josh88
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Is green algae a good sign?
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Krish
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Hard to tell from the picture because it's so dark, but algae is usually a sign of excess nutrients (ie nitrates, phosphates etc). They use it as a food source to grow. This is where people get confused because they will test their water and read zero nitrates, but yet they have a tank full of algae. This is because it is bound up in the algae which is using it for it's growth so therefore the nitrates and so forth have to be available/present for it to grow.
Your tank is young though and all a part of the cycling process.
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Your tank is young though and all a part of the cycling process.
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josh88
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I'll get a better picture today. And post it. So if algae is bad. Why the want for purple coralline algae other than the look. Wouldn't the algae suggest the same thing?. And because of the hermits I have the algae pretty much doesn't exist in The tank. Except on the walls.
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Krish
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Algae isn't "bad" it's just some people don't like the look of it over taking their tank. Also it's usually a good indication that you have excess nutrients in your tank, but keep in mind, it is also a food source for most marine life in one way or the other. Just like we need our "green's" they need them too. Some just rather feed it to them through flake foods etc rather than have a forrest growing in their tanks like this
As for coralline, I wouldn't classify it so much with being an algae (eventhough it is called coralline algae) because it uses calcium, alk etc in the water to actually grow like a coral would. This is why people with tons of coralline growth have to dose their tanks sometimes to keep the calcium and alk levels up seeing the coralline is using it. Green hair algae won't do this. The attraction people have to coralline is it adds color to your rocks. It comes in many different shades from purple, green, red, pink, white and so on. Give's your tank a nice look if not allowed to run wild.
I did an article on coralline algae a while back. I'll jump on s pc and send you a link to the related discussion thread for it like I did with the diatom article for you. Give me a sec.
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Krish
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josh88
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I'm not put off by the green and purple algae I have now. It doesn't look all long haired like pic you posted. More like its green rock. And the hermits seem to leave it alone. It's the brown/gold brown diatom they seem to enjoy.
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josh88
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My alk is 10 now. My cal is 420-440 goes up And down. My mag was low. But its coming up again. My LFS told me that high magnesium would promote more coralline growth which would also suffocate the brown diatom. Is that true?
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jrgilles
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Haven't heard that. I don't see how more coraline would suffocate diatoms. Haven't heard that high Mg promotes coraline either. Doesn't mean its not true, just haven't heard that before.
josh88
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This is what it looks like now. I'm going to turkey base the rest and do a water change tonight
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Krish
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Never heard that either lol.
As for your tank Josh, still hard to tell but looks like green turf algae. Give it time and see what it does. You are still very early in the game. You probably have cyno to look forward to
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josh88
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Ok so let me know if I'm gathering this right. You get algae, and diatom blooms due to excessive nutrients they depend on. Phosphate, nitrate, and nitrite. But if they are registering at 0. Then the arrow more points to the water source, meaning silactates? But if my source of water is ro/di water. What would the issue be then. And I understand that it could be the new tank cycle. This is more directed towards future issues if they arise
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Krish
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When I get on my pc in a few I'll reply to ya! My phone is running off of fumes right now :lol:
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Krish
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Ok...So if you have algae in your tank and you run some tests and your nitrate and phosphate results come back zero, that doesn't mean you have zero nitrates or phosphates. All that means is it is bound up in the algae that is using it for it's growth. As they are made available to the algae, the algae quickly consumes it so you will read zero nitrates and even phosphates thinking you don't have, but it's just bound up in the algae. So this is where we go back to refugiums again. People will set up a little fuge with an algae in in like chaeto for example to out-compete any other algae in the tank for the available nutrients. As the ball of chaeto grows by binding up the excess nutrients in the water, you trim it back and remove some of the algae out of your tank which exports these excess nutrients out of your system. By doing it this way, you don't have to look at the un-sightly bush of algae growing in your tank. As your tank matures, you may notice the algae will grow less and less because the bacteria that is responsible for dealing with nitrates will eventually multiply and be able to convert them itself and therefore leaving nothing for the algae to feed on so it stops growing. So don't let the test kits fool you. If algae is growing, then the food source is there... You just can't test for it because the algae is using it up so quickly for it's growth.
