ID Red Slime/Cyano?

[ATXJayhawk]

Helping a friend with his tank (75G with hang on skimmer/overflow box and no sump, T5HO). It seems that this red stuff has been taking over his tank the past couple of months. He is running a Phosban pad, Activated Carbon and GFO and doing bi-weekly 10% water changes. Tried adjusting feeding to every 2-3 days and shortening light cycle. We cleaned all the rocks off by spot treating with H202 but its creeping back again. The crushed coral seems to have the same substance on it and is about 2-3 years old (vigorous vacuuming during wc). Is this kicking up phosphates during the vacuuming and causing the nutrient excess? What about QTing livestock and replacing with new LS and spot treating the rocks again? I will link him this thread to specify any other details/answer the questions/feedback. Attached is a screenshot.

Thanks!

Julian

[Bpb]

You said the substrate is 2-3 years old? May seem like a silly question, but is the TANK in its current form 2-3 years old? That just looks like alot of cyano to me. How long has the cyano problem been going?

[ARSchwartz]

Substrate ~2yrs old. Crushed coral was put in when I moved to Austin and the old sand was recommended to be discarded as it was ~3 years old at that point and would be pretty disturbed during transit.

This problem is very new, the most recent change to the tank was the new light fixture I purchased, which was a 48" Coralife Lunar Aqualight T5 Lamp High Output Fixture. This was done less than a year ago, so bulbs are still plenty good. I'm currently running lights for 10 hours a day, darkness the other 14.

Creeping back is an understatement, tank looked good for a matter of days, within a month it's about at a complete takeover again.

For what it's worth, this is the protein skimmer I've always used: http://www.marinedepot.com/ps_ViewItem.aspx?idProduct=AC3123&child=ACRPDB

[victoly]

Any tank water parameters for us to chew on ?

[haze152]

First you want to determine tank levels I live in round rock and don't mind doing a phosphate test with my Hana meter. You also want to Check Nitrates Cyano thrives off nitrates and phosphates. you can do several things to remove Cyano from tank you can run chemi-clean make sure you follow direction, you can use phosgaurd do drop levels or you can do lights out method. Just remember all of these are just band aids you need to find what is causing high levels. Also if your bulbs are a year old its probably time to change them. This is just my 2 cents I am sure other will chime in. I am off the next 4 days if you want to do bring water by to test.

[subsea]

Inorganic phosphate in the water column can be treated with resin. However, organic phosphate in detritus fuels cynobacteria. Your water test will not measure phosphate in substrate. Cynobacteria mats are composed of different bacteria that act in unison. Randy Holmes, in an in depth article on organic phosphate describes enzyme action converting organic phosphate into inorganic phosphate to then be assimilated by the cynobacteria. He further describe a feedback loop that regulated enzyme production in relation to biomass assimilation.

Imagine that. Not only are the bacteria on automated controls, they have biofeed back control systems.

Patrick

[subsea]

I have not find lights off as an effective method to control cynobacteria.. It is not a micro algae, it is a bacteria mass. I do not think that it is photosynthic at all. Florida Drawf Ceriths will eat it at the surface and in the depths of the substrate. They also multiply in the sandbeds.

Patrick

[ARSchwartz]

Appreciate all the responses, but after running chemi-clean the entire tank crashed within 24-36 hours from dosing. Followed instructions precisely, yet it failed and epicly.

Performed the 20% water change anyway, though all fish (even my cleaner shrimp) are dead. Heading out of town so will let it do its thing and see if it looks any better/worse when I return in 2 days.

[Planeden]

Sorry to hear that. How it gets better while you're gone.

[Neon Reefer]

Sorry to hear about your friend's tank!

ChemiClean is normally a safe product to use in a reef tank, so i wouldn't beat myself up for using it. Biggest problems arise with it's use when one does not manually remove as much of the slime as possible prior to the dosing. What happens here is the killing off of all that bacteria produces ammonia and other toxins which reeks havock on the water quality. The other problem can be w/ overdosing and depleting the oxygen saturation causing a kill off. A method of overcomning this is to let the skimmer run with the collection cup off. You can usually adjust it up in the watercolumn and just let it produce the foam and micro bubbles.

Sometimes is all we can do is learn from the experience.

[ARSchwartz]

If my tank wasn't still covered in the original problem, I would be more inclined to believe that.

Then again, at this point it is completely irrelevant what happened.