Tangs in a 90?

[Rikko]

Originally Posted by naesco

so which experts and authors have made this a rule of thumb? I have never seen anyone but fanatics say you must have a 6 foot tank because if you think of it what does that mean?
All of them Stir; the brackets indicate my opinion. I have posted some threads which I have posted in the past.

Hardly an answer, Wayne. Who are "all" the experts? From both links you posted I see a deliberate and powerful unwillingness to provide any concrete numbers on tank size. The best we get is "the bigger the environment the better", and really, that applies to every-bloody-thing in the world. It's a fact that many, many people keep tangs in abismally small tanks and many (I won't say many, many this time) of them thrive.
Want an analogy? Keep a chinchilla in a small cage. They're cute, cuddly, and love to be scratched. I have mine in 48x36x80"H cages and they also get the room to run around in every other night for a few hours. Know what? They're not cute and cuddly. They generally consider me a food provider and otherwise ignore me. Which of the two are better pets? Sure, the ones in the bigger cage may be closer to "wild" rodents, but if that's the only environment they've known for a long period of time, they adapt and thrive in it. Same basis for that phenomenon of long-term prisoners being released and not wanting to go.

Tangs need the length for swimming. Volume is irrelavent. A large tank filled with coral with little end to end swimming room isn't any good either.

Not depth? Not height? You propose that a tank 6" wide and 6" tall but 120" long is superior to a standard 20 gallon tank?

Certainly no one with any experience would keep 3 tangs in a three foot tank.
No one with any experince would mix similar species of tangs
No one with any experience would choose an Achilles tang. A tang which is almost impossible to keep by the most experienced tang keepers with ideal setups.

Absolute rubbish on all counts, and you know it. Taking an ethical stand on something doesn't mean you're all of a sudden on the "right" side. We're all enslaving marine life in the name of our own amusement. We aren't helping anything (or are we "learning"? I could recall other experiments where great breakthroughs were made in the early 1940s, but it's not yet time to invoke Godwin's Law). Look carefully on the net and you'll see people with tangs (and a great many other things) in environments smaller than are "optimal" - they aren't advertising it, but they do it and they succeed. C'est la vie.