John, I get what you're saying. If I only kept one or two fish in each of the tanks in my sig and fed them lightly, and only every few days, nitrates would stay low for a long time. I just don't see the point in having one fish in a 55g.
You are beginning to expose one of saddest and most common practices in this hobby. What exactly is the point in stocking as many fish as your heart desires.
We have been defining maximum stocking levels for a particular tank as either so many fish per gallon or so may inches of fish blah blah blah... This trend begins as soon as somebody enters the hobby. The first instinct of the new hobbiest is to load the tanks with as many fish as seems visually satisfying, without any knowledge of the mayhem and death that is about to ensue.
After that lesson is learned (if it is learned) then lower stocking levels are accepted and hopefully biological filtration becomes understood, and a regimen of water changes is also accepted as a periodic ritual. Biological filtration is commonly referred to as the nitrogen cycle. Oxidizing ammonia into nitrate only represents half the cycle. The rest of the cycle involves reincorporating nitrogen either into atmospheric nitrogen or for consumption by vegetation. If you look at the sticky in this forum, you will see a time when the hobby did not even understand that much. We only learned this over the last couple decades.
This is the place were most hobbiest will plateau, satisfied with the stocking levels and water changes. What we would like to explore is the next deeper level for the hobby. We would like to discover what other cycles are occurring in our tanks. We have already identified the nutrients and the sources. Now we need to develop the methods to monitor them and tweak them. What tools or test are best deployed to do this? What nutrients should we be watching for? What is the optimum balance between plants, fish, feeding? These are all wonderful things we can explore about the hobby, but we must have a place to do this without the water change nazis imposing their beliefs on us.
if somebody is happy with their stocking levels and water change regimen, fine, I am very happy that they are enjoying the hobby, I just wish they would be respectful of how other people try to enjoy the hobby.
Most people here are to young to remember (including myself) what a zoo was like 50 years ago. They were just metal cage boxes with depressed animals circling around in them. Today zoos are designed with large outdoor space that closely resembles there natural environment. In the old days, zoo keepers really believed it would be too dangerous to let the gorillas have a tree in their environment because they thought they would hurt themselves by falling out of it.
Here is the last of my thought, and thank you for reading this far. And thank you Joel for responding with an olive branch, for I was about to abandon this forum for one more tolerant of these ideas.
It would be easy to get everybody to agree that overpopulation of fish leads to dead fish. But would everybody agree that a number just lower than fish dying leads to fish that are quarrelsome and constantly competing for space? And that a number just lower than that has fish that are not very active, because they are trying to stay in the small corner of the tank so as not to venture and be chased away from a territory belonging to another fish? What really is a good stocking level that is only concerned with welfare of the fish.
Here is what I think is a beautiful tank and one that I am working towards...
I would like to observe a species of fish in an aquarium identical to its native environment. Stocked with plants and other life forms in quantities proportionate to nature so as not to affect the fishes natural behavior. I would like to see the fish hunt, feed, mate and raise young, just as they do in the wild.
I would like this aquarium to be so well in balance that the electrical power could be out for a week or more, and life in the tank will sustain without any stress on the inhabitants.
But to get there, we must have a deeper understanding of the ecology of the aquarium.