Yah that open brain is wicked, I feel like I got away with theft though, it was ugly as sin when I bought it so I definitely did not pay the same kind of premium you often see them go for. I've never seen a brain with blue on it the way this one does.
And I definitely agree and a variety of methods working, what's important is the effect of what you are doing - how much light, water chemistry, flow, etc. how you achieve those things can be widely variable. I'm doing this to show with tests that doing a 100% water change, when done right, isn't dangerous to a system in terms of any of the metrics of "reef health" that we typically measure. I still see a lot of advice out there saying that it's dangerous to do it, but my hypothesis is that for the vast majority of animals out there, even a pretty significant sudden change in parameters like alk and calcium can be easily mitigated and adapted to by the organism. I'm not saying a change from dKH 6 to 12 is something you want to do often, but if you're using a good quality salt and keeping up with maintenance in general, you shouldn't ever get such a massive swing with a 100% change. It's my hypothesis that there's really only a few parameters that really, acutely matter from a biological functioning point of view - salinity being the most important, then probably pH and then after that temperature. Those are the ones that while a wide range of conditions are acceptable, marine organisms seem to need time to adjust to changes, and don't respond well to instantaneous shifts. All the rest of the major and trace ions only need to be held within a pretty wide range over long periods of time, but I don't think that sudden changes within that range (the key is the "within that range" part) once a week, or month, or year pose any threat to either the corals, motile animals, bacteria, or algae. I think to some people that sounds like a radical idea, but I'm going to try and show it using the tests available to us in the hobby as best I can.
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