lduncan

Anyway, I think there are heaps of monti's which are much nicer than the superman. http://www.fnzas.org.nz/fishroom/monti- ... 13855.html

I use to. It was killed by the monti eating nudibrachs before I even knew they existed!

Montipora undata.

Don't see any glass walls in the ocean either. There is nothing natural about at glass box full of corals and fish. Layton

No, not really. Some parts of some reefs you could look in any direction and not see sand.

If swing arms compensate for temperature, they must use some plastics with interesting thermal properties. How does that work?

Well there aren't anywhere near as many pods as before, but there's obviously still enough in my tank to support the mandarin, easily.

grammatically and spelling :lol: : I've heard better engrish before.

Not at the moment. I haven't got the existing tank setup for it to be as low maintenance as possible. I really can't be bothered to at the moment. But it's something i've thought about for when I upgrade (whenever that ends up happening, other priorities at the moment). How to make it as clean as possible with the minimum possible maintenance. But how ever I do it, it's going to be a lot more work than BB. It will be purely aesthetic, nothing more. Layton

Hopefully that edit function will be back soon. That last post of mine was a bit of an abortion. :lol:

Well that's how i'll be running sand in a tank. Spotlessly clean, because there is no absolutely no advantage in the alternative for corals or fish. The as far as corals and fish are concerned, there are not inherent benefits of having sand, it's purely aesthetic. Actually maybe there are a few fish which require sand. But there aren't that many, most we don't even see. (Garden eels, some gobies etc) Actuall I remember that a lot of people were concerned about mandarin fish when going BB, I have one myself, and it's just as fat as when I had sand in. So there are no shortage of pods around for it. Layton

With all the food that goes in every day? The skimmer will stop skimming before nutrients ever reach levels low enough to cause that. Nutrients are so tightly cycled that it's very difficult to ever get to the situation where you actually kill acros from lack of food. The first signs are usually an increase in algae on the rocks, by the time that happens, it takes a long time to reverse that. What is most troublesome for acros and stonies in particular, is green boring algaes which kill them from the inside out. It's very difficult to stop or illuminate this once it sets in. Steve Weast has posted in at least one of the sand bed threads, and has stated that he keeps his sand clean by vacuuming, and continually replacing it, he doesn't run it like a dsb. Layton

Some people don't. You don't know how long it will take to hit the first big cycle, and there is little warning. But still, it's just more bioload sitting in the tank competing for food, and consuming more resources.

They sure do, and that's why they are so good to start with. But they can't do this indefinitely, which is where the long term effects come into play. Layton

Well I think some of it was incomplete. Some was just based on biased assumptions.

I know you won't want to hear this, but i'll say it anyway. Maybe that's part of the problem, the Zeovit. It would be interesting to see what happens if you stopped dosing all those additives for a while and see the effects. Really it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that it bleaches corals, and then attempts to substitute for the lack of zooxanthellae by bacterial and chemical feeding.

Are you talking about your tank in particular, or in general? Layton

It's not really clean, it's just hiding the dirt from view. And no, you don't need dirt, especially the amounts that accumulate in sand. Layton

Your not being challenged to prove anything. Just produce some logical reasoning. True proof is not always easy to find. Layton

No one's saying that you can't have a great looking tank with a sand bed. To me though, sand, when run as a filtration system or for coral feeding, reasons has some major pitfalls. They do eventually lead to negative effects on SPS corals, as well as cyclical algae problems. To me the critters and bacteria in the sand are nothing more than unecessary bioload. I'm not particularly interested in keeping critters. I'm interested in corals and fish. Some people have other priorities, some people love watching the diversity which comes with nutrients trapped in sand, and that maybe a reason for having sand. Some don't like the look of BB tanks, so keep a thin layer of sand, which they religiously clean, in order to avoid the long term effects of sand storage. That's another valid reason for having sand. But to put sand in a tank under the misguided belief that it's going to be more beneficial to your corals I think is wrong. Some keep things which aren't particularly effected by the longer term effects of the sand, and prefer to deal with them in other ways. Layton

