[Delphinus]

So will a 48" 50g work or am I going to have to make my 75g reef into a clown loach tank for the next couple of years?

I should mention it's not the plants that don't grow, it's the cyanoslime and other crap (beard algae?? or something) that just overtakes it. I can prune the plants and clean the slime of the plants and other items, but the fuzzy stuff on the rocks and other items is impossible to remove. It's like the tank needs a complete tear-down and scrubbing from top to bottom once per month. That's just way too much work, when I compare to the incremental maintenance that the reef tanks require, there's no comparison. I actually find my one FW tank a much harder chore than my multiple reef tanks.

My thinking is that by abandoning the approach to having a highly planted tank that I can go to a tank that is not as brightly lit and may therefore be a bit easier to keep on top of.

So it sounds like I can expect the clowns to double in the next year or two? That would sort of explain why I suddenly find myself wondering if I'm actually noticing them bigger from one day to the previous. They were maybe 1.5" - 2" when I got them, and it took at least two years for them to double from that size, and then again maybe another two years to double from that size. To think that in another two years they will be double from here almost means we're talking about exponential growth.. I thought maybe it would be more of a tapered curve?

Man... I obviously need to bone up a bit on my FW reading. Despite that the tank is ten years going strong now, I have nowhere near the knowledge that you guys have for FW..