Not sure how much it matters but if I could keep every parameter of my water to match exactly the water and everything it contains flowing over the Great Barrier Reef then it would be a no brainer to replicate that in our glass cages.
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More like 200 cents.I have been reefing for 25 years and I have been in the hobby for 35 years. First off the old days were laughable. There was a center of innovation in the U.S. That center was LA. Germany had solid innovation, but they may as well have been on Mars for what it mattered to 99% of hobbiests. Sorry, there were other places that had solid people that had made head way in their particular areas but there was no internet, there was no easy transfer of knowlege, good or bad. Those that have come to this hobby within the last 10 years take this fact for granted. I just want to put that out there, because I see way too many people thinking that the old days had it better ... 100% they didn't. We have terrible surviorship bias when it comes to this. Remember it is only the dedicated that are here today to tell the tale.
When I first started out in reef keeping there were and are the same manufactures producing the same tests, with one exception ... Hanna. Hilariously, none of their quality has changed. There were the same now as they were then. The advent of automated testing is very very new, and the actual availability of lab testing to hobbyists is really new. In 1995 measuring the sodium or rubidium or even the potassium of my tank was akin to me flying to the moon for a vacation. We water changed. When in doubt water change it out. Closed systems where mythical beasts akin to the Loch Ness monster. Nobody talked or thought about it because why? There was no way to even know if you dosed something that it was even near seawater much less that your tank was even consuming it. Sure Universities may have had the equipment to test but even then it was only the specialized areas in large Universities with matching budgets that could even dream of this. Now I can pay $40 and ICP will tell me dang near everything that I want to know and as others have done on this board, you can even coerce them into testing for crazy things like Rubidium. I think I have made my point. We are just now even able to see the parameters much less chase them. You see these old solid systems with the few aquarists that have made it through the years. They built their successful systems on trail and error. Not on feedback from testing.
To your particular question about trace elements. Here is the problem ... when we were in school we "learned" the base principal of something. Then we advanced in grades and built on this base principle. Always moving forward they said. The problem is that we never really got the base principle. I see it in everything. Nobody wants to do the dumb old boring thing that all of the disgusting noobs do. They want to get to the kewl thing that they can show off to their friends. Sadly because they didn't truly understand the principles they were working with they fail when the advanced idea required them to have an advanced understanding of the dumb ole noob stuff. In learning Spanish my teacher said learn to pronounce the vowels. Do it until you can do it in your sleep. I have. My Spanish is not gringo Spanish, because I concentrated on the basics. It is amazing how the basics permeate all of the upper levels of understanding. Ok, tea ... china ... what's the point. Very few in this hobby can master the basics. Let me re-iterate. Very few can master the basics. Why? Because the basics aren't kewl. You can't show off to your friends. You can't tell everyone how smart you are. When I started I started with a Niger Trigger in a 10 gallon tank with an undergravel filter and Penn Plax hood and airstones. You have to go through all of the steps and learn each step to get to the next. We believe that we can skip past these dumb old processes because ... interwebz. We can not and we fail.
So what does this all mean. First Salt water is a small hobby, Fish only is the the vast majority of that hobby. Coral is a specialty and stony corals are a smaller part of that specialty, it goes down from there but I want to stop here because at this point my guesstimate is that we are at 5% of a very small hobby. Yikes. There are many that try to grow coral and many that start in the hobby and see how hard it is to grow these coral and think, I can do that those other people they aren't as smart as me, I will succeed where they have failed. I don't think I need to elaborate from there. The reason I point this out is because there is a lot of debate even among those that can carry all of this out. Also there is a huge scientist hobbiest divide. This exacerbates already contentious subjects. This is the bleeding bleeding edge of this hobby. The problem is that many people see these debates (because now they can) and they think this sounds like it can solve the problem that I am having with my aquarium and they pull the debate out of context and try to use it. I am actually an AnCap so I am accept this as neccessary and important, but for many this is confusing and it creates a cacophony of hopeless disinformation. The only good thing I can say about the old days is that it wasn't easy to publish a book, so if a book was published at least something to bring to the table. Now anyone can say anything on any forum and there will be no vetting process whatsoever (as I believe it should be). This however brings it's own problems.
My personal view of trace elements is this. You must be able to properly mineralize your tank before you can even fathom or contemplate working with trace elements to even determine their efficacy. There are few IMO on this board that I think would be capable. I am not one of them. I am still trying to get the big three down. But as I start to refine my process I can see those that want to take it beyond where I am just starting to arrive because they have been here for years. It is a refinement. If you have looked to provide a razor sharp edge to a knife, you know that you can't start with the finest grit possible and get anywhere. You have to go through the various grits each time making the blade sharper and sharper. Plenty of new and novice people will talk about things that are refinement process and they will try to apply them to the current problems that they are solving. Maybe one in a million will do something interesting or new, or more likely they will just fail and have to fall back to the actual boring old methods that have worked in the past to solve their current problems. But who wants to do something as dumb as that.
