the old way of keeping a reef tank

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WarOrks15

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ok so i had this guy come in to the lfs today. we were talking an i guess he had a reef tank 20+ years ago and he had a carpet anenomy in it. but he just had the stock light on the tank. and once a week he gave it a gold fish to eat. he said that this thing was liveing for 1 year +. now why is it that people say that they need MH when he was able to grow it under just the stock light. he had a full reef tank under this stock light with every thing gorwing well? reefrunner69 i know you have had a sw tank for over 10 years is there any idea how this could be done? it has just got me thinking. this guy is a great guy and has been showing up to this fish store for about 25 years and he knows what he is talking about. but i just find very odd that every one says that they HAVE to have the MH to keep them alive.
 
What size tank? The fact that he fed it probably helped and you got to take into consideration the definition of reef tank 20 years ago and now. There are lots of factors and there are exceptions to every rule. 1+ years says it didn't make it to 2years and anemones are pretty much imortal, so that isn't exactly success. Another issue is the boy that could ride his bicycle on top of the picket fence....until someone told him about gravity :mrgreen:
 
well i dont know like how long he had it but he did say it was for a long time and was growing. but if it was not getting the light it needed it would have died in less them 6 months right? and i do understand that it could have just been luck but there has to be more people out there who have had the same thing. i just fine things like this cool and very cool. i love to fins out how things were a long time ago. (i know that 20 years is not a long time) but you get what i am saying. things must have been much harder then it is now with people not knowing what they know now and all. i talked to this guy for a long time. and i would have loved to sit down with him for hours just listening to him tell about all of his tank and how he had them up and running so great that he dose not have to do any thing to them. he has one fw tank that no one feeds and he only changed about 10 gal of water every other month. (it is 55 gal) and he dose not have to clean any of the glass and the water is clear. people who have been in this hobby for a long time know all the inside tricks because they had to do so much more to get a tank running back then.

when i say reef i mean it by what today reef is. and as for size it was prolly just like no more then a 55 gal tank.
 
Actually a well fed anemone can live in lower light conditions. The nutrition they get from solid food is more critical than what they get from photosynthesis.
 
I'm very new to sw, but this question got me interested, so I talked to my dad about it. He said that the biggest differnce between what we consider doing well in a reef today and 20 years ago is way different. He says that 20 years ago just keeping a coral alive for more than a month was considered good, and the longer it lived the better people assumed it was doing. He points out however that like all living things living and growing doesn't mean thriving. Their are kids in africa today that didn't eat much, but they are still growing and living, does that mean that they are thriving????

Corals can be the same way, and today we don't consider a limping along coral to be healthy or doing well, but 20 years ago it was a totally different story.

Don't take this as fact, this is simply what I understood from a convo with my daddy, haha. Any other thoughts???

HTH, Joshua...
 
Yep, back in the good old days, keeping a tank alive for 6 months was a huge success. So a year of life from an anemone would have been "a long time" for it to live.
 
indy said:
Yep, back in the good old days, keeping a tank alive for 6 months was a huge success. So a year of life from an anemone would have been "a long time" for it to live.

I am not sure I would have taken part in the hobbie back then if that was the case. I do love the challenge of fishkeeping, but if the SW hobbie was basically slowly killing SW fish and inverts over a number of months, I would not have found that to appealing at all.

:cry:
 
Joshua you are wrong!!!

Haha kidding :p Just had to say that after your topic in the lounge, lol.

Actually I was going to write pretty much what you said, only much less eloquently :lol:
 
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