From Reefs Magazine

Skepticism is a method, not a position. Officially, it’s defined as a method of intellectual caution and suspended judgment. A skeptic is not closed minded to new ideas, but is cautious of ideas that are presented without much, or any, supporting evidence. In our hobby there are tons of ideas presented without much, or any, supporting evidence. Being a skeptical reefer essentially boils down to taking advice/products/new ideas with a bucket of salt. Being a skeptical reefkeeper requires that you investigate why, how and if the suggested ideas actually work. As a skeptical reefkeeper, you decide what is best for you, your animals, and your wallet based upon critical thinking: not just because you heard someone else say it. The goal of this series of articles is not to provide you with reef recipes or to tell you which ideas are flat out wrong or which products really do what they say they do or which claims or which expert to believe – the goal is to help you make those kinds of determinations for yourself in the face of sometimes overwhelming conflicting advice.

Words words words

This is a photo of and elephant seal and has nothing to do with this article.

Our hobby is constantly evolving, and the terms we use to communicate ideas to one another change and morph over time and these changes can lead to confusion. For instance, the term refugium initially referred to an area of a system that small animals could use as a refuge from predation, but now refugium also refers to an area of the system used to grow algae for nutrient export or simply a small tank plumbed into a larger system. The ideas can overlap, but they don’t necessarily, so when someone asks for information on setting up a ‘fuge, it becomes important to know what the term means to them in order to help them with information relevant to their needs.

The reefkeeping hobby and industry has no centralized leadership, so new terms develop in a kind of meandering way, and it’s possible for some vendors (by no means all, just some) to take advantage of this process by using terms that are ambiguous or downright misleading. This is particularly apparent in the realm of captive propagation/rearing of marine animals. This is where skeptical thinking can really come in handy – what do those terms really mean and can you trust those saying them?

Knowing what you have

One of the most obvious ways to save money and protect the lives of animals in your aquarium is to know what animals you have and what animals you may be adding. If you don’t know what you have, you don’t really know how to care for it, and if you don’t know what you are getting, you don’t really know how to care for it or if it will coexist with the animals you already have. The idea seems a bit rudimentary, but pulling it off can still be tricky in the world of reefkeeping due to the oversimplification of coral identification.

In the article “Renaming our corals” Chris Jury points out that the 5 groups that hobbyists generally break corals into, small-polyped stony (SPS), large-polyped stony (LPS), soft corals, zoanthids, and mushroom polyps are, in practice, unhelpful in determining how to keep those corals alive in reef tanks. Relying on those groupings can give us a false sense of understanding. According to Jury, the problem with applying this cookbook style of reefkeeping is that it utterly ignores the true diversity that exists within or between each group. This is analogous to saying that seals, bears and wolves are really all the same animals and have the same needs. Obviously, this is not the case, yet a similar argument is propagated in reefkeeping circles simply by utilizing these terms and believing that they confer some knowledge about a certain coral’s requirements. Simply put, the idea that these terms give us any useful information about light, water flow, food or any other requirements is a myth, and I wish to debunk it. He goes on to debunk it rather well in my opinion, as well as discussing the idea that there is no ecological or biological reason to divide stony corals into SPS and LPS. The article is worth the read.

Can you reliably identify any of these corals from this picture? Accurate identifications to species probably take more work than just looking at a snapshot.

Scientific classification 

Scientific classification is a hierarchical scheme that groups organisms together based on shared characteristics, and is governed by internationally accepted rules that help ensure that each species has only one name. Sometimes scientific nomenclature is referred to as Latin names, but the words used to create the names are not always from Latin, and non Latin words used in scientific nomenclatures are “Latinized”, so the term “Scientific Name” is preferred. The first letter memory aid “King Phillip Comes Over From Germany Soon” (there are other mnemonics, but this is the one I learned (Editor’s note: Or “King Phillip Came Over For Good Sex” – for some reason, my students always remember that one …. LM. ) helps us remember the terms of the hierarchy – Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. Reefkeepers are most familiar with the last two, which are really the core of scientific nomenclature or binominal nomenclature, genus and species, which are always italicized with the genus being capitalized and the species not, for example Acropora tenuis. The full taxonomic classification is Animalia: Cnidaria: Anthozoa: Scleractinia: Acroporidae: Acropora tenuis. It is important to remember that science doesn’t stand still, and as new information becomes available, the scientific names can change, as can any of the various levels of taxonomy. Sometimes you will see an animal written as Acropora sp., or spp. Acropora sp. refers to a single species which is unknown but the genus is known. Acropora spp. is used to refer to a larger group of multiple species.

