Algae Identification
- Thread starter WVU247
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I have seen about 6 rip cleans since the last update here in the best-of-the-best thread
A_Poythress' mixed algae challenge + Natural reef's dinos challenge are the new bob tanks to reference in my opinion, due to depth of work done
out of the recent 6, these two rinsed the best, performed reef dentistry the best and warrant inclusion here
notice the trend
we take one tanks that are the last resort for the reefer, they're fed up with normal controls
we use reef surgery and reef dentistry to simply turn them around overnite, and we predict what future gardening will look like until the tanks are substrates overtaken with either coralline, or corals, but not invaders. follow the flow in that thread to see the pattern we collect here
Look at AP's succession pics, we will get updates from them as well on upcoming battles: you will get to see how we handle the unknown here-the growback and prevention phase which hasn't occurred yet
www.reef2reef.com
beginning:
after some test rocking, some targeted dentistry in progress
here is the sand rinse pre test below, see how clean this is (gets them in the b.o.b thread )
and now for the payoff
A_Poythress' mixed algae challenge + Natural reef's dinos challenge are the new bob tanks to reference in my opinion, due to depth of work done
out of the recent 6, these two rinsed the best, performed reef dentistry the best and warrant inclusion here
notice the trend
we take one tanks that are the last resort for the reefer, they're fed up with normal controls
we use reef surgery and reef dentistry to simply turn them around overnite, and we predict what future gardening will look like until the tanks are substrates overtaken with either coralline, or corals, but not invaders. follow the flow in that thread to see the pattern we collect here
Look at AP's succession pics, we will get updates from them as well on upcoming battles: you will get to see how we handle the unknown here-the growback and prevention phase which hasn't occurred yet
GHA - Losing the battle
Hey all, I have been battling GHA since August of 2022. I feel like I am losing the battle here and do not really know what else to do. little info about my current tank: 25G Innovative Marine Nuvo - 2 clown fish - 1 pink spotted goby - 1 tuxedo urchin - 3 peppermint shrimp - 1 reef glass...
www.reef2reef.com
beginning:
after some test rocking, some targeted dentistry in progress
here is the sand rinse pre test below, see how clean this is (gets them in the b.o.b thread
)and now for the payoff
side detail
when I look at the stickies up top here, threads that don't have to actually earn anything via results they get to stay up top to promulgate 'best practices' just by first view alone, I don't see a tenth of these correction rates and pics. I see messy tradeoff invasions between hair algae, cyano and dinos, across all stickied methods
its ironic that the best outcome cure rates have to earn their upkeep via actual results, with no sticky cheats. I'm truly not sure why this isn't a sticky, it isn't based on testimony of outcomes that's for sure. I sell it too hard I bet he he
**those big sticky threads are needed: large tanks can't just rip clean, they need that type of science that works only through the water as they all do- every sticky thread is a parameter and testing only thread. The limitation being given to readers is withholding the rip clean process that tanks 40 gallons and below can be using. it's not even mentioned at all, never stickied as a best option which obviously it is, and that's an unfair limitation to the process and to nano owners
***nano owners have an opt out button they can only find via back alley channels, it should be a commonly-known process. stickying that would help ensure coverage to more readers.
there is no other thread on this board that takes near-leaving the hobby entrants and converts them this fast.
**Omit Troylee's hard work thread from my rant above. that's fifty pages he did of CLEAN peroxide dosing for his readers, its the oldest peroxide work thread on the internet indeed, from any site. legit work there, that's a classic, it should never be un-stickied. the other 4 are total messes but necessary endeavors into learning about large tank control.
when I look at the stickies up top here, threads that don't have to actually earn anything via results they get to stay up top to promulgate 'best practices' just by first view alone, I don't see a tenth of these correction rates and pics. I see messy tradeoff invasions between hair algae, cyano and dinos, across all stickied methods
its ironic that the best outcome cure rates have to earn their upkeep via actual results, with no sticky cheats. I'm truly not sure why this isn't a sticky, it isn't based on testimony of outcomes that's for sure. I sell it too hard I bet he he
**those big sticky threads are needed: large tanks can't just rip clean, they need that type of science that works only through the water as they all do- every sticky thread is a parameter and testing only thread. The limitation being given to readers is withholding the rip clean process that tanks 40 gallons and below can be using. it's not even mentioned at all, never stickied as a best option which obviously it is, and that's an unfair limitation to the process and to nano owners
***nano owners have an opt out button they can only find via back alley channels, it should be a commonly-known process. stickying that would help ensure coverage to more readers.
there is no other thread on this board that takes near-leaving the hobby entrants and converts them this fast.
