My name is Samantha Groene, and I am a biological technician at UF-TAL. I’ve been with the lab for almost two years, but this is my first official introduction on the Rising Tide Conservation blog. This past week, some of you might have seen me in Denver. The annual Marine Aquarium Conference of North America (MACNA) took place in Denver, Colorado this year and I had the privilege of representing Rising Tide at the conference! This year’s MACNA was quite the experience! I met so many wonderful people, made a lot of new contacts, and hadan overall great time. MACNA is a great opportunity for Rising Tide to be ableto communicate the importance of aquaculture to hobbyists and help foster a better future for the critters that we all love. It was very rewarding raising awareness for Rising Tide — meeting hobbyists, vendors, and exhibitors and sharing with them a cause that is so important for our hobby and our reefs. I brought with me to MACNA some of our F1 semicircle angelfish to put on display at the Rising Tide booth and at the Boyd Enterprises booth. These fish were some of the stars of the show, and later were MORE: Rising Tide at MACNA 2014