Brown Substance Am I Algae ?

New Brown Stuff

not sure if this is brown algae or what figured id post it on here and see what it was. just wondering if it was a weird color of cyano or something else.

Ammonia 0
Nitrate 0
Nitrite 0
Phosphates 0

 

Looks like diatoms a type of algae. Get a good clean up crew from Reef Cleaners to take care of it.

 

Lol have a huge clean up crew none of them are going near it.

 

Do you have snails?

 

yea like 20 of them

 

Let them grow to the point they're at now, then scrape them off the glass. They'll grow back every couple days, but having particulate phytoplankton in the water is pretty beneficial for any filter feeders, and your skimmer will also pull them out of the water very efficiently. This stuff helps with nutrient export quite a bit.

 

cool cool was reading about it. but thanks for the idea was just looking to see if it was bad or good. never can tell what these growing things are there are just so many

 

yea my biggest thing was I did not want it to sprout on my rocks. they are brown right now also but I had a green hair algae breakout and think the brown I see now is from the Green algae dieing cuz my GFO is killing it. Just a waiting game to see what dies and dissapears I guess all in good fun will see how things go. Hopefully the blenny will get big and fat

 

Have another question about this stuff. It seems that it takes over quite quickly. Would introducing a UV sterilizer to the system on a closed loop so I can turn it on and off solve this issue? Would that kill or slow down the growth of it? Was thinking about getting one but from what I have read they can be both good and bad. One killing the good organisms that live in a reef environment. Good obviously killing the bad ones. What are some of the pro's and con's that you guys see using this kind of UV unit on your reef tank? Do you run one? Is it good to oversize getting more wattage than what is needed?

Forgive me for asking so many stupid questions but love to soak up as much data on the forums as I can so that if something does happen I know what to do before it happens.

 

so just as a recap to this after lots of time with these diatoms tonite I finally figured out what the problem was. After pulling the rock from my refugium out had some cyano on it so I cleaned it and noticed a wierd looking rock. Well got it all cleaned off and here it was a limestone chunk. For the life of me dont know how it got there but one of they key things in limestone is silica.

Yay for no more brown stuff