With fish, getting the correct genus and species is often pretty straightforward because the shared characteristics are pretty straight forward: color, pattern, body shape, number of rays in a fin, and so on can be pretty easy to identify by people not necessarily trained in fish taxonomy (with at least one well known exception: it is notoriously difficult to tell A. ocellaris from A. percula). Corals however, are often not so straightforward. Corals are classified by looking primarily at the skeletal structure, which can often be difficult to see under the living flesh of the coral. It can even be more difficult according to Charles Delbeek and Julian Sprung; skeletal characteristics of stony corals vary among individuals of the same species from different regions of the world, or from different locations on the reef. Characteristics used for identification of genus and species may vary even on individual colonies! In other words, grown out frags of the same coral can have very different growth forms and different skeletal structure in different flow and different lighting, so much so that it can be impossible to know that then grown out colonies originally came from the same fragment. A recent genetic study on Hawaiian Porites (Zach Forsman et al) coral found that some corals thought to be different species were genetically indistinguishable from each other. According to the authors, “Our approach shows that morphological characteristics previously thought capable of delineating species must be re-examined to accurately understand patterns of evolution, and biodiversity in reef-building coral.”

Sometimes people are scared off of using scientific names because they are difficult to pronounce. Indeed, different people, even highly trained people, pronounce scientific names differently. There really aren’t hard and fast rules for pronunciation, though there are different schools of thought, so my advice is to go for it because trying is a fun way to expand your involvement in reefkeeping.

Common names

Common names are flexible and are generally used within specific communities as a short hand to identify animals quickly and easily. However, these common names can often lead to confusion because different groups of people will use different common names to refer to the same animal so not everyone may be familiar with a particular common name. For instance, Hippo tang, Palette Surgeonfish, Blue Tang, Pacific blue tang, and (shudder) Doryfish all are common names forParacanthurus hepatus.

Many prefer common names that somehow refer to the scientific name. Scotts Fairy Wrasse reflects the scientific name Cirrhilabrus scottorum, while “Nemo fish” is about as far away from Amphiprion ocellaris as you can get. I like it even more when the common name is actually part of the scientific name, like the actual genus as in Rhinopias, Gonipora or the species as in Ventrails anthias (not italicized as they are common names). Scott Michael sums up the feeling nicely by using a common name that is derived from the scientific name, amateur aquarists, divers and marine scientists can all better communicate with one another. Better communication means better understanding, and better understanding translates into better reefkeeping.

Named corals

This is a fragment of ‘True Blue Mobious Dirty Sanchez Acro’ and therefore should cost $1000 a polyp.

It seems like you can’t turn around in reefkeeping circles without hearing about corals with outrageous common names. Crazy sounding names like “reverse inverted dragons breath purple nipple monster” tell us almost nothing useful about the coral; we don’t even know what kind of coral it is. Much more useful would be “reverse inverted dragons breath purple nipple monster acro” because it at least lets us know the coral is an Acropora sp. These extravagant names have come into play as part of a marketing war by people selling coral fragments. It seems the more exotic sounding the name, the more some people are willing to pay for the fragment, sometimes into the 1000s of dollars.

Initially, these kinds of names weren’t so crazy and actually helped track the lineage of the coral. “Tubbs Blue Zoa” let potential buyers know who the coral came from (a guy named Tubbs), and gave the quality of the coral some weight based on Tubbs’ reputation, as well as some indication of what the coral looks like, what it is and how long its been in captivity. Some vendors sold wild collected similar corals as the “Tubbs Blue Zoa” getting the sales benefit of the linage and reputation without the corals actually being of that lineage. Then we saw “True Tubbs Blue Zoas” for sale, but there was no way to know if they really were or weren’t. The addition of the idea of a “Limited Edition” or “LE” seems to be more marketing as the coral was only “LE” until the next shipment came in with more of that particular coral.

At least today a lot of the corals we are interested in buying are presented with WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) photographs, so even with the crazy names, you get some idea of what the coral might look like. Of course you have to trust that the photo is representative of the actual coral instead of the colors being digitally enhanced or a super macro photo or photographed under extreme lighting (photography used for sale is certainly a place to apply the skeptical method).

My advice: don’t get sucked into sexy marketing names. I suggest buying corals that you like the look of and are willing to pay for rather than trying to get your hands on the expensive, flash in the pan coral de jour. After all, in a few months, that coral might loose its perceived value because lots of people have grown it out and have fragments available for sale or trade. It’s your tank, it should be about what you like, not about what other people think of your tank.

Captive Bred?

As threats to the worlds coral reefs became widely understood, reefkeepers have become more interested in “sustainable”inhabitants for their glass boxes (Though it could be argued that the shift had less to do with caring for the reefs, and more to do with worrying that animals would be no longer available to the trade, but that’s a discussion for a different time). To fill the desire for more ecologically sound corals, some vendors started offering animals advertised as captive propagated, captive raised, tank raised or tank bred. Of course, the question arises to the skeptical reefkeeper “what do those terms actually mean?” The short answer is they mean different things to different people and some people stretch or break even the most common sense understanding of what those words mean in order to get you to buy whatever they are selling.

