Wy Renegade
Aquarium Advice Addict
Wow - my vent thread turned into a case in point. Ironic.
I could tell you that I was surprized, but then I would be lying .
Is it sadder that some goldfish end up in bowls, or that an entire community based around biology is relatively ignorant of scientific standards
Although I suppose we all have our own priorities.
Personally, I always have to chuckle when I see a call for data or imperical evidence show up in these threads. While I agree that aquarium forums like this are based around "biology", in truth they have very little to do with real science. Or perhaps it would be more fair to say that real science has very little to do with aquarium keeping. The simple truth of the matter is that about 99% of what is bandied about on the internet forums as "fact" is nothing more than opinions based on individuals or perhaps a group of individuals observations or personal experiences. If you actually go looking, there is very little emperical evidence or data to support anything that occurs within the aquarium industry. Why is that do we suppose? I think that answer to that is fairly obvious; aquariums are at the base of things, an artificial environment created by humans that in truth follow very few of the rules of nature. Thus in order to provide any sort of valide emperical evidence, we would have to study not a number of tanks of the same sort/size, but rather we would have to study every single tank. Why? Because quite simply every single tank is a unique situation to which the existing rules of nature do not apply.
In nature, temperatures are not constant, food is not daily available at the same time or space, in the same form, nor is it always nutritionally ideal. Further, it is not always easy to get ahold of. In nature predatures exist, large volumes of water are almost always involved, and nature takes care of water changes, dissolved oxygen, etc.
In some cases we can take science that exists and apply it fairly accurately to a particular fish or situation, but that is certainly not always the case.