Please delete my account, the button which allows members to leave seems to have been disabled.

Sorry but since when did providing good information and facts ever hurt anyone?

This forum has a major fault in that almost all the questions are answered by "the mods" and any deviation from "mods" advice is put down as being unhelpful. This has happened several times with me and it it becoming a little tedious.

"Goldies are a good example of a species where hundreds of thousands have been kept over the years and i'd guess only a tiny percentage have ever made to the life expectancy they should".

It isn't just Goldies, while there is a group of fish keepers who buy books, join clubs, join forums ect they form a minority.
The general standard of fishkeeping hasn't moved on all that much at all. You only have to listen in to the conversations going on in any lfs to realise that little or no research ever goes on other than asking the vendor. Even that advice often gets ignored if it doesn't suit the hobbyist. If my lfs gets a tank full of baby redtailed catfish I guarantee they would all be sold within a couple of days. I've lost count of the number of times I've been told that "I used to keep fish but they kept dying so I packed it in". The good old days may not have been that great in reality but there is a lot of room for improvement even today.

Suey, I'm not advocating that there was ever such a thing as the good old days, certainly our knowledge has increased dramatically over the years and there have been great advances in the hardware too.
But you can't ignore the fact that many fish did live lives which were longer than their wild counterparts even back then. I realise that when you care about the fish you want what is best for them and that's where it gets confusing because people start offering opinion as fact.
I seen it said on here several times that a five gallon tank is no use for keeping fish. Yet if you look you'll find many Killifish breeders use such tanks for maintaining pairs/trios of Killifish quite successfully.

For the record I do agree bigger is almost always better in many ways. Easier to maintain too.

"they have put fish together who would never be found in nature in the same waters, or who are known to prefer very different conditions from each other".

Is this an assumption or have you checked the information? Many fish which are kept in the hobby have been widely introduced beyond their natural range. It's also not right to assume that a species will only live in conditions which are the same or very similar to that species natural range.

Guppies for example are often quoted as needing slightly hard alkaline water to thrive, yet they are present in at least 69 Countries some of which don't even have waters which are hard or alkaline.

http://fishbase.mnhn.fr/Country/Count ... ia&SpeciesName=reticulata

I think if you checked you would find that a surprising number of the fish which "don't exist together in nature" actually do.

Also just because fish live together in the wild it doesn't mean that they will in a tank. Pike and roach are found together in the wild, but in a tank...

OK playing devils advocate for a while:

When I was 7yrs old my gran bought me a goldfish bowl complete with 4 goldfish. The fish didn't suffocate which indicates that there was sufficient gas exchange at the surface, they didn't immediately keel over and die and I had them for about three years like that before transferring them to my first little pond.

Obviously I wouldn't advocate keeping them like that now but it does indicate that some of the dire warnings about tank size are being over stated. Which is why I asked for the reasoning behind the recommendations.
Otherwise these recommendations are going to end up being repeated parrot fashion with no one knowing why. The explanation behind any recommendation is important otherwise it is just an opinion with little value.

When it comes down to stocking there are some things which have to be taken in to account.
Obvious things like gas exchange, room to avoid stressors and so on. After that it is a matter of opinion and it is difficult to prove one way is wrong.
Rather than quoting hard and fast rules about how much space is required (lets be honest this is a dynamic situation anyway depending on the size of the fish) I think it would be more useful to explain as fully as possible the reasoning behind the opinion, at least then there could be a sensible discussion and who knows people may actually learn something!!!

"The person actually warns people to not use any medications that aren't natural".

There are too many people pushing this point of view in fish keeping. All it does is it displays their complete lack of knowledge of the subject in favour of their own biased preferences, they have a closed mind and have stopped learning.

It is always better to keep an open mind and try to see both sides of the argument, find out as much as possible through your own research and then base your decision on the facts before you. Take nothing for granted and question everything which isn't a solid fact, that way you will always keep learning.

The aquarium use of garlic is meant to appeal to the people who think natural is best. It is aimed at fish keepers who prefer new age medicines, herbalism, homeopathy ect. Apart from being a mild appetite stimulant, which it does by mimicking the effects of insulin it has little other use in fish keeping.
If it is used as a remedy for things like white spot, so much is required to have an effect that the fish would be living in garlic soup:

Some of the chemicals found in garlic do kill the protozoa at very high doses. When tested it took 570mg/l of garlic extract to kill the parasite totally (a clove of garlic typically contains about 4mg of the active ingredient allicin, meaning that 142 cloves of garlic per litre of water would be required as an effective white spot therapy) while it only took 0.25 mg/l of malachite green to do the same.

If you want to treat yourself with these crackpot remedies that's your choice. But when an animal in your care falls ill you are duty bound to provide the most effective proven treatment.

Quote: "They have managed to do it (sort of), the Biosphere projects were sort of working ( apart from massive O2 fluctations from 2%-60% amongst other things)."

So in other words the system failed. Even a large scale well funded project could not achieve a good result.

Sorry but this concept is doomed to fail, trying it with any livestock is therefore unethical.