Dark green alge + cyano bacteria

[balajeek15]

73gal DT running for 2+ years, stocked with mixed corals and 8 fishes, (cleanup crew: few crabs, tongo snails, just two really big nerite snail.)

since last two months i been dealing with cyano, the purple slime all over the rocks and on sand bed. vaccum up all i can on rocks and sand bed 3 times so far spending atleast 2-3 hrs each time, I was expecting it would get better over time but it does not seem to be, plus when i did the 4th time clean up yesterday i found the rocks are covered with dark green hairy algae, I really haven't noticed it until i started vacuuming the slime, it was around 2-3 weeks before i had through clean and at that time there was nothing like this. I gave a try using a tooth-brush to clean it off but it wouldn't go. The hairy alge is on the 50% of rocks. Wonder why and what should I be doing.

Things i have changed around 6 months past:
- 6-8 months ago added MiracleMud 2Lbs on sump. Before adding i cleaned out the sump for all debris
- I had two kessil a360we + one hydra 26hd in the middle all along, 3 weeks ago i removed both the kessil and replaced with hydra 26hd
- first year i had gfo on phoshpan reactor, then removed 2nd year because my NO3 and PO4 were zero all the time and sps were dying, after research learned that i need to have some NO3/PO4, now my sps are growing well and some are really growing.
- was dosing nitrate and phosphate for nearly 6 months, then stoped as nitrate and phosphate were increasing.

Parameters I test them almost everyweek :
Salt: 35ppt
NO3 - 5 to 10
PO4 - .10 to .15
Ca - 350
Mg - 1300 (My Redsea test always shows this)
KH - 8.0


Dosing:
BRS KH and Ca set by Neptune DOS
Once a week RedSea ABCD, alternate week Reef-Roids spot feed.

Feed: alternate with Flakes, brine, pellets

Anyone experienced can guess how i can bring cyano in to control or if any of the changes made within few months should be removed! and how about this green alge!

I am thinking of getting a log of snails to clean the alge, any recommenation! (i had like 20 different snails, overtime they die or the crabs kills them, i have i think two huge snails but its all the time only on the back glass, never seen them on rocks, they are the reason my corals get knocked down sometime)
Also add back the GFO reactor.

Look at this pic took yesterday of rightside of the rock to notice the hairy alge.

 

[Macbalacano]

My 2 cents:

- Parameters are ok, but definitely at that phosphate level (relative to your nitrate level which isn't that high), you will more nuisance algae.

- I would recommend the following snails: Cerith, Trochus, Turbo for algae. I personally run a crabless tank as I find the snails are much more effective.

- I think reefroids are part of the problem. I find any time I used to feed reefroids, my phosphates would double instantly. Plus I'd get vermatid snails and would choke my clam.

- I think you can look into other gentler ways of exporting nitrates and phosphates - running a fuge with Chaeto OR an Algae scrubber

- For cyano, i'd use chemiclean treatment to knock it out once and then work on the other issues above, which are a long term solution.

 

[Dkmoo]

It looks to me like your tank is going thru the ugly phase again. If I had to guess, I'm estimating your "tank maturity age" is only somewhere between 6 months and 1 year and here's why:

Normally, in a newly cycled tank, with new rock and substrate, first 6 months as you feed and add nutrient, the various biological processes will start their competition until the different organisms reach equilibrium after a few ugly phases and blooms. During this time, a portion of the nutrient will also be locked in the new substrate until it reaches saturation in the rock and sand. This happens generally somewhere between the 6 to 12 month mark. Then another round of rebalancing occurs since the rock no longer can absorb the same amount of nutrient. This is usually when people encounter the "my tanks been good for 8 month then suddenly gha break for no reason". Once the tank reequalizes from this is when it generally becomes "mature"

What happened in your tank is - year 1 GFO took care of all phosphate export, so your system never had to try to achieve equilibrium naturally, esp for the P cycle. Then when you took it off and realized you need no3po4, you started dosing but it took awhile to raise bc ur rockwork and substrate never had to absorb any nutrient in year 1 either bc of the GFO. So it just started saturation process in year 2. During year 2, you also changed light, and cleaned sump, which removed a lot of the bacterial microfauna, since your tank hasn't reached maturity when you did that, it pushed back the maturation process too. 6 months ago, you added miracle mud which added more stuff for nutrient to be absorbed and prolonged the saturation process. What happening now looks like the saturation is finally ending and you are getting the final ugly phase.

If you want your tank to reach natural equilibrium, then only time and manual removal is the long term solution. Adding snails can help bc more biodiversity contributes to more stability once equilibrium is reached.