Here is a personal example/experience of mine. I set up my tank. After I completed the initial cycle, got rid of diatoms etc, I started to get hair algae and cyno growing in my tank. I tested my water and was reading 10 ppm of nitrates. I HATE the look of algae in my tank and so I got a light suitable for plant growth with more watts per gal than the tank had on it which I ran for more hours a day than the lights on the tank (which was placed in my fuge section of my sump) and guess what happened? The algae stopped growing in my tank and started growing in my sump. Why? Because the conditions down there were more favorable for it to grow there. Every week when doing a water change, I would get in there with my H.O.T Magnum canister filter with a polishing cartridge in it and suck out all of the algae. By the next week, it all grew back. I repeated this every week exporting the bound up nitrates and phosphates along with the algae. As time progressed and my tank matured, the algae in the sump grew less and less until eventually, I couldn't get it to grow anymore. The bacteria in my tank along with just my regular tank maintenance, skimming and I guess the use of my phosban reactor was enough to keep my nitrates at zero so I took the light off of my sump and never used it ever again.
Here is a picture of a new cartridge next to one after just one cleaning of my sump.
I lost a lot of pictures when my computer crashed, but atleast you can see where I had the fuge section. Where you see the light in the center of the sump is where the algae grew. This shot was taken when I first added the light
Here's a shot with some starting to grow in that chamber. By the end of the week, it got so bad in there that you couldn't see in there that well. It grew all over the walls and floor of the sump. This picture was probably taken about 2 days after a cleaning.
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Lastly, here's what the tank looked like. As you can see...No algae. All grew in the sump.
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Krish
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I also have an article I've been working on on nuisance algae's that is 95% complete in our rough draft section. I may finish it up and let Mojo publish it as it may help and answer many questions regarding algae. Just need a few hours to finish it up.
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josh88
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Dude guys are so full of knowledge. I don't mean to sound stupid. But books don't even begin to explain half the things you and mike have told me. Jeep, and some others. Thanks. So here's my thing. I have that natural over flow in my tank could I add it there? And offset the timing so that the back light turns on when my moon lights turn on. My moon lights are on longer than my day bulbs. Because I went to shortening the length in which the diatom and green turf algae could photosynthesis. Would that not draw them there. Where the skimmer grab it. Just a thought don't knock me lol.
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Krish
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You should be able to set up a fuge back there. Get the right lights and algae and you should be good to go or....You can just wait it out a bit. Just as you would export algae as it grew in a fuge, you can manually remove it from the tank. That picture I posted of that bushy green tank and i know of some others (like dragonfly years ago) cleared up by manual removal right out of the tank. Just Have to be careful not to release spores back into the water column. Who knows, this may be the worst of it as you said you did start with cured liverock so who knows. Guess it's s call you will have to make. All tanks are different and everyone has an approach they prefer over another so think about it a bit.
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josh88
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What algae would you recommend
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Krish
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Chaeto seems to be the most popular to use.
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josh88
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Ok got some macro. If I remember that being what the lfs said. I did testing tonight.
Calcium 480ppm
alkalinity 10
Phosphate 0.0
Nitrate 0.0
Nitrite 0.0
Ammonia 0.25 ppm
Magnesium 1200ppm
Ph 7.8
Sg 1.025
Temp 78'f
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Calcium 480ppm
alkalinity 10
Phosphate 0.0
Nitrate 0.0
Nitrite 0.0
Ammonia 0.25 ppm
Magnesium 1200ppm
Ph 7.8
Sg 1.025
Temp 78'f
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josh88
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So on my next test I should see my nitrite rise, which will then be converted to nitrate, and ill see that rise. I think I'm going to take some of the snails back. I'm beginning to see mikes point 1 in 1 out. I've been reading and 1 turbo snail med. Size should be plenty for my tank. I'll keep two of the hermit crabs. But I watched something crazy today. One of the hermit crabs was out of It's shell fighting with another. I had to leave to run errands, but didn't know what to think. When I did a water change later, one of them floated out from behind the rocks not in A shell. I watched it for like 30 minutes, found an empty shell, set it next to it. And walked away. When I came back. It was still laying there. So I'm assuming it died. And I researched molting. And all that. This thing was not cloudy white/blue.
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