Is this Lyngbya?

[ChuzUThisDay]

I've been having a heck of a time with some flavor of nuisance algae/cyano. Several months back, it would mat on my sand bed. I could clean it up, vacuum it away, then it would return within 48 hours. I thought removing the sand bed would help, but this stuff just grown on everything. I can get aggressive and clean it away with a razors and brushes, then it grows right back. I did a blackout for 72 hours and the same results. When it starts growing back, it does output bubbles. However, that does not last long and it soon looks like long stringy algae. Am I facing Lyngbya or is it something totally different? Here's some shots of it off gassing oxygen:

Where it was two days ago:

I used Chemi-Clean Sunday night and so far have had zero indication it is working. When I get home from work, I will be doing the recommended 20 percent water change.

What's the direction I need to go in?

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

It possibly lingbya yea.

Post up your parameters. N/p , alk if you have it. Are you dosing cal/alk?

A ph test in the am and pm will help too.

 

[ChuzUThisDay]

Should I test before the water change or after?

I have been dosing kalk, but I stopped about two weeks ago. I have noticed zero change since.

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

Should I test before the water change or after?

I have been dosing kalk, but I stopped about two weeks ago. I have noticed zero change since.

Before please. We need a snap shot of what's happening now.
Test you ph tonight or now for that matter , and do none first thing in the morning. There will probably be a difference there.

 

[Jose Mayo]

Lyngbya is a species of filamentous cyanobacteria, like all cyanobacteria, responds well to the macrolide antibiotic AZITROMYCIN, I was able to control an outbreak in my 500 liter tank with a single dose of 1 mg / liter, in total 500 mg. The usual pharmaceutical form is 500 mg / tablet, it is sold in packs of 2, 3 and 5 tablets. The tablet self-dissolves in the tank. It does not affect corals, fish, crustaceans or mollusks and, in this dose, has little effect on the biological filter (increases nitrite), which soon recovers. At this dose, in 4 to 5 days removes all cyanobacteria from the tank. It is necessary to remove GAC or equivalent and the glass of the skimmer and replace after 2 days without cyano.

 

[ChuzUThisDay]

So, life happens and I didn't get to do the planned water change or test parameters last night. I did check them this morning though with no lights on when I got the water samples. I know I'll get blasted for using an API test kit, but that's what I have. I can see that I need to leave kalk alone. I had started adding it to top off water due to Ca being in the low 300s and KH around 8. Weekly/bi-weekly water changes will be my go to for Ca/KH from now until I truly need it otherwise. Below are the readings:

ph - 8.3
P - <.25
N - 0
Ca - 720
KH - 12

I'm thinking today will be another scrubbing rocks and glass before performing the water change.

 

[brandon429]

that invader never beat us on our two huge peroxide threads, and we had plenty of submissions. An oversized UV sterilizer employed here, after you clean with an algaecide step which has been omitted so far will fix it for sure. Replace or clean your entire sandbed per the sand rinse thread so you aren't fueling it, blue up the lights vs heavy white, we've beaten I bet 20 Lyng tanks online got all good after pics too. There is a thread I posted on today about GHA, your step options are there clearly if you want to simply win and not wait. If you want to dose stuff and wait, that may work too


our force method is way easier on nanos

large tanks without that access usually do a water dose. you had mentioned scrubbing prior, so it sounds like there is access and we have a bit of an amplified way of fixing those issues when the demand arises.

 

[ChuzUThisDay]

that invader never beat us on our two huge peroxide threads, and we had plenty of submissions. An oversized UV sterilizer employed here, after you clean with an algaecide step which has been omitted so far will fix it for sure. Replace or clean your entire sandbed per the sand rinse thread so you aren't fueling it, blue up the lights vs heavy white, we've beaten I bet 20 Lyng tanks online got all good after pics too. There is a thread I posted on today about GHA, your step options are there clearly if you want to simply win and not wait. If you want to dose stuff and wait, that may work too


our force method is way easier on nanos

large tanks without that access usually do a water dose. you had mentioned scrubbing prior, so it sounds like there is access and we have a bit of an amplified way of fixing those issues when the demand arises.

