What's The Deal With This Rock?

[jeffopentax]

Is that freshwater substrate? You need to be careful with stuff like that as saltwater will corrode the rocks and will leach out heavy metals and other stuff into the water. It will cause cyano blooms as well as other issues long term. If it is you should swap it out for saltwater substrate.

Finally found the rest of the substrate used in the 30g. According to the package, it should be ok.

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[jeffopentax]

Has anyone used ultralife red slime remover and noticed a decrease in gha? No idea what's in that stuff, but maybe it has a slight beneficial side effect?


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[kapelan]

Any system should be balanced.
Example snake poison can kill and can cure a human depends of dosage.
The same rule is applicably to any live system.
Cyano is part of our life.
It is growing up because it has something to eat.
Cianobacteria desperately needs:
- light
- phosphates
- nitrates
How to reduce cyano? - remove source of life: light, phosphate or nitrates. Removing any of these components will kill cyano.
How to do it?
1. if no any corals, easiest way to turn of the light for 1 week, water will be clear as a baby tear
2. use something that will eat nitrates or phosphates faster than cyano: unfortunately cyano is the best of eating them, so this option can help, but cannot kill it.
3. Provide less nitrates/phosphates to the system - means do not feed the fish. Fish can easely survive for 1 week without any food. Even more fish will eat this algae.
4. Put into the system something that will eat cyano, so we will have a cycle: nitrates are eaten by cyano<-cyano eaten by "clean up crew" <- clean up crew (copepods) will be eaten by fish. This is ideally balanced system: too much cyano promote clean up crew, clean up crew will die if nothing to eat.
5. Provide "right light". Scientists spends tons of time/money developing bulbs that provide "right spectrum". In a short: cyano prefer white to red spectrum. Corals can use deep blue spectrum. Knowing this fact and providing blue will give more energy to corals than to algae. So corals would be stronger and will kill a concurrent.
Also duration of light is important: corals has more chance to survive from "short day light", all types of algae needs long day. So providing "high power" light for a short time will give a favor to corals but not to algae.

 

[Salty Cracker]

"gfo"

 

[Shooter000]

"gfo"

What's GFO?, snicker snicker

 

[jeffopentax]

Can algae use blue light? I recently changed my lighting to be completely off for about 5 hours at night. Moonlights used to be on 24/7. Would that be making any difference?


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[zoomster]

Can algae use blue light? I recently changed my lighting to be completely off for about 5 hours at night. Moonlights used to be on 24/7. Would that be making any difference?


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What exactly is your "lighting schedule" Jeff?.
If you only have 5 hrs of complete down time, this may explain some of your algae issues?

 

[jeffopentax]

What exactly is your "lighting schedule" Jeff?.
If you only have 5 hrs of complete down time, this may explain some of your algae issues?

Here's my lighting schedule. Leds on ramp timer:

450nm
0:00 - 0%
5:00 - 0%
10:00 - 100%
12:00 - 100%
13:30 - 80%
17:30 - 70%
18:30 - 30%
20:30 - 5%

12,000k
0:00 - 0%
5:30 - 0%
6:30 - 10%
11:00 - 70%
12:00 - 100%
13:30 - 100%
19:00 - 30%
20:00 - 0%


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[AdInfinitum]

Any system should be balanced.
Example snake poison can kill and can cure a human depends of dosage.
The same rule is applicably to any live system.
Cyano is part of our life.
It is growing up because it has something to eat.
Cianobacteria desperately needs:
- light
- phosphates
- nitrates
How to reduce cyano? - remove source of life: light, phosphate or nitrates. Removing any of these components will kill cyano.
How to do it?
1. if no any corals, easiest way to turn of the light for 1 week, water will be clear as a baby tear
2. use something that will eat nitrates or phosphates faster than cyano: unfortunately cyano is the best of eating them, so this option can help, but cannot kill it.
3. Provide less nitrates/phosphates to the system - means do not feed the fish. Fish can easely survive for 1 week without any food. Even more fish will eat this algae.
4. Put into the system something that will eat cyano, so we will have a cycle: nitrates are eaten by cyano<-cyano eaten by "clean up crew" <- clean up crew (copepods) will be eaten by fish. This is ideally balanced system: too much cyano promote clean up crew, clean up crew will die if nothing to eat.
5. Provide "right light". Scientists spends tons of time/money developing bulbs that provide "right spectrum". In a short: cyano prefer white to red spectrum. Corals can use deep blue spectrum. Knowing this fact and providing blue will give more energy to corals than to algae. So corals would be stronger and will kill a concurrent.
Also duration of light is important: corals has more chance to survive from "short day light", all types of algae needs long day. So providing "high power" light for a short time will give a favor to corals but not to algae.

This answer is fine for algae but it is incorrect regarding Cyano-bacteria.
Lacking nitrate, Cyano has the capacity to fix atmospheric Nitrogen. Lacking Phosphate, Cyano has the capacity to utilize bound Phosphorus not normally accessible to living things.

Just an FYI to help understand the challenge.

 

[Jewel]

I must admit I used that Red slime remover, hesitantly I must add BUT it got rid of my Algea problems. I've always heard it was a temporary fix but it worked. Perhaps my GFO hadn't kicked in. Not sure but I wouldn't discount it.

 

[AdInfinitum]

I must admit I used that Red slime remover, hesitantly I must add BUT it got rid of my Algea problems. I've always heard it was a temporary fix but it worked. Perhaps my GFO hadn't kicked in. Not sure but I wouldn't discount it.

IMO There's nothing wrong with using antibiotics to help when Cyano has taken over in an older system although I would avoid it when it is just a newer tank going through the inevitable "Cyano stage".
Since it can create it's own nutrients, Cyano issues can snowball, not allowing balance to reestablish by preventing competing organisms from getting a foothold.