Randy: I didn't read as much as you did but what I got from it was your advice: Keep your tank within the range the organisms require.
So the steps to answer the questions look like this: find the species, find its distribution range, find the average temperature of the water in those areas where the species is thriving and thats your answer. Do you disagree with this?
No, that is pretty much the run of it. The guy says some really intelligent and insightful things, but I have problems with the way he arrives there. These animals evolved long ago? Really? Is evolution a process that suddenly "decides" that an organisms has reached its potential and then just...stops? This is verging on creationism! Every single living thing on this earth has evolved just as long as every other thing on earth. The snowball is rolling...things don't hop off 300 million years ago because 'trilobite' was some deity's end-game.
One huge thing that he never mentions is the adaptation of
Individuals, rather than species...essentially, acquired 'tolerance' of organisms. If you take a fish that has been in pH 7.6 for years and plop in into 8.3, it's probably going to kill it...but the book says 8.3 daddy! If you are running up your electric bill keeping your tank at 76F and read this and say, 'hey, what a waste?' and kick the rheostat up to 84, things aren't going to go so well. Every organisms we keep has the ability to adapt and tolerate unnatural conditions. They are in a friggin' box in our living rooms! It is drastic changes that damage fish and corals, not long slow changes. His scare-mongering comments about ranges in temperature are just that...
I am just railing against ecologists because the way they oversimplify extremely complex systems is just unrealistic and doesn't amount to much more than soft newspaper science. This is coming from someone who worked in the field as an marine ecologist for quite a few years. If the data-collection is fundamentally flawed, everything that stems from it is a grand inference.
Basically, I was scolding reefski for saying giving awful, incomplete, and potentially harmful advice. What's good for the goose is not necessarily good for the gander, and to insinuate otherwise is irresponsible. Taking the fact that everyone I know has a mixed reef, with no common locality, this holds true to an even greater extent.
Carl is a really really good guy. Disagreements are always welcome - scolding is something we do to minors.
