David Grigor - Our nominee for the Marine Aquarium Hobbyist of the Year Award David Grigor’s 120 gallon soft coral tank in 2015 The Twin Cities Marine Aquarium society (Minneapolis/St Paul area in Minnesota) wishes to nominate one of our members, David Grigor, for the Marine Aquarium Hobbyist of the Year award. David combines years of experience, great skill, artistry, and expertise in reef aquarium keeping with amazing helpfulness, generosity to others, and a great, long-term dedication to the hobby overall. David is also just about the nicest, most trustworthy person you will ever meet, and despite his tremendous knowledge and skill, he has great humility. We can hardly imagine a more deserving recipient of this award. David has been keeping reef aquaria for a long time, and has been an active member of our local aquarium club for 16 of the roughly 17 years of its existence. Though David has little formal training in science, through extensive reading and experimentation with his reef systems he has mastered both the science and the art of reef keeping. David is viewed by members of our club as one of foremost authorities (if not THE foremost authority) in our group on almost any aspect of reef keeping. If you have questions about water chemistry, David is a great resource. If you have questions about pumps, or lights, or skimmers, or algal turf scrubbers, there are few folks more knowledgeable than David. If you have questions about setting up and programming your AquaController David can help. If you have questions about specific corals or fish, or coral propagation, or aquascaping, or acrylic fabrication, David is full of good information, creative ideas, and good advice. David has had a series of aquaria over the years, including a 300 gallon reef tank that he built himself. He currently has a 180 gallon stony coral tank, a 120 gallon soft coral tank (see photo above), a big frag tank, and one or two smaller tanks. Every one of his tanks that the authors of this letter have seen has been absolutely stunning. His tanks include a diversity of very healthy corals and some of the healthiest reef fish you will ever see in an aquarium. All of his tanks are beautifully and intelligently aquascaped and very well maintained. Also, his tanks include some coral colonies that he has had growing for at least ten years. Reef tanks don't get much better than this. David is very resourceful, and very skilled at building things, and has done quite a lot of acrylic fabrication both for himself and for others. He has also built a series of very effective downflow style algal turf scrubbers, and has been sharing his experiences and gradually evolving designs with others. In addition to his obvious skills in reefkeeping, one of David's most wonderful qualities is his amazing generosity. He has always shared coral frags freely (or for very minimal cost) with others. However, what is much more impressive is that despite working full time and having a wife and young kids he is amazingly generous with his time. For example, about 14 years ago he helped Bill Capman at Augsburg College move two different large reef systems that had been donated to the college. One of these moves was of a 220 gallon system involving livestock. This was at least a 14 hour operation, ending at about 2:00 AM. On top of this, David volunteered additional help to get this system running in its new location: he volunteered to build a metal halide light enclosure, he drilled holes for bulkheads in a set of additional small tanks hooked up to this system, and most impressively he custom built (for just the cost of materials) a wonderful elaborate 7ft x 2ft x 1ft sump with removable screen partitions to allow a great diversity of otherwise incompatible organisms (including Cassiopea jellyfish!) to be kept long term for the teaching of invertebrate ​ ​ biology and biological diversity. Recently he also offered to build Augsburg College an algal turf scrubber (again, just for the cost of materials). Over the years he has continued to offer this sort of help and support to a variety of other members of our club, never expecting anything in return. David also set up and maintained a nice reef system at his church. One encounters very few people, in any walk of life, with this level of generosity. David doesn't just help individuals, but offers his help to the larger group in additional ways. For example, over the years he has run workshops for our local club on topics as diverse as aquascaping, making your own fish foods (see photos below), and acrylic fabrication. Moreover, he has hosted multiple gatherings at his home over the years so others could enjoy and learn from his aquarium systems (see first photo below). David has also served on the board as Vice President and