What is Great Success?

[Paul B]

I have been reading through a lot of threads on here and elsewhere and I hear all the time, "I use this or that with great success" or "I fed my moorish Idol bagels and cream cheese with great success". Or
I never show my wife what I spend on my tank and have great success.

What exactly is great success?

Is great success when you buy a clownfish on Friday and it lives long enough to get it out of the bag without jumping on the floor and it is now next Tuesday but it ate a flake on Monday Is that great
Success"? Or did you buy a Moorish Idol because you saw it eating Hamburger Helper in the store and the store owner assured you the fish has been eating this for 6 months so you got it home and although it is covered in spots and is nauseous so you put Prizapro on it and it is still alive after 3 days.

I don't know but "Success and Great Success" should mean different things. To me, "success" is if you buy a fish and a year or two later it is alive and healthy. That means the fish is eating and thriving, disease free and seems healthy. But "Great Success" is only when you buy a fish, it eats right away and eventually, if it is a pair, it spawns and keeps spawning for it's entire presumed lifespan which in fish can be anywhere from 4 years to 40 years. If you have a clownfish and it is 10 years old, you are successful at keeping that fish. But is that same fish lives
30 or 40 years, that is great success because clownfish live into their 40s.

If a person lives 30 or 40 or even 50 years was he successful? I don't think so because a humans presumed lifespan is somewhere around 80 so anything else is a failure.
If we say we have great success at something, some people may get the wrong impression. As fa as I know, no one with a home tank has ever kept a moorish Idol for it's presumed lifespan which is "probably" 15 or so years. I kept one for five years which is a dismal failure.
I think we really need to pick our words more carefully.

Like if I say I am a real hunk of a Man and a great catch. I may be lying.

 

[Pat24601]

So, you are trying to say a live fish in a tank that isn’t a total algae farm isn’t great success?

Because that’s pretty much my standard....

 

[DaveK]

@Paul B , you bring up some great points. This not only applies to the fish and other livestock we keep, but to the equipment we use. All to often I see some one wax poetically about a product that I know to be terrible or at best marginal.

An example. It's not as common today but at one time it was common for people to make their own skimmers. I'd see these DIY projects range for excellent to ones that would be very unlikely to work at all. Yet all of these projects "works great", at least according to the people that built them.

One other item about equipment. If you have been in the hobby 10 years or more, think about all the products that were brought to market and at the time were considered fantastic, and today are considered unnecessary or almost obsolete.

Getting back to fish. I'm sure Paul remembers all this. In the early days of the hobby, it was considered doing good if you kept a SW fish alive for a year. The nitrogen cycle was not understood and the tanks were mostly bare bottom and decorated with coral skeletons. Filtration was a outside filter. If you had a large outside power filter, that was about as good as you could get. Even then many claimed "great success" with such a system, even though it was just about impossible to keep fish to anywhere near their normal life expectancy.

At least today it's possible to get an off the shelf system and if you set it up correctly and maintain it properly, you can keep many fish, inverts, and corals to a ripe old age.

My biggest problem with statements like "great success" or "works great" or "everything is good" is that when used alone then convey no information. If these were qualified with more information, such as "Using this new method I was able to keep this species 4 years, rather than 6 months" I would consider this to be at least partial success and maybe even great success, depending upon what others in the hobby were able to do.

 

[Paul B]

Pat, in your case I would call that "Exceptionally Great Success"

Dave, IMO we use a lot of words incorrectly and in doing that it takes away from the real things that are a great success. I know there is "one" guy spawning and raising orange spotted filefish. That is a great success because almost no one can keep one.

Another word I hear all the time is "Hero". WE call so many people Hero's that it dims the things real hero's did. WE call people who survive tragedy's hero's. They are lucky and some of them may be hero's, but that takes away from the people that ran into that tragedy to save them who are the real hero's.

When I was stationed in Colorado I thought I was the hottest thing around. (I even had hair) I had this motorcycle and I was cruising out someplace on a deserted stretch of road in the plains and I spot these two beautiful girls in a convertible. (you didn't need helmets in those days)
The girls stopped and I pulled up next to them to put my moves on them. I stopped and put my foot down. My bellbottom pants leg got stuck in the pedal and I fell over in the street looking very stupid. I stayed there until the girls were very far away and I couldn't hear them laughing any more.
That was not an example of a Great Success.

 

[Pat24601]

I've got a friend that really hates the way people throw around the word "Hero".

He particularly hates it when folks like athletes are called "heroes" just for making a good play or winning a game. Somehow, a guy getting paid millions of dollars to live a cushy life and make athletic plays playing a boy's game isn't something he finds all that "heroic" when compared to, say, people in an armed conflict or responding to real, life-threatening emergencies.

I can't imagine why he thinks that...

 

[Paul B]

Pat, I have that argument almost every day. Like "Really" an athlete is a Hero!. Give me a break. It's a game with just as much importance as a game of checkers. Who cares. Like after the Superbowl, people were turning over cars. Those ere people with absolutely no life and they should all have had to pay for that car and if a cop was around, he should have shot them.

I know hero's and served with them, one of them was awarded the Medal of Honor for what he did and he deserved it. Should we put him in the same category as some very over paid football player who happens to be lucky that he was born a moose.
I think not. My Medal of Honor friend received no money and I am sure almost no one has heard of him Like Capt Ed Freeman who flew his Huey into a very hot LZ after he was ordered away because the fighting was too intence 13 times to rescue his fellow soldiers. Thats a hero.

https://www.facebook.com/susan.hurl...528186706672&notif_t=nf_share_story&ref=notif

 

[DaveK]

So, you are trying to say a live fish in a tank that isn’t a total algae farm isn’t great success?

Because that’s pretty much my standard....

Often times this all depends upon your point of view.

If your goal is keeping the fish alive and not have an algae farm in the process, this this could be considered a great success.

However, if your goal is to have an algae farm, then this is definitely not a great success.

 

[Pat24601]

Often times this all depends upon your point of view.

If your goal is keeping the fish alive and not have an algae farm in the process, this this could be considered a great success.

However, if your goal is to have an algae farm, then this is definitely not a great success.

Funny enough, right now I’m running my display tank fallow and deliberately growing algae for my snails. So, my tank is basically an algae farm. I thought of you earlier when I realized that.

So, you are correct. Having a live fish and no algae in my case is definitely not a success and in fact would be a big and mysterious problem implying spontaneous generation.

If I recall correctly, vodka dosing solves spontaneous generation issues. Or, does it cause them? Whichever.