Research
I have been thinking of this topic the most once I decided to start a build thread. Everyone reading this is already an expert researcher. You've had to dig through piles of caresheets, compared reviews of every LED light on the market, and have a tank wet before you venture to specific builds. So I'm not gonna tell you how to continue your search for knowledge. I just want to point out some things I noticed along my path.
What to watch out for!
Look at the date!
The hobby has been changing exponentially, it's foolhardy to assume everything posted 20 years ago is still the best or efficient way to do something. Just weight it with some more recent data and make a decision.
Beware of dead ends!
We've all seen the thread "my fish is sick" "do this it will work" "ok" . I want to know the end! Did the thing work? Did it not work and the owner left the hobby? Did the fish go zombie and eat the owner? Once again look for trusted sources cross reference with older or newer articles.
Naysayers!
Last thing I'd like to warn everyone is of the "Naysayers". These are well intention people who tend to derail conversations while pushing their style of fish keeping on others. Some may be the Tang Police or Goldfish bowl Police or even a grumpy fish shopsowner. I ran into my version of naysayers when I was on hunt for information about the Mandarin Dragonet all I saw were negative posts about how they are impossible to care for. This discouraged me, but after alot of digging I have seen plenty of success with a bit of planning and prep. Discouraging voices are something you will have to deal with but if you invest the time up front it will pay off in the end. Don't get me wrong, educating someone before making a tragic mistake is the right thing to do, but that attempt should not stiffle a creative approach to problem solving. Helping someone accomplish their goals is what I strive for and not discouraging them from completeing their goal.
What are you looking for?
Topics to start your education.
Water chemistry
- Learn the nitrogen cycle
- Learn how and what to test in aquarium water
- What makes up natural seawater
- How do you dose to maintain natural seawater levels
- How do you remove unwanted elements from seawater.
Fish, invertebrates, and coral
- what do you like?
- What does it take to keep it?
- What is it compatible with?
- Is it ordimental or does it acomplish a job in a reef tank?
- Do you need special equipment?
My favorite thing to do when learning about new tank inhabitants was to make up the perfect build for each animal I was considering. From seahorse tanks with gorgonians, Fowler butterfly tank, LPS frogfish, mangrove lagoons, clown harems with anenomes and countless others. This helped me identify what was in my skill level, price level, and how passionate I was at keeping those animals.
Lastly is equipment. This is where build threads help the most. See what other people are using and maybe more importantly what they stopped using. What brands are reliable and what they are compatible with. Many of the online retailers have great reviews and customer service to help with any questions.
How do you find it?
You are looking for information and skills to help advise your choices when you start your tank. Reliable ways to find this is via the Internet, your local fish store, and personal real life experience.
Internet is our best resource now. It has all the information it's just a matter of finding what you want and making sure. I'm a visual person so YouTube was the first thing that caught my eye. The range of youtubers are vast; from the new hobbyist to experienced fish breeders or store owners, from DIY home hobbyist to massive aquarium companies. My goal when looking at videos is look for reefers with similar methodology as me and compare them to reefers that have a very different view. Finding new equipment from large companies and compare them with reviews from home hobbyists. The different points of view and opinions is the best way to gather reliable information, the biggest error is to find one voice and take that as fact, which sets you up for failure.
Forums are the next step on the internet. This may not have the visual allure YouTube has but has decades of reefkeeping info at the tips of your fingers. Any and everything you want to look up there will be hundreds of threads full of discussion about those topics. My goal of research on the internet is simple, follow your interests down the rabbit hole. Jump from article to article, open tons of new tabs, dig into everyone's opinion, and with all that info develop you own opinion. After you have done all that, find a new thread to pull on and start the process again. For example I did plenty of research on mantis shrimp, I knew I would never could keep one. But as I learned more and more I found it's close relative the pistol shrimp. One of my favorite animals in the hobby now, all because I followed the bread crumbs and kept researching.
Once you believe you have a solid opinion on some basics, it's time to test you skills with some real live experts. Now you have to hunt for your "LFS". This is something I thought would be simple and uneventful, boy was I wrong. I found that I have 4-5 fish stores ranging from 10 minutes away to 2 hours. So I took my day off and visited them all. Armed with a list of questions and a firm understanding of what I was looking for in a store. Here are some of the questions I asked.
- How long have you been in business?
- How do you compete with the internet?
- How do you treat new shipments of fish?
- Where do you order fish?
- Do you have a specialty?
- Do you have an email list? Youtube?
This tells me their experience, their prices compared to internet, source of fish and quarantine process, and how helpful they are to new hobbyists. When you get short answers, "I don't know", or shotty quarantine processes; it's time to move to the next store. Check out how clean the store and tanks are. Did you see dead animals? Do they carry creatures you would be interested in? These are just a few of the things I focused on. It is their job to make you feel comfortable and confident shopping in their stores, if they take the time and answer all your questions you might be in the right place.
My LFS is an hour away and has been in business for over 20 years, they always offer internet pricing for equipment, they do not medicate or quarantine incoming fish, but 90% of their fish are aquacultured or come from local hobbyist so they are confident in the health of their stock. Aquaculture is apassion of mine so I was very excited about this. They added me to their email list and showed me their YouTube and links to articles written for reefs.com. They may be a one and a million store, but I would never had found this all out without asking! Having a trusted LFS that is willing to help and explain the hobbyist the best place for research.
Last step is real life personal experience, so now that you have your LFS, now buy something! Now this isn't something I would have recommended at the start but now looking back it was invaluable. I bought a Betta fish. Being out of the hobby for years I was rusty with the day to day of running a tank. This practice taught me more than I thought I ever would. And in the next post I'll discuss all the ups and downs of running a freshwater nano and how it directly related to my reef.
If you have any research tips or places you go to for answers let us know! I'm sure I'm not the only one who can use the help.
