It’s very easy to start a tank and run it without problems given no hardware bad luck like power outages. I’m doing that with more than one tank in threads and in messages, all you have to do is keep your sandbed clean and the rocks manually cleared of algae in the beginning
The reason you read about all the lost tanks, bleached corals and invasions is due to following old hands off rules where uglies cycled in and out of the tank, everyone starves nutrients to try and rid the tank of manifested invasions, that’s the whole trick, not doing the old school way
About 75% of the invasion assistance messages I get are from tankers who did not start out hand guiding, they’re years into an invasion and ready to start some hesitant work having tried the common options and nutrient detailing, actually killing the invader and doing the work it takes to keep clouding filthy detritus out of their tanks still takes more convincing even though they’re asking to be uninvaded... it’s purely a psychology of hesitation. ..tank invasions and losses when not hardware failures are usually human caused due to information and motivation system differences, they’re not very hard to beat biologically. It’s hard to convince someone to uninvade their tank, it’s usually not hard to make it occur. It’s amazing how much people actually want to hold on to an invader...refuse to kill it, refuse to clean the filthy sandbed feeding it over five worms they’ve never seen in the bed. even though the title of their thread is they’re about to leave reefing due to an invasion, and not because they cannot see the worlds most important worms in their sandbed...reefing psychology will soon become its own realm aside from reefing biology go ahead and stamp that as fact, we are working to get the word out.
So the polar opposite of invaded tank destiny behavior is day 1 when you make a reef using rules of access, and farming no invader. What you buy doesn’t matter, how much reef crap you will tolerate from your system is what matters, the resolute forty out of forty accept nothing but coralline and coral and they work to get that and they always send me the proof pics ~
Large tank keepers often advise hands off, waste storage reefing from the 90s to all current reef keepers but it’s not correct that the masses reef well like that, the lucky do. you can get biological compliance in forty out of forty new tanks after a year in threads if they’re hand cleaned. If they’re ran by someone who advises hands off, allow what may reefing, more than half are invaded and gone well before one year I’ve seen this pattern for years now. Very rarely do proponents of a given system have examples other than their own reefs to show, how information is replicated by others matters more than someone’s home reef.
Only go hands off when your reef is mature and you are ok with risking loss to invasion, or don’t stop cleaning it and it’ll just run normally. The risk is over work, but not loss.
Learn to back off the cleaning work after your rocks and coral and coralline and grazer balances do the excluding for you, use all up manual work until then, allow no uglies and you’ll never be invaded or lose to an invasion
Don’t stack your rocks in a wall, make accessible rock coral bommies that can simply be lifted out of the tank and manually cleared of algae vs stripping nutrients and dosing this or that to your invaded tank hoping the item will remove an invader we allowed to gain in mass.
Consider not even adding a sandbed until a year later into maturation, this makes early hand guiding much easier
Don’t add fish until your system is already showing compliance with early hand guiding and corals are doing well and your algae work is under control, fish provide massive nutrient boosts to the system and early fish use of the nongrazer type is fully implicated in tank invasion work threads using solely thousands of other people systems as study
Pack corals when new, feed them well, change water, hand kill algae using kill not suppression methods, allow coralline to take over, plant more corals and wait to add fish until cruise control is going, all tricks to be opposite of the thirty year methods we’ve used that allow tanks to be invaded shortly after setup. It was even incorrect that more gallons makes for a stabler reef...no, whichever reef you can access all the water and all the substrate as needed is the stabler reef, volume has nothing to do with anything in reefing if a one gallon system is third oldest of anyone posting here...access rules the day if you want to force a win using physical means up until the pure art of biological tank arrangement can do the work for you
Quarantine of fish rules the day nowadays, fallow systems, use that until something better comes along. *owing to the universal differences of things that happen in someone’s home reef vs what happens across forty public reefs in a thread, tank transfer and fallow and quarantine is not beaten by any other method to give the best hedge against fish disease. What Humblefish has done, with threads using other peoples money, by the thousands now documented, is not beaten by anything as of July 2018 so it’s the best cure and prevention science we have. I’m aware garlic cured someone else’s crypto. Or live ocean mud etc or feeding clams and mussels all aware, but HF method has repeatability and it’s actually shown in more than three living examples
I guess my final point is, be careful where one gets procedural info, it’s amazing how much does actually not translate well from the home of a master into mass reefing...the tendency is to stay safe (no work threads of others tanks) and only comment about what works in the ocean or at home on a single example.
Consider consulting tank turnaround work threads so you can reverse engineer what caused the loss of many old tanks before a new tank is set up. you’ll see a pattern of exactly this for the invaded: purposefully farming with nearly thousand-yard stare intensity the very invader they hate and want help correcting. Insert the reasons why they farmed mass on purpose (my phosphate is high/low, my nitrate is high/low, I can’t clean my sandbed it has worms, my tank is too big to clean, I can’t clean my rocks there are too many stacked, I can’t remove detritus as someone with an old reef told me to keep it, my gfo is almost tuned but my corals are bleaching and I’ll hold further, I just hesitantly cleaned my sandbed although it still cant pass a drop test but you want me to clean it AGAIN-no that’s too much partial work, I don’t have time)
Dog whisperer Caesar Milan already said what he rehabilitates, now just apply that tenet to reefing and our hobby sustainability will increase massively. We’re still killing our own reef animals we’d never actually kill on purpose if we mapped out ahead of time how this game was going to go down
Caesar Milan impacted my reefing big time. The exercise he talked about as number one on hierarchy...above anything for rehabbing dogs, that’s the busy mode you see earning the after pics in our threads and messages.
Any reefer reading this, try and feel this deep personal accountability sting: by allowing a hands off, occur what may uglies phase, or by designing a tank far outside access means and artistic skill, we end up killing ahead of time the substrates and animals that the anti aquarium faction has every right to harp on us about. We are killing our own tanks perhaps as much or more so than chain of command / collection practice killing, and this can be stopped if we learn to reef in a new and totally accountable way, hand cleaning 101
What good is sustainability on real reefs when home reefers cannot be pried free of their invasions and mass do overs?
How serious then is it for teachers to teach reefing methods that continue this trend, even if their own example tank doesn’t die?
