[Sk8r]

I generally agree: I advocate certain ranges for newbies because they are further from disaster than other readings, and fairly easy to achieve in relation to each other...if we can get the newbies to stay alive for long enough, and make few enough swings into disastrous territory, I hope they'll be with us a while...but when I say 1.025 is a 'good' salinity it's because a .001 either side of that isn't a bad swing and most things a newbie is likely to buy are going to be ok with it after acclimation.

But thank you, Peter: very much worth observing than some rules are "sorta guidelines" and that we need to remember that.

I've found corals are tougher in some regards than we commonly believe [I had a bit of bubble coral survive cycle and then perish when a too zealous cleanup knocked it off its precarious perch.]

And the interrelation of brilliant light PLUS temperature plus other factors seems complex: 85 degrees can bleach, but how old are your lights, etc?

Your corals survive bad conditions and then rtn when things 'improve'.

Not to mention the fish that lives in near muck of a dying tank and then fails when rescued, or the coral you pull out of where it fell and then see it's in better condition than its 'well-placed' brethren.

Or my bundle of torch/frog/hammer that happily accommodates my tailspot blenny, who likes, for some reason, to camp in the torch...while my highfin gobies seem to like to sit on the candycane and flirt with disaster in the clam.

Watch and wonder.