What do tweak during ugly phase - GHA outbreak

[mtealeaves]

Hey all. I'm trying to decide what to do, if anything on my tank thats going through the "ugly phase" and a big bloom of green hair algae. It's covering everything pretty much see attached pic. I have about 13 coral frags introduced in the past week or so plus a couple clowns and a damsel.

I introduced a cleanup crew two days ago - they are making some progress but some of the GHA is pretty large not sure if they are gonna take care of it. Ive heard that urchins will crush it?

I had a skimmer running but just turned off today since it seems the algae took my nitrates down from 10-15 to zero and phosphates are at .06. was planning on turning back on when algae was gone and nitrates back around 10? Or should I just leave running ?

I have scraped glass and vacuumed during WC. I have a challenge here in that in the process to manually remove but i end up doing a 20-25% WC. The salt mix is TMP so it keeps dripping my ALk. I was targeting 8 ALk but TMP is only 7 and I just checked and I'm at 6.9.. I can just keep adding reef fusion to get back to 8. Eventually I was gonna switch to red sea salt mix which has 8 alk I believe and then dose to meet coral usage with AFR.

Lighting is probably high. Kessil ap9x - avg intensity 150 PAR at the middle of the tank. 100 or so at sand level and like 250 at top. Duration 10 hours. 20% color, 70% violet, 10% red, 4% green. My jntent was to have lighting for mixed reef from the start, ultimately adding sps on the top rocks. Should I lower duration?


Thank you for any advice!

 

[tzabor10]

Lowering lights is a good start.
Take the CUC off the glass and place on the algae.
Buy a fingernail manicure kit from Amazon. Manually clip and scrape.

 

[Fish Fan]

I agree, your lighting is a bit hot, especially without any high-light demand corals. I think the light is surely feeding the GHA. I would even advise a two or three day "black out" where you don't light the tank at all. This will beat the algae back some, but won't hurt your corals at all.

Your skimmer may have dropped your nitrate, but I'd be willing to bet the growing GHA is taking it up like a sponge. Likely, the GHA is also taking up a lot of phosphate, but that's being leached back in from your rocks, which bind phosphate.

Definitely try scrapping the GHA off the rocks with a tooth brush and siphoning it out. Scrape your glass so the snails will want to work on the rocks.

An ALK of 7 isn't bad at all, and you can bring it up with a little extra AFR if needed, but keep in mind you don't have a high demand for ALK tank just yet, so just using the salt mix how it comes is likely just fine until you have a tank full of growing corals.

Good luck!

 

[p1u5h13r4m24]

Yes shorten your light schedule. Make sure to maintain nutrients, if you bottom out u will get Dino’s. Remove what you can by hand and just let those turbo snails do the rest. Just be patient these ugly stages can take 2 months

 

[mtealeaves]

Yes shorten your light schedule. Make sure to maintain nutrients, if you bottom out u will get Dino’s. Remove what you can by hand and just let those turbo snails do the rest. Just be patient these ugly stages can take 2 months

Thanks!

 

[mtealeaves]

I agree, your lighting is a bit hot, especially without any high-light demand corals. I think the light is surely feeding the GHA. I would even advise a two or three day "black out" where you don't light the tank at all. This will beat the algae back some, but won't hurt your corals at all.

Your skimmer may have dropped your nitrate, but I'd be willing to bet the growing GHA is taking it up like a sponge. Likely, the GHA is also taking up a lot of phosphate, but that's being leached back in from your rocks, which bind phosphate.

Definitely try scrapping the GHA off the rocks with a tooth brush and siphoning it out. Scrape your glass so the snails will want to work on the rocks.

An ALK of 7 isn't bad at all, and you can bring it up with a little extra AFR if needed, but keep in mind you don't have a high demand for ALK tank just yet, so just using the salt mix how it comes is likely just fine until you have a tank full of growing corals.

Good luck!

Thank you for the input!

 

[mtealeaves]

Thanks!

Just a follow-up to your response - what's a good way to keep nutrients up without feeding algae too much? Should I just feed the three fish in there a big more heavy? Get another fish or two? Thanks