The Other Way to Run a Reef Tank (no Quarantine)

fishybizzness

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No lol:) but im not surprised that there is one. It was when I was having some trouble - and trying to micromanage my tank - and you read one article and it says a the other says the opposite. I.e. people giving 'their method' of success - which probably cant be (for the most part) generalized to a lot of tanks. I finally just picked methods that made sense - and have stuck to them. I still have coral that just will not grow in my tank. (corals that are considered 'easy') - yet others - that are 'difficult' (goniopora) - grow, and thrive.
Good afternoon,
I've read many times that what works for one person may not work for another. I believe that there are basic similarities between people who keep tanks without quarantining as well as a few differences. As you previously said that you do not quarantine I would like to respectfully ask that you start a thread detailing your methods. I am following on the no quarantine path and I believe that the more examples people like me have to use as learning tools the more likely we will ultimately succeed. Thanks
 

Sandbox

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Actually there is a horseradish farm down the road from here and I eat the stuff every day. I haven't smeared it on my knee yet, but maybe tonight. :rolleyes:
This might make some people’s head roll, but here we go. I had a skiing accident and tore my ACL. My grandma told me to pee on a rag and wrap my knee up. I looked at her crazy, but she survived **** Poland and later Communist Poland, so I tried it. It worked! Swelling and pain went down. If the horseradish doesn’t work, now you have a back up plan! (I hope I don’t get deleted again, I mean no disrespect.) ;).
 

MnFish1

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Good afternoon,
I've read many times that what works for one person may not work for another. I believe that there are basic similarities between people who keep tanks without quarantining as well as a few differences. As you previously said that you do not quarantine I would like to respectfully ask that you start a thread detailing your methods. I am following on the no quarantine path and I believe that the more examples people like me have to use as learning tools the more likely we will ultimately succeed. Thanks

The methods I use are basically @Paul B 's methods - except I dont feed 'live food' and I don't believe that I need to keep adding bacteria and parasites to my tank. Its really simple - I've said it several times.

EDIT - Im also picky about where and how I buy fish and corals. Only if they are in a tank already reef-safe ie with invertebrates, showing no sign of illness from a known source. I don't buy fish online - Only from a store that is 15 minutes away - this minimizes stress on transfer (IMHO).
 
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Matt Carden

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It really doesn't matter how long you quarantine, as long as you do it in a stress free environment, something that mimics the environment that they will be put in for the long haul. No bare bottom glass tanks.
So no 30 days, or 14,in 1.75ppm Copper?!
 

Ardeus

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Actually there is a horseradish farm down the road from here and I eat the stuff every day. I haven't smeared it on my knee yet, but maybe tonight. :rolleyes:

I lived in the Amazon and I got sick while I was there. People at the office told me I needed to get back home to find out what was wrong with me. Before doing that I decided to go to a place where they sold mainly plant roots to treat whatever.

The old lady looked at me, asked 2 or 3 questions, went inside and prepared something for me to drink for 10 days.

I talked with her for almost 2 hours about random stuff and she told me she was constantly being harassed by foreign men, mainly american, who wanted to know how she was using plants to treat a variety of diseases. She didn't like them.

Most of her knowledge had come from her grandmother and she continued to learn throughout her life from other people and making her own experiments.

Even science takes leads from anecdotal knowledge because it often points into directions that researchers wouldn't think about.

I see Paul's article in the same light and I unfortunately find that 99% of the posts here trying to in/validate his experience from a scientific point of view, end up clouding the information that could be useful to a lot of people.

Science really drops the ball much more often than most people realise and I am not talking about being wrong.

Just look at what happended to the insects in many places in the world while a ton of research was being done on them for decades. Was it scientists that noticed that 76% of flying insects disappeared in nature reserves in Germany? No, it was data collected by amateurs.

I wish there wasn't so much pushing for Paul to scientifically justify his method. It wasn't how he get here and I am willing to bet that most of the scientific reasoning he presented was an afterthought.
 

MnFish1

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I lived in the Amazon and I got sick while I was there. People at the office told me I needed to get back home to find out what was wrong with me. Before doing that I decided to go to a place where they sold mainly plant roots to treat whatever.

The old lady looked at me, asked 2 or 3 questions, went inside and prepared something for me to drink for 10 days.

I talked with her for almost 2 hours about random stuff and she told me she was constantly being harassed by foreign men, mainly american, who wanted to know how she was using plants to treat a variety of diseases. She didn't like them.

Most of her knowledge had come from her grandmother and she continued to learn throughout her life from other people and making her own experiments.

Even science takes leads from anecdotal knowledge because it often points into directions that researchers wouldn't think about.