My 2 cents.
I have been reefing for 25 years and I have been in the hobby for 35 years. First off the old days were laughable. There was a center of innovation in the U.S. That center was LA. Germany had solid innovation, but they may as well have been on Mars for what it mattered to 99% of hobbiests. Sorry, there were other places that had solid people that had made head way in their particular areas but there was no internet, there was no easy transfer of knowlege, good or bad. Those that have come to this hobby within the last 10 years take this fact for granted. I just want to put that out there, because I see way too many people thinking that the old days had it better ... 100% they didn't. We have terrible surviorship bias when it comes to this. Remember it is only the dedicated that are here today to tell the tale.
When I first started out in reef keeping there were and are the same manufactures producing the same tests, with one exception ... Hanna. Hilariously, none of their quality has changed. There were the same now as they were then. The advent of automated testing is very very new, and the actual availability of lab testing to hobbyists is really new. In 1995 measuring the sodium or rubidium or even the potassium of my tank was akin to me flying to the moon for a vacation. We water changed. When in doubt water change it out. Closed systems where mythical beasts akin to the Loch Ness monster. Nobody talked or thought about it because why? There was no way to even know if you dosed something that it was even near seawater much less that your tank was even consuming it. Sure Universities may have had the equipment to test but even then it was only the specialized areas in large Universities with matching budgets that could even dream of this. Now I can pay $40 and ICP will tell me dang near everything that I want to know and as others have done on this board, you can even coerce them into testing for crazy things like Rubidium. I think I have made my point. We are just now even able to see the parameters much less chase them. You see these old solid systems with the few aquarists that have made it through the years. They built their successful systems on trail and error. Not on feedback from testing.
To your particular question about trace elements. Here is the problem ... when we were in school we "learned" the base principal of something. Then we advanced in grades and built on this base principle. Always moving forward they said. The problem is that we never really got the base principle. I see it in everything. Nobody wants to do the dumb old boring thing that all of the disgusting noobs do. They want to get to the kewl thing that they can show off to their friends. Sadly because they didn't truly understand the principles they were working with they fail when the advanced idea required them to have an advanced understanding of the dumb ole noob stuff. In learning Spanish my teacher said learn to pronounce the vowels. Do it until you can do it in your sleep. I have. My Spanish is not gringo Spanish, because I concentrated on the basics. It is amazing how the basics permeate all of the upper levels of understanding. Ok, tea ... china ... what's the point. Very few in this hobby can master the basics. Let me re-iterate. Very few can master the basics. Why? Because the basics aren't kewl. You can't show off to your friends. You can't tell everyone how smart you are. When I started I started with a Niger Trigger in a 10 gallon tank with an undergravel filter and Penn Plax hood and airstones. You have to go through all of the steps and learn each step to get to the next. We believe that we can skip past these dumb old processes because ... interwebz. We can not and we fail.
So what does this all mean. First Salt water is a small hobby, Fish only is the the vast majority of that hobby. Coral is a specialty and stony corals are a smaller part of that specialty, it goes down from there but I want to stop here because at this point my guesstimate is that we are at 5% of a very small hobby. Yikes. There are many that try to grow coral and many that start in the hobby and see how hard it is to grow these coral and think, I can do that those other people they aren't as smart as me, I will succeed where they have failed. I don't think I need to elaborate from there. The reason I point this out is because there is a lot of debate even among those that can carry all of this out. Also there is a huge scientist hobbiest divide. This exacerbates already contentious subjects. This is the bleeding bleeding edge of this hobby. The problem is that many people see these debates (because now they can) and they think this sounds like it can solve the problem that I am having with my aquarium and they pull the debate out of context and try to use it. I am actually an AnCap so I am accept this as neccessary and important, but for many this is confusing and it creates a cacophony of hopeless disinformation. The only good thing I can say about the old days is that it wasn't easy to publish a book, so if a book was published at least something to bring to the table. Now anyone can say anything on any forum and there will be no vetting process whatsoever (as I believe it should be). This however brings it's own problems.
My personal view of trace elements is this. You must be able to properly mineralize your tank before you can even fathom or contemplate working with trace elements to even determine their efficacy. There are few IMO on this board that I think would be capable. I am not one of them. I am still trying to get the big three down. But as I start to refine my process I can see those that want to take it beyond where I am just starting to arrive because they have been here for years. It is a refinement. If you have looked to provide a razor sharp edge to a knife, you know that you can't start with the finest grit possible and get anywhere. You have to go through the various grits each time making the blade sharper and sharper. Plenty of new and novice people will talk about things that are refinement process and they will try to apply them to the current problems that they are solving. Maybe one in a million will do something interesting or new, or more likely they will just fail and have to fall back to the actual boring old methods that have worked in the past to solve their current problems. But who wants to do something as dumb as that.
My 2 cents.
