Red Slime

[TheReefDude]

Hello fellow reefers! I wanted to talk a bit about Red Slime ( cyanobacteria ) that has become a huge pain in my butt as of lately. I have a 46 gallon bowfront. Not only is it an eye sore, but I'm fairly certain that its not a good thing to have in your tank. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm trying to be patient with it, and remove a little bit of it here and there when I can. I do a 20 gallon bi-weekly water changes but it just seems to keep coming back. It's taken over my sand bed, and now has made it's way onto my rock scape. Here's what's inside of the tank, along with feeding schedule, and lighting hours...So the tank is aprox. 6 months old, I've got 2 Zoa frags, a Bubble Coral, Green Star Polyps, Acans, Favia, and a single frag of a hard coral that I'm not too familiar with. I've also got 4 Emerald Crabs that do a pretty decent job with hair algae, 5-6 hermit crabs, as well as a clown fish, and a Dottyback. My lights cycle on at 08:30 a.m and start to dim out around 6:00 p.m eventually cutting off at 8:30pm (12 hour cycle). I feed the fish every other day (I feed them oyster feast). As for the corals, I was spot feeding them Coral Frenzy 3 times per week, and then I cut down to 2 times per week, eventually cutting down to 1 day per week. My buddy said it could be over feeding the corals or even the Coral Frenzy that has been causing the red slime outbreak. I recently switched up to Reef Roids after a bit of research and I'm impressed so far. Any suggestions on how to tackle this problem?

 

[Spare time]

Just use some chemi clean or ultralife. If you have close to 0 or 0 nitrate or high phosphates that could be the problem but in any case just manuall remove as much as you can and then do chemiclean or ultralife.