When too much analysis kills the fish tank

But why do we measure the "parameters" of aquariums? Why don’t we dare admit when we don’t measure them? Why are they so essential?
Let’s discover together how the systemic approach answers these questions and truly revolutionizes aquaristics.

 

A story of "black boxes"

It is said that during the war, when the Allies captured an enemy plane and stripped it to learn the secret devices it contained, they used the "black box" technique.

The principle was that any device could be trapped. So it could not be opened to examine its mechanisms and connections to deduce its functionalities.

So they connected it and simply observed what it produced.

 

I don’t know if this story is true, but it is taught to all students to whom the systemic approach is taught.

What does it consist of?

 

Analyze, dissect the living?

Normally, when we want to understand a physical, chemical, or biological system, we do analyses and measurements. We dissect in the laboratory and model from these measurements and calculations to know how to reproduce a phenomenon, and thus explain it. This is called the analytical approach: we open the engine and take it apart!

But in the field of living things and ecology, we reach such a level of complexity that it becomes difficult.

 

How to analyze all the interactions within an ecosystem or a living organism where everything interacts with everything constantly? How to put a complex ecosystem into equations? How to dissect a living organism to understand why it lives... without killing it?

We then favor the systemic approach: we observe the result of the whole, considering it as a "black box."

 

A fish dead and alive at the same time?

When I created the first poubellarium in 2004, I just initially wanted to offer my female guppy a summer vacation, in a trash bin in the garden.

The analytical approach of the experts (there are always many on the Internet!) led to an obvious reality: based on pH, hardness, deplorable hygiene, temperatures, and their instability, my guppy was dead. And yet, she was very much alive, and even more than ever!

Everything that was going to become natural aquaristics was there.

 

If we analyzed the 4 or 5 classic "parameters," considered essential since they were the only ones known, the fish should have been dead.

And since it was actually lively, superb, and more colorful than in spring, it means we were missing something.

Pleasure? Live food? The absence of artificial and mechanical noises? Soft and variable light, raindrops? And why not the stars visible in the sky?

We will probably never know, but the fact is that measuring parameters was useless, just misleading.

 

pH, for example, is of little importance.
Blow on osmosis water and its pH will immediately vary. On hard water, nothing will happen.
pH is only the result of the one true really important constant: water hardness. And you know that roughly. Rainwater is soft, tap water is often hard (you will know by looking at your analyses on the Internet), and the mix of the two is... in between!
It is sufficiently precise.

The limits of aquarium water analysis

An aquatic ecosystem cannot be approached by the poor physico-chemical parameters contained in the essential kit praised by the seller.
Everything these tests indicate is sometimes interesting, but almost always secondary. Because the effect of this or that on the fish or the water louse or the shrimp will actually depend on a whole bunch of other things.

The poubellarium proves this to us: the fish "should" be dead, but it is actually more beautiful and healthier than those that stayed inside, which nevertheless have "the right parameters."

If you spend two months in the hospital, all theoretical parameters will be respected. Your food is weighed, adapted... but disgusting and capable of bringing your morale down to zero! The room temperature is monitored, your health is under surveillance, everything is "monitored."

And yet, the essence of what makes you energetic, happy, and dynamic is not there. This ideal place on paper is actually the worst for you.

You would be better off facing the wind and drizzle on a Breton beach, with soaked socks but friends to warm up together while laughing over mediocre tea in a tourist dive!

 

The Excel spreadsheet does not allow you to see the complex reality.

It does not inform you at all about the health of your aquatic ecosystem.

It tells you nothing about its microbiota which nevertheless ensures its stability and conditions all cycles, including those, probably many, that we do not know!

What if we let go?

No need to analyze this microbiota and its thousands of species of bacteria, viruses, fungi, or amoebas that make it up. Identifying them would be useless to you, because you would still have to list the millions of interactions between each species and the others! And even then, you wouldn't know what to do with it.

The systemic approach is generally the only effective one in the field to manage complex systems.

And your aquarium is one.

 

A heavily planted aquarium, with strong light and a solid and varied microbiota (and therefore a bit dirty) contains less nitrate than tap water, or even none at all.

Fish fed with natural food, feeling the pleasure of the hunt, chasing a daphnia , regaining their essential instincts, are less sick, less fragile, because less stressed.

 

The older the aquarium gets, the more it generally becomes stable and welcoming.

Yet, its measurable "parameters" have not changed.

These parameters that enrich the perfect little chemist's briefcase merchant give us the impression of control. The numbers reassure us. So we found a few... and we hold on to them!

They will never tell you about the softness of water on the scales (determined by colloidal molecules? Or not?). They won't tell you anything about the taste of the water in which the fish or shrimp live. Nothing about the complex feeling that makes you feel good or bad in this aquarium...

 

A goldfish will live much longer in a pond with unknown and never measured parameters, with green and muddy water, than in an aquarium that ticks all the boxes of the perfect aquarist's manual.

Nature is beautiful.

Life is beautiful.

And aquaristics is wonderful precisely because it is like them: it fits neither into boxes nor into our arrogance.

Let's learn not to know everything.

But to look.