What is a "matured" reef tank?

[mrhasan]

Originally Posted by iamfrontosa

I think mature in terms of biological filtration. Maintaining the big three is easy in my opinion.

I completely forgot to write about bio filtration, good point!

Using cured live rock would address that plus there are products out there that works great. If you wait for a year and then suddenly dump 1 fish per 10 gallon of water volume, the parameters will get thrown off no matter how long you wait for the tank to mature but then again, I may be wrong. To grow biological filtration, adding inhabitants slowly over time makes more sense (to me) than waiting for the arbitrary maturing time.

[Dearth]

You can put fish, coral and inverts in almost immediately after cycling the tank as there are foods and additives that can be used to keep these alive however to me a matured tank is one where a copepod population is alive and thriving as they for many are the base foods for so many things if your tank can support a healthy population of pods without having to continuously reseed with pods you have a mature healthy tank IMO.