge that he just couldn’t present in a useful and applicable way

[@JohnSmith-kk4ds]

Who the f*** let's their kid talk loudly like that the entire time he's giving a presentation. Have some respect.