Science has a nifty short hand for tracking captive breeding based on filial generations – any generation resulting from a controlled mating of the parental generation. Filial generation is generally notated by the letter F followed by a number F1. F0 (sometimes written as P for parent) are wild collected specimens. F1 refers to the first generation after capture, F2 the second and F3 the third, and so on. Sometimes, F1 is not considered really to be captive bred/propagated to make sure we are avoiding the possibility of “impregnation” before capture so to be absolutely sure the animals we are interested in acquiring are truly captive bread means what we are really after is the F2 generation and beyond. That said, in general, the F1 generation is often considered to be captive bred in fish. Remember I said before that there is no governing body to decide what terms in our hobby really mean: here it is in action.

For fish, the terms captive bred or tank bred seem pretty straight forward: the animal being offered as captive bred was bred in captivity. The parents did the deed in captivity, and the animal was born in captivity i.e., the F1 generation. The problem with the term captive bred comes when vendors slap it on animals that are not captive bred at all, like small wild collected Banggai Cardinalfish (Pterapogon kauderni) to take advantage of the hobbyists desire to purchase responsibly. Thankfully due to more educated hobbyists, it is becoming very difficult to get away with, but it still occurs so if someone is selling a captive bred animal ask questions like “who bred them, where were they bred, how old are they?” If those questions don’t have solid answers, you might want to buy different animals.

Captive bred fish, like the hatchling Banggai Cardinalfish (Pterapogon kauderni) in his fathers mouth are fantastic, but get some conformation that fish being sold as captive bred really are captive bred.

Tank or Captive Raised

Tank or Captive Raised is a bit of nebulous term. It seems to refer to wild collected animals that have been in captivity for some unspecified amount of time, though it seems to connote the idea that the animal in question has been collected as a juvenile and raised to adulthood thereby lessening collection pressure on adults of breeding age. It also seems to connote the idea that the animal is healthier than its wild collected counterparts because it has been fed well and acclimated to captive conditions. That is all well and good, but the terms get abused. For instance, Sepia bandensis cuttlefish eggs are imported and often these eggs hatch in transit or in vendors and suppliers holding tanks. Sometimes, as soon as they hatch, they are promoted as tank raised (or even worse, captive bred!) To make matters worse in this situation, suppliers often don’t have the correct foods available for these animals and by the time they are in the hands of the hobbyist, their health has declined and the whole idea of the benefit of tank raised animals has a black eye. The real question about the idea of “tank raised” animals is how long do they need to be in a tank to be considered tank raised? A day? A week? A month? 6 Months? Further, do large juveniles or adult wild collected fish that have been in captivity for X amount of time count as tank raised? The term is wide open for marketing abuse, so be sure to ask what the vendor means by tank raised and how long the animal has been tank raised before completing your purchase.

Captive Propagated

Since sexual reproduction of corals in captivity is still in its infancy, the hobby instead talks about captive propagated corals – corals that are grown in captivity. It turned out (turns out probably this is still happening) that some vendors would chop up freshly imported wild corals, glue the fragments to plugs or rock, and sell them as captive propagated, sometimes without even giving the corals time to encrust. For most people, these corals are only captive propagated in the strictest semantic sense; after all the corals weren’t cut up in the ocean, they were cut up in captivity. This excuse rings hollow, and is clearly a way to get around the intention of the idea of the captive propagation movement to minimize the amount of coral wild coral being collected for our hobby. So, what do people really mean when they talk about captive propagated corals? Some version of “this coral was grown in captivity”. Does that mean cutting the new growth on a branch of wild collected coral after it has grown in an aquarium is captive propagated?

We can loosely apply the filial generation terminology here. For corals (looking for the F2), this means we are looking for the fragment taken from the fragment taken from the wild collected colony. Some people are willing to accept a fragment of just the new growth, the F1, as captive propagated because it is very clear that that tissue was added completely in captivity. It seems that fresh fragments taken from wild collected corals are clearly not captive propagated, while it can be argued that those same fragments given time to encrust and grow may be. As mentioned earlier, there is no real authority for the aquarium world in these matters, so we need to allow for some common sense flexibility. Again, your best defense against vendors using terminology without the reality to sell items is to ask a bunch of questions. If you don’t like the answers move on to another vendor.

Frags, frags everywhere. Are they captive propogated or chop shopped? All you can do is ask and then decide if you trust the answer.

Conclusion

It’s often been asserted that words have power. That’s as true in reefkeeping as it is in any other arena. The skeptical reefkeeper is cautious with that power, and understands the myriad ways that power can be misused.