Adding commercial treatment products and GFO can solve your short term problems but will also prevent natural equilibrium from occurring, so as soon as you stop using them, your problem will come back

 

[balajeek15]

My 2 cents:

- Parameters are ok, but definitely at that phosphate level (relative to your nitrate level which isn't that high), you will more nuisance algae.

- I would recommend the following snails: Cerith, Trochus, Turbo for algae. I personally run a crabless tank as I find the snails are much more effective.

- I think reefroids are part of the problem. I find any time I used to feed reefroids, my phosphates would double instantly. Plus I'd get vermatid snails and would choke my clam.

- I think you can look into other gentler ways of exporting nitrates and phosphates - running a fuge with Chaeto OR an Algae scrubber

- For cyano, i'd use chemiclean treatment to knock it out once and then work on the other issues above, which are a long term solution.

Will be going to LFS to get the snails, how do you handle crabs killing the snails that falls upside down, get rid of crabs! still i don't know what the purpose of crabs are in the tank.

 

[balajeek15]

It looks to me like your tank is going thru the ugly phase again. If I had to guess, I'm estimating your "tank maturity age" is only somewhere between 6 months and 1 year and here's why:

Normally, in a newly cycled tank, with new rock and substrate, first 6 months as you feed and add nutrient, the various biological processes will start their competition until the different organisms reach equilibrium after a few ugly phases and blooms. During this time, a portion of the nutrient will also be locked in the new substrate until it reaches saturation in the rock and sand. This happens generally somewhere between the 6 to 12 month mark. Then another round of rebalancing occurs since the rock no longer can absorb the same amount of nutrient. This is usually when people encounter the "my tanks been good for 8 month then suddenly gha break for no reason". Once the tank reequalizes from this is when it generally becomes "mature"

What happened in your tank is - year 1 GFO took care of all phosphate export, so your system never had to try to achieve equilibrium naturally, esp for the P cycle. Then when you took it off and realized you need no3po4, you started dosing but it took awhile to raise bc ur rockwork and substrate never had to absorb any nutrient in year 1 either bc of the GFO. So it just started saturation process in year 2. During year 2, you also changed light, and cleaned sump, which removed a lot of the bacterial microfauna, since your tank hasn't reached maturity when you did that, it pushed back the maturation process too. 6 months ago, you added miracle mud which added more stuff for nutrient to be absorbed and prolonged the saturation process. What happening now looks like the saturation is finally ending and you are getting the final ugly phase.

If you want your tank to reach natural equilibrium, then only time and manual removal is the long term solution. Adding snails can help bc more biodiversity contributes to more stability once equilibrium is reached.

Adding commercial treatment products and GFO can solve your short term problems but will also prevent natural equilibrium from occurring, so as soon as you stop using them, your problem will come back

Thats a great write up, thanks for taking time, as you suggest before going to install chemicals, will try my best to continue the natural process. going to lfs today to get some snails to tacked the hairy alage, would Red sea ABCD a chemical additive too?

 

[balajeek15]

It looks to me like your tank is going thru the ugly phase again. If I had to guess, I'm estimating your "tank maturity age" is only somewhere between 6 months and 1 year and here's why:

Normally, in a newly cycled tank, with new rock and substrate, first 6 months as you feed and add nutrient, the various biological processes will start their competition until the different organisms reach equilibrium after a few ugly phases and blooms. During this time, a portion of the nutrient will also be locked in the new substrate until it reaches saturation in the rock and sand. This happens generally somewhere between the 6 to 12 month mark. Then another round of rebalancing occurs since the rock no longer can absorb the same amount of nutrient. This is usually when people encounter the "my tanks been good for 8 month then suddenly gha break for no reason". Once the tank reequalizes from this is when it generally becomes "mature"

What happened in your tank is - year 1 GFO took care of all phosphate export, so your system never had to try to achieve equilibrium naturally, esp for the P cycle. Then when you took it off and realized you need no3po4, you started dosing but it took awhile to raise bc ur rockwork and substrate never had to absorb any nutrient in year 1 either bc of the GFO. So it just started saturation process in year 2. During year 2, you also changed light, and cleaned sump, which removed a lot of the bacterial microfauna, since your tank hasn't reached maturity when you did that, it pushed back the maturation process too. 6 months ago, you added miracle mud which added more stuff for nutrient to be absorbed and prolonged the saturation process. What happening now looks like the saturation is finally ending and you are getting the final ugly phase.

If you want your tank to reach natural equilibrium, then only time and manual removal is the long term solution. Adding snails can help bc more biodiversity contributes to more stability once equilibrium is reached.