I see Paul's article in the same light and I unfortunately find that 99% of the posts here trying to in/validate his experience from a scientific point of view, end up clouding the information that could be useful to a lot of people.

Science really drops the ball much more often than most people realise and I am not talking about being wrong.

Just look at what happended to the insects in many places in the world while a ton of research was being done on them for decades. Was it scientists that noticed that 76% of flying insects disappeared in nature reserves in Germany? No, it was data collected by amateurs.

I wish there wasn't so much pushing for Paul to scientifically justify his method. It wasn't how he get here and I am willing to bet that most of the scientific reasoning he presented was an afterthought.
I never asked paul to scientifically justify anything. I asked paul to justify the scientific things he used in his article for evidence. As have several others. As of yet I haven’t seen anything.

As a counter argument look at those bracelets that are sold by nice people that are on late night tv. If you want to believe those bracelets work then they will work. But when they’ve been studied they don’t work
 

Ardeus

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Unless you want to attribute the results of 47 years of practice to a statistical abnormality, the scientific background that Paul provided in his article is the least important part. To start with, because that's not how he got those results.

The most important part is therefore the results themselves and how he and others got to them.

I followed this thread since the beginning and I was able to extract extremely valuable practical information that I easily was able to put into practice. With nearly 50 pages of posts, it's much more difficult for someone that stumbles on this thread to do the same.

There's a very small percentage of posts about the "how" and too many about the obsessive scientific approach to the "why".
 

MnFish1

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Unless you want to attribute the results of 47 years of practice to a statistical abnormality, the scientific background that Paul provided in his article is the least important part. To start with, because that's not how he got those results.

The most important part is therefore the results themselves and how he and others got to them.

I followed this thread since the beginning and I was able to extract extremely valuable practical information that I easily was able to put into practice. With nearly 50 pages of posts, it's much more difficult for someone that stumbles on this thread to do the same.

There's a very small percentage of posts about the "how" and too many about the obsessive scientific approach to the "why".

Honestly - You're not paying attention to what I and others have said. IN any case - 1 person out of xxx,xxxx,000 reefers that has kept a tank for 47 years (realistically) is a statistical abnormality - by any definition.
 

Thales

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I lived in the Amazon and I got sick while I was there. People at the office told me I needed to get back home to find out what was wrong with me. Before doing that I decided to go to a place where they sold mainly plant roots to treat whatever.

The old lady looked at me, asked 2 or 3 questions, went inside and prepared something for me to drink for 10 days.

I talked with her for almost 2 hours about random stuff and she told me she was constantly being harassed by foreign men, mainly american, who wanted to know how she was using plants to treat a variety of diseases. She didn't like them.

Most of her knowledge had come from her grandmother and she continued to learn throughout her life from other people and making her own experiments.

The issue with trusting this kind of folk treatment is that most of the time the ailment, whatever it was, resolves on its own, so whatever action that was taken is given credit for having done something. It's the old 'correlation is not causation' idea, and the most popular example is 'the rooster crowed, and the sun came up, so the rooster caused the sun to come up'. It's why there are so many 'treatments' for colds in humans and ich in fish that seem to work.

Even science takes leads from anecdotal knowledge because it often points into directions that researchers wouldn't think about.

Most scientists would take that further - anecdote is one of the fundamental building blocks of science. At its heart, anecdote is really just making an observation. The more sciencey part comes into play when trying to see if the observation equals reality, which it often doesn't because there are a lot of flaws in the way in which humans perceive the world.

I see Paul's article in the same light and I unfortunately find that 99% of the posts here trying to in/validate his experience from a scientific point of view, end up clouding the information that could be useful to a lot of people.

His experience is a scientific point of view. He is reporting what he sees. One of the places that encourages people to ask probing questions is when he come up with ideas about why what he is seeing is happening, and then stating them as truth. This happens to almost everyone btw.
I don't think anyone is trying to validate his experience, he is the only one that can do that, rather to push on his conclusions about what is happening and why. When he says "Fish eat parasites with every meal and those parasites are processed in the fishes kidney among other places and that causes the fish to exude antiparisitic and antibacterial properties in their slime. They constantly do this and it keeps parasites and bacteria from killing the fish even though some parasites will get through to sample some fish flesh." it is at least partially incorrect. Fish do not eat ich and develop antiparasitic properties to the parasite. He says a lot that his fish are immune, but he doesn't really know that, he only knows that he doesn't see parasites on the fish (they could easily be infected at levels that don't show).
It isn't his experience that anyone questions, it is the reality of some of the claims.

Science really drops the ball much more often than most people realise and I am not talking about being wrong.