Don’t take things at face value. Inquire. Discover. Be skeptical. Enjoy the process and your reef.

Next time

Scientificalness? Ethics? Rationalizing the hobby? Tune in to find out.

References, links and further reading

Zac H Forsman, Daniel J Barshis, Cynthia L Hunter, Robert J Toonen
BMC Evolutionary Biology 2009, 9:45 (24 February 2009)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/9/45/abstract

http://www.biology-online.org/dictio…ial_generation

Renaming our Corals, Chris Jury
http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-03/cj/index.php

http://www.classbrain.com/artmovies/…icle_200.shtml

http://www.skeptic.com/

Marine Fishes by Scott Michael, 1999 (Microcosom Ltd.)

The Reef Aquarium, Vol 1-3 by Delbeek and Sprung, 1994, 1997, 2005 (Ricordea Publishing)

The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan, 1997 (Ballantine Books)

Previous Reading:
Part I: Are You Sure That Thing Is True?
Part II: Magic in a Bottle
Part III: Sustainable? Responsible? Really?

From Reefs Magazine

Sorry, I can’t just tell you what to do. I wish I could, but there is that whole Biblical quote “Tell someone what to do and their fish and corals die, get them to understand the bigger complex picture and their fish and corals live”. This hobby is not simple and there are as many opinions about how to keep our glass boxes thriving as there are people with glass boxes. The goal of this series of articles is not to necessarily provide you with reef recipes or to tell you which ideas are flat out wrong or which products really do what they say they do or which claims or which expert to believe – the goal is to help you make those kinds of determinations for yourself in the face of conflicting advice.

The drama of ‘juicing’ fish

The early 80’s was a time of glam rock, hardy elegance corals, and DIY sumps filled with hair curlers for bio media. Back then, rocks covered with hair algae were lovely, panther groupers were the hot fish, and aiptasia were considered fabu. Hardly anyone stopped to think about where animals for our reef tanks were coming from…we were all too busy just trying to keep them alive for more than a month. Fish would come into the LFS; some would make it, and some would slowly waste away despite eating well. Most of us figured we were making some husbandry mistake that resulted in the death of the fish. However, some began to apply skeptical methodology to the problem and hypothesized that the issue might have something to do with the way the fish were being handled somewhere along the way to the LFS.

Cyanide fishing kills fish and corals - which hardly seems to justify the lower prices the practice can create.

Cyanide fishing presents another, even more catastrophic problem.

When a fish hides in coral, and cyanide is squirted into that coral to make fish collection easier, the cyanide also kills the coral. Think about it for a minute…if a collector squirts 100 squirts of cyanide a day to collect fish, that’s 100 patches of coral that die. If you have 100 collectors doing that every day, you get a lot of dead habitat very quickly, and dead habitat means no food or breeding areas for the fish we want in our tanks, which means less animals overall (and the corals which we now also want in our tanks are dead too). Cyanide was also being used to collect fish for people to eat (the cyanide breaks down before people eat the fish), which meant even more was being sprayed into corals and more habitat was destroyed.

People started to become aware of this issue in the 80’s when 1. SCUBA in exotic locations became more popular, and 2. the trade in live coral began to boom. Some in the industry sought to address the issue by training collectors to collect with nets and skill rather than juice. Those animals could be advertised as net-caught, which made consumers happy because they could still get the fish they wanted, safe in the knowledge that wild reefs were not poisoned in the process. A win for everyone! Let’s move on! Not so much.

As it happens, those who were skeptical of net-caught claims looked deeper. Sure enough, some collecting outfits continued to use cyanide, even after being trained to net catch, but simply said they weren’t. ‘Juicing’ fish was easier and cheaper than using nets. While some collecting outfits did net-catch exclusively, skeptics discovered that as cyanide caught fish and net caught fish made their way through the chain of custody, they were mixed together in holding facilities so there was no longer a way to differentiate between the specimens; both were sold as cyanide free.

How much of this coral can be sustainably collected? How do you know? Who can you ask?

To combat the negative press about cyanide use, the hobby was told that fish could now have a cyanide detection test (CDT) which would weed out juiced fish. Great! Problem taken care of, right? Wrong! As we know to ask from the first installment the immortal question from They Might Be Giants – ‘are you sure that that thing is true, or did someone just tell it to you’ skeptical reefers questioned the CDT. How was the test administered? Who administered it? How often? How accurate was it? How long did it take to get results? As it turned out, there was a CDT, but it was not fast, it needed to be done in a lab, and the fish had to basically be blended to carry out the test. This all made the test impractical because the only fish you could be sure was or wasn’t ‘juiced’ was converted into slurry, and a fish slurry makes an odd sort of display.