Treasurer of our club at various times. And he even volunteered for the dunk tank at our reef club picnic a few years ago - he’s drying off after being dunked in the second photo below! Another significant area of service to the reef aquarium community has been his involvement with a variety of different online reef forums over the years. He has been an active participant (and on multiple occasions a moderator) in forums such as Reef Central, The Reef Tank, and our own local forum (http://www.tcmas.org/) for ​ ​ about as long as such forums have existed. Since the creation of our local club forum in 2007, David has made over 15,600 posts. Post count, of course, does not always mean that much, since some folks have huge post counts while rarely saying anything of value. In David's case, however, this high post count is significant, as David almost always has something useful and helpful to say. He contributes to threads posted by new reef aquarists just as readily as he does to very technical threads debating very advanced topics. Often, he creates very useful essays on topics of interest (e.g. see his essay on redundancy in aquarium system design linked to below). David is always kind and polite, and never engages in the unpleasantness and drama that sometimes creeps into online forum discussions. Moreover, the fact that he uses his actual name as a user name rather than hiding behind some anonymous, obscure screen name is testament to his integrity. There is so much more that we could write, but we will conclude by repeating something we said in our first paragraph. Along with all of his knowledge and skills, David Grigor is simply a really nice guy. He has a soft-spoken unassuming personality, always treats people with respect regardless of who they are, and is absolutely trustworthy. David is the sort of person you wouldn't hesitate handing the keys to your house to if he was your neighbor and you needed someone to watch over your house while you were on vacation. In summary, we can't imagine a more worthy recipient of the Marine Aquarium Hobbyist of the Year award! This nomination document was written in July 2015 on behalf of the Twin Cities Marine Aquarium Society (TCMAS) by: ● Bill AKA Capman (Augsburg College Biology Dept, Minneapolis, MN and 17 year TCMAS member) ● James AKA LowersmyBP (TCMAS member) ● Angie AKA acharpenter (TCMAS President) ● A variety of other TCMAS members, who unanimously endorsed David as our nominee, also contributed. SEE WEB LINKS THAT FOLLOW ON THE NEXT PAGES BELOW Additional resources: Here is a semi random, very small, and very incomplete collection of links that illustrate David’s dedication to the hobby, and a few of his many contributions. ​ ​ ----------------- Here is David's web site describing his 180 gallon reef tank: http://home.comcast.net/~dgrigor/ (Note: his reef is far more impressive looking now than in these early photos!) ----------------- Here we see and read about David's visit to a third grade classroom, in which he set up a small reef aquarium in the classroom for a few days and talked to the kids about coral reefs: http://www.tcmas.org/v4/forums/showthread.php?56256-3rd-Grade-Classroom-di scussion&highlight= ----------------- Here is a writeup by David on his aquascaping techniques: http://www.tcmas.org/v4/forums/content.php?33-Aquascaping-Techniques-By-Da vid-Grigor And here is a roughly ten year old thread from The Reef Tank about an aquascaping workshop run by David during which another member's tank was aquascaped: http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/f58/february-meeting-aquascaping-demo-24t h-feb-65894.html?highlight=aquascaping+grigor And here is a much more recent thread about another aquascaping workshop that David participated in where he demonstrated his coral pegging system: http://www.tcmas.org/v4/forums/showthread.php?57644-Aquascaping-Workshop -at-New-Wave-Aquaria&p=611303&viewfull=1#post611303 ----------------- Here is David's wonderfully useful essay on the importance of redundancy in aquarium system design: http://www.tcmas.org/v4/forums/content.php?28-Redundancy-in-our-Reef-System s-By-David-Grigor ----------------- Here are two threads in which David shares his experiences in designing, building, and using algal turf scrubbers: http://www.tcmas.org/v4/forums/showthread.php?46357-Grigor-s-ATS-Version-2 &highlight= http://www.tcmas.org/v4/forums/showthread.php?59137-Grigor-ATS-Version-3 ----------------- Here we see David Grigor enjoying himself leading a workshop that he organized in which club members got together to make frozen fish food for their tanks. David is the guy in the red shirt: http://www.tcmas.org/v4/forums/showthread.php?30450-DIY-Fish-amp-Coral-Foo d-Workshop!!!!!&p=339259&viewfull=1#post339259 ----------------- On