There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to keeping a successful captive reef tank and unfortunately a tank can go south in a hurry if one of those parts gets out of whack. Sometimes a tank crash is due to a mistake by the reef keeper while other times it is carelessness or just bad luck.

As for mistakes, they do happen, although many can be prevented by doing some homework before acting to correct a problem or attempting to achieve better results. Yes, knowledge is power when it comes to reef keeping and I learned this the hard way when I tried something without doing the required research, causing a former tank to crash.

It was years ago, and at the time there MORE