Its not just ‘juice’

The story gets even more involved. As it turns out, cyanide itself wasn’t the only part of the collection that destroyed coral habitat. Imagine you are a collector squirting cyanide into a huge coral head to knock out a bunch of damsels. You squirt, the damsels stop swimming, but they are still deep in the coral – how do you get them out? You break the coral with a hammer or crowbar or whatever was available. When the net trainings began and collectors were trained to use a ‘tickle stick’ to coax fish from their hiding places and into a net, some of the cyanide use actually did stop, but not all of it…because smashing is faster than coaxing. Instead of knocking out the fish and then smashing the coral to get at them, the knocking out step gets skipped, the coral gets smashed and the frightened fish are netted out of their smashed hiding places. Sure, not juiced, but the habitat destruction remained practically the same.

How about now?

We hear different things. What really need is a way for the industry to act as a whole for it’s own, and the environment’s benefit. In the last decade or so, the idea of sustainable collection has really caught our hobby’s collective psyche, but is there really any way to know if the animals that are being sold as sustainable or responsibly collected really are either of those things?

Catching fish with hand nets, barrier nets and tickle sticks provides quality fish with minimal impact on the reef

There have certainly been attempts to answer these questions. Most notably, in 1998, the Marine Aquarium Council (MAC) was established “by key stakeholders to provide voluntary standards and an eco-labeling system for the marine aquarium trade.” Unfortunately, MAC was quickly, right or wrongly attacked for myriad reasons including corruption, lack of follow up in the field and the voluntary nature and utility of its certifications. Getting actual information about the reality of these attacks or the MAC’s actual effectiveness is very difficult for a skeptical thinker because it’s just so hard to get any evidence that isn’t suspect for one reason or another. It’s hard to trust the MAC’s info because they are the ones putting it out and it’s hard to trust the detractors’ info because they often seem to have some sort of personal or professional axe to grind with the MAC.

Today, MAC’s future is unclear. What is clear is that what they were trying to do still needs to be done.

Skepticality in action

Given the above history with cyanide fishing and reef smashing, it’s no wonder that our hobby is periodically vilified as environmentally damaging. Recently, ‘Snorkel Bob’ has begun a campaign to get marine ornamental collection in Hawaii shut down completely, and he has lots of followers. Snorkel Bob’s most recent attack on the hobby was presented on the Sea Shepherds website (yes, the ‘Whale Wars’ people) as a launching point for his media tour to promote his new book and to ‘reach millions’ in his message that the marine hobby is indeed a bad thing for the planet. Essentially, Snorkel Bob says that fish collection for our hobby is responsible for dwindling fish numbers around Hawaii. Funnily enough, these attacks seem to be lacking the kind of skeptical and critical thinking that we have been discussing.

Notice the pile of dead coral skeleton in this picture. Does it point to poor collection/husbandry practices or is it simply the nature of the hobby?

Bob Fenner was one of the first to publicly react to Snorkel Bob’s statements questioning many of the claims made by in ways that make a skeptic proud. ( http://www.coralmagazine-us.com/cont…bby-commentary ).

Fenner points out that the numbers of fish being collected is widely debated, that a lot of fish are collected as food, that other impacts on those fish populations (golf course run-off and food fishing) are significant, but often ignored, and that Snorkel Bob runs a reef tourism operation which surely impacts the wild reefs around Hawaii – thousands of people (transported by polluting motor boats) covered in sunscreen, body soaps, and toxic bug repellants, brought to the same spots, day after day, week after week, year after year to flail about on the reef…are helping the reef? Or helping Snorkel Bob’s bottom line?

As with many such emotional claims, there are nuggets of truth (albeit exaggerated) buried in what Snorkel Bob is saying. However, when examined skeptically, his conclusions seem flimsy and self-serving.

Do the Right Thing

Many hobbyists want to do ‘the right thing’ and buy sustainably caught animals for their tanks, but are continually frustrated by supporting projects only to find that they are not doing the noble work they set out to accomplish. Don’t despair. There really is good work being done out there, though it may be hard to see.

As collecting stations pop up marketing themselves as environmentally friendly, history shows us we must be skeptical even though we want to believe. Are they really doing what they say they are doing or are they are just using green speak to drum up more business?

Let’s look at one such operation: the SeaSmart (http://seasmart.ecoez.com/) project in Papua New Guinea. This project claims they are using all local labor, local ownership, safe collecting practices, and scientific survey techniques to determine how many of each animal can be collected without damaging the local environment. Are they for real? Here are several important pieces of evidence that indicate that SeaSmart may be giving us more that just lip service.

