Ohh...  That's right.

Everything Marcus says is wrong.

Jake, I thought it was against club policy to agree with me.

Thanks buddy!

I like the idea of Shane's synthetic storm.  I have noticed that our cucumbers are never fully extended except when I am stiring up the substrate.

I have always heard and read that the bio load in our tanks is way off from the natural reef.  We have too many fish and other organisms to our ratio of water and seafloor.  Doesn't it make sense that we should compensate for this by vacuuming.  I think that if we had miles of sea floor with a nice current sweeping toward the near by drop off then we wouldn't need to vacuum.  But we have a load of fish and coral in a box.

If you are worried about loosing organisms, just vacuum into your refugium. 

I am too lazy to read the above posts, so I will just give my thoughts.  Of course, I dissagree with most people on this topic.  Why is that different than any other topic?

I am 100% sold on gravel vaccing tanks.  I have seen tanks that have been set up for long periods of time and I will tell you that the detritus does NOT get eaten by "bugs".  Maybe some of it does, but tanks that do get vacced are by far cleaner than those that do not.  Obviously if a tank is not very populated with fish, then it would not have to be vacced as much a largely popluated tank.  Again, I don't care what all of you do to your tanks, but mine is getting gravel vacced.

There is a proper way to gravel vac a tank.  By that I mean only going down 1/3-1/2 of the substrate and only doing one side per cleaning.  That way your bacteria doesn't loose too much at once.  I am also a firm believer in refugias which is why I feel vaccing doesn't hurt my tanks as much as it might if I didn't have a refugia on it.

One more piece of info on this topic, wait until one of you has to move a tank that has never been gravel vacced.  You can watch all your fish die as the ammonia gets released into the water.

Struhs,

My current tank is only about 8 months old, but it is definately a rainbow of colors in the sand.  You should also be able to look close and see little detritus particles and also tiny shrimp running around in the sand.

Adam