Cyano all over just in one day...

The problem is a sudden and very unexpected spread of cyano bacteria in my sand. The spread covers about 9 square inches of a corner of my tank floor that is exposed to direct light from 4x55 JBJ flourescents above. There was hardly any sign of cyano yesterday and now it is covering an entire corner of the tank today...this has never happened to me. There is a ton of current in the area which confuses me.


PARAMETERS
Temperature:77.2
PH: 8.6
Ammonia:
Nitrite: 0
Nitrate: 0
Salinity: normal
dKH/KH/Alkalinity:180
Magnesium: dont know
Calcium:enough to grow a lot of coralline and host healthy thick torch coral stems
Phosphate:normal
Liquid or Strips: strips
Brand Name: API
Are they Expired?: No


Tank size? 20g
Estimated total system? 20g

Reef, fish only or, freshwater? reef

Current inhabitants? What and how many? Coral Beauty, Engineering goby, gumdrop goby, mcclosker wrasse, royal gramma, 1 chomi

Clean up crew? 25-30 hermits, 10 nassarius snails, 2 large turbo snails

How long has your tank been set-up? 5 months

Substrate. yes
Type? crushed coral
Depth? varies from 1" to 2"

Live rock? yes. base adn branch
How much? 40 lbs
Did you recently add some? no

Filtration.
Type? Reaction 4 stage w/ uv EFU-45 rated for 190 gal.
Protein skimmer? rio nano skimmer
Do you wet or dry skim? wet
Maintenance schedule for filtration? top off every other day and water change every month
Drilled tank/hang on back overflow? no
Sump/refugium. What's in it and how much? no
Macro? What kind? no

Lighting. JBJ 4x55 pc's
Lighting type? pc
Age of bulbs? 4.5 months

Feeding
What? Ocean nutrition flakes
How much? minimal
How often? once a day

Water change schedule.
How much? 5 gal
How often? every month
What salt brand? n/a
Water source? local lfs

Additives/supplements used? Kent marine tech I, DBT's zoo plankton

Do you have a ground probe? no
What kind of flow does your tank have? a lot of flow. especially in the cyano infected area.

 

Chemi clean

 

Do you know your actual phosphate level? "normal" could mean so many things. If you do have proper flow, there are probably too many nutrients in the tank. Have you had a any problems before?

 

The water was checked last week for phosphates as well as everything else at the lfs as a "backup" to my own tests. All he said was that it was normal. Sorry...

I have never had any problems before...This is rare for my tank....
What do you mean too many nutrients???

 

What does your LFS use to test? I almost guarantee that the nitrates are a false reading for a few reason's. First and foremost, your using strips. Test strips are horrible and wildly inaccurate, and should never be trusted. Thats a pretty well stocked 20 to not be reading any nitrates, specially when feeding only flakes (again loaded with nitrates and phosphates).

The nutrients that cyano feed off of is mainly nitrates and phosphates. You have an elevated level of at least one of those. Either the strips are giving a false reading or the cyano itself is using the nutrients up fast enough to show a blank when testing.

 

For clarification:
I use API strips every other day to check to make sure nothing spikes. On my strips, the Nitrates and Nitrites read 0. Last week when picking up my RODI topoff water, the lfs did their weekly check. They use the Seachem equipment and it has been reliable for others. The owner of the lfs is a good friend of mine from before he managed the store and I trust his results.
Could the phosphates have spiked within the last 4 days to spike the cyano so quickly?
What can I do to control it????

 

It could have. There are a number of things that could cause it.
Regardless, I would pick up a good set of liquid tests for your own personal use ASAP. Also, once you do that and maybe even before, test the water you are buying from the LFS BEFORE you add it to your tank. It's real easy for stores to get behind on the filter/membrane maintenance, and when that happens, you can end up with water that's actually worse than straight tap, as the dirty elements will start to unload into the water.
Also, next time, ask EXACTLY what the phosphates are. They should be at 0, or close to.

 

Thank you for the advice packleader, you have always been a great help. What should I do thoguh immediately to control the cyano? Would limited lighting, higher or lower temps, stirring up the sand, or anything help at all? If I buy the kits Im going to have to order them online...they are much cheaper than what the stores around here sell them for..

 

For now, I would just try to manually remove it. It will come up in sheets and is pretty easy to just pick out. Cutting the lights won't necessarily help. It works off of lighting, phosphates, nitrates, etc. And it can survive and multiply with any one of those if the others are not present.
And I order all mine too. They are about half price or so online from retail, at least around here.
The only other thing I could suggest in addition to that would be to go through your filter and make sure its nice and clean, and the elements are good. Fresh carbon never hurt anything

 

This was taken from another dissertation and fits what I have come to realize.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ReefTECH
It's very clear to me and should be to the professional and amateur community that I directly depicted the causes for imbalance in a closed eco-system that fuel the problem at bay. Further more I've dedicated reliable resources for the reference of my argument to make it painfully clear that there is a cause for this issue.

Hi: My comment that no one knows what causes cyano was not directed at any one individual. Also, I may have missed it, but I did not see any cited scientific references in this thread that identify the cause of cyano bacteria algae.

Indeed, the literature is, at best, divided on the cause of cyano in reef systems.

Fossa and Nilsen sum it up well in The Modern Reef Aquarium: Vol. 1.

"The slime algae are the more disagreeable type of blue-green algae by far. They show as a bluish-black or bright red layer that can appear all of a sudden and without any apparent reason in aquaria that have been set up quite a long time. Aquarists call this phenomenon the "red pest". Very often it starts with a seemingly harmless small spot of black or red colour on the bottom of the aquarium. They remain like that