Algae Identification

WVU247

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Any opinions on what type of algae this is growing on my rocks and sand bed?

Algae Problem.jpg
 

RichtheReefer21

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If possible, could you press your phone camera flush against the glass and then try to take a closeup or pull some off and get a pic under white lighting?
 

NS Mike D

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while we are try to ID this, I don't see any coral and your join date is within the past year, so I am tagging @brandon429 to check in to see if a rip clean may be an appropriate option.

How old is your tank and what size?
 

brandon429

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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
1682693667761.png


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.
 
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WVU247

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while we are try to ID this, I don't see any coral and your join date is within the past year, so I am tagging @brandon429 to check in to see if a rip clean may be an appropriate option.

How old is your tank and what size?
Its around a year and half old and its a redsea max e 170
 

RichtheReefer21

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In the meantime.. are you interested in getting down to the bare bones of potentially a root cause or reason it has taken over your rock? Maybe we can find a long term fix catered for your system... We are here to help :)
 
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WVU247

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In the meantime.. are you interested in getting down to the bare bones of potentially a root cause or reason it has taken over your rock? Maybe we can find a long term fix catered for your system... We are here to help :)
I'm willing to do anything at this point
 

RichtheReefer21

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I'm willing to do anything at this point
While we wait for a solid i.d... wanna go over your system, flow, nutrient levels (no3 and po4) wc schedule? Dosing? Lighting? White light %? CleanUp crew? Skimmer runnin? Refugium?

Just touching on some typical offenders in cases like yours. Maybe we can find a fix and once it's back under control ull have a long term grip on keepin it down from now on.
 

brandon429

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A rip clean means taking apart a reef and rinsing out the sand in tap water for hours, not minutes, hours using cool tap water until the sand is snowglobe clean. Hours by hand in a bucket. Rinse over and over by mixing and pouring out waste


final rinse in RO water, to evacuate tap, sand is now like snowglobe grains that cannot cloud (and wont feed invasions any longer with packed in waste)



a rip clean puts back an invader free tank and zero cloud, zero waste, all in one pass.


dosing meds or fluconazole or Vibrant or dinox kills off algae which rots in the system and compounds waste vs putting back a totally clean reef like we do here



the single most important aspect of these five pages is the tap water sandbed rinse it has to be hours of rinsing, complete total cloudless rinse then with RO water at the end for sand that can be added back into the main reef as it’s being reassembled and nothing clouds.


the examples I linked here in this post are the top five cleanest rip cleans on the planet. All readers should work this hard and race to see who can be the cleanest reassembly



clean reassembly will have water so clear the tank looks empty, and it will skip cycle.


a dirty rinse looks horrible with spotty marks on the glass, sand cloud in the water due to X excuse on why they couldn’t rinse well, don’t do that or I’ll be mad.


*ways people have failed rip cleans/harmed things:

#1 is under rinsing sand for fear of bacteria evacuation. Evacuate them right down the drain, our tanks don't need sandbed bacteria they tolerate their presence and when we blast out excess bacteria from a sandbed, like a dentist blasts out plaque and bacteria scums from our mouths, everything is refreshed for a while until the cyclic waste cycle collection and sinking process begins again.

sandbed bacteria produce waste acids that jack with pH, they consume oxygen in competition with fish, and collections of dead rotting cells upwelled in waste clouds are the killing component. Sandbeds don't sit in a 3D plane in the middle of the water like rocks; they are on a flat plane on the ground level and only a tiny bit of water contacts the surface area in sand to get oxidized...we rip clean to 100% rinsed perfection to avoid this rotting mess and everyone's tanks perk up tenfold upon completion.


*not lowering the light intensity on the new setup. #2

-don't run your old PAR intensity after a rip clean when all the organics have been removed instantly. start back on a ramp up cycle as if its a totally new light. no whites, go blues only and ramp back over a week to lesser levels than you used to run that got us into an algae problem. some tanks can bleach corals with sunburn effect, it has nothing to do with lost bacteria, we stopped all bleach risks by doing simple light acclimation on the post rip clean tank.


#3 forgetting to cover fish when in holding, they'll jump out and jerky on the carpet/floor.
 
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WVU247

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While we wait for a solid i.d... wanna go over your system, flow, nutrient levels (no3 and po4) wc schedule? Dosing? Lighting? White light %? CleanUp crew? Skimmer runnin? Refugium?

Just touching on some typical offenders in cases like yours. Maybe we can find a fix and once it's back under control ull have a long term grip on keepin it down from now on.
RedSea Max E 170, Maxspect Gyre XF 230, NO3: 20, PO4: 0.19, Water Changes: try for every two weeks about 10-15 gallons, No dosing, Lighting Schedule included below, Skimmer is the stock skimmer in the back of the tank, No refugium

Lighting Schedule.PNG
 

Miller535

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its 100% indicated since the sandbed will cloud massively if we reach in and drop test, and the rocks could be easily cleared externally, outside the water, sitting on the counter, with peroxide spray and some toothbrushing to clear this initial growth plugging up all the pores in the rock. its simply unideal to use any means of killing that rock algae, and letting it rot internally to compile with the current waste loading, we need mass export here- a reef storm.

This is an of itself didn't "cure" my problem, but I believe it to be a NECESSARY starting point.
 

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RedSea Max E 170, Maxspect Gyre XF 230, NO3: 20, PO4: 0.19, Water Changes: try for every two weeks about 10-15 gallons, No dosing, Lighting Schedule included below, Skimmer is the stock skimmer in the back of the tank, No refugium

Lighting Schedule.PNG

do you use RODI water?
 

brandon429

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****THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of this entire process, for current readers, is that you rinse your sand properly.

simply do not re install cloudy sand, look at what these coming examples produce. they produce water so clear the tank looks empty when its full. be that clear


***************take your final rinse sand for a glass container test. do you see how in this video we can know all the sand is perfectly clear, by testing a final prep portion? do this pre test in glass, see if disturbance clouds (rinse it all more if so) or if the test sand is this clean its all ready for reassembly after a brief RO water rinse.


to put back half rinsed cloudy sand after reading this thread is a federal crime.
 
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WVU247

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I once had a poster use will to clear their whole tank in one pass, we linked that as first read in our thread to reward resolve.

three mos later since the first pass didnt fully remove their work for the life of the reef, they let it forest back up. had to remove link, it was one off resolve. we're full on
we work until we dont have to work, but we dont let lack of preventative steps keep the plants in the dominant position.
So first remove sand and then move on to the rock
 

brandon429

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That is a study example for a bad outcome, the opposite of what we want

The result: some of his stuff is dying. It was preventable. Contrast that outcome to the others we collected here. The irony is that cleaning up a system without taking it apart is dangerous, and taking it apart and rinsing out the sand as the first move is the only safe way.
 
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vetteguy53081

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This is algae that should be easily reduced with liquid vibrant.
Other option would be a combo of : Conch snails, turbo snails, astrea snails and trochus snails. Also a sea Hare should mow this right down
 

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