Alex T.
Active member
Picoreefer,
I think you get the idea of what most of us are doing and what one of us apparently isn't.
The more advanced and honed your skills are, the more you can get away with. A well trained eye and understanding of the basics will allow you to pick up on many problems before they happen. The technology and gadgets that many of us use to grow and color our SPS will do no good in the wrong hands without a well armed understanding of what makes SPS thrive.
Saying that anyone can run an SPS tank like most run a fish tank is a fallacy. Nobody makes the transition with much success by accident. A full blown SPS tank with corals popping out of the water gets harder and harder to maintain as the corals grow. Water volume will be displaced by the corals, and proper flow patterns will need to be increased to account for more filled in space. When this starts to happen, you will need additional supplementing and maintenance to get the same results. You may even need to perform larger water changes to keep nuisance algae and nutrient build up in check. The sand bed you could once vacuum is no longer accessible and the beautiful aquascape you filled in with corals will need to be maintained/trimmed to keep SPS colonies from overtaking each other. You'll have many people tell you that anything's possible, but you need to look at what the majority of SPS keepers are doing to get a true feel for what can be expected.
The hobby has come a long way in the last 10 years, and the chances of keeping a successful SPS aquarium is much more possible because of the tools we have available...not in spite of them.
I think you get the idea of what most of us are doing and what one of us apparently isn't.
The more advanced and honed your skills are, the more you can get away with. A well trained eye and understanding of the basics will allow you to pick up on many problems before they happen. The technology and gadgets that many of us use to grow and color our SPS will do no good in the wrong hands without a well armed understanding of what makes SPS thrive.
Saying that anyone can run an SPS tank like most run a fish tank is a fallacy. Nobody makes the transition with much success by accident. A full blown SPS tank with corals popping out of the water gets harder and harder to maintain as the corals grow. Water volume will be displaced by the corals, and proper flow patterns will need to be increased to account for more filled in space. When this starts to happen, you will need additional supplementing and maintenance to get the same results. You may even need to perform larger water changes to keep nuisance algae and nutrient build up in check. The sand bed you could once vacuum is no longer accessible and the beautiful aquascape you filled in with corals will need to be maintained/trimmed to keep SPS colonies from overtaking each other. You'll have many people tell you that anything's possible, but you need to look at what the majority of SPS keepers are doing to get a true feel for what can be expected.
The hobby has come a long way in the last 10 years, and the chances of keeping a successful SPS aquarium is much more possible because of the tools we have available...not in spite of them.
