Help with ID and treatment!

[Swav8tor]

Have been quickly growing this algae, at first I thought Dino’s but know I’m not sure, one thought is Lyngbya Cyano. The tank is 2 months old.

Tank is IM 20
Upgraded IM pump (500gph)
Aqamai KPS (running 50%)
2 Prime HD
Ghost skimmer
Refugium in 2nd chamber Chaeto +pods
2 intank baskets running floss and matrix, ChemiPure elite
Running RFG’s on output

Small 6 line
Small Pygmy angel

Couple of Cerths and blue leg hermits
The rest are corals

NH3-0
NO2-0
NO3-0
PO4-.01
CA-430
dKH-8.4
MG-1300 but upped to 1600 recently
Salinity-1.024
PH-8.3

Pics are a couple weeks old, will update when I get home from trip. I have been dosing nitrate via stump remover but not religiously. In the pics you can see bubbles in the algae but they are not there now.

 

[brandon429]

I have about a hundred before and after pictures of tanks like that being fixed wanna see them/two threads

You have a long way option to fix
or
You have a by Saturday option. It’s a time-to-fix choice, nutrient controlling works and just cleaning your tank up with an algae kill step works too, faster.


You need to simply take apart the reef and clean it the right way, don’t alter water params around it, set water params to what corals want and become the grazer for the nano.




For example

Reef Miser/ nano-reef.com w perm:

Before

After

And the rest went away within the week. Since you have a sensitive lysmata shrimp we would remove him and hold him somewhere for the hour cleanup job, then reacclimate.

Another diagnostic tool for your new reef is this: if you reached in and grabbed sand and dropped it, would a massive cloud result?


Simply killing the growth off the rock doesn’t make you change course on nitrate dosing or P dosing, can continue. It’s merely a choice to have the invader gone by Saturday or not, that simple. You can continue all current directions for the tank after it has no invader, just as you can opt to keep the invader, and do some more water adjustments. I like the by Saturday option because it allows us to compile libraries of quick ref before and after pics. Nutrient dosing cures take weeks and have a 50% win rate.

 

[Swav8tor]

I have about a hundred before and after pictures of tanks like that being fixed wanna see them/two threads

You have a long way option to fix
or
You have a by Saturday option. It’s a time-to-fix choice, nutrient controlling works and just cleaning your tank up with an algae kill step works too, faster.


You need to simply take apart the reef and clean it the right way, don’t alter water params around it, set water params to what corals want and become the grazer for the nano.




For example

Reef Miser/ nano-reef.com w perm:

Before

After

And the rest went away within the week. Since you have a sensitive lysmata shrimp we would remove him and hold him somewhere for the hour cleanup job, then reacclimate.

Another diagnostic tool for your new reef is this: if you reached in and grabbed sand and dropped it, would a massive cloud result?


Simply killing the growth off the rock doesn’t make you change course on nitrate dosing or P dosing, can continue. It’s merely a choice to have the invader gone by Saturday or not, that simple. You can continue all current directions for the tank after it has no invader, just as you can opt to keep the invader, and do some more water adjustments. I like the by Saturday option because it allows us to compile libraries of quick ref before and after pics. Nutrient dosing cures take weeks and have a 50% win rate.

Is the by Saturday route a Fluconazole treatment?

 

[brandon429]

It's never that fast ha! No it's truly tank surgery/takedown cleaning. One thread is the sand rinse showing how we take apart reefs and reassemble them without losing stuff, for pages

Being detritus free stops successive invaders, fluc won't

The algae kill step is when your rocks are outside the tank- you remove the growths with a knife tip, precision work

Put peroxide on the cleaned spots, rinse off, reassemble a perfect reef tonite/shines by tomorrow. In the sand rinse thread I purposefully invaded my own twelve year nano, then fixed it overnite, to participate. Five times.

 

[Swav8tor]

It's never that fast ha! No it's truly tank surgery/takedown cleaning. One thread is the sand rinse showing how we take apart reefs and reassemble them without losing stuff, for pages

Being detritus free stops successive invaders, fluc won't

The algae kill step is when your rocks are outside the tank- you remove the growths with a knife tip, precision work

Put peroxide on the cleaned spots, rinse off, reassemble a perfect reef tonite/shines by tomorrow. In the sand rinse thread I purposefully invaded my own twelve year nano, then fixed it overnite, to participate. Five times.

Won’t that cause a cycle?

 

[brandon429]

No and we pride ourselves on being able to repeat it for pages check out the work from page twelve on:

 

[brandon429]

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/the-official-sand-rinse-thread-aka-one-against-many.230281/page-12

 

[brandon429]

We could plan a custom job here in this thread easily. Then link it there if you'd like to force clean the tank. It is a big move to do, with a careful order of ops literally it's reef surgery, and the pages show how well we command it in nanos.

 

[Swav8tor]

Here is the tank with some all white shots as well.

The next ones are through a microscope

Lots of crawling things in there, some pods I’m assuming but there were worm type as well.

 

[Swav8tor]

Why would only half of this rock be covered?

 

[Swav8tor]

Here are some links to uploaded YouTube vids.

 

[PirateDan]

I’m new but im surprised nobody has brought up the fact that the tank is only 2 months old with so much in it I didn’t see algae until around the 4th month then it slowly went away

 

[brandon429]

It’s a doable job / pretty good amnt of work since we are starting action at full coverage vs the first growth but the procedure is basically to take apart and clean as we did in the example thread so your sandbed has no clouding.

To ramp up to that, before you do surgery, we need to spot test an area

Is there a removable section of rock just one piece you can take out from the tank, use a knife to debride the algae off the rock, apply peroxide to the clean spot and put back after rinsing

Before the big job we always seek to model the kill step on a small piece

Is that possible for you to do as we did here in the peroxide thread
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/reef2reef-pest-algae-challenge-thread-hydrogen-peroxide.187042/

Between that thread and the sand rinse thread your tank fix has been shown twenty times in similar tanks. Helpful to see before you begin, we need to test rock some area of your rocks before we begin. Only the areas on the rock need to be tested, the stuff on the walls will be scraped clean during the takeapart cleaning and in the future scraped clean and siphoned out before they take over the wall

 

[dwest]

Here is the tank with some all white shots as well.

The next ones are through a microscope

Lots of crawling things in there, some pods I’m assuming but there were worm type as well.

I don’t see dinos in the microscope shots.

 

[Turbo's Aquatics]

The tank is 2 months old.

I’m new but im surprised nobody has brought up the fact that the tank is only 2 months old

You beat me to it!

Here's a pic from one of my favorite articles on reefkeeping, applicable to new hobbyists and old as well:

The nitrogen cycle is only the startup of a SW tank cycle. The next 6-12 months is a maturing phase, and it's typically in this time frame where algae outbreaks occur and things can sort of roller-coaster, and if you stock the tank up too quickly, you might see corals randomly dying & fish getting sick, etc...hobbyists can very easily fall into the trap of chasing problems = making more problems => giving up and selling everything off.

Long-term stability and balance are the keys, and you just can't shortcut the process significantly. That's always the #1 thing to keep in mind!

 

[Swav8tor]

So fellow reefers. Update on tank. Almost all that nasty algae is gone. What did I do, not sure but have some ideas. One is it’s still a new tank and they all go through the uglies. Two, I used Kent Marine Tech M to raise mag levels to about 1600.