Actually I think you argue just to argue. Your constantly proven wrong yet you never give up. Because the final statement says in fact that, the freshwater koi, trout, and bass showed dramaticly less losses when acclimated over 30 minutes. Thats is everything in terms of this argument. THat reputes what you are saying, yet you brush it off by saying, well most of the argument is about saltwater. The one part about fresh proves you wrong and you ignore it, how convenient.
Oy! You have to be very careful using that word, since in a scientific context that word takes on a much stronger definition that its common usage. And, considering the context here, regarding this acclimatization, scientifically nothing has been proven whatsoever. This can be seen by that laundry list of open questions that andy just asked just a few posts ago.
Finally, I just wanted to make sure that everyone reading this thread picked up on an important point here, which is critical evaluation of the sources. Just because someone puts up a webpage and writes a bunch of statements, doesn't mean it is true. Even if several hundred or several thousand people write the same thing on their own individual webpages, doesn't mean it is true. Science is not a democracy; the theory that has the most papers written about it doesn't make it right.
Let me give a directly fish-related example: For a very long time, people thought that the
Nitrobacter bacteria was the primary nitrite oxidizer in aquariums. After all, it was the bacteria that was identified in waste water plants that indeed does the majority of the nitrite oxidation.
Nitrobacter could be found listed in many, many books -- books written for the beginning aquarist, advanced fishkeepers, even trade journals and scientific papers. It can still be found published in many books today. However, most home aquaria have very, very few
Nitrobacter in them, instead they usually have
Nitrospira. Dr. Tim Hovanec discovered this in the 1990's, using more advanced DNA sampling techniques.
Just because all the old literature, again hundreds maybe even thousands of different sources, listed the wrong name doesn't mean that the old literature is right. I fear that if we were having this argument 10 years ago, you might have pulled book after book after article that said
Nitrobacter to "prove" me wrong. But, lots of copies that say the same wrong thing doesn't make it so. When the actual work was done, looking at the DNA of actual aquarium DNA, it was found that is was not
Nitrobacter, despite what all the old books said.
(I can take this "just because it was printed a lot of times, doesn't make it so" argument to its extremes to prove a point. In the 1948 U.S. Presidential Election a lot of newspapers printed "Dewey Defeats Truman," but that didn't make Dewey President. A better example is probably all the Internet myths that I am sure you have seen. A quick perusal of snopes.com shows just how many of them are complete hogwash.)
Look, mistakes happen, very often with the best of intentions. Someone quite some time ago probably thought that a very long acclimatization period was best. And, it makes sense, no? But, gut instinct, and "sense" is not science. Just because someone thinks that it is best for the fish, doesn't make it so. Gut instinct and emotion and feelings are great tools the human body and mind has, but they aren't science. One of the hardest tasks of learning science is to learn to ignore your instinct until it can be retrained from a science point of view. And, a good scientist never 100% trusts his instinct, because he learns that instinct can lead him down the wrong paths. Now, a good scientist doesn't ignore his instinct, either. Because instinct can lead to some great insights that a straight on analysis may never have yielded. But, a scientist never trusts in instinct alone, because instinct isn't science.
So, someone, trying to do right by the fish, their instinct tells them that it takes a long time to acclimatize, and that gets printed. And, then it gets printed over and over and over, every publisher and editor and author who review that new article or book to be printed said "yeah, that seems right" and again are all trying to do right by the fish. But, once again, instinct isn't science. And now that these facts are being looked at more closely, it is turning out that difference in hardness and mineral levels seems to be the really important water stat for safe acclimatization. Just because many, many books and these days webpages have printed the same statement,
does not make it true.
Could this newer research about hardness and mineral levels being more important end up being wrong? Absolutely. But, today, the evidence for hardness is stronger than the evidence for pH and temperature, so that is the current theory. Since the evidence is strongest for hardness, that becomes the newest theory. If, and only if, stronger evidence for something else comes along, then that something else will become the newest theory. No good scientist will hold on the the old theory, just because it was their favorite, or just because it was printed in a lot of different places. If the new theory makes predictions better, then the old theory is discarded. It is as simple as that.
hehe
/www.thefreedictionary.com/acclimatising
