Managing Tissue Necrosis | Reef Builders | The Reef and Saltwater Aquarium Blog
While we have come a long way in the hobby and have improved our husbandry skills for keeping corals immeasurably over the past four decades, we still have much to learn, especially in the area of…
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Paul, thank you for your years in the hobby and never advising reefers in challenge to fall back on guesstimates with powerful human meds running in short supply chains, without full courses or matched targets in place. You help by showing alternate ways to control tissue necrosis
thank you,
B.
There are ways of controlling rtn and stn in reefing that don't involve skipping the target match phase of effective antibiotics admin= plating bacterial samples on agar, at incubation with timed number of days then doing cell counts and colony isolation then matching with reference to a known antibiotic match + complete course. (not one time mass dose, we don't kill enough targets that way, we begin a gradient resistance in leftover target cells with antibiotic guessing, their strongest multiply)
Until that's done, there's no legitimate use for human med antibacterial medications, guesses that drive resistance adaptation, in reefing
We stick our arms in these tanks and paint the furniture in cross contam bacteria
Don't stick your arms in a continually- culled vat of water that only selects for the most resistant cells for the known matched targets indicated for cipro.
Keep that up a few years and your water will crawl out of your tank
Dosing antibiotics impacted by supply chain availability without any specific matching isn't ok and it does not work the best to control rtn.
There are examples of old reefs out there in addition to Paul's, these reefs recall a patterned method option to avoid coral malady long before cipro dosing was endorsed on a widespread scale
These frags that get infected by rtn are susceptible, genetically or caused by correctable tank design
They were in the right place, wrong time. Overriding that with a short term blanket kill, leaving a wake of unkilled bacterial cells to develop best means is opposite of wise
Why is it nano reefs have so much less incidence of uncorrectable rtn and stn, they outnumber full size home reefs I'll bet, due to size and cost. In that bulk data are trends you can use to inspect coral malady rate by gallonage divisions...tank size which in my opinion hasn't been looked at as a separate means and ways option. Nano reefs have design and handling differences that make less incidence of rtn and stn if we chart against the common pro nano or pico reef. What are they doing differently that allows this much sps to grow for ten years in a bowl and never get rtn
That's one gallon. It's coral per gallon ratio is off the charts compared to a large tank. So, find its pattern and upscale it to large tanks and you'll beat rtn without antibiotics. Make an article on that?
It's not a novelty, that's a running youtube proof on best means and ways to avoid rtn in dense old coral stands. It just happens to be in a fishbowl
Filtering research options for rtn and stn prevention to include subsets of what 1-3 gallon sps reefs have been logging for 22 years at nano-reef.com + how they reef differently than old tree stump-style hands off large tanks has value
Maritza vase reef did it without meds, in a much harder container.
Find what works in non medicine approaches, forward those best practices in articles
As an observer for what nano reefing has been doing its fair to say we don't worry about nor encounter uncontrollable rtn and stn, that must be something a different method conveys. It's not a concern for the pico reef forum at nano-reef.com, searchable 14 year forum history trove of repeating no rtn / stn events data.
We can choose to investigate in the hobby a best means practice using designs that forward bacterial competition and inherent resistance vs initial kill of target which is short- term hidden consequence reefing.
Atoll's aged and matured reef system. Very old long lived, no rtn stn due to what I see as bacterial diversity vs target kill attempts.
There are ways of dealing with stn and rtn that make cipro use never needed in the hobby: reef that way.
Consider all subsets of data seemingly immune to the condition for copyable designs before adding antibiotics to control maladies in sps corals and anemones. Those are the top two uses/ delayed consequence reasons to use cipro in reefing...they're using them to fix anemones (preserve the weakest non selected strains) and to stop rtn and stn events while maintaining the very tank designs that beget the condition.
Its not that you might need a little cipro to be an effective reefer, to prevent rtn and stn, it's that design options exist right now for you to never need it and those practices need the development
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