First, they have a track record of several years, which is longer than most other ‘green’ collecting stations, which tend to fold after a year or two. Second, the organization works closely with the government of Papua New Guinea, a nation that has a history of taking their natural resources seriously, protecting them, and educating their population on the reasons why those resources are important. Finally, and perhaps most encouragingly, SeaSmart is making an effort to be transparent to the consumer. The outfit uses social media, including Facebook, to continually post information, photos and video of the project. Previous attempts at sustainable collection had very little if any documentation, so it’s great to see SeaSmart putting that info out there on their own. SeaSmart even has an open door policy, so if you can get yourself to PNG, get in touch with these guys and they say they’ll be happy to show you first hand what they are doing. If you do go, please make sure to report back and share the information with other skeptical reefkeepers who would love to get behind a company that is doing good work.

Freshly harvested wild acros. Corals of this size ship badly and remove a lot of coral from the wild which means its probably not a responsible collection practice.

If you keep asking questions, and digging when something doesn’t seem right to you, you are helping the hobby. You are helping to expose bad business, helping to save other hobbyists from wasting time or money on bad business, and most importantly, you are spreading the idea that good, sustainable work is wanted and important. You are also sending the message that empty promises will not be believed for long.

Next time

In the next installment we’ll explore the differences between captive bred, tank bred, tank raised, aquaculutured, and maricultured. Or maybe old reefers tales re-visitied. Or maybe we’ll look at electrical savings plans and see if they really save electricity. Or maybe…

Questions or comments – please start a thread on Manhattan Reefs or shoot me an Email atskepticalreefkeeper@gmail.com

More about cyanide:
http://ecovitality.org/cyanide-essay.htm
http://www.wetwebmedia.com/cyanishart.htm http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2006-01/sp/index.php

Links, further reading and references
• http://homepages.wmich.edu/~korista/baloney.html
• http://www.nizkor.org/features/falla…dex.html#index
• http://www.skeptic.com/
• “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” by Carl Sagan, 1997 (Ballantine Books)

Is this the tank of your dreams? A healthy dose of skepticism might help you get there. Photo by Sanjay Joshi

Reefkeeping is as much an art as it is a science. There is so much that we don’t understand about what actually goes on inside our boxes of water that we must rely on cultivating a ‘saltwater thumb’ for success over time. Building that saltwater thumb, however, can be a daunting task. There are a million opinions on every aspect of reef keeping, and the modern reefkeeper can access those opinions thru websites, online forums, or those big heavy things on the shelves at home (Books? I think that’s what they’re called). Essentially, you can find support for every aspect of the hobby regardless of how ‘fringe’ it may be – the question is, how do you sift through all those opinions to make decisions about what to do with your reef tank? My answer – be a skeptic. In the next few issues of Reefs Magazine, we’ll look at critical and skeptical thinking, how they relate to reefkeeping, and how they can help you wade through the flood of good and bad information available to the modern reefkeeper.

Be a Skeptic

The idea of being a skeptic seems to have a negative connotation, as if somehow being skeptical means saying no for the sake of saying no. That’s not quite right. Skepticism is a method, not a position. Officially, it’s defined as “a method of intellectual caution and suspended judgment.” A skeptic is not closed minded to new ideas, but is cautious of ideas that are presented without much, or any, supporting evidence. In our hobby there are tons of ideas presented without much supporting evidence. Being a skeptical reefer essentially boils down to taking advice/products/new ideas with a bucket of salt, and following up to get a handle on why, how and if the suggested ideas actually work. This boils down to the one adage about reefkeeping that almost every experienced reefer agrees with, namely, be patient. Taking your time in your decision making is just as important as taking your time stocking your reef because, as they say, “nothing good happens quickly in a reef tank”. So, when that shiny new idea about reefkeeping shows up, with many people being very excited – slow down and think.

The series of tubes we call the internet is full of good and bad information. Make sure you filter everything well. Photo by Richard Ross

Why bother?

Two reasons – animals’ lives and money. The animals in our glass boxes rely on us to keep them alive, and if we embrace a methodology that turns out not to work, they die. Seems like a simple idea, but many people prefer to do what seems quick and easy, instead of being patient and thorough, and it does indeed, cost animals their lives. Need an example? Every year or two there seems to be some kind of salt controversy. Either X brand of salt is bad so you should stop using it, or X brand of salt is good so you should start using it. People rush to switch salts and some crash their tanks or kill their corals. Only then do they start looking into the reasoning behind the claims that got them to switch salts in the first place. And what do we usually find? Someone saying, “Things looked better.”

Do these colors come from magic potions or sound husbandry? Photo by Sanjay Joshi

As it turns out these animals cost money, sometimes lots of money. Killing them by embracing untested, unsupported methodology is throwing money away. Not to mention, that simply embracing the “new methodology” costs money in itself – salt, for instance, isn’t cheap. More importantly, we can’t ignore that the animals we keep are a finite resource and that we are ethically responsible for their well being.

