I am currently battling diatoms in my new 65G. The bloom has gotten ridiculously bad in the beginning but now is starting to come back less aggressively.
Today I cleaned my back wall. It was completely covered in hair algae and a very intense dusting of diatoms (confirmed under microscope). I was shocked at how thick the mats were when I scraped it off but eventually got 95% of it off.
I then had this thought. Diatoms feed off silicates and the advice for the new tank is to let it run its course until the silicates are consumed. However, if diatoms die off, don’t the silicates return back to the water assuming no water changes? Then the diatoms should return. Must be missing something here.
Anyway, it was super satisfying to clean the back wall and remove all this brown green gunk. If by doing manual removal also removes available silicates used by living diatoms, well atleast I’m going in the right direction.
Today I cleaned my back wall. It was completely covered in hair algae and a very intense dusting of diatoms (confirmed under microscope). I was shocked at how thick the mats were when I scraped it off but eventually got 95% of it off.
I then had this thought. Diatoms feed off silicates and the advice for the new tank is to let it run its course until the silicates are consumed. However, if diatoms die off, don’t the silicates return back to the water assuming no water changes? Then the diatoms should return. Must be missing something here.
Anyway, it was super satisfying to clean the back wall and remove all this brown green gunk. If by doing manual removal also removes available silicates used by living diatoms, well atleast I’m going in the right direction.