OMG! I hear sirens!
I think if we were to put all the reefs in a room and look at them... especially the ones that are not online, we might be surprised on what the "Average" reef actually looks like. We the online reefing communities are a minority in both numbers and what a reef/sw tank should look like.
Think about it... for some reason the fish stores keep bringing in dyed corals, big angles, and tangs, Moorish idols, groupers ect.. That isn't because they all die... it is because people are buying them for there tanks. And as far as deep sand beds... oh we are just crazy for wanting to spend that money to cover the bottom of the tank...
Same with those 300 fish tank decorations you can get at bigger stores... they don't bring them in because they look pretty on the shelves... people buy them and put them in thee tanks..
When I was younger I had what was considered a "reef”... it was a 48 gal tank with crushed coral (big) and crushed oyster shells for a substrate, a bunch of lava rock and tuffa for the rock, and more fish than I will ever admit to :eek: now no one could crucify you for over stocking or keeping fish that were going to die as they were "Just fish" and they weren’t to bad to replace.. That was part of the mentality of having a fish tank back then... well after about a year and a few more fish I got tired of all the damn algae and tore it down and went back to fresh water. What is my point? Well my point is that was a nice "Reef" tank back then... since then through the internet and my fresh water tanks I have re-thought my ideas and taken on the ideals of what "we" (our limited number) call a reef tank, but I still go to the fish stores and see that exact same mentality that I saw some 20ish years ago, and I see people buying the same way that I bought 20 years ago and I realize that what we call "responsible reefers" are few and far between. there are even people on the boards that are only there to get help when something goes wrong and could care less about what there fish are going through .. Just as long as they are pretty and swim... and there are people who have 10 big fish in a 33 gal and are proud of how it looks...
I am just rambling here but what I am trying to show is that while there have been advances in the Technology and methods of fish keeping; there have been few advances in the average mentality of fish keeping.
Steve
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