In an effort to maximize the life and health of our reef animals, and spend money wisely, lets look at some methods for sifting through online information.

Anecdotal evidence

There is so much reefkeeping information available on the interwebs and so much access and participation in discussion by experienced reefers that our hobby has really jumped forward in leaps and bounds. At the same time there is much information out there that just doesn’t pan out, or have any actual support. Most of this is based on anecdote. Merriam-Webster defines anecdote as “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident”. More hardcore, Ron Shimek says “Anecdote is unsubstantiated or unverified observation generally made by an unqualified observer who often really doesn’t know what they are looking at.”1 . For example, ‘I did a water change and my hair algae algae went away’. That’s a nice and harmless observation, but can a generalization be generated from it? Should you do a water change when you get hair algae? This is exactly where being skeptical comes into play. What kind of algae (there are many)? Was it actually algae or something else like dinoflaglates? What else was being done to get rid of it (usually lots of things)? What does ‘went away’ mean? Will it come back? What about all the cases of tanks with hair algae that didn’t go away after a water change? Unfortunately, anecdote is often converted to ‘Truth’ with amazing speed. “I did a water change and my hair algae went away’ gets converted to ‘water changes make hair algae go away’ which simply does not pan out across different reef systems. Even worse is when the observation isn’t all that harmless, as in the case of saltwater ich, Cryptocaryon irritans.

Real or a mirage of photoshop and macro photography? Photo by Sanjay Joshi

A case in point

Several years ago a thread was started on an online forum about a possible new cure for ich. Throughout the thread, many common fallacies were used that I think all reefkeepers should be aware of because poor reasoning leads to poor decisions. The original poster reported that they had ich on their fish for four or 5 days. They put ginger in the fish food and, hallelujah , the ich went away within 24 hours. Therefore ginger cured the ich. This is the most often seen fallacy, or logical misunderstanding, that we see in reefkeeping – post hoc, ergo propter hoc – Latin for “It happened after, so it was caused by”. Correlation is not causation. Just because one event occurred after another doesn’t mean the first event caused the second. A classic example would be that after a rooster crowed, the sun rose. Therefore the rooster’s crowing caused the sun to rise. Seems silly because we all know its silly, but it gets a little more complicated when we want to believe. Cryptocaryon has a complex and confusing lifecycle. To help explain why the posting claiming that ginger cured the fish of ich is fallacious lets take a quick look at the lifecycle:

The lifecycle of crypto is summed up well in an article in Reefkeeping Magazine, so I’ll quote Steven Pro: “The stage where the parasite is attached to a fish is called a trophont. The trophont will spend three to seven days (depending on temperature) feeding on the fish. After that, the trophont leaves the fish and becomes what is called a protomont. This protomont travels to the substrate and begins to crawl around for usually two to eight hours, but it could go for as long as eighteen hours after it leaves it’s fish host. Once the protomont attaches to a surface, it begins to encyst and is now called a tomont. Division inside the cyst into hundreds of daughter parasites, called tomites, begins shortly thereafter. This noninfectious stage can last anywhere from three to twenty-eight days. During this extended period, the parasite cyst is lying in wait for a host. After this period, the tomites hatch and begin swimming around, looking for a fish host. At this point, they are called theronts, and they must find a host within twenty-four hours or die. They prefer to seek out the skin and gill tissue, then transform into trophonts, and begin the process all over again (Colorni & Burgess, 1997).”2.

Some guy told a friend of mine these fish were reef safe. Photo by Sanjay Joshi

The short version of all that is that the trophonts, the actual white spots we see, leave the fish in 3 to 7 days without any treatment at all. This happens with or without ginger. It happens with our without many of the other crypto ‘cures’ I have seen tossed around including: water changes, salt mix changes, and my favorite, changing light bulbs! After this was pointed out, the original poster then did a bit of a turnaround and wrote that they weren’t sure that the ginger cured the ich and that more study would be needed. They did however stick to their guns regarding the ginger being a cure for ich. In my opinion it was critical for that information to have been included in the first post so people wouldn’t rush out and start feeding their sick fish ginger – which they did.

Soon, another fallacy reared its head, argumentum ad verecundium – an argument from authority. It was claimed that someone with a PhD in Europe previously developed this ginger method and it does “in fact” work. The idea here is that since a PhD said it, it must be true. PhD’s, or any authority, are wrong all the time about a great many things. There are few reasons to believe someone simply because they are an authority. In this particular case it’s even worse because no one could name the PhD, point us to anything that supported the claim that any such PhD existed, or that they developed a method of treating ich with ginger. Even once this was pointed out, the idea that the claim supported the ginger treatment idea persisted.

