Some help need it to correctly ID ! Dino or Diatoms or else?

[Rodrigo Segnini]

To start, my small 10 gallons Nano have been running for at least 1year, used to be a quarantine tank that evolved to just another tank!
This tank have been running with live rock, and HOB filter for the first 6 months! Nothing fancy as mention before, was just a quarantine tank running filter cartridge on the HOB, illuminated by a Current Orbit pro light , a nano Tunze powerhead and hosting a pair of Clownfishes with CUC. Feeding just enough to keep nutrients in check by just doing 50% water changes once or twice a month depending on how much I’ve been feeding while quarantine other corlas before transfer to my display!
To make the history short my display started to get crowded and several corals that supposed to be passing by became permanent residents and became more a propagation tank.
4 months ago I had the brilliant idea of adding a sand bed to it and a little watchman goby.
Up till then everything was going good! 2 months ago upggrade the light for a prime HD running a BRS/Saxby hybrid custom preset peaking at 60%, 10 inch hight, an MP10 running RC at maximum 30% and upgraded the HOB with an Tidal running matrix and Chemyblue!
Now Is full packed with corlas and nutrients started to climb up. I’m not dosing in this tank so I’m doing by monthly 30% water changes to replenish elements and controlling nutrients!
Last week I spotted some brown kind of algae growing on my rock top and frag rack! So I scrubbed rocks deep clean tank and did 2 40% water changes within a week.
My nitrates were 12 and my phosphates around 0.04 Alk was low at 7, calcium and magnesium were kind of hight (or were they supposed to be based on RS Coral pro salt parameters) 470 and 1360 respectively. Adjusted salt Alk assuming was precipitating because the heat season and raised slowly the Alk to 7.8. After this tank parameters were spot on Alk raised to 7.8. Nitrates at 6 and phosphates at 0.02!
3 day later this brown algae came back with a boom!! Literally I came back home to a brown cover tank!
Panicked and did some self test of identification just to be more lost !

can please help me to ID this ? I thought Dino but lining towards Diatoms...

Sorry for the long writing but I’m trying to give some context step by step of changes to help cypher the culprit of the problem!

 

[Ron Reefman]

Bump

I'm no algae expert, but I think that's dinos. But I'm far from 100% sure.

Hopefully somebody else will jump in and help out!

 

[Rodrigo Segnini]

Bump

I'm no algae expert, but I think that's dinos. But I'm far from 100% sure.

Hopefully somebody else will jump in and help out!

Initially Dino was my first thought but never bubble up and under microscope those strings made me believe some kind of Cyano or Diatoms? Hope someone here with better knowledge on algae identification will enlighten us!

 

[Rodrigo Segnini]

Just wanted to add some aspects of this nuisance:

1. Does not bubble.
2. Does not disappear at night.
3. Does not comes out easy (like other Cyanos I’ve deal with) need to be scrubbed from rocks and frags, can’t be blown!
4. No fish or any other invertebrates seem to munch on it.

I just cleaned and scrubbed all the tank, rocks glass , frag rack and coral frags (they are bot so happy now) with this another 20% water change.

Im trying to approached as if were cyano and tomorrow morning gonna administrate some Red Cyano RX from Aquatic Vet.

As writing in the direction seems to deplete Oxigen and lower PH to reason why is advised to treat early morning when PH start to rise up and used in conjunction with an PH buffer.

I’m not gonna use any PH buffer but I’m adding a airstone and pointed one of the power heads to the surface to increase oxigen exchange.

let’s hope is Cyano as several people advise and not Dinos because the recommend risen nutrients and stop water changes
I’ll keep posting this Journey!

 

[Rodrigo Segnini]

BUMP
Any algae connoisseur that can positive ID this ???
maybe @taricha I've seen alaways good advised from your part.

 

[Rodrigo Segnini]

Last Update, as today 48 hours have passed since I dose Red Cyano RX. Sadly the nuisance algae or bacteria started to grow back again. I Could not see any reduction apart from the deep cleaning I performed. I deliberately left 2 spots dirty to check progress as control sample I’ll keep dosing Vibrant and Microbacter7 weekly alternating.
Still confused by this and want help will be gladly received !

 

[SMSREEF]

Let me preface this with: I am not a microbiologist.

Does not look like Dino’s to me.
Does not look like cyano to me either.
My guess is diatoms, but snails should be eating them...

Here is a good article that has helped me ID things in my tank.

