The -wow- showoff
 

I lol'd...

http://reefcentral.com/forums/showth...readid=1644119

Of course Vertex has it's own line of pricey cone skimmers too, eh Albert? How much Lowenbrau did it take to convince ol' Klaus? ;)

LOL, Klaus is a good man.

Wow...that's interesting. I would really like to see a comparison with a Korallen Zucht Revolution skimmer...I am interested to see actual performance data when the company claims that the skimmer skims "gentler" and preserves planktonic life. I'm really just rather interested in the skimmer. :lol:

There's better skimmers for the price, IMO.

Tunze has made this claim also. I doubt such claims since I think a lot of planktonic life is damaged on it's way through a centrifugal pump.

^ My thoughts exactly.

As a total random interjection here, I truly doubt the veracity of claims that pumps are that damaging on plankton. I'm sure some don't survive the trip, but many do and I bet it's safe to say that most will. Just look at how it happens. Copepod dances a little too close to powerhead input, gets sucked in, gets spit out about 10 ms later, maybe a little dizzy but otherwise totally intact and totally alive. It's not like the pump is a blender where the contents are held in place by gravity and repeatedly beaten into a liquified pulp by the blades.. I bet the copepod just hitches a ride in the gaps between the impeller blades and doesn't even make a full rotation before exiting. I'm sure some are chopped of course, but I honestly doubt that pumps and skimmers really have any large impact on the population numbers of plankton/copepods/etc. in a tank, since they prefer to crawl around substrate anyhow..

I think another way of looking at it is "who cares?"

We all feed our tanks foods that make the nutritional value of some vestigal traces of "plankton" look like peanuts... Dried out, malnourished peanuts... :D

In the lab, we regularly centrifuge cells at 4000 - 5000g's, and they survive all right. A wee little pump's got nothing on planktonic life.