Historical Reefing

[maroun.c]

Way too many changes the hobby was easy going, dosing was limited to the strict necessary but contrary to what people believe we could still achieve good colors and growth. Lightong was pretty basic halides or T5s but it worked well (maybe at a bit higher running cost) equipmebt was constantly improving but we were able to run tanks that werent nutrient starved (dosing nitrates or tanks with low nitrates was almost unheard of )
People had more say in their tanks and the hobby had an individual approach to most aspects of keeping a tank that tanks were more unique VS following dIctated methods for mostly nutrient starved corals.
Choce of corals was mich more classic and its very weord to see the amount of new corals abd colors that emerged in the last few years as if they were non existant in the past
Vendors "baking" corals is a major change abd it brought unseen colors yet on the negative side micro fragging took over and coral sizes have tremendously decreased due to demand and prices are crazy. A small frag with a bit of crust is now called a colony!
On forums you could see tanks with mature colonies vs tanks with a million frags that get fragged each time they grow a millimiter to recover the initial investment as all becomea a business.
Water changes were a good thing where now most methods are oriented towards reducing or totally stopping them.
Equipment has come a very ling way woth controllers, automation, even Ca reactors are more or less automated now and soon with automatic testers full automation will be a given, but all this automation as succesful abd as less labor intensive as it is did also leqd to a didferent type of crashes.
I still have more respect to old mature tanks which eventhough are not stocked with the latest cherry corals have a diversity of mature big colonies that mimick more what u see on a dive.

 

[garbled]

I think the silliest memory I have is that xenia was considered largely impossible to keep. So many people had trouble keeping it, and then a few people had these "miracle tanks" where it would thrive for unknown reasons. GSP was the same, people had a hard time keeping it.

 

[tony'stank]

I started my first saltwater tank in 1986-87 after reading George Smits articles in FAMA. It was a 60 Gal tall tank. I had a a DYI sump with bio balls and a crushed coral and aggronite reverse flow under gravel filter. It was primarily Fish with a couple of anemones and a large hermit crab. Those were the only inverts I could get at the LFS in Detroit at that time. The lighting was shop fluorescents. In 1988 I started a 125 Gal acrylic tank that I drilled for overflows myself. The lighting was DYI metal halides ( made from outdoor spotlights) which were later supplemented by power compacts. My sump was 40 breeder modified to have a bio ball wet dry filter. I did use live rock that was shipped to me in seawater and had a ton of plant an inveterate life. By the 1990,s I had ditched the wet dry and started using my first protein skimmer. About 1995 I used a DSB with a plenum. With this , with water changes and using kalkwasser for evaporation replacement this was basically my routine for over twenty years. I never really had any problems with Nitrates or pH and never had a tank crash. I started using commercial metal halides in 2005 and switched to LEDs in about 2010. Four years ago I started my most recent tank RSR 450 mixed reef. I bought this tank from the same Detroit area LFS ( Pet Connection) where I had bought my first tank in 1986.