Adding commercial treatment products and GFO can solve your short term problems but will also prevent natural equilibrium from occurring, so as soon as you stop using them, your problem will come back

Also another question: everytime i vaccum the sand with slime, I do get 3-4 hand full of sand, will it be okay to clean with freshwater and put them back in the tank? I have many lbs in a bag lying in my garage for sometime now.

 

[Dkmoo]

Thats a great write up, thanks for taking time, as you suggest before going to install chemicals, will try my best to continue the natural process. going to lfs today to get some snails to tacked the hairy alage, would Red sea ABCD a chemical additive too?

Also another question: everytime i vaccum the sand with slime, I do get 3-4 hand full of sand, will it be okay to clean with freshwater and put them back in the tank? I have many lbs in a bag lying in my garage for sometime now.

Cool, np.

ABCD should be fine. Those are just trace elements that doesn't impact the nutrient cycle significantly. If you are dosing that, are you also checking the trace elements you are dosing? Ie, iron and potassium kits or ICP? If you are not, and are dosing based on calc consumption based on their instructions (like me) then I suggest dosing half the amounts, esp if you do water changes. These trace elements are naturally replenished to a degree if you feed a variety of food and with water change. The half dose is just a supplement to make sure it doesn't get too low and it help avoid overdosing if you are not testing those levels regularly you really don't know how much is in there. For these trace elements "too high" is usually a lot more problematic that "too low"

On washing sand - freshwater is ok if its the same fw you use to make saltwater. Ie, either rodi, or dechlor tap if yiu are one of the few lucky ones with clean tap and modern piping. The concern there is that if you use fw, you also will kill off the microfauna in the sand, so when you put it back , yiu are introducing dead organic material that ll temporarily increase your no3/po4 levels. But since your tank is going thru the ugly phase anyway, and if its only a few handful of sand on your 73g, it probably not gonna matter much. For the few pounds already in your garage, whatever live stuff in there is already dead, to recycle that, reefers typically boil and bleach them, then use a bleach remover to remove the bleach, the let the sand dry, before putting it back in - basically sterilizing the sand.

There are two alternatives to the above

1) wash with new saltwater. It is more wasteful since you have to make extra and can't refill your tank with the washing water. This is what I do. Benefit here is that you can wash off the detritus and algae, but you don't kill off the good microfauna on the sand so its still "live sand" when you put it back. Only do this for the live sand you vacuum out, not the dead sand in your garage.

2) don't put it back, just throw it away - new live sand isn't too expensive compared to everything else in the hobby - just by a 5 pound bag and "refill" your sand bed every few months. Benefit there is obviously less work, but also you are introducing a more variety of microfauna in your tank. Since you added the sand from your first batch, you are not sure which species of microfauna "made it" and which ones didn't. Different batches of live sand, even from the same brand, will vary a bit in the type of microfauna in there. But even if its the exact same types as your initial batch, you are still introducing new ones for the ones that didn't survive originally.

EDIT: addressed the pounds of dead sand in your garage.

 

[Dkmoo]

A few points on snails

Don't get too many at once - it may clean everything out but if your tank doesn't have enough natural algae regrowth, they may starve and die. Some die off is natural as the tank reaches the natural algae growth/algae eater balance. But if too many die at the same time it doesnt help the balancing process

I'd start with 10 and go from there. Maybe 2 turbo, 3 trochus, and 5 cerith. If they clean up too fast, feed them some algae sheets once a week to slow down the die off rate

For cyano my experience with snail is hit and miss. Since cyano is bacteria, and snail is primarily herbivore, i havent seem many of them specifically go after cyano. Oftentimes I see the snail trails on the cyano film im not sure if they are just walking over them and leaving the trail , or are actually eating them. A few times when I specifically observed them, wherever I see them actually eating cyano is also in areas that had either film or other types of algae and the cyano is dragged onto their mouths along with the real algae.

 

[Dkmoo]

Sry for the multiple posts - one final point on snails and other types of CUC - to see if you have enough - think of it like this:

In theory, if you added the "perfectly balanced" amount of CUC, that means that how much they consume is perfectly matching now much is currently growing, this logically means that you should see no change to the amount of algae already in your tank right? So if you see them disappearing without seeing new patches growing elsewhere, then by definition that means your algae consumption rate is outpacing regrowth rate, and eventually there will be die off and rebalance that occurs.

So when you are adding new snail in, don't look for results by asking yourself "is my algae clearing up?" and instead ask yourself "is my algae still growing/spreading more"

 

[Nick428]

This sounds familiar to me this took a lot of work i basically removed a ton of detritus from my sandbed and this algae and cyano disappeared pretty quickly.

