The WORST advice EVER!!!!

[Bob Weigant]

gold fish will help cycle your tank ( fresh water )
Damsel's are great for cycling SW tanks and they almost always live

 

[ZoWhat]

From a 40,000ft perspective.... I would say the WORST advice is....

.... from posters who think successful reefing is a matter of SCIENCE

I think there are thousand of tiny factors that make up a mature tank. You could have two identical tanks side-by-side, and tankA grows SPS like crazy and tankB SPS recedes and dies....even though the tanks are IDENTICAL.

I see far tooooooo much ART and tiny hidden husbandry skills beat out SCIENCE every time.

So when I read a poster who says, "Scientifically you should do steps 1, 2, 3, 4" .... its probably 75% great advice, 25% pure luck to get it CORRECT in your own tank.



.

 

[Daveyy]

Use T5HO, LED are rubbish

 

[Daveyy]

Use T5HO, LED are rubbish

 

[EmptyWallet]

"Reefing is a piece of cake these days with all the technology"

 

[Dr. Dendrostein]

my pet peeve regarding advice common in the hobby:

all your early invasions are normal. Leave them in. Its the uglies phase, it goes away on its own

(then we spend twenty years developing invasion stop methods to undo the advice for the 70%~ it never goes away)

People are told to sit there and watch any manner of invaders totally take over a tank, then work back slowly, hopefully, hesitantly, through the water only while trying to add animals to the setup. Recipe for the reason we have massive, massive invasion and dinos and loss within the hobby from biological means not just hardware/error issues.


The counter option: permit no invasion ever, disallow it from day one if you chose to build a system that lets you access the invaded areas for simple hand guiding. Simply opting out of the uglies phase and never self infecting is a new option we like to replace the old one with.

Once you hand guide to maturity, the work lessens and you can back off. if you start with purposeful invasion, you have a 70% chance of having to reinvest again at one point or become part of a rescue thread. Don't own a system so large or so densely stacked that you can't simply guide it into looking great vs letting it wreck/unwreck

The worst advice, is no good advice, my first tank was given to me and I went to the local fish store and chose a variety of fish that should not have been together. The local fish store not once mentioned anything. Bummer

 

[EmptyWallet]

And I agree with the original statement, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure - especially when your talking about the dreaded GHA. I recently moved house and 'started over' - scrubbed every rock free of GHA and put into blackout for 2 weeks. Now I spend an hour a day with a toothbrush searching for the first sign of a single strand - the fish think the toothbrush is another tang

 

[Easy E]

You can't go wrong with a pair of clowns.

 

[TheHarold]

A tank is ready for acros within the first year, no problem!

What’s wrong with that? Couple months is more than enough.

It has more to do with the maturity of the hobbiest than the maturity of the tank IMOZ

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

 

[Orm Embar]

"Yes, you can add this fish without any problems"
"You need a trickle filter and coil denitrator, not live rock with a skimmer" (back in the 80's)
"A big enough skimmer solves all nitrate/phosphate problems"
"Caulerpa is reef safe"
"You can't do it that way"
"This light is more than enough for corals"

 

[BryanD]

"Water changes are overrated and unnecessary with the proper equipment and dosing". Yeah, whatever .... That has got to be the most cluelsss statement anyone could make concerning owning an aquarium, of any type.

 

[PYRU]

You can use tap water it will be ok especially in a fowlr or fo

 

[CeeGee]

Zero Nitrates and Zero phosphates. This was advice from all the “pros” for years. My tank was so clean all corals stayed white and I even had some form of ghost algae that proliferated despite lack of nutrients.

Took me years to figure out what the problem really was.

Not sure what kept me chugging along all those years with my aquarium looking so bad. Those same people throwing out their expert advice were not real interested in helping you figure out why their advice wasn’t working.

 

[lbiminiblue]

@sde1500
Ive asked for work threads here and in prior threads, that's where I based my recommend on never allowing an uglies phase/purposeful invasion phase. I rarely get even a single example when asking, its offputting like you mentioned.

You guys certainly don't mind challenging the recommend in quotes, nobody called you out so I know if I just ask for a single work example the back n forth slows greatly and the greater recommend will still and always be to purposefully wreck your tank.

