excess dirty stage growth

[Osimno]

Yesterday during the day I had a sudden extreme growth of the (diatom???) dirty stage brown growth in all 4 sides of my glass. normally I'd get little bits here and there but it was completely covered top to bottom. as I scraped it all off it was littering my tank with rolls of it and my corals didn't seem very happy about it.

The sand also did get some of the brown coloured growth on the top too with went away with a quick vac.

Again today in about a 6 hour period, my glass is covered and I will have to clean / do a small water change again tomorrow.

Would this excess growth be an indication of something wrong with my parameters or could it even be the good bacteria is loosing the fight to the bad bacteria (stuff that grows the dirty stage) as it was really sudden.

Thanks

 

[ahiggins]

Not necessarily. Is it dusty or slimey? Slimey is usually bad-ish bacteria whereas dusty is normal. Even a layer of brown is usually normal as long as it’s not chunky/slimey.
do you have anything in the tank coral wise? If not, keep the lights off-it’ll cut down on the growth Significantly. If you want to list out your nitrates and phosphates we can double check that everything’s good.

 

[Osimno]

Running my hand along the glass the brown growth is a bit slimey, it scrapes off in big rolls, not sure how to explain it, sort of like when you scoop icecream and it rolls into itself. I do have coral but I could possibly turn the light intensity down as I have done a blackout on the tank before and they all recovered fine. I can check my nitrates tomorrow possibly along with phosphates. I've been having to borrow a family members phosphate checker every so often, but will be getting my own very shorty so I'll be able to keep on top of testing for more things more regularly. I do small water changes about every 3-4 days depending on what my nitrate levels are doing because of my tank being on the smaller side

 

[ahiggins]

That’s not sounding like the bad stuff to me, at least when I had it-it wouldn’t come off solid

 

[jgirardnrg]

What do you have for a clean up crew? My Trochus snails keep my glass pretty clean.

 

[Osimno]

That’s not sounding like the bad stuff to me, at least when I had it-it wouldn’t come off solid

I'm pretty sure it's still just the dirty stage growth, I was just so surprised to see so much of it grow in so little time

 

[Osimno]

What do you have for a clean up crew? My Trochus snails keep my glass pretty clean.

I have a hermit that honestly doesn't do anything in terms of getting rid of algae on my rocks. two zombi snails which do keep my sand clean of food and fish poop. and I just in the last few days got a turbo snail to test out how much it would eat. I think I'll get another one or two turbos