Can you help ID this?

[revenant]

I’ve been scouring images on google and such .... what I though might be dinos looks more just like brown nuisance algae to me now... I vacuumed a bunch of the back wall of my aquarium yesterday... I did see some stringy bits which made me think dinos but there were very few and no air bubbles... plus it seems to mostly be on the back wall we’re my third power head is pointing at for flow behind the rocks... the parts on the rocks the snails were eating it it looks like.. some of the more dense spots sort of look like hair blowing in the breeze.. a few pics:

 

[Johniejumbo]

Diatoms perhaps?

 

[revenant]

Maybe.. I had an outbreak of those a month ago.. mostly on the sand bed but my conches dealt with that handily.. The more I look at the pics and now re-examine the tank very closely it looks kind of green too...

The tank is set to be two months old at end Sept.. I put three fish in when the cycle was nearing the end and then three more last week... So I have definitely been adding to the bio-load a lot in the last few weeks..

Water params:
amon 0
nitrite 0
nitrate just under 5ppm (this sort of dropped suddenly from hovering around 10ppm to 5 and now looks under 5)
phos .25 (yes I am working on this)
Sal 1.025
Temp 79
my calcium and mg are higher than ideal but from all of my reading that is not too terrible.

 

[Johniejumbo]

It’s a young tank. It’ll probably go through various algae stages before it settles in. Good routine maintenance and a decent clean up crew should keep it under control. If it starts getting out of hand then you may need to revise your maintenance or intervene in other ways.

 

[Tired]

Yep, looks like a regular part of the "uglies". The nitrate drop is probably from the algae using it up. Looks like a mix of several common pest algae species, no big deal. Keep your glass clean and pull out any bits of hair algae that get long, snails can't eat those.

Instead of trying to chase phosphate down, let the nitrates stay a bit over 5ppm, and add more snails. Consider some manual removal. You're going to have lots of algae anyway, until your tank starts to mature and builds up a community of non-pest algae that can compete with the more invasive kinds. One thing you can do to help that is make sure you don't have low nutrients. Low nutrients are bad for algae and corals, and you actually want algae. You just want to get your rocks covered in types of algae that are relatively well-behaved and will outcompete the less well-behaved stuff.

Stop adding fish. You should really only add one at a time, and you've been adding a lot.

 

[revenant]

Thanks.. I did add more snails this weekend and they’re on the back wall eating they algae which is great... the only thing I am thinking about adding is a dose of pods.. but I do have some now but I can’t tell how good the population is... my six
Line is hunting them.. and the royal gramma is ramming the sandbed and eating what poofs up from that.. so I must have some.. just the population stopped hanging out on the glass like it was... used to have sooo many.. I did manually vacuum out some algae yesterday ... going to let the fish and snails work on it now... yes seems like general nuisance algae once I took a good long look at it... just going to keep doing weekly water changes, swap the sock out, and keep tabs on the water chem... thanks everyone!!

 

[revenant]

My CuC is handling the algae fairly well.. I did end up buying some pods on ebay which come soon.. my six line wrasse and flame hawk will keep the population under control. Going to add those when I get them and just keep general maintenance and such going for the next few weeks.. Young tank needs to mature a bit... Coraline algae growth is just taking off and I can see it beating the green in places. woot!