**Omit Troylee's hard work thread from my rant above. that's fifty pages he did of CLEAN peroxide dosing for his readers, its the oldest peroxide work thread on the internet indeed, from any site. legit work there, that's a classic, it should never be un-stickied. the other 4 are total messes but necessary endeavors into learning about large tank control.
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This is a real dinos battle, a tough strain, a TOUGH strain by NaturalReef
*these dinos already punch through a big UV sterilizer ran on this nano, the very thing we use to defeat dinos and prevent them isn't working, because this strain is particularly virulent
we don't bother to ID, because ID doesn't change what we do in reef tank surgery it's all action
factors of this surgery that involve updated cycling science:
we ripped out the sandbed and didn't put it back. we don't expect these dinos to fold first pass, although if they do that's awesome lucky
no sandbed=no place to hide, no place to gain insulation refuge among the litter which sandbeds provide to dinos, we can now easily siphon up remassed strands off the bottom and on the rocks until they physically exhaust...we can put back in the sandbed later. we ripped out the sandbed, cleaned the rocks, and the entire system still carries the clam and coral and fish via skip cycle because reef rocks have enough bacteria for any job in a reef display, that's an ongoing pattern we use here.
*I have been wanting to get a real dinos challenge here, stand alone dinos not mixed with any other presentation, so we can compare our methods to the 2 big dinos threads up top here in stickies.
progression shots:
LOOK at this water prep room, this is what a professional 220 gallon setup would use in terms of 0/0 ro di water, with staunch upkeep of canisters, he's got powerful UV its just not enough to scrape up the dinos from lodging in the tank so we did that surgically and will still use his UV along with our repeat physical removal
hint of causative: look at these powerful LED's spotting above the nano, this light intensity will absolutely drive nanos with dino's issues, we're reducing the overall power of the LED -~30% and sustaining two months during the battle, slowly ramping back afterwards and checking for regrowth changes in the target if any
the holding buckets:
Look above: he cleaned out the entire tank back to bare glass, so we don't hitch in any remaining dinos on the new assembly, we're trying to cut mass bigtime here.
Communal organisms benefit from the community (feed acquisition, shelter, insulation etc)
we rob that community support here
here's the payoff, total cleaning of rocks during surgery.
Now THIS is clean: look how the tank literally looks empty. that's clean, now we reinstate UV after cleaning out it's housing, we lower light power, we disallow absolutely any strands of the ability to remass.
I will update here with pics in the future
when the dinos die, we put a rinsed bed back in place.
there was no bottle bac used.
there is no recycle during the clean because rock bacteria are this tough, they're not weak and in need of reinforcement. Don't forget: in a world where everyone is trying to sell you things to add to bacteria, to 'diversify' them for benefit: we're actually removing bacteria free of charge for these wins. Naturally-selected strains will do fine if we remove unfairly-aggregated competition bacteria/dinos/cyano/etc.
*these dinos already punch through a big UV sterilizer ran on this nano, the very thing we use to defeat dinos and prevent them isn't working, because this strain is particularly virulent
we don't bother to ID, because ID doesn't change what we do in reef tank surgery it's all action
factors of this surgery that involve updated cycling science:
we ripped out the sandbed and didn't put it back. we don't expect these dinos to fold first pass, although if they do that's awesome lucky
no sandbed=no place to hide, no place to gain insulation refuge among the litter which sandbeds provide to dinos, we can now easily siphon up remassed strands off the bottom and on the rocks until they physically exhaust...we can put back in the sandbed later. we ripped out the sandbed, cleaned the rocks, and the entire system still carries the clam and coral and fish via skip cycle because reef rocks have enough bacteria for any job in a reef display, that's an ongoing pattern we use here.
