Need help

[aqua.reefer]

I’ve been fighting cyanobacteria for the last month and a half. I have done two treatments of chemi-clean, a treatment of slime out and have done weekly water chAnges.

I have tested my water weekly here are the last results.

Ph - 8.1
ammo - 0
nitrite 0
nitrate - 15
Ca - 425
Mg - 1421
kh 9.1
phos .1
sal 1.25

What else can I do?

 

[blaxsun]

If you're running red on any of your lights, turn that channel down to zero.

 

[dennislagoon]

How sure are you that it’s cyano? Do you have any pictures under white light or better yet.. anything from under a microscope?

 

[aqua.reefer]

If you're running red on any of your lights, turn that channel down to zero.

I had my reds 3-8% throughout the day. I’ll put it to 0 see if that helps.

 

[aqua.reefer]

How sure are you that it’s cyano? Do you have any pictures under white light or better yet.. anything from under a microscope?

I brought a sample to my LFS and was told it was cyano.

 

[dennislagoon]

The reason I asked is because chemiclean didn’t seem to work, and when used correctly it usually has quite a high succes rate.

What color does the slime look like? It makes me wonder if you’re not facing dinos.

 

[aqua.reefer]

The reason I asked is because chemiclean didn’t seem to work, and when used correctly it usually has quite a high succes rate.

What color does the slime look like? It makes me wonder if you’re not facing dinos.

this is what it looks like now after the treatment above but it is normally red and slimey.

 

[dennislagoon]

You sure you dosed the correct amount? And how long did you run the chemiclean threatment? You can try to run it to 72 hours. Most of the time you'll see significant improvement at 48 hours but some strands take an extra day.

Something else is going on as well. Could be dinos, chrysophytes or just diatoms. Hard to tell without a microscope and all of them need different ways to threat. A cheap microscope from Amazon could already help out a ton.

However, there could also be an easier way out if above doesn't work for you. Since cyano, diatoms and dinos are all photosynthetic and you only have a couple of corals, you could temporarily house your corals at a friend with a tank, your LFS or by setting up a small tank yourself. Then turn your lights off for a while and avoid bright- or direct sunlight, until things disappear on their own. Meanwhile I would add beneficial bacteria like MicroBacter 7.

Eventually it's still good to find the root cause if possible. Wether it would have been a nutrient unbalance, a lack of flow, a mini recycle, silicates in your RO or improper light settings. Just so when you turn on the lights, you're not heading to the same direction again.