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Could be the start of some "golden algae" or chrysophytes.If you look closely at the picture, I do have this almost slime like stuff on the rocks. Not sure if that is contributing to anything. I haven't seen it in any of my other tanks.
Could be the start of some "golden algae" or chrysophytes.
Do you have any coralline starting up?
I haven't tested them in awhile. I have to clean the glass about every 3 days or so. I'll test tonight and see.What are your NO3 and PO4 levels at? If there not much to begin with your fuge certainly won’t thrive…
What salt brand are you using? And what parameters do you typically keep in the tank?I did my regular 15g water change on Saturday. I also cleaned the skimmer cup, replaced filter floss and got a new ATO reservoir. The ATO reservoir is a food safe/grade dog food container that I washed out with vinegar and water.
Sunday: All the corals looking the same, but a bit less cyano so I was happy.
Sunday night comes around and in the span of an hour my pacman frag completely RTN and a few other frags have gone white at the base. Literally looked at the tank after dinner, walked the dog and came back to this! I added some carbon, but really not sure what else to do or the cause.
I checked the temp, salinity and all the basic params and no change from when I tested them before the water change on Saturday.
On the plus side, there doesn't seem to be any more coral tissue lost this morning.
I'm currently using red sea blue bucket.What salt brand are you using? And what parameters do you typically keep in the tank?
Hmm okay. Only thing I can think of typically for your recently bleaching issue is an alk swing thats why I was askingI'm currently using red sea blue bucket.
current params are:
Temp: 78
Salinity: 1.026
Alk: 7.5(slowly getting it up to 8)
Cal: 450
Mag: 1290(also trying to raise this a bit)
Nitrate: 4
Phosphate: 0.07
Man vacations always seem to strike right when the tank is having issues :/Well I think I found my issue. I had 0 nitrates for the last week and a bit I was dosing nitrates to help bring them up. Got them up a bit higher than I wanted, but then phosphate bottomed out. Which is probably what caused the RTN of the pacman. During my quick panic testing on Sunday night I have now figure out if you don't hold down the button on the hanna phosphate checker it gives you the reading right away instead of after 3 mins. Which gives you very inaccurate results...
After doing more thorough and less rushed/panic testing I know have detectable nitrates and phosphates.
Params as of last night:
Temp: 78
Salinity: 1.026
Alk: 8.1
Cal: 420
Mag: 1230
Nitrate: 20
Phosphate: 0.22
I had a big jump in Alk from Sunday to Monday. I'm guessing growth has stopped/significantly slowed down. When I test tonight, if it's gone up by another 1dkh I will cut my dosing in half.
Currently my forest fire isn't looking great, elkhorn might not make it, montipora has significant bleaching and one other sps that I can't remember the name of has lost tissue at the base. Things don't seem to be getting worse though so that's good I guess.
My slight cyano problem has become much worse and is taking over most of the rocks and a bunch of the sandbed.
Of course I leave for vacation on thursday and will be gone a bit over a week. No idea what the tank will look like when I get back, but if cyano takes over I'm bracing for the worst.
Should I do another water change before leaving or just let things be and see if they even themselves out?
Man vacations always seem to strike right when the tank is having issues :/
My advice would be to do one more water change to get the nitrates down a little bit. Do you have someone coming over to watch the tank while you are gone? Feeding will play a role in how your nutrients progress while you are gone. Additionally, the spike in phos can cause growth to slow, which will cause the alk spike (ironically, the same thing happened to me last month while I was away on my honeymoon). The main task for now is to drop nitrates a bit and to get phos back under 0.1. The high phos is whats fueling the cyano for sure.
Normally I'd say add some GFO (start SMALL in quantity; dropping phos too fast is worse than it climbing) but since you are going out of town, I'd be hesitant to add something you can monitor. I guess if it were me in this situation, I'd add a small amount of GFO (maybe half of the prescribed amount) so it could help bring it down, but without crashing it. Even then I'd be nervous to since I won't be there to keep an eye on it.
Sorry I can't give any hard advice! That is what I can offer based on my experiences and knowledge though! Also, as a note, if the phos proves to be stubborn like mine was (came home to phos of .59) the combined effort of GFO and lanthanum chloride works well to fight it back down (I use brightwell phosphat-e and can't speak highly enough of it)