Cyano going to cause me to shut down my tank

[ncaldwell]

Did you clean the sand when you took it out? I'd check the bottom of the bucket of sand for nasties. I did the same when battling dino's and the bottom of the sand had a horrible sulfur smell and was unusable. If it smells or turned blue/green it's gone anaerobic and isn't safe to put back

 

[Servillius]

Since changing the bulb I am seeing ok results. Cyano is staying about even, certainly less than ten days or so ago, and HA is continuing to die back.

I have about 15-20 lbs of sand I have removed over the last several months, it has been out into a bucket and has mostly dried out. I really want to rinse it well and put it back in the tank, does this seem like a really bad idea?

That sand probably has a lot of trapped phosphate that is still in there. Best plan is to fill the bucket with water and check phosphate every two days. When it’s down to 0 after two days, then you can use it. It would be very interesting to get a reading on your first test after two days too. That will give you some idea of whether there are trapped nutrients and how much.

 

[Servillius]

That sand probably has a lot of trapped phosphate that is still in there. Best plan is to fill the bucket with water and check phosphate every two days. When it’s down to 0 after two days, then you can use it. It would be very interesting to get a reading on your first test after two days too. That will give you some idea of whether there are trapped nutrients and how much.

Crap. This was badly written. Empty all the water out and replace it every two days after you test. Sorry.

 

[Potatohead]

So I did rinse the crap out of the sand and put it back in. It didn't smell and I rinsed it about as well as humanly possible, lol. After one day there were some small spots of cyano from previous areas that popped up, but minor. I'm about to head home from work and will see what it's like tonight. HA continues to die back (at a slower rate) and the chaeto is still growing. Recent water test is 2 nitrate and .04 phosphate.

I am thinking about getting a conch, some ceriths and/or a goby to help keep the sand clean as well. I already have some nassarius snails but they only keep clean where they dig in, they don't really move around and clean the surface. I also need some more hermits as I had some really big blue legs for a couple years but I haven't seen the big guys in a couple weeks, I guess they probably died, I don't know what their life span typically is. They were pretty big for blue legs though.

 

[Potatohead]

Cliff Notes Update:

- Hair algae and cyano in the display is really getting knocked back, probably ~20% of what it was.
- Nitrate has come up to the 3-4 range, phosphates still .02-.03
- Chaeto growing fine, hair algae prominent in refugium but over the last few days has started to die back as well. Chaeto still looks good other than some cyano grows on it and I need to clear it off every few days
- Skimmate when I was carbon dosing was mostly a dark green, now it's black, BLACK and absolutely reeks
- Pretty much all of my corals have either died or are really not happy. The only coral I would say is doing fine is a hammer coral which has probably grown more since I started this thread than the previous year in the tank. Acans and zoas haven't opened in weeks, fish are fine. I don't think I have much choice other than to ride this out and try again in hopefully 2-3 months. Coralline algae still growing. Doing 10% water changes every 7-10 days.

 

[tthouston]

I read your thread and I didn't see anybody asking you what the salt mix are you used? Most of the thread I read about cyano issue the hobbies said they use instant ocean salt mix, how about you?
The reason I say it, because I used instant ocean salt mix and I had cyano issue. first, I have to treat my tank by Red slime remover then start using other salt mix. imo

 

[reeferfoxx]

I found that letting cyano grow out until bubbles collect under the mats, then siphoning the mats out and adding GAC for a few days really puts a damper on regrowth. Oh, that and tablespoons of Fiji mud

Jan. 4th 2018


Feb. 11th 2018

 

[Potatohead]

I read your thread and I didn't see anybody asking you what the salt mix are you used? Most of the thread I read about cyano issue the hobbies said they use instant ocean salt mix, how about you?
The reason I say it, because I used instant ocean salt mix and I had cyano issue. first, I have to treat my tank by Red slime remover then start using other salt mix. imo

I was using Seachem Reef but it has been discontinued, so I switched to H2Ocean. I have used IO in the past but not for a while.

 

[chipmunkofdoom2]

I read your thread and I didn't see anybody asking you what the salt mix are you used? Most of the thread I read about cyano issue the hobbies said they use instant ocean salt mix, how about you?
The reason I say it, because I used instant ocean salt mix and I had cyano issue. first, I have to treat my tank by Red slime remover then start using other salt mix. imo

I think it's going to be difficult to prove this. The problem with claiming that IO causes anything is that IO is used by a LOT of reefers. There are both jaw-dropping SPS tanks and dirty tanks with cyano, all of which use IO. It's dangerous to form a hypothesis empirically based on the use of IO alone. Something else is going on here.

