with me its rather a matter of being successful with the clients I have. Hamilton seems to be mired in a sea of misconceptions about basic reefing concepts and maintaining marine tanks. This is why I switched over to RC a few years back and got away from the local reef forums
It seems the enlightenment in the reefkeeping business is centred around the Oakville/Mississauga/GTO area.
In that I appreciate being able to communicate with guys from that area
When you think about it capn, the challenge of keeping a salt water reef is a daunting one. The single greatest earthbound source of new species on the planet occurs in, on or around coral reefs. This suggests a critically complex ecosystem that by definition is in a constant state of change, if it is in a healthy state. As a generator of new species it seems to me, that its most productive state would be in the midst of chaos. And we are trying to control that turmoil in an incredibly small water column with a fairly limited set of tools.
This hobby (coral reef management) is still incredibly young, at most maybe 30 yrs. Much of the valuable experience has been limited to a relatively few sources and all too often wrapped in a level of complexity in language and knowledge not all that accessible to the average hobbyist. I would argue that by far the greatest advance in the evolution of coral reef management has been the internet itself. With so much activity going on around the world it is making available a mountain of information available to the average hobbyist. Better still it is also beginning to make available the tools to distill useful information from the raw data of experience.
The challenge we face in this environment is that not all of the members of this community are trained or predisposed to separate themselves from the facts of our experience versus our feelings about those facts. In other words it is extremely difficult to divine the constants about our hobby that reflect solid principles that remain true day after day after day.......
I think to make matters even worse, that the ideal state for a serious hobbyist, is to accept that lightning does strike reefs, cyclones and hurricanes do cause havoc, tsunamis wreak major damage and nature somehow copes with all this and even benefits from this normal evolutionary process. Forest fires destroy forests and thereby create positive opportunities for new growth. Who is to say that some of the processes that we try so desperately to curtail are actually part of the contribution to healthy evolutionary stages of growth and revitalization?
This isn't to throw a wet blanket (excuse the pun) on our efforts to find pleasure in this domain in fact my argument would be that we should expect a degree of uncertainty as a central feature of our reefing experience. This is truly a concrete example that our efforts to learn about this hobby are more about the journey than the destination. All we can hope to achieve is coping with one level of change preparing for the next level of change.
This in turn should not mean that we throw the baby out with the saltwater either. There are best practices that can be demonstrated and proven to be effective. We who are serious about this hobby owe it to each other to try and codify those principles in a useful form for the benefit of all in this community. Advances in this discipline will come rapidly when we are able to popularize the notion of excellence in the pursuit of 'best practices'.
So to bring this all home..........."Hamilton seems to be mired in a sea of misconceptions about basic reefing concepts and maintaining marine tanks." This forum is all about changing that dynamic one paragraph or one picture at a time!!!!
Peter
just kidding that is a nice thing to do but it doesn't encourage the growth of it
