berkeman said:
Okay, I'll bite (pun intended). What the heck does that mean? I can envision at least 5 different things...
Light Cycle: lights with timers is the simple way. Electronic controls and software can make it possible to gradually increase and decrease lighting, often considered less surprising (less stressful) to the fish.
Water Changes: can easily be automated if the plumbing is set-up properly. Turn on water in, excess water goes out overflows. These can be water changes to individual tanks or to whole water systems. While a lot can be one with biological filtration to avoid ammonia poisoning, eventually end products of bacterial metabolism will build up in a water system. This is usually done by water changes, fancy and expensive chemical filtration is usually not used,except for special purposes.
Salinity: Salt mixes of various kinds(or other chemicals) can be added, from a tub of concentrates. The dosing pump can be controlled by a conductivity controller (electronic box for our purposes) for adding general salts.
pH: Alternatively, you could have a tub with acid, base, or a buffer, controlled by a pH controller to keep the water system's pH at some preset level.
Feeding: There are a variety of ways to set-up feedings. Feeders on top of tanks are pretty easy to set-up and use, but are not that much of a labor saver, due to their fidelly nature, requiring frequent hands on attention. Big places like some universities (>10,000 tanks) use robots for feeding. One fidelly thing rather than 10,000 of them.
More smaller feedings are considered better. Robots and other automation approaches make more feedings less of a labor burden.
I feed by hand at home (few hundred tanks at max), but I did make a cool feeder gun.
Temperature: Thermostats/heaters, fancy systems like automated monitoring systems (including some of the hobbyist level ones) can control out puts and set points. So temperature up and down with morning and evening. This can also be done with two sets of heaters with two different set points and a timer controlling when one of them is on.
Monitoring: Both professional (universities, fish farms) and advanced hobbyist level systems we have auto-monitoring systems which can receive a variety of inputs. Some are standard (temperature), but often these systems will accept standard industrial inputs, so signals from a huge variety of monitors. At universities, we would look for water on the floor, temperatures in various places, motor (pump) function, water pressure, water level, pH, lights on/off in different places, salinity, UV light function, power.
At home: only had some water on the floor and temperature alarms.
If alarm parameters are exceeded, calls are placed to people.
It also gives you a continuous readout of conditions, which can be very handy for figuring out problems.
Maybe I'm forgetting some...