Hunting With A Microscope

Diatoms and blue-green algae are only two of many groups of organisms that can be studied using a microscope.

reefs.com

 

[taricha]

It's definitely a diatom.
Closest match to my eye is pseudo-nitzschia
But I want to be careful with saying that's what it is. Because that is like the only widespread diatom I know of that's toxic, and it's very possible you have something similar that is harmless.
So don't do anything aggressive, just export as much as you can, and watch for signs of livestock stress etc.

 

[Rodrigo Segnini]

It's definitely a diatom.
Closest match to my eye is pseudo-nitzschia
But I want to be careful with saying that's what it is. Because that is like the only widespread diatom I know of that's toxic, and it's very possible you have something similar that is harmless.
So don't do anything aggressive, just export as much as you can, and watch for signs of livestock stress etc.

Thank you, so much for your input!
For some reason my snails kind of avoid them, maybe your theory of being toxic makes sense!
I’ll try to export as much as possible and waited out!!
I’ll keep posting the progress

 

[3sxp]

Hi Rodrigo. I know this is an old thread but I'm wondering how this turned out for you?

I have this exact thing going on - pennate diatom with this zigzag formation pattern - and the growth is really explosive. I'm manually removing every 4-5 days and it coats the tank. What did you wind up doing?

I think it may be a nitzschia but not pseudo-nitzschia... the zigzag form is distinctive.

I am also dosing microbacter7...

 

[taricha]

I have this exact thing going on - pennate diatom with this zigzag formation pattern - and the growth is really explosive. I'm manually removing every 4-5 days and it coats the tank. What did you wind up doing?

Do you have herbivores (snails etc) and do they eat this stuff or noticeably avoid it?

 

[3sxp]

Do you have herbivores (snails etc) and do they eat this stuff or noticeably avoid it?

I just last week got a CUC pack from reefcleaners upping my snails from ~5 to over 60 (though 30 tiny dwarf ceriths) and they are making headway. There was so much of it before that it was hard to tell if they were making a dent. I can see it being more controlled now on the rocks and sand. So they seem to eat it. It's just extremely fast-growing. Picked up an urchin over the weekend who is going to town now too and noticeably clearing it.

 

[taricha]

I just last week got a CUC pack from reefcleaners upping my snails from ~5 to over 60 (though 30 tiny dwarf ceriths) and they are making headway. There was so much of it before that it was hard to tell if they were making a dent. I can see it being more controlled now on the rocks and sand. So they seem to eat it. It's just extremely fast-growing. Picked up an urchin over the weekend who is going to town now too and noticeably clearing it.

This is excellent news, and to my mind is the most important factor when thinking about what to do. The fact that your herbivores are actively grazing it down tells us that it's non-toxic, and that there are herbivores that will eat it and can reproduce and scale up to the size of the food source.
But also just vacuum it out. Manual removal is removing the organism, and more importantly all of the stuff that it used to grow. It's an efficient way to export what is driving this aggressive growth.

 

[3sxp]

This is excellent news, and to my mind is the most important factor when thinking about what to do. The fact that your herbivores are actively grazing it down tells us that it's non-toxic, and that there are herbivores that will eat it and can reproduce and scale up to the size of the food source.
But also just vacuum it out. Manual removal is removing the organism, and more importantly all of the stuff that it used to grow. It's an efficient way to export what is driving this aggressive growth.

Thank you! And yes, if my problem is now reduced to cleaning the glass once a week, that's a sizeable improvement. I was relieved to identify that it seems to be some kind of diatom -- which means to some extent I should leave it alone, I think, because it's one of the more innocuous uglies? Importantly, before I added the additional CUC I was having to manually pull algae off the coral -- the CUC seems to 'prioritize' keeping the corals clean, which is great.

I do think that I have a flow problem. A lot of detritus settles on the sand and rock, visible when I stir the water. However, the tank is pretty small (30g, 25 with rock/sand) and the animals pretty low-flow animals (determining what is "low" and "medium" and "high" flow is one of my big remaining confusion points) -- zoas, chalice, leather. I don't have a powerhead in the main display, though, and most people who run this tank seem to. I think that running one would probably clear more of the detritus, leaving the algae less to work with.

So the next step I was considering was either or both of adding some live rock (thinking bommiereef.com) or adding a wavemaker -- Nero 3 or MP10. But altogether this is probably dropping $500 into the tank so I'm weighing options...

 

[taricha]

I was relieved to identify that it seems to be some kind of diatom -- which means to some extent I should leave it alone, I think, because it's one of the more innocuous uglies?

The fact that herbivores are active in eating it is confirmation that this is nontoxic stuff. (I haven't seen toxic diatoms in the hobby, they are rare - but not impossible).

"Leave it alone" is ok, but manual removal of anything brown enough to bother you typically gets to good outcomes faster.