The issue is six million + home dosers, guessers, among the few like Jay who have by training the right to use the meds to keep animals he keeps, in zoos. That's where it belongs, high level
If Jay used zoo protocols to determine a need for meds in his home tank, a specific fish for example: I'm for that. He's a fish doc
Show me any article ever written for reefing that shows the specific course, dose and duration plus specific match to target before touting the benefits of antibiotic use in a home aquarium
there isn't such an article from coral magazine or anyone else, although some author somewhere sure might give the public his guesstimate for mass application agreed:
https://reefbuilders.com/2023/04/10/managing-tissue-necrosis/
Mike tells thousands and thousands of reefers to simply add a guess dose of antibiotic, as that worked for him.
it's written as plan as day
When tens of thousands of home aquarists follow teaching like Mike's above, they get some initial results but at the price of external locus of control (for now)
People who write medical journals would recoil at that article
My tank runs with internal locus of control, opposite, which is why it will outlive most drug addicted tanks. Mike's article doesn't tell us that, or use examples that aren't his reefs.
Home reefs can regulate their own microbial levels and balances just fine *long term, decades so far in study * if you keep them physically clean and anticipate ways that waste accumulation harms reef life
There's ways to manage tissue necrosis without meds, it's possible to prevent it from happening at all. Mike didn't tell us that part: we got to the dosing part as the core of the teaching
Antibiotics aren't needed,
we can design better receiving systems that select out pathogens, if we aim for that
Why is it our reef professors won't take a clear stance like that?
Mike's corals are huge unfragged stands that still exist in a home tank and not the ocean, therefore currents and dilutions and energy the coral sees daily will never be the same yet the mass of coral keeps growing unabated in his tank, like a tooth outgrowing the mandible and taking on lots of new competition at the microbial level
pockets of waste form in the catchments on the coral and cause localized losses, I see his issue more like a need for physical reef dentistry but he chose to self elect himself a doctor-> and prescribed meds to everyone with zero means to discern the need.
My montipora is about fifteen years running and never needs meds or dosed: physically cleaning the reef like a good dentist and keeping growths in scale for the tank ALSO works, long term, in fishbowls or in real reefs, and it's internal locus of control that fosters zero bad actors in the microbial world.
To reef clean is to naturally control pathogens. having a reef tank so large you can't clean it correctly is also a design choice, but i didn't read that in Mike's article as it's sole focus was getting expanded use of antibiotics for home reefers.
he wrote that article while the meds were still free flowing...
Now what do his readers do?
I'd rather he innovated a different way for large tankers to keep montipora long term but we didn't have incentive to develop those means.
that's the price of reef antibacterial drugs, lost development time
As we train newcomers to go right to drugs, immediately as the article and this thread advocates, we rob our hobby of innovation that frees reefers from using antibiotics and we kill of billions and billions of semi strong bacterial non targets, leaving only super strong ones, over time.
Randy,
I'm taking from your position here that the countless, countless searchable medical journals that all say in unison guesstimating with antibiotics is bad: are wrong?
Can you state your position clearly so I'm not having to guess where you stand?