Well said. There aren't too many here that are in tune with their tank. Or willing to put the time in to learn. I read one thread where there was a lot of detail into something, videos and such explaining it all. One person asked if the OP could summarize it all because he didn't have the time to go through everything. This is the state of our hobby now.I have been reefing for 25 years and I have been in the hobby for 35 years. First off the old days were laughable. There was a center of innovation in the U.S. That center was LA. Germany had solid innovation, but they may as well have been on Mars for what it mattered to 99% of hobbiests. Sorry, there were other places that had solid people that had made head way in their particular areas but there was no internet, there was no easy transfer of knowlege, good or bad. Those that have come to this hobby within the last 10 years take this fact for granted. I just want to put that out there, because I see way too many people thinking that the old days had it better ... 100% they didn't. We have terrible surviorship bias when it comes to this. Remember it is only the dedicated that are here today to tell the tale.
When I first started out in reef keeping there were and are the same manufactures producing the same tests, with one exception ... Hanna. Hilariously, none of their quality has changed. There were the same now as they were then. The advent of automated testing is very very new, and the actual availability of lab testing to hobbyists is really new. In 1995 measuring the sodium or rubidium or even the potassium of my tank was akin to me flying to the moon for a vacation. We water changed. When in doubt water change it out. Closed systems where mythical beasts akin to the Loch Ness monster. Nobody talked or thought about it because why? There was no way to even know if you dosed something that it was even near seawater much less that your tank was even consuming it. Sure Universities may have had the equipment to test but even then it was only the specialized areas in large Universities with matching budgets that could even dream of this. Now I can pay $40 and ICP will tell me dang near everything that I want to know and as others have done on this board, you can even coerce them into testing for crazy things like Rubidium. I think I have made my point. We are just now even able to see the parameters much less chase them. You see these old solid systems with the few aquarists that have made it through the years. They built their successful systems on trail and error. Not on feedback from testing.
To your particular question about trace elements. Here is the problem ... when we were in school we "learned" the base principal of something. Then we advanced in grades and built on this base principle. Always moving forward they said. The problem is that we never really got the base principle. I see it in everything. Nobody wants to do the dumb old boring thing that all of the disgusting noobs do. They want to get to the kewl thing that they can show off to their friends. Sadly because they didn't truly understand the principles they were working with they fail when the advanced idea required them to have an advanced understanding of the dumb ole noob stuff. In learning Spanish my teacher said learn to pronounce the vowels. Do it until you can do it in your sleep. I have. My Spanish is not gringo Spanish, because I concentrated on the basics. It is amazing how the basics permeate all of the upper levels of understanding. Ok, tea ... china ... what's the point. Very few in this hobby can master the basics. Let me re-iterate. Very few can master the basics. Why? Because the basics aren't kewl. You can't show off to your friends. You can't tell everyone how smart you are. When I started I started with a Niger Trigger in a 10 gallon tank with an undergravel filter and Penn Plax hood and airstones. You have to go through all of the steps and learn each step to get to the next. We believe that we can skip past these dumb old processes because ... interwebz. We can not and we fail.
So what does this all mean. First Salt water is a small hobby, Fish only is the the vast majority of that hobby. Coral is a specialty and stony corals are a smaller part of that specialty, it goes down from there but I want to stop here because at this point my guesstimate is that we are at 5% of a very small hobby. Yikes. There are many that try to grow coral and many that start in the hobby and see how hard it is to grow these coral and think, I can do that those other people they aren't as smart as me, I will succeed where they have failed. I don't think I need to elaborate from there. The reason I point this out is because there is a lot of debate even among those that can carry all of this out. Also there is a huge scientist hobbiest divide. This exacerbates already contentious subjects. This is the bleeding bleeding edge of this hobby. The problem is that many people see these debates (because now they can) and they think this sounds like it can solve the problem that I am having with my aquarium and they pull the debate out of context and try to use it. I am actually an AnCap so I am accept this as neccessary and important, but for many this is confusing and it creates a cacophony of hopeless disinformation. The only good thing I can say about the old days is that it wasn't easy to publish a book, so if a book was published at least something to bring to the table. Now anyone can say anything on any forum and there will be no vetting process whatsoever (as I believe it should be). This however brings it's own problems.
My personal view of trace elements is this. You must be able to properly mineralize your tank before you can even fathom or contemplate working with trace elements to even determine their efficacy. There are few IMO on this board that I think would be capable. I am not one of them. I am still trying to get the big three down. But as I start to refine my process I can see those that want to take it beyond where I am just starting to arrive because they have been here for years. It is a refinement. If you have looked to provide a razor sharp edge to a knife, you know that you can't start with the finest grit possible and get anywhere. You have to go through the various grits each time making the blade sharper and sharper. Plenty of new and novice people will talk about things that are refinement process and they will try to apply them to the current problems that they are solving. Maybe one in a million will do something interesting or new, or more likely they will just fail and have to fall back to the actual boring old methods that have worked in the past to solve their current problems. But who wants to do something as dumb as that.
My 2 cents.