But you do keep your tank according to what science dictates. You may not be keeping parameters, conditions, lighting, etc identical to a wild reef, but all of the fundamentals in managing a reef, from water chemistry, to lighting, to flow, to nutrition, basically everything we do is based off our collective scientific understanding of biological, chemical, and physical processes/interactions. Even if the average reefer doesn’t know or fully understand why we do the things we do (for example cycling a tank, or the need for flow or intense lighting, or the need to dose a 2 part), it’s still based on years and years of scientific observation and experimentation. The assertion that science doesn’t dictate anything in the hobby is absurd.90% with science. But many times I’ve had a hard time interpreting what science has to say and the real impact on reef tanks.
Let me elaborate a bit: many stressors are very often useful in our tanks: UV, symbiont limitation, fragging…
Example: is UV important for corals? Science says not at all, it is a stress factor. But for us reefers that stress stimulates pigmentation for many corals and making a nice looking tank.
Is coral pigmentation a health status indication for science? Not at all in many cases (sorry for reefers who disagree, you are not truly reading scientific articles). But it is our goal here! Coral pigmentation for many scleratinian corals is a marker of stress. This is complex.
Is iron important for symbionts? Yeah. But today I believe iron limitation is important. Excess produces brownish corals, les good looking, richer in symbionts and my personal belief is that they even grow much slower.
I believe our tanks are incredibly more rich in nutrients than nature and that creates a very different environment. To me that’s pretty much one of the reasons people keep acros successfully with strong lights. They are NOT providing excess energy for photosynthesis, they are providing a limitation factor for zooxantellae! That is also (IMHO) today we can keep very colorful acros with much less PAR, we just use chemical methods for limitation of symbiont growth (many people are not aware of this even doing it).
That said, scientific articles are an amazing source of information, but to the new to average reefer it may look misleading.
Today I do not keep my tank according to what science dictates, but I surely find a LOT of very useful information.