The original poster then picked up a fish infected with ich from the LFS to further ‘test’ the ginger method. It was presented that trying the ginger on another infected fish would give further credence that the ginger worked, but that was just post hoc, ergo propter hoc again but people ate it up claiming that the ‘scientific’ approach was wonderful. However, there really was no science – no control, no redundancy, no scrapes to determine levels of infection – it was all just anecdote! Some people ate it up, but some started asking questions.

One person pointed out that there was no science to support the ginger claim. They were immediately pounced on for belittling people just for trying something new. This is a form of the Poisoning the Well fallacy or trying to generate bias. The claim is that since the poster is belittling people, the points they are making don’t matter, but one has nothing at all to do with the other. The points really do matter. Even big hairy jerks are right some time. And, in this case, the poster wasn’t actually belittling anyone. People often take disagreement personally rather than talking it for what it was – pointing out that the proported conclusions about ginger don’t hold up.

Next, people said everyone should take a chance on a ginger treatment because it’s new and might work. This is an Appeal to Novelty; Just because something is new and shiny does not necessarily make it correct or worth trying. Sometimes new things are outright bad ideas – let’s use table salt for our reef tanks! There was also a little bit of an Appeal to Tradition, “Ginger has been used for centuries in Chinese medicine, so it must do something.” Just because something is done traditionally, doesn’t mean it actually has any effect – blood letting was also a tradition. Furthermore, the idea that something works on people, even if it were accurate, does not necessarily mean that it will work on other animals. We also got some observational selection. Some people posted that they treated their fish with ginger, but they died from the parasite. This claim was immediately swept away by people saying that nothing is 100%. You can’t dismiss results you don’t like just to make the claim you want to be true seem more plausible. There was also an appeal to ignorance. “Since there was no proof ginger didn’t cure ich, it could be concluded that it did cure ich.” Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Links to ginger being linked to antibacterial action were posted in defense of the claim that ginger cured ich. It was quickly pointed out that ich is not bacteria. No fallacy there, just your basic skeptical insight.

Ginger cures ick? Wow I didn't know that, thanks. Photo by Sanjay Joshi

In the next 20 pages of the thread there was a lot of argumentum ad hominem, against anyone suggesting that ginger might not cure ich. Rather than, “We’re testing ginger, wait and see” responses became, “You just hate new ideas, so your points don’t matter” and “You think you are an expert, but you’re just a hobbyist like me so your points don’t mean anything” or, more to the point, “You’re stupid and ugly and I don’t like you.” Of course that makes little sense, loving or hating new ideas has nothing really to do with pointing out reasons there is no support for the idea.

For me, the important point was that the misinformation in the thread had been quickly converted to gospel. It started showing up on other forums as a proven cure. People started treating their fish with ginger. In the case of minor infections it wasn’t really a problem. Many fish are able to fight off minor infections. People with heavily infected fish that tried Ginger often ended up with dead fish when they could have used one of the proven methods to cure their fish of the parasite (hyposalinity or copper). This is the real world impact of non-skeptical thinking. Ideas get accepted as truth, when they aren’t. Luckily, the ginger treatment didn’t gain too much traction, even though it still gets brought up from time to time.

The Internet is a wonderful thing, but it can also be dangerous. You can find support for any idea, but your animals are counting on you. You owe it to them to make sure you aren’t just finding the answers you are looking for, but that you are looking for information with a critical eye.

One final thought about anecdote

Anecdotal evidence has its place in the world, and in a hobby like ours its downright necessary. Dictionary.com defines anecdotal evidence as “non-scientific observations or studies, which do not provide proof but may assist research efforts.” Our hobby has certainly pushed research – just look at the lighting studies of Sanjay Joshi which helped to put to rest the misleading ‘watts per gallon’ lighting rule, or the recent skimmer studies by Ken Feldman that are putting some real data into what protein skimmers are actually doing. However, a lot of the stuff we deal with everyday has not really been looked at with scientific scrutiny because real science takes time, money, expertise and review. There are about a bagillion things that reefers want studied that simply aren’t going to be gotten to anytime soon. We all rely on observational reports to make some day-to-day decisions about our tank’s flow, lighting, feeds, animal interactions, and more. I think it is important that we remember that anecdote has its limits, be careful in your reporting and even more cautious in your reading.

Some reefkeeping products promise amazing things, so how do you tell the truth from bunk? More importantly, how do you write about bunk product claims without getting sued? We’ll find out in the next installment.

Links, further reading and references

1 – (http://www.reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-06/rs/index.php)

2- (http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2003-08/sp/index.php)

“The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” by Carl Sagan, 1997 (Ballantine Books)

http://www.nizkor.org/features/falla…dex.html#index
http://www.skeptic.com/