I have spent pretension too much maintenance upon fish that fixed to check out early. It is a recurring nightmare for anyone in the hobby. One hours of daylight your reef tank looks following a scene from Finding Nemo. The next-door morning, its a graveyard. I used to think I was just cursed. most likely the water in my neighborhood was inherently hostile. I bought the test strips. I bought the liquid droppers. I stared at color charts until my eyes hurt. Was that light green or a slightly more tawny green? Who knows? It turns out that guessing is a great showing off to flush keep beside the toilet. To really Create the Optimal Aquatic quality past Einstapp's Focused aquarium capacity calculator is to fake later the guesswork. It is more or less data. It is about precision. I finally stopped playing "mad scientist" and started using actual math.
The torture yourself is genuine for most aquarists. We are frustrating to replicate plants in a glass box. nature has billions of gallons of water to dilute mistakes. We have twenty or fifty or most likely a hundred gallons. One tiny spike in ammonia levels can destroy everything. This is where most people fail. They treat their tank following a trimming rather than a technical biological engine. I speculative this the difficult artifice later my costly Lionfish started looking sluggish.