Unless of course there has been a confirmed bad batch of Instant Ocean with high phosphates, silicates or other mineral that cyano needs.

 

[BigJohnny]

@Potatohead

Curious to hear an update.....how's everything going?

 

[Potatohead]

@Potatohead

Curious to hear an update.....how's everything going?

Sorry I missed this question before but today I was going to bump this thread and saw it now.

Had I answered your question when you asked if, things were going really well. For about a two month window I had started adding acro frags, they were growing with excellent polyp extension, things were going well. I never really got rid of cyano completely but it was mostly gone. However the last couple months have really gone back almost to where I was before. I am really disheartened.

When things were going well my nitrate was about 3-5 and phosphate about .03-.04. Since then they’re now about 40 and .01, cyano has absolutely run amok, and I don’t know why or how my nutrients got so out of whack. I haven’t changed anything. My acros don’t look terrible but my zoas haven’t fully opened in about three weeks and my acans aren’t happy either.

Because phosphate was so low, nitrate high and zoas not happy I thought the tank might be phosphate limiting. Pulled gfo and halved the size of my chaeto ball, not much change. So a few weeks ago I started dosing phosphate, about .04 ppm per day. Has not helped at all either. Started dosing a small amount of carbon to help nitrate, that has only been about 4-5 days so probably not doing much at this point but cyano (its both red and green so it’s probably spirulina) is getting worse again.

Any turf algae that was in the tank is still dying back slowly but with this much cyano, who cares. I am 100% lost as to what to do and seriously considering pulling everything out and doing about a four month cure on all the rock and sand. At that point I can’t even be sure I would start it up again.

 

[brandon429]

@Sallstrom

@Lasse


Ok go

 

[brandon429]

I wish I could get my paws on this tank right before you tear it down.



If you are willing to follow the steps for removing all the detritus in your tank then you'll be uninvaded, seems simple enough. Could be big work on your part, but I'd relish the opportunity. some tuners are able to fix your cyano having nothing to do with detritus, they deserve a go at nutrient tuning/my vote. can you post an updated tank pic


I just linked the most powerful eyes in reefing to this thread, even if you don't want to manually de cloud the sand, and rocks, and take kill steps on the target the number of people now linked to this thread are about to fix it up alternatively using powerful aquarium techniques

 

[Lasse]

My advises - that I can still give you - is still the same as in post 35 - only thing I would add is that I would not use any carbon dosing at this moment. Are you still using NoPoX ? Have you done any Triton test (or from any other firm testing that way?)

Or you can follow Brandon428 path to clean everything for detritus (and stay there for the whole life of the aquarium).

In short either add biodiversity which competes with cyanobacteria about the resources in the detritus , or cleans the tank from all detritus all the time

Both methods will sooner or later end in a well looking aquaria but chose one path and stay there is important - to mix methods - its normally ends bad.

Sincerely Lasse

 

[Sallstrom]

I agree on @Lasse's post 35.
But I would also try even harder to keep everything you can control as stable as possible. Sure, maybe vacuum out the mats of cyano once to get a good start, but after that I would keep my hands dry.
So here are things I think might favour cyano, directly or indirectly
.
Changes in light - both time and colour schedule.
Temperature swings
Changing water - another change in the aquarium. Maybe try a period without changing water?
Medicines/other treatments that kill of organisms in the tank.
KH swings

As for the nutrients, I would aim for 5-10ppm nitrate and 0,05-0,1ppm phosphate. But don't chase those numbers too fast, take it slow and let the tank take its time to tune itself.
When you reached those numbers try to stay as stable as possible at those levels.
Make sure you have enough PO4 in the water if you use a carbon source to lower the NO3.

And get some grazers that eats hair algae. Hair algae isn't something bad, they pretty much like the same conditions as most corals do. So to get rid of them by starving them etc I believe might be bad for the corals as well. To erase them with chemicals only open up that space for new things, which might turn out to be worse. The coralline algae you want instead are not an opportunist, they need time and stable conditions as well as the corals.

