scott, he basically said that you don't need to do water changes unless your water quality calls for it. He was involved in some extensive aquarium salt testing and said that even the "best" salts are very impure. Every water change increases the concentration of these impurities in the system. He showed pics of tanks that hadn't had water changes in years. Nutrient removal can be achieved with the use of ATS systems. He also talked about skimmers making it impossible to have levels of live food in the water column even close to what corals need. His thought is skimmers should only be used in emergency situations or in quarantine/hospital tanks. He talked about using a slow acclimation process you can build up the bacteria levels in a tank high enough to compensate for extremely high feeding volumes. There was a ton of info that made sense, but I would be hesitant to practice it. Things like introducing fish that feed on sps into sps tanks. He observed that this would cause the coral to withdrawal their polyps in the day, like they do in the wild, thus allowing more light to be absorbed by the coral, resulting in better growth and color. The summary was that there is no "ideal" reef set up, and that there are many ways to achieve success. I took some notes, but I haven't reviewed them yet, it was a lot to take in in 2.5 hrs.
Jay, I'll make a sketch later tonight and show you what I'm talking about. I'm super excited about it, my wife says I'm crazy.
bill
You need to keep in mind that Eric Bornerman is somewhat controversial. In addition, he's not really doing his job if he just says "keep doing what you've been doing, you'll get great results".
Personally, I disagree whit him about water changes and not using a skimmer. Yes, I have tried a system using algae turf scrubbing and no skimming. I found the typical berlin system (filter sock, large powerful skimming, and live rock in the tank) plus refugium works a whole lot better.
As for doing or not doing water changes, I can recall that many years ago the FW hobby in a long phase where they considered "old water" to be the very best for spawning raising FW fish in. This was later found to be completely wrong, and nowadays small frequent partial water changes are recommended, and even the use of RO/DI water is often used for difficult fish such as discus.
The system being advocated by Bornerman seems to be almost identical to the systems built by Dr. Walter Adey, and described in his book
Dynamic Aquaria, co authored by Karen Loveland. The sketch you have shove us is almost identical to the system Addy designed for the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum. This system was set up in 1980 and was torn down quite a few years ago. By the standards of the time if was state of the art. By today's standards, the system had a lot of great ideas, but also some limitations. I would consider it a bit dated by today's standards.
I do recommend the above book, for additional information, if anyone is going to construct such a system. It's got a lot of interesting ideas in it, but I would also include ideas from more modern systems.
In any case, I do hope this gets people thinking about how we can do things better.
As a sidebar, the system in the Smithsonian had an algae problem, so to help control it, they introduced a yellow tang. The only problem was that the system was supposed to be an Atlantic reef. The fish was too difficult to remove and for years, you could visit the display, and see the yellow tang swimming around with all the other Atlantic reef fish.