Cookie and suphew, I think there is one thing which is confusing the issue for you. You are not trying to compare things equally. You are trying to compare your perceptions on the way many people run BB, which is as you say big skimmers to remove as much as possible as fast as possible. To a sand system with less skimming. There are good reasons why people run BB that way. However if you're looking to isolate the benifits (if any) of using sand, you have to level the field and have all other variables such as food input, and skimmer output fixed, and look at changing the one variable, the sand, in isolation. That's were a lot of your arguments fall down. In your reasoning, you're assuming more than one variable changes which is confusing the matter. Now back to why people run BB the way they do? It's because there is plenty of food available to the types of corals they are keeping, no matter how hard they try to remove nutrients, there is still plenty of food there. Any BB owner could just as easily let as much crap accumulate in the tank as a sand bed does, but it's completely unecessary. It's totally up to them how clean or dirty they run their tank. Skimmer output per unit time is not dependant on the size of skimmer, (except when the skimmer has reached it's absolute maximum limit) It is dependant on the concentration of simmable material in the water (in this case we'll call it food). Take this for an example. You have two tanks, one with heaps of food in circulation, the other with nothing. Both tanks have a AP902 on them. Which skimmer will pull more out in a hour of running? Clearly it's the one on the tank with the most food in circulation. Now which one has the most food available to corals? Clearly the one with the most in circulation. So what can you imply from that? A tank with a high skimmer output, is likely to have more food available than one with low skimmer output, all other things being equal. You need to compare apples with apples. Two tanks, one with sand, one without sand, both with AP902's. Which skimmer is more efficient? Answer, they have the same efficiency, as they are the same type and size of skimmer. Then see above. The skimmer which pulls out more stuff implies that there is more food in circulation. Not an attack, it's just that some posts seem a knee jerk reaction. It's just a suggestion to stop to think for a bit. Sometimes it seems that people write stuff without thinking in response to some of my posts, just because it was me that posted it. Just give some things some time to digest, and actually consider what I've said. It actually might make sense. Sounds like you've been listening to all that GE propaganda. A lot of people have the wrong idea on what the dangers of GE are. Anyway, how is UV mutation (which incidentally is a natural process) going to effect the corals. They digest this food, which is a process of breaking stuff in order to form the compounds which the coral needs. You right dead stuff does break down. But it doesn't do it spontaneously. There is a class of organisms which cause that break down - bacteria. Also we already know that corals are quite capable of using dissolved nutrients directly, anyway. Two operative words there 'necessarily' and 'inert'. An inert substance can trap and accumulate detrital matter, which results in large bacterial populations, but you could also have the same amount of detrital matter on it's own, and the bacterial populations would also be there. The sand isn't doing anything special, or necessarily supplying the bacteria with anything in particular. All the bacteria need are the nutrients. If they can get them in the water, they'll be there, if they can get it living on the rocks they'll be there, if they can get it living on the glass, they'll be there. I don't really think you want to drag zeovit into this one Lets just say that the rocks are far from inert, and there is more than just bacterial feeding going on. Layton

So UV is going to kill all the bacteria in your tank? You don't need a skimmer for bacteria to be easily skimmed. I don't see your point. Comes to my point before, the more food you have in the water, the more you skimmer will pull out in a certain time. However some people take the fact that the skimmer is pulling a lot of stuff out, as meaning that the water has no food. It's not always the case. UV can only get stuff which is floating in the water. There is a vast amount of bacteria which is NOT floating in the water, like on every surface in the tank. Whether the bacteria which arrives at corals is dead or alive is irrelevant. It's all food to them. Layton

I don't think you guys are thinking. Killing does not equal removing. It kills some of the bacteria in the water that's all. Corals don't care whether it's dead or alive, to them it's all the same - food. You also forgot the other part of my statement, which actually says that total bacteria populations were increased, when using UV. Layton

What don't you get? The UV doesn't remove anything from the water, just changes it.

nope.