My point was to educate others that protein skimming is not specific to reef or even just marine systems. They're used on an industrial scale to remove waste in freshwater fish farming
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You're entitled to your views but the community deserves to know the real scope and scale of the tool you've chosen to exclude.
If you never feed, you don't need a filter, much less a skimmer.
If you makes frequent water changes with a small bioload, you can get away with it.
But in my case, where I have massive import of food and other organics, it's the single most effective export tool to remove them quickly. Likewise, industrial fish farmers don't minimize the food intake of their stock. They need them to gain weight as fast as possible. Their livelihoods depend on this accelerated growth rate. However, with this massive overfeeding, the amount of waste generated by the fish stock would overwhelm the volume that the fish are kept in. They can increase the water volume- but that costs money. They can reduce the feeding or fish, but that loses profit. So the way they balance the extreme bioload with the smallest area and volume is by skimming.
If you think skimming is difficult or inefficient in a small saltwater reef, the challenges in a massive freshwater farm are significantly greater. The power consumption of those beasts is so high that if they can do without the cost, they would do it in a heartbeat.
So, if you have a beta bowl and keep one fish that you feed some pellets once a day, you don't even have to make water changes except once a week (maybe). But if you run a commercial aquaculture tilapia farm, you spend thousands of $ in power to drive massive skimmer's. In this continuum of keeping life in water, we're each at a different point. Just as I wouldn't insist on putting a skimmer on a beta bowl, I wouldn't advise the fish farmer to take down his skimmer's. Depending on an individual's water volume, bioload, and desire for animal growth, they should find their best approach and not assume that the entire continuum should go that way because of their narrow window of data that applies to their tank.
Peace and let's let each find their way rather than take an ultra-dogmatic approach where only one answer works for everyone.