I stirred the sand let it settle on the surface and siphoned into a filter sock

 

[Silent]

Also another question: everytime i vaccum the sand with slime, I do get 3-4 hand full of sand, will it be okay to clean with freshwater and put them back in the tank? I have many lbs in a bag lying in my garage for sometime now.

@brandon429 might have insight to this question.

 

[homer1475]

When I clean my sanbed I simply use a hose woth a si[hon into the sump with a large filter sock. I always get a filter sock full of sand. I dump it in a small bucket with about 50/50 bleach and tap water. Let it sit for a couple days, then rinse in tap. Fill bucket back up with tap water and throw in some prime. Let that sit for a couple days, then just lay out to fully dry for a week or so. When I get a bag full I dump it back into the tank. Been doing it that way for about 15 years or so.

I personally do not buy into the "live" sand gimmick. Here I'll charge you twice the price for a wet bag of sand that god knows how long has been bagged for(basically killing anything that was live), and has been sitting on a shelf even longer.

 

[balajeek15]

Cool, np.

ABCD should be fine. Those are just trace elements that doesn't impact the nutrient cycle significantly. If you are dosing that, are you also checking the trace elements you are dosing? Ie, iron and potassium kits or ICP? If you are not, and are dosing based on calc consumption based on their instructions (like me) then I suggest dosing half the amounts, esp if you do water changes. These trace elements are naturally replenished to a degree if you feed a variety of food and with water change. The half dose is just a supplement to make sure it doesn't get too low and it help avoid overdosing if you are not testing those levels regularly you really don't know how much is in there. For these trace elements "too high" is usually a lot more problematic that "too low"

On washing sand - freshwater is ok if its the same fw you use to make saltwater. Ie, either rodi, or dechlor tap if yiu are one of the few lucky ones with clean tap and modern piping. The concern there is that if you use fw, you also will kill off the microfauna in the sand, so when you put it back , yiu are introducing dead organic material that ll temporarily increase your no3/po4 levels. But since your tank is going thru the ugly phase anyway, and if its only a few handful of sand on your 73g, it probably not gonna matter much. For the few pounds already in your garage, whatever live stuff in there is already dead, to recycle that, reefers typically boil and bleach them, then use a bleach remover to remove the bleach, the let the sand dry, before putting it back in - basically sterilizing the sand.

There are two alternatives to the above

1) wash with new saltwater. It is more wasteful since you have to make extra and can't refill your tank with the washing water. This is what I do. Benefit here is that you can wash off the detritus and algae, but you don't kill off the good microfauna on the sand so its still "live sand" when you put it back. Only do this for the live sand you vacuum out, not the dead sand in your garage.

2) don't put it back, just throw it away - new live sand isn't too expensive compared to everything else in the hobby - just by a 5 pound bag and "refill" your sand bed every few months. Benefit there is obviously less work, but also you are introducing a more variety of microfauna in your tank. Since you added the sand from your first batch, you are not sure which species of microfauna "made it" and which ones didn't. Different batches of live sand, even from the same brand, will vary a bit in the type of microfauna in there. But even if its the exact same types as your initial batch, you are still introducing new ones for the ones that didn't survive originally.

EDIT: addressed the pounds of dead sand in your garage.

I'll just throw the sand as easier to buy one rather than going thru the cleaning process.

 

[balajeek15]

A few points on snails

Don't get too many at once - it may clean everything out but if your tank doesn't have enough natural algae regrowth, they may starve and die. Some die off is natural as the tank reaches the natural algae growth/algae eater balance. But if too many die at the same time it doesnt help the balancing process

I'd start with 10 and go from there. Maybe 2 turbo, 3 trochus, and 5 cerith. If they clean up too fast, feed them some algae sheets once a week to slow down the die off rate

For cyano my experience with snail is hit and miss. Since cyano is bacteria, and snail is primarily herbivore, i havent seem many of them specifically go after cyano. Oftentimes I see the snail trails on the cyano film im not sure if they are just walking over them and leaving the trail , or are actually eating them. A few times when I specifically observed them, wherever I see them actually eating cyano is also in areas that had either film or other types of algae and the cyano is dragged onto their mouths along with the real algae.

just returned from lfs and got chaeto, turbo, turchus they didn't have cerith

 

[homer1475]

Conch's also will eat cyano from the sandbed.

 

[balajeek15]

thanks all, as of now i added some snails and chaeto.
will keep stir the sand every other day little bit and hopefully my cyano and hairy alge goes away.