So I've been reading these forums for a while now, and posting shortly after I started and I see a lot of the common "I have Dinos!" and "I have GHA!" threads. In my head the culprit is usually boiled down to Nitrate balance. If you suck out too many Nitrates, you're going to risk Dinos. If you have an excess, you get a GHA/Cyano bloom.
This takes me to my current problem: I think I have both? In one corner, I've got some nasty Cyano blooming on the sand bed. In other places, I see Dinos (they are on the sand, go away at night and come back by the end of the day). How do you get into that predicament?
Here's my levels as of this morning:
Salinity: 1.026
NO3: 0ppm (ugh!)
PO4: .04
Ca: 410
Mg: 1340
Now, I did have a pretty icky GHA problem that popped up. I finally got some Red Ogo into my sump, and it ended up bottoming out my NO3. I slightly reduced the photo period in the sump and added a few snails to it (to clean that up). I also started dosing some small measure of NeoNitro to keep NO3 from zero as I was starting to see bleaching of my coraline (Ca/Mg were fine all this time). This NeoNitro looks to have been a tad too much and I've got an ugly Cyano patch forming and my Coraline is kinda covered in brown stuff.
I know my tank isn't "newbie" stage at this point (up and running for 6 months) and I know it's not at the "established" stage either. Is this typical to see this epic battle of bad things all in hopes of the good things somehow coming in at the last minute to save the day?
Here's the Cyano:
Here's some Dinos:
Here they are together!
This takes me to my current problem: I think I have both? In one corner, I've got some nasty Cyano blooming on the sand bed. In other places, I see Dinos (they are on the sand, go away at night and come back by the end of the day). How do you get into that predicament?
Here's my levels as of this morning:
Salinity: 1.026
NO3: 0ppm (ugh!)
PO4: .04
Ca: 410
Mg: 1340
Now, I did have a pretty icky GHA problem that popped up. I finally got some Red Ogo into my sump, and it ended up bottoming out my NO3. I slightly reduced the photo period in the sump and added a few snails to it (to clean that up). I also started dosing some small measure of NeoNitro to keep NO3 from zero as I was starting to see bleaching of my coraline (Ca/Mg were fine all this time). This NeoNitro looks to have been a tad too much and I've got an ugly Cyano patch forming and my Coraline is kinda covered in brown stuff.
I know my tank isn't "newbie" stage at this point (up and running for 6 months) and I know it's not at the "established" stage either. Is this typical to see this epic battle of bad things all in hopes of the good things somehow coming in at the last minute to save the day?
Here's the Cyano:
Here's some Dinos:
Here they are together!