Stress During Tank Maintenance and Aquascaping

Brisk

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How can you minimize stress for fish and corals during tank maintenance and aquascaping changes?
 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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by specifically running a tank so clean no clouding results from the work done inside. or, you clean the tank (the sandbed full of clouding waste) correctly before you do the tank handling.

if you choose not to run a clean system and still do in-tank work that kicks up waste, look what can happen:


contrast that, to this: sixty pages of the roughest tank handling and scape changes on the internet, with not one single loss for nine years (because we cleaned all sandbeds ahead of tank maintenance / scape change time)


so, you can see that releasing clouding waste into the tank is the harm, and being 100% free of that waste allows any form of physical handling and changes you want to do. in that thread are nuances: keep your fish covered while they're in holding etc. gotta read up to learn the handling surgical process.

if you truly study the second link, you can see that sandbed rip cleaning allows you to never be invaded, never lose tanks due to handling errors, never hesitate when moving or upgrading a reef tank, and you can change out sandbeds all at once with no recycling...all from just being cloud (waste) free.

you can specifically see in the contrast between the two threads an enduring irony:

-handling things partially, such as the sand alone in an attempt to remove the 'least' bacteria or cause the least system upset via changes has 100% of the loss examples. that first link is one of ten I have.

-handling the tank 100% all at once, via surgery (so that sensitive animals can be removed away from the clouding) shows that we don't lose critical bacteria, and no system upset happens.

is a human mouth better or worse after going to a dentist for a mouth rip clean? it's not true that leaving waste in place is the safe option in dentistry or in reefing.

of course thousands of people handle their scape changes and bed handling without taking the tank down, every so often one of the systems dies. If I killed someone's system in my work thread I'd stop running it and have it removed. in order to gain perfect results when advising tank handling, there is only one safe method on the entire internet.
 
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Paul B

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I had the privilege of SCUBA diving on a reef someplace in the tropics right after a nasty storm. There were elkhorn corals almost as large as my house up side down and few fans were thrown high up on a mountain along with sailboats.

You could never disturb your tank as much as a hurricane or Typhoon that fish experience many times a year. It kind of renews the sea bottom and your tank.

I make a "Typhoon all the time in my tank to blow detritus out of the pores in the rocks and to clean the gravel over my reverse undergravel filter. I like it and so do the fish.

I don't want to clean out all the detritus but I don't want the pores in the rock to clog and my UG filter needs that at least twice a year.

 

brandon429

why did you put a reef in that
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we constantly need to advise others Paul: your detritus is not like theirs.

sandbeds that sit on the bottom have lethality due to gradients that don't exist in a rugf tank. curious: do you leave out that detail on purpose these last 100 times or is it by accident?

when you make comparisons between your sandbed and others, you are making them seem equivalent.

they're polar opposite in fact.

your implication is that my first warning link above is no risk for this job, but you cannot know that if the examples in your repertoire are always just your own tank, with pics I saw in 2018.
 

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