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Rock Boogers


ckyuv

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Anyone know what this stuff may be? Tank is still pretty new, so it may just be from cycling I just have never seen it before. Can't tell weather it's an algae or bacteria. It has no consistency and if you hit it with a powerhead or anything it just falls apart and gets picked up by the filter. It's only in areas of high light and takes about a week to slime up like this again if I blow it off the rock. 

 

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Not sure if any of this is related, but I started the tank with man made rock /dry sand and everything that has gone into the tank has been dipped in peroxide other than an anemone. I'm almost thinking my lack of biodiversity may be to blame. 

Also have a low bio load ( 2 snowflakes and a firefish ) and have been dosing aminos  ( ME Polyp Extender ). The snotty stuff came before the aminos though so I don't think that has any impact. 

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Hard to be certain, but looks like dinoflagellates to me.  I had this happen on both tanks I recently started up with dry rock.  The theory is that there is not  much biodiversity to compete with these nasty single cell critters for what little nutirents are in the tank.  What worked for me was (1) making sure my nitrates and phosphates were not too low, I shoot for 5 and 0.05 respectively (dosed Seachem Flourish and Brightwell Neophos as needed), (2) manual removal by siphoning using the semi rigid tubing used for things like your RODI unit, with fresh water changes to replace, (3) adding pods, (4) dosing phyto.  It's anyone's guess as to which combination of these things *really* cleared them up, but I did the same thing for both tanks and within about 4 weeks I kicked them out.

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For the pods and phyto, what did you use? When I first started the tank I just dumped a thing of tiger pods and a random tube of phyto in the tank. Not sure if either will sustain itself after one time.

For the phosphorus / nitrate I have some aquavitro fuel I'll have to check that out to see if I can bring up the levels 

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29 minutes ago, jolt said:

I dosed 30ml/day of live phyto in my 80 gallon setup,  and just added a bunch of different kinds of pods

Did dosing the phyto daily cause your skimmer to go nuts?

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7 hours ago, Reefpuck said:

Did dosing the phyto daily cause your skimmer to go nuts?

No it did not.  I do want to repeat that I don't know which of all the things I did was really the cure.  Once it worked in one tank I repeated in the other, but there was no science involved.  It's entirely possible that the phyto had no effect at all ....

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I definitely agree with a lack of biodiversity.  My vote is it's Lungbia cyanobacteria though.  When I see this it's associated with low nitrates (low PO4 is rarely an issue in my systems).  I mostly use manual removal to fix this but if it's convienent I might give select rocks a 2 minute dip in a bucket with a ratio of 6/1 tank water/H2O2.   

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