Maybe quitting Zeovit

[midgetwaiter]

Originally Posted by Snappy

Please don't take offence but it sounds like you've never been scuba diving on a reef before. As luck would have it I just got back from a holiday last night where I was diving and some of the sps colours I witnessed were absolutely amazing. That said not every sps is a bright colour but the most popular ones in the hobby are and zeo tanks can help them achieve their full potential. It's easy to keep a coral brown and still healthy but I personally enjoy a more colourful look. Now to address your point of "natural", since most of us have corals from many parts of the world together in a glass cage that would not be found together in nature the only way to get a true "natural" look would be to have a geographic specific tank. That goes for fish too.

No I haven't ever been diving, still on the to do list.

There's no question that some corals have amazing pigments in the wild. What I was saying is that it is more likely for them to have brown or at least more muted colours. It seems to me that the bright pigments you can get with a ULN system seem to be one of the leading reasons people try it out. As both Greg and Oceanic pointed out brightly pigmented corals are over represented in the hobby compared to any wild reef patch because those are the ones selected for collection and mariculture. Nothing wrong with that of course. Additionally everyone is trying to tailor their systems to encourage these pigments to develop further. Again there's nothing wrong with that, it's very attractive.

What gets me is when people charaterize this setup as "natural", it's just not. The meaning of natural has been so twisted when used to market products in every aspect of our lives, not just the hobby and it bothers me. Like Greg pointed out there's nothing natural about what we are doing with fish and corals in the first place. People read natural and they think it must be a simple or at least easy to manage system.

I'm not against Zeovit, I'm against bullsh*t.

If you look at Drew's original issues through my patented anti-bullsh*t filter it frames the problem he is having differently. What he's trying to do is establish and grow bacteria cultures to eliminate nutrients he doesn't want without any other things like cyano getting a hold of these nutrients and doing things we don't want with them. This would be tricky to do in a sterile petri dish but instead we're doing it in a closed system with god know what else growing in it and a limited ability to both measure and control the concentrations the nutrients involved. There may be too much of something, to little of something else etc.

I think that pretending that we have a clear, full understanding of how these things work, what factors influence them and what they really accomplish in the end leads to frustrations like Drew initially expressed. It's not a clear, simple or "natural" thing. Every system is different and therefore every implementation of the system must take into account these differences, many of which we can't measure or control very well. I would suggest that if Drew had looked at his problem from that point of view initially he wouldn't have been so frustrated.

Who knows maybe I am just an overly pedantic net troll but it is my natural behavior so it must be good right?