No UV sterilizer here.
Algaecide step? What kind of algaecide?
Sandbed is gone and I'm bare bottom now; I removed it completely a while back.
It's not GHA, but I am trying to remove the Lyngbya the same way that one would remove GHA.
Being a 125, I do have room to pull some of the rock out, but I have coral on everything that's in there. I can try scrubbing a piece out of the tank and dipping it in a 5 gal bucket to keep it wet, but trying to get a piece of rock out without reaking havoc may be trying.

I assume that is what you're suggesting, pull a piece of rock out, rasp off the Lynbya, peroxide that area, then see if it comes back?

 

[brandon429]

yep and the reason we like test rocks is to know all characters before the upscale

its dental work type debriding

a steak knife is so neat for this, dig in and work that stuff out it shouldn't penetrate whatsoever if its a moneran (I didn't know that)

if its a plant, it w have some holdfast, and that's what you are visually inspecting and noting during the dental work outside the tank. so after you knife the whole test rock clean, and rinse it all off, its lyngbya (tbd) free due to our parrotfish behavior

then peroxide all over the cleaned areas...in between corals etc, targeted runs which will kill stragglers and if it is a moneran they'll be highly receptive to it and not come back. UV wont remove it for us, but that growth gets on the back wall, after a good scraping I know you do, via the water column and that's an intercept point

guess what amazon w likely have on sale black Friday

amazon return policies are nice 15% stocking fee. Buy the largest sterilizer you can afford, grossly oversized if you don't feel like playing around. this is only an ideal, easy to prescribe your expenditures heh

other people know pond owners not using one, so its a handy option to at least brainstorm if possible. You'd be surprised at the ability of peroxide to suppress its growback after you clean the whole tank + water change, we can hit that tank with a calculated dose which wont kill anything else.

even that can be modeled in a 5 gallon paint bucket before upscaling. the test rock is so nice as its noncommittal to anything across your whole tank, until the specifics of your invader, lighting, nutrient profile and other unknowns have been modeled.

Id prefer that invasion you have over most others I could envision, though it seems bad now. Perox can beat it for sure wielded and tested correctly.

I am convinced the sole cause of your issue is import, that's a requisite hitchhiker...meaning if we dosed fertilizer to my system that stuff nor dinos can never come about. what will come about is standard common red cyano, universally vectoring in, and some algae species that are associated with live rock.

from that type of etiology, we never do attack the known hitchhikers by starvation, we target them independent of nutrients in our big fix threads. since we've done so much work w peroxide you really don't have to model anything, next time you scrub just run the method around your good corals and you'll like the result. the growback will be fractional and related to a few variables we'll easily control in the next round.

 

[brandon429]

so many of these invasions are more than one species at once

that could be lingbya and GHA mixed, who knows.

check out seabass' work here in the middle of the page. shocking before n afters

https://www.nano-reef.com/forums/topic/268706-peroxide-saves-my-tank-with-pics-to-prove-it/?page=65

 

[ChuzUThisDay]

ok, I'll find a rock that's relatively easy to get out, take pics, get the stuff off and peroxide it, then get pictures of it afterwards.

Are we guessing that the nuisance will/will not grow back on it?

As for a black friday deal on a UV sterilizer, that would be great. If you see a deal on one, let me know please.

 

[brandon429]

I predict it will almost not grow back at all, things would have to be pretty bad with it in circulation to regrow from the disinfected spot. But, if some does grow back, then we're learning its holding fast a bit deeper and we can pre rasp better before we upscale.

You can tell in that peroxide thread we haven't been doing the pre scraping very long, 90% of those after pics are simply dumping peroxide across the totally invaded spot either in the drained aquarium, or externally.

the pre rasping was an amplification step discovered by watching parrotfish and hawksbill turtles on animal planet heh, thanks nature.

 

[Ranjib]

Ca 720 .. is very high.

 

[ChuzUThisDay]

Ca 720 .. is very high.

yes it is. i was quite surprised to see it this high.

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

So, life happens and I didn't get to do the planned water change or test parameters last night. I did check them this morning though with no lights on when I got the water samples. I know I'll get blasted for using an API test kit, but that's what I have. I can see that I need to leave kalk alone. I had started adding it to top off water due to Ca being in the low 300s and KH around 8. Weekly/bi-weekly water changes will be my go to for Ca/KH from now until I truly need it otherwise. Below are the readings:

ph - 8.3
P - <.25
N - 0
Ca - 720
KH - 12

I'm thinking today will be another scrubbing rocks and glass before performing the water change.