That keeps us busy in our work threads, continue on if you think its right.

*remember its not as serious as you guys like to make it... we're simply saying that if you have a nano or a shallow tank, clean the filth out at the start, don't let it compound to a cyano or dinos invasion that takes 5 months to clear...cleaning isn't harmful.

The rates of loss from all sizes of tanks nowadays is totally unacceptable and one way to reduce that is to consider not repeating the errors of the past though it works for 30%.

Im aware that the majority of reefers will still self invade. The % we show how to not do that sure like the method.

Makes bold and sweeping claims concerning the “majority” of reefers and percentages, when no such statistics on reefers exist, besides threads shared on a handful of forums.

 

[lbiminiblue]

From a 40,000ft perspective.... I would say the WORST advice is....

.... from posters who think successful reefing is a matter of SCIENCE

I think there are thousand of tiny factors that make up a mature tank. You could have two identical tanks side-by-side, and tankA grows SPS like crazy and tankB SPS recedes and dies....even though the tanks are IDENTICAL.

I see far tooooooo much ART and tiny hidden husbandry skills beat out SCIENCE every time.

So when I read a poster who says, "Scientifically you should do steps 1, 2, 3, 4" .... its probably 75% great advice, 25% pure luck to get it CORRECT in your own tank.



.

Not really worth debating, but identical tanks, by definition, would have identical capabilities. Similar tanks? Sure, that could easily happen.

 

[TheHarold]

Makes bold and sweeping claims concerning the “majority” of reefers and percentages, when no such statistics on reefers exist, besides threads shared on a handful of forums.

Don’t bother trying to reason. Look at the ratio of likes on his posts versus the responses to them in this thread; everyone knows.

 

[Jon Fishman]

From a 40,000ft perspective.... I would say the WORST advice is....

.... from posters who think successful reefing is a matter of SCIENCE

I think there are thousand of tiny factors that make up a mature tank. You could have two identical tanks side-by-side, and tankA grows SPS like crazy and tankB SPS recedes and dies....even though the tanks are IDENTICAL.

I see far tooooooo much ART and tiny hidden husbandry skills beat out SCIENCE every time.

So when I read a poster who says, "Scientifically you should do steps 1, 2, 3, 4" .... its probably 75% great advice, 25% pure luck to get it CORRECT in your own tank.



.

I know Euphyllia etc are tough for me to grow well...... I have an Anemone I can’t kill, and Montipora and Acros grow noticeably quick for me......

I don’t test often, or thorough enough..... I change water etc, and if something looks “off” or dying back..... I test......

My zoas always do awesome...... so at the end of the day, I avoid euphyllia and other stuff that I have poor results with

 

[MnFish1]

Worst advise, " if you have algea you have po4 even if all test are zero, run more gfo." that led to a tank full of white skeletons for more bryopsis to grow on, lol. ( not really laughing)

You do have PO4 if you have algae even if it reads zero. Doesn't mean to use GFO though.

 

[eggplantparrot]

overhead this

*use this PH-up if your PH is too low, and when it's too high, lower it back down with this PH-down*

 

[MnFish1]

From a 40,000ft perspective.... I would say the WORST advice is....

.... from posters who think successful reefing is a matter of SCIENCE

I think there are thousand of tiny factors that make up a mature tank. You could have two identical tanks side-by-side, and tankA grows SPS like crazy and tankB SPS recedes and dies....even though the tanks are IDENTICAL.

I see far tooooooo much ART and tiny hidden husbandry skills beat out SCIENCE every time.

So when I read a poster who says, "Scientifically you should do steps 1, 2, 3, 4" .... its probably 75% great advice, 25% pure luck to get it CORRECT in your own tank.

I think that what we do should be 'based' on science. but each individual tank is an art - the art of choosing which fish, coral etc - though those are also based science. Alkalinity testing is based on science. Etc etc.

If what you are saying is that there is no 'cookbook' approach that leads to a successful reef 'all of the time' I agree. Most of that though is not the problem of the cookbook or the 'science' its the fault of the cook's (so to speak) interpretation.