Don’t Neglect Your Tank: Just Change Your Tank Personality

There was a great post on ReefBuilders on Friday about how to neglect your reef when other things are more important. In the case of the author, his newborn baby girl (Congrats) became the focal point of his life and he knew he’d have less time to devote to this tank.

The post raised some good points about automating systems and keeping your bioload low so that if something goes wrong, your tank won’t crash quickly. However, what the author is really pointing to is that when the time you can devote to your reef is changing, then what you really need to do is change your tank personality.

When you change your tank personality, you’ll know how your tank will react. In the case of the author, he was going from a reef junkie to a tank dabbler. His tank isn’t his life anymore, but he still wants it to look good. He knew he’d be giving up going to every reef club meeting and selling frags, but that’s o.k. because selling coral isn’t the big thing to do on his list. What did he do? He trimmed his corals way back so that they wouldn’t be touching each other and so that he didn’t have to work on them every week. Will his tank look less grown out? Yes, but that’s not important to him anymore.

Another way to think about changing tank personalities is that it gives you permission to make changes in your tank without the guilt. If you are changing from a reef junkie to a tank dabbler, then you know you aren’t going to be staring at, or working on your tank all the time.  The author of the article calls it “neglecting”, but really, you are just changing your tank personality and your approach to your tank changes with it. Its not neglect, its just a different level of care for how you are approaching your tank. No guilt needed because you aren’t neglecting anything.

Changing your tank personality in the other direction has the same effect. If you know you are going from a tank dabbler to a reef enthusiast, then you’ll need to be testing your tank more often, dipping corals and watching for pests. I.e…more time spent on your tank and your tank is now part of the family.

Hint: make sure your spouse/significant other/friends understand what’s happening so that they don’t think you’ve abandoned them for a box of glass.

There’s nothing wrong with changing your tank personality and changing the level of care you give your tank. By knowing which tank personality you are, and which personality you want to end up, the changes will feel less like neglect and instead more like a simple shift in your tank.

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