Tank is around 1.5mo old, I had some brown splotches start to appear in the sand maybe 2 weeks into my cycle. These never went away (although they have come down a bit).
I picked up a crappy handheld microscope for ID, but these dont seem to match anything I can find on this forum/youtube. This was a sample I took from sucking some up and letting them settle in a small vial. They re-constituted into some brown on the sand that came along for the ride, and this sample is from a brown cloud that formed above the sand. They swim quickly in a corkscrew motion and dont circle around an anchor point like I have read about with dinos. The microscope is supposedly up to 250x. At 100x I can barely seem them and at 250x they are still tiny, much smaller than other 100x pictures I have seen. I dont entirely trust this microscopes magnification specs though.
Nitrates: 17.5 (salifert)
PO4: 0 as far as I can tell (Salifert)
Also, prepare for the worst microscope video you have ever seen(sorry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsDtgn3QvQw
I picked up a crappy handheld microscope for ID, but these dont seem to match anything I can find on this forum/youtube. This was a sample I took from sucking some up and letting them settle in a small vial. They re-constituted into some brown on the sand that came along for the ride, and this sample is from a brown cloud that formed above the sand. They swim quickly in a corkscrew motion and dont circle around an anchor point like I have read about with dinos. The microscope is supposedly up to 250x. At 100x I can barely seem them and at 250x they are still tiny, much smaller than other 100x pictures I have seen. I dont entirely trust this microscopes magnification specs though.
Nitrates: 17.5 (salifert)
PO4: 0 as far as I can tell (Salifert)
Also, prepare for the worst microscope video you have ever seen(sorry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsDtgn3QvQw