*I have been wanting to get a real dinos challenge here, stand alone dinos not mixed with any other presentation, so we can compare our methods to the 2 big dinos threads up top here in stickies.
progression shots:
LOOK at this water prep room, this is what a professional 220 gallon setup would use in terms of 0/0 ro di water, with staunch upkeep of canisters, he's got powerful UV its just not enough to scrape up the dinos from lodging in the tank so we did that surgically and will still use his UV along with our repeat physical removal
hint of causative: look at these powerful LED's spotting above the nano, this light intensity will absolutely drive nanos with dino's issues, we're reducing the overall power of the LED -~30% and sustaining two months during the battle, slowly ramping back afterwards and checking for regrowth changes in the target if any
the holding buckets:
Look above: he cleaned out the entire tank back to bare glass, so we don't hitch in any remaining dinos on the new assembly, we're trying to cut mass bigtime here.
Communal organisms benefit from the community (feed acquisition, shelter, insulation etc)
we rob that community support here
here's the payoff, total cleaning of rocks during surgery.
Now THIS is clean: look how the tank literally looks empty. that's clean, now we reinstate UV after cleaning out it's housing, we lower light power, we disallow absolutely any strands of the ability to remass.
I will update here with pics in the future
when the dinos die, we put a rinsed bed back in place.
there was no bottle bac used.
there is no recycle during the clean because rock bacteria are this tough, they're not weak and in need of reinforcement. Don't forget: in a world where everyone is trying to sell you things to add to bacteria, to 'diversify' them for benefit: we're actually removing bacteria free of charge for these wins. Naturally-selected strains will do fine if we remove unfairly-aggregated competition bacteria/dinos/cyano/etc.
who's ready to do an end of the year rip clean
someone out there got a wrecked nano you've been messing with for 9 months
let's fix it by 3 pm tomorrow/post up
what makes this a best-of-the-best thread is their attitude for ongoing control it's not just the powerful before and after pics, the 50 page thread of rinses has hundreds of shocking before and afters
but this group is uniquely willing among the collection to force compliance thereafter
and if they get lazy/edit them out
best of the best in rip cleaning has to mean something, there has to be a standard of measure that sets apart from run of the mill rip clean, this is the bob.
someone out there got a wrecked nano you've been messing with for 9 months
let's fix it by 3 pm tomorrow/post up
what makes this a best-of-the-best thread is their attitude for ongoing control it's not just the powerful before and after pics, the 50 page thread of rinses has hundreds of shocking before and afters
but this group is uniquely willing among the collection to force compliance thereafter
and if they get lazy/edit them out
best of the best in rip cleaning has to mean something, there has to be a standard of measure that sets apart from run of the mill rip clean, this is the bob.
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Wow, I'm exhausted just reading this.A rip clean is taking apart your reef to clean it while it's parted out. the end result is 100% waste-free reefing, which ejects invaders and all clogging material in one pass, your tank is ripped so clean even when filled with water it looks empty. It is reef tank surgery; you'll spend hours causing this change we see in coming examples. That control and ordered approach is why all the example systems skip cycle just fine and we never used bottle bacteria after the clean. Plenty of bacteria exist on rocks after the deep cleaning
******when your tank is drained, take it out of the house and power wash it down + dry it so that it's laser clean, like new. We don't want you to do all this cleaning effort only to reassemble with algae- stained walls, caked in dried hard water deposits on the upper edges
Be thorough in each step and you'll get the results you see, these examples are best of the best rip cleans.
vacuuming your reef leaves in a large portion of waste still in the tank.
We never vacuum sand out of a running reef tank, that's a shortcut and a dangerous one.
dosing chemi clean to kill cyano, or any other doser, or using Nitrate and Phosphate + / - tricks to kill invasions does not export the cells. any type of work to kill invasions in a tank leaves those cells to lyse/rot/compound along with the waste already in your tank.
this is why tradeoff invasions between dinos/cyano/algae/diatoms are so common in non-rip clean work threads.
the benefit you get for the hours it takes to run a true rip clean is your tank looks and runs like you want it to, for a while, until conditions in your home bring it right back full circle. rip cleans aren't a permanent fix for algae / invasion management, they're a tool to reverse old tank syndrome in reef tanks because OTS is caused by compounding waste and dead cells. ripping that mass out of the tank correctly, surgically, gets the results you can clearly see here.
we do not vacuum sand out of a tank full of water that's dangerous because on the way up the sand clouding can kill animals in the tank. we have to take these reefs apart, the hard way in sections, so that we keep sensitive fish and shrimp and corals away from dangerous sandbed clouding/detritus clouding. your sand will come out of the tank for rinsing at the very last takedown step, once fish and corals and rocks are taken out.