What time did you test the ph?

Did you do a second test on the cal to confirm?

Your not currently dosing correct?

What are you using for the no3 test.
After you scrub , you may want to feed the fish a bit more.
Some bacteria and a few others (Dino's cyano a Chrystos) deplete and then thrive in low nitrate systems. So manual removal ,(UV scrub , wc , canister etc) is the first stage. Reduces it numbers, reduces its over consumption and over competiton.
Feeding the benifial bacterias and mirofauna is a next step. (you make have read on no3 dosing for dinos.)
This fixes the systemic prob.

Algecides and antibiotics kinda work to, but do not discriminate much. I prefer to preserve macroflora and fauna to keep the competition up. I also like a bottle of dr tims Or bio Spira.

Me, being a simple man, prefer to just use the tools I have. Tooth brush , fish food and I own a canister filter. (Some inexpensive ones have UV) and I always have peroxide.

 

[ChuzUThisDay]

So, I wanted to experiment a little to see what would happen based upon suggestions I've received.

I have two pieces of rubble that are approx 2.5" x 1" give or take a little. I'll refer to them as rock 1 and rock 2.

I first tried scrubbing both rocks with a stiff brush and rinsing only (they looked good afterwards). 1 day later, they both had significant growth on them:

After seeing how fast the growth was coming back, I wanted to try something else. I scrubbed rock 1 again with the brush and for rock 2 I used my Dremel and took off the top layer of the rock:

I then took both rocks and covered them in cheap dollar store peroxide for approximately 60 seconds. Rock 1 I submerged totally. Rock 2, I used a syringe to avoid the zoas as much as possible:

After 48 hours, this is what I'm seeing:

I'm not seeing any growth on either rock 1 or 2 at this point (48 hours after peroxide). I thought that the brushing may not get enough of the ugly off, but it appears to have worked as well as the Dremel did. If peroxide is truly keeping this from growing back, what is my next step?

Please tell me it's not removing my rock from the tank and scrubbing it off then squirting it with peroxide!!!

Thanks for all the input thus far!
Richard

 

[saltyfilmfolks]

You may want to use a canister filter or reactor with floss only and scrub the tank to remove the bio mass from the system and then dose peroxide.

 

[djwasimani]

I've been having a heck of a time with some flavor of nuisance algae/cyano. Several months back, it would mat on my sand bed. I could clean it up, vacuum it away, then it would return within 48 hours. I thought removing the sand bed would help, but this stuff just grown on everything. I can get aggressive and clean it away with a razors and brushes, then it grows right back. I did a blackout for 72 hours and the same results. When it starts growing back, it does output bubbles. However, that does not last long and it soon looks like long stringy algae. Am I facing Lyngbya or is it something totally different? Here's some shots of it off gassing oxygen:

Where it was two days ago:

I used Chemi-Clean Sunday night and so far have had zero indication it is working. When I get home from work, I will be doing the recommended 20 percent water change.

What's the direction I need to go in?

Sometimes chemiclean takes a little time to start working. I used chemiclean on my tank it start to work after 48 hrs

 

[ChuzUThisDay]

You may want to use a canister filter or reactor with floss only and scrub the tank to remove the bio mass from the system and then dose peroxide.

Just so that my slow mind understands your suggestion...

I need to scrub as much off everything in the tank as I can.
While scrubbing, try to suck it up and put the other end of the hose into my filter sock with some extra floss.
Change and empty that sock when I'm finished.
Place some floss in the new sock (instead of a canister/reactor as I don't have either?) to try and catch as much as I can.
Then dose peroxide.

How long after scrubbing and catching it do I wait to dose peroxide?
How do I dose peroxide into my tank? Will it hard any inverts/coral/fish?

Thanks @saltyfilmfolks and @brandon429

 

[ChuzUThisDay]

Sometimes chemiclean takes a little time to start working. I used chemiclean on my tank it start to work after 48 hrs

I ran a dose of chemiclean several weeks back. I actually left it in the tank for 7 days before doing the water change. I did notice that the glass stayed clean for a longer time afterwards, but as far as this stuff dying off or even slowing down.... nope.

Thanks for the recommendation though!