Of course science is drops the ball sometimes, however, not only is being wrong part of the process, but science is right a whole lot of the time. Only in science, do people say "I was wrong, thanks for figuring it out", and then use the new information to make everything better. So when the shuttle crashes we don't say 'see, science sucks and scientists are stupid', we say, 'lets figure out what went wrong so it doesn't happen again, and so we all have better information for the future'.
You may be referencing a totally different fork in the conversation - my apologies if I am talking about something you don't mean.

Just look at what happended to the insects in many places in the world while a ton of research was being done on them for decades. Was it scientists that noticed that 76% of flying insects disappeared in nature reserves in Germany? No, it was data collected by amateurs.

Those amateurs weren't just willy nilly out there making observations - "The research, published in the journal Plos One, is based on the work of dozens of amateur entomologists across Germany who began using strictly standardised ways of collecting insects in 1989. Special tents called malaise traps were used to capture more than 1,500 samples of all flying insects at 63 different nature reserves."
https://www.theguardian.com/environ...eddon-after-dramatic-plunge-in-insect-numbers
They didn't just say 'there are fewer bugs around', the collected years of data to support their ideas.
It isn't amateurs against professionals, it is both of them working together.
Amateur scientists are great. I started out that way, and have a huge respect for it.

I wish there wasn't so much pushing for Paul to scientifically justify his method. It wasn't how he get here and I am willing to bet that most of the scientific reasoning he presented was an afterthought.

It is absolutely how he got here, by his own descriptions. He is totally doing science, and I think he runs into the common problem of converting ideas about how things might be working or what might be causing what he observes, into truth.
 

Thales

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Matt Carden

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Almost no one keeps a QT system the way Paul has defined it, so there is no one to come forward.
Except for the 76 day part. All the qt threads propose using a bare bottom tank with pvc essentially sterile except for nitrifying autotrophic bacteria. The methods discussed for fish are usually 30 days in duration while everything else is the 76 days.
 

Matt Carden

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I don't know anyone ever that has recommended a bare tank for QT.

@Thales. Can you elaborate what you mean by bare tank? Most that recommend QT out here suggest nothing in the tank except a few pvc elbows. Seems pretty bare to me.
@HotRocks @4FordFamily @Humblefish among others had me convinced I had to set up these sterile(except for autotrophic bacteria) tanks. Which went contrary to my original plan to try to establish a natural ecosystem reef tank. @Paul B article has set me straight. Thank you Paul

Edit: no one personally convinced me to qt. Just saying that by reading the at threads I was convinced.
 
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Humblefish

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@HotRocks @4FordFamily @Humblefish among others had me convinced I had to set up these sterile(except for autotrophic bacteria) tanks. Which went contrary to my original plan to try to establish a natural ecosystem reef tank. @Paul B article has set me straight. Thank you Paul

I advocate using a (somewhat) sterile QT to best administer medications, if needed.

I’ve never suggested setting up a sterile DT, only disease-free.
 

4FordFamily

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@HotRocks @4FordFamily @Humblefish among others had me convinced I had to set up these sterile(except for autotrophic bacteria) tanks. Which went contrary to my original plan to try to establish a natural ecosystem reef tank. @Paul B article has set me straight. Thank you Paul
Going the other route sure sounds better on paper, practice is where it falls apart. Unfortunately, enter the entire fish disease forum. Good luck either way :)

I certainly wanted to believe this stuff works. It didn’t for me, after ten years and far too many deaths I gave up.
 

Thales

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Except for the 76 day part. All the qt threads propose using a bare bottom tank with pvc essentially sterile except for nitrifying autotrophic bacteria. The methods discussed for fish are usually 30 days in duration while everything else is the 76 days.

I think what people mean by sterile is messing up the discussion. What does it mean to you?

BB is not sterile at all, its just BB, and there are many reasons why it may make sense for QT. There are all kinds of ways to do QT, and I am not a fan of generalities because it can change so much depending on the fish going into QT

As I mentioned earlier, I think most of the recipes for for QT (or really anything in the hobby) are really a way to try to make up for someones lack of experience. IT is really hard to guide someone through their first disease outbreak. So, the general recommendations often lack detail.
 

Humblefish

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@Matt Carden Below are pics of my last DT. Does it look "sterile" to you??

100_2846_zpsz3ihendr.jpg
100_2971_zpsb9lvgxlp.jpg

100_1950_zpsf66dfe7c.jpg

 

Thales

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@HotRocks @4FordFamily @Humblefish among others had me convinced I had to set up these sterile(except for autotrophic bacteria) tanks. Which went contrary to my original plan to try to establish a natural ecosystem reef tank. @Paul B article has set me straight. Thank you Paul
I'm confused. Are you talking about setting up QT or a reef tank?
 

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