Newbie reefer here. Recently, I've been battling a brown-ish growth in my sand bed. I suspect it's cyano due to the presence of small tendrils, but its brown so could it be diatoms?
Its a 75G, currently stocked with 2 ocellaris clowns, 1 royal gramma, 1 firefish, 1 starry blenny, and 1 pajama cardinalfish. I feed 1/4 of a hikari mysis shrimp cube twice daily. Lights are on for 9 hours a day. Powerhead is a jebao mcp-120. Was running at 50% on the turbulence mode but was planning on bumping it up to around 75%. I had been using the API reef master test kits which were giving me 0-5 nitrates and 0-0.25 phosphates but picked up a hanna checker for phosphates (the ULR one) and two days ago was 0.5, yesterday was 0.3, today was 0.7ppm. Tank is around 7 months old.
Images are from today, did a water change yesterday and cleaned most of the sand bed in the process. Almost all of these patches returned overnight.
Thanks in advance for the assistance! I am very much new to reef-keeping and fish-keeping so any and all advice would be much appreciated!
Its a 75G, currently stocked with 2 ocellaris clowns, 1 royal gramma, 1 firefish, 1 starry blenny, and 1 pajama cardinalfish. I feed 1/4 of a hikari mysis shrimp cube twice daily. Lights are on for 9 hours a day. Powerhead is a jebao mcp-120. Was running at 50% on the turbulence mode but was planning on bumping it up to around 75%. I had been using the API reef master test kits which were giving me 0-5 nitrates and 0-0.25 phosphates but picked up a hanna checker for phosphates (the ULR one) and two days ago was 0.5, yesterday was 0.3, today was 0.7ppm. Tank is around 7 months old.
Images are from today, did a water change yesterday and cleaned most of the sand bed in the process. Almost all of these patches returned overnight.
Thanks in advance for the assistance! I am very much new to reef-keeping and fish-keeping so any and all advice would be much appreciated!