Cyano problem, need help

[EnterName]

also, i dont know if this is a clue, but in the morning before the lights are up, there is only a little coloration on the sand bed.. the sand looks mostly clean with some red/purple spots. As the aquarium lights intensify during the day, then the brown mat starts to intensify




I think I have amphidinium dino? All this time I thoguth it was cyano.


View attachment 4543605

Other mat forming organisms are also increasing with the photoperiod so it's not a 100% certain ID but Amphidinium is certainly a possibility as some of them apparently create less mucus and like to go a bit deeper into the substrate.

 

[Dan_P]

This is like a mat of brown/red.. The previous battle I had with dinos was very obvious, gooe everywhere and strings up.

Unless you're saying I have a different dinos that isn't like the previous one I had. Cant wait for the scope to come...

I was tempted to think dinoflagellates because the only time that I observed cyanobacteria that were not green or red/purple was under sever nitrogen depletion which you don’t have.

Good luck with your microscopy investigation.

 

[EnterName]

@125mph finally found an image. I knew I had seen this stuff before:

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/microscopy-thread.1138845/post-14467504

[...]

Amphidinium (or Testudodinium which is hard to differentiate somemtimes) can create this slime-less substrate coverage

 

[CHSUB]

I have a bad GHA problem as well, been battling that for a while too..

Do you think I could stop dosing nitrate and be okay? I had dinos last year because my phosphate and nitrates crashed to zero and took about a month to get rid of the dinos. Thats why I'm very afraid of nitrates dropping to zero... If i dont dose, my nitrate last time went to 0 and I quickly dosed it back (phosphate was still at 0.03 ) so I think thats why I didnt get dinos again this time,.

I would stop and not be concerned with low no3. Clean aquariums never suffer algae problems. Manual removal and vigorous maintenance is all that is needed…

 

[W31Olds]

I have Cyano in my DT right now that is Rust Colored. Not sure why but it's definitely Cyano. I just checked some under my Microscope and it matches the image. I would think your problem is the same. I have been dosing Microbacter-7 and it's seems to be slowing down

 

[RobertK]

I have been battling cyano for about 9 months and not sure what to do.

- Ran chemi-clean 4 times, and it keeps coming back
- Ran coral snow + cyanoclean and it did nothing

My nitrates are around 5ppm and phosphate around .04ppm, but phosphate stays stable and nitrate drops by 1ppm per day and i dose another 3-4ppm every few days to keep it from crashing. AI thinks its an imbalance of nitrates dropping too fast and has me dosing 1ppm per day to keep it stable. Trying that now.

Running a skimmer, turb scrubber, and fleece roller (reefmat).

Tried lots of water changes, cleaning sand bed. Nothing works

I'm guessing dinos. Your microscope will help you ID what this is, then you'll know what your options are for how to proceed! Looks like you picked a nice scope!

 

[Fritz05]

I had cyano several times, including the kind tht disappears over night. I always had low nitrates and phosphates, and tried all kinds of things to raise them, including. dosing nitrates, phosphates, and vinegar. Nothing worked, until I stopped all my efforts and returned to my regular maintenance interval and nothing else. The cyano eventually disappeared, but it took several months.

 

[GuppyHJD]

Have you run your skimmer dryer to let nitrates raise a bit?
Curious what test kits are you using?

 

[mcarroll]

AI thinks its an imbalance of nitrates dropping too fast and has me dosing 1ppm per day to keep it stable. Trying that now.

I have been battling cyano for about 9 months and not sure what to do.

- Ran chemi-clean 4 times, and it keeps coming back
- Ran coral snow + cyanoclean and it did nothing

My nitrates are around 5ppm and phosphate around .04ppm, but phosphate stays stable and nitrate drops by 1ppm per day and i dose another 3-4ppm every few days to keep it from crashing. AI thinks its an imbalance of nitrates dropping too fast and has me dosing 1ppm per day to keep it stable. Trying that now.

Running a skimmer, turb scrubber, and fleece roller (reefmat).

Tried lots of water changes, cleaning sand bed. Nothing works

Cyano is a tough one. IMO "nutrients" has a much wider meaning to them than to other algae....not just N & P.

What do you have for flow?

How well does your skimmer appear to be working? How would you describe the skimmate?

What does "turb scrubber" mean? (Turf scrubber? If so, seems contrary to your tank's needs IMO. How does it seem to be running? Describe its production.)

Mechanical filtration like a reef mat should be unnecessary under good reefing conditions. Does it seem to be necessary in your tank or does it not seem to do much?

How are your corals doing? Anything corals warring or declining?

 

[125mph]

Got the microscope today, finally. Was tinkering with it.