Okey, my thought was to not add that much to Lasse's post. But I got carried away, so I will stop now
And all this is just my thoughts on how to handle problems like these. I'm sure it can be solved in other ways too, but this is what I have found help in "my" tanks.

 

[Belgian Anthias]

An important consideration I want to add here is that the use of antibiotics in aquaria ( a closed environment) is prohibited by law in Germany. The reason is simple. The cultivation of resisting strains. This includes all products claiming to kill bacteria but do not advertises the composition of the product, as these products may contain antibiotics.
A commercial product able to do wonders, removing cyano's or algae without effecting other organisms, is a very valuable product and not patent such a product seems to be unlikely. If patented there is no reason to keep the composition a secret.
A lot of commercial products not publishing the composition are based on carbohydrates for stimulating competition for nutrients and using them may implement a higher risks as when using the so called "vodka method" ( as the dose is not known) but as the composition of the product is not known these products must be considered to be dangerous for the environment.
http://ilovereefing.de/cyano-bakterien-bekampfen-gastbeitrag/?lang=en

 

[brandon429]

that's a lot of focus on a place where it was needed/respect/excellent team response

And it takes a little time to make headway too...am not expecting a rush turnaround like we cause in smaller nano reefs as it takes time for nutrient boosting and balancing to boost the competing populations that suppress the target. he may need to boost the competitors as well, to save wait time on them building naturally.

No harm with Couch making some adjustments and continuing the update, I think the restart should be delayed this is the best time science shines and when it happens to people's 400 gallon setup, this type of water tuning is about the only hope unless I can convince a few to get that pond sterilizer off Amazon which is more $ and still not as awesome as making adjustments with cheap sources of N and P

Also I wanted to add this: since I've been reading water tuner work on cyano and cousins/dinos / it's getting really popular for people to buy the competing strains of microorganisms, live, from places like algen and others. You can buy a bag of 250K squirming cyano cures nowadays. Though I haven't seen update pics and need to go back and re read the tank volume here, it sure seems like a new plan to:

Have the top nutrients back in line for the nitrate and phosphate

Still hand remove what you can, all of it, though we can wait a while on removing the bed and rinsing the rocks out till later if at all. It does not undo anyone's system for the keeper to hand cheat out some of the offending mass. This positions your tank work as growback prevention and not mass removal.

Add the bag of bugs and also consider ready cheap bottle bac competing strains like mb7 and some brightwell brand competing bottle strains are cheap and certainly might work. Threads online show some responding tanks to those

Sort of a little blended method from the two approaches to this challenge.

proud of the team
B

 

[Lasse]

From the link

However, an old method is extraction of soil. It brings a number of beneficial microorganisms, not only bacteria, and even phages to the tank. Take a few spoons of unfertilized garden soil, if possible from different locations, if available some good compost, and mix it with water in a jar. After that, let the soil depose, and give the clear liquid portion on top into the tank. Unfortunately a success assurance can’t be promised with this approach. It depends a lot on the type of organisms accidentally introduced, but it does have chances of success and it costs not even a cent.

Wunderbar. I sometimes use that method when I start a system because it brings in nitrification bacteria too. I store the liquid in my refrigerator and add a little every day for tree weeks. I had never thought that it could be good for establish a good micro population too. With this method I use to have a fish and a cleaning crew already day 3 - 4 after start.

I have never seen this article before but it is mostly like I could have written it by myself - very good. Thank you @Belgian Anthias.

Sincerely Lasse

 

[brandon429]

I did not see that thank you for captioning it from his link.

Amazing if the balance needed is right out the front door, I'd have never thought of that simplicity, how creative for BA to have read that and kept it handy for such a time of need. Couch, consider your tank challenge energized. Hook us up with the updates/ pics and this could turn into reef article gold.

Setting up the new tank is less ideal since cyano/spirulina are found everywhere, it seems that to practice controlling it now in the challenge system is really prep for one day controlling it in future systems.

 

[brandon429]

@bcarl77



I never forget about your ongoing work either, what do you think about this spoonful of soil idea above... we have certainly not given that idea a go. we've de-detritused your system pretty well with the sandbed pull, maybe boosting these competing strains from terrestrial sources will help, it's not going to hurt to try.

Though we are awaiting update pics, by description alone his invader sounds similarly well adapted and your challenge work doesn't leave my mind.