read each work example here to learn the process before you begin, see how folks take apart their reefs in order, hold the fish covered in totes so they won't jump, and then they do the rip cleaning process.
we do not use bottle bac here, the retail world tries to sell us bottle bac for everything in reefing on the hint we can't afford to lose bacteria; that is not true, it does not work that way. we do not use bottle bac here because we know that rock bacteria aren't harmed in a rip clean.
the single most important part of this whole process is that you rinse new or old sand, destined to be in the new tank, to cloudless perfection using tap water at the start and then saltwater at the end, to evacuate the tap. *the reason we use tap water is because it's endless. if you use RO/DI water, it'll run out before you're truly cloudless rinsed. Tap water won't. the brief contact time we have with tap water isn't going to contaminate or harm your sand.
How to clean ROCKS in the rip clean process (the rest of the thread is examples on perfection sand rinsing)
You are doing this type of dentistry on your reef rocks, not with a brush, with a knife or a pointed metal tip
see that plaque scraped away on the left: that's the algae, dinos, vermitids, adherents you don't want
your rocks are reef teeth.
you are a reef dentist
-take out a test rock and set on the counter in the air. Won't hurt cycling bac, won't hurt corals (mine routinely get 20+ mins in air during disassembly cleanings) but if you would like to dribble saltwater across the rocks and corals that's fine too.
the point is, we aren't adjusting params to starve the algae we're doing dentist's work on the rocks as if they're teeth.
We need to take a steak knife/sharp metal object, and precision grind/rasp out the algae anchor points pulling / scraping away and rinse off the sections with saltwater pour over down the drain in the sink. this allows us to detail around corals, sponges, things we want to keep and we use the knife vs a brush because brushes break up algae and smash the bits deeper into crevices
a knife tip is a precision rasp tool like a clean up crew working in the exact spot we wanted them to work
be rough, scrape well for heavy attachment areas. This is what the first poster in the thread did to get his rocks so very clean, for the reveal on the next page.
once your test rock is worked 100% clean via metal rasping, you can dribble or spot-apply common 3% peroxide on the cleaned spots, after rasping, so that any leftover anchor cells are burned clean.
None of this process harms filter bacteria, it won't uncycle any rock or system. it's the price we pay for not having tons of grazers like the ocean, and I don't recommend we go all crazy in adding CUC's in a reef tank because they're disease risks for the fish and rarely actually target the rocks as well.
you can set a test rock back in the tank and observe it a few days; if you like it's appearance in comparison to the others-scale up and do them all. This process is simply total control for a nano-reef or any size tank until we get lucky and don't have to be reef dentists.
This whole thread is the top cleanest sand rinses Ive seen among thousands of posted / guided rip cleans.
most folks rinse 99.99% well and that's safe.
this thread/ they rinsed 1000% well/above and beyond, because they wanted the perfection outcome.
it feels weird to be rinsing our sand for about 3 straight hours in tap water but that's the rule.
the messy cloud in the sand is whats feeding everything and that cloud can kill the tank in some conditions. we're rinsing it all away because sandbed bacteria do NOT matter we don't need them. only rock bacteria, that's why we rinsed in saltwater above. we take the tanks fully apart, holding fish/rocks/corals in totes with heated swater because we want them isolated away from the jacked up sandbeds that some tanks have. that clouding is what kills, its NEVER a loss of cycling bacteria.
-the only params you need to match in the prior tank/ ripped clean version is temp and salinity.
-look how we advise each entrant to lower their lighting PAR, remove white spectrum for a while and run it as windex blue. this prevents coral bleaching in ripped clean tanks, re ramp your light back to preferred levels over several days. **consider if your previous levels were too bright and white anyway, light intensity and spectrum is a major cause of invasions in reefing.
notice how we do not measure params here, we're a physical thread, we fix reefs by flushing and cleaning not by guessing levels with non digital test kits.
How about the fixed tanks, did that part stand out
Did you notice that owning a nano reef means you have a way to never be invaded with any type of wreckage that we see happening to large tanks?
How about the part where identification doesn't play any role in invasion fixing
Lots of other repeating clues are available too
Did you notice that owning a nano reef means you have a way to never be invaded with any type of wreckage that we see happening to large tanks?
How about the part where identification doesn't play any role in invasion fixing
Lots of other repeating clues are available too
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