I did start dosing 1.5ml/day silicates starting last week when suspected dinos. Its actually helped a lot but the rust brown is still there, just not as heavy.

 

[125mph]

Have you run your skimmer dryer to let nitrates raise a bit?
Curious what test kits are you using?

Using hanna.

Skimmer is a bk deluxe. Its dark wet skimmate. Yes i think i might turn it off to let nitrates rise. It drop to near zero just this week

 

[125mph]

Cyano is a tough one. IMO "nutrients" has a much wider meaning to them than to other algae....not just N & P.

What do you have for flow?

How well does your skimmer appear to be working? How would you describe the skimmate?

What does "turb scrubber" mean? (Turf scrubber? If so, seems contrary to your tank's needs IMO. How does it seem to be running? Describe its production.)

Mechanical filtration like a reef mat should be unnecessary under good reefing conditions. Does it seem to be necessary in your tank or does it not seem to do much?

How are your corals doing? Anything corals warring or declining?

Did the reefmat cause i hate filter socks.

Turf scubber is the APIS-60 four squares scrubber. Get a good amount of big green stuff every month.

Just afraid of nitrates of phosphate bottoming out cause last time I had heavy dinos breakout. It happen in my frag tank too.

Sps heavt tank and corals doing good.

 

[zbrusko]

I fought this same problem for a long time. Tried all kinds of bacteria additives to no avail. Ultimately, I alternated lights off/on (not total blackout, but my tank is in wall, so it got very little ambient light) for 4 2-day cycles and added 4 lbs of gulf live sand. Was also dosing silicates. It’s pretty much cleared up, and si has been dropping naturally. Some diatoms eating that up.

 

[SantaMonica Verified Sponsor]

Dino's will go away if you stick with low nutrients.

Many people have heard that reducing nutrients to "zero" (nitrate, phosphate, etc as measured by hobby test kits) is not good for coral growth. The answer is, it depends. "Zero" is not really zero of course; hobby test kits don't need to test super low levels like lab tests do. In other words, there is always a level of nutrients there, even if you have "all zeros".

First thing to know is that natural reefs always test "zero" for nutrients with hobby test kits. Yet, they have very high growth rates; acro's can grow two feet in one year. But yes, some hobbyists do see less growth with zero nutrients. Why is this, and what is different with tanks compared to natural reefs?

One answer is food particles. The enormous amount of visible food particles (and invisible dissolved particles) in natural reefs is so high that at night some divers can't see their own hands. And the enormous level of photosynthesis on reefs consumes most of the resulting nutrients. But hobbyists can't have this level of food particles because of nutrient build up, so they reduce feeding, to as little as 1/1000 of natural reef levels. Thus, corals can starve from lack of food particles.

So one bandaid to help with this is to keep tank nutrients above "zero". This feeds bacteria around the corals, and the bacteria then become coral food. Softies take it in directly, by inflating with water, and polyps eat the microbes and pods that eat the bacteria.

This works but is self-limiting, because in most cases higher levels of phosphate is going to slow the coral growth, and also because bacteria are hard for polyps to grab. So the trick is to keep food particle levels up high, and keep nutrients down low, at the same time. In other words, try to duplicate natural reefs.

Also, some people say they get some brown dust algae (usually dino's) when nutrients go to zero. However this is temporary, because of phosphate leaving the sand and rocks. After a few weeks, this will go away.

 

[EnterName]

Also, some people say they get some brown dust algae (usually dino's) when nutrients go to zero. However this is temporary, because of phosphate leaving the sand and rocks. After a few weeks, this will go away.

I agree with almost everything you said, but after experimenting for 6+ years with a tank in the ultra low nutrient range, I wouldn't say the brown stains on the substrate are temporary, because you can absolutely sustain them for months or even years. It can sometimes also be stopped by dosing nutrients and then started again by stopping the dosage. When it looks like dust rather than slime it's more likely to be diatoms (there are exceptions) and those stains are indeed temporary, but dinoflagellates can definitely stay "indefinitely".

Not all tanks get rid of dinoflagellates by dosing nutrients, and you can obviously make things even worse that way, but sometimes it actually works. For Symbiodinium and related coral symbionts we already have scientific data explaining how adding nitrogen can actually "starve" dinoflagellates:
elevated nitrogen levels make them divide faster, so if phosphate is kept reasonably low, they reproduce too quickly and then run short of the phosphate they need (see Rosset et al., 2017 & Nalley et al., 2023). I could imagine the same applies to the benthic dinoflagellates causing issues in our tanks, and maybe a comparable limitation happens with carbon and trace elements when both nitrogen and phosphorus are provided in higher concentrations. That might explain why people started associating zero readings with dinoflagellates, even though it doesn't really seem to make sense from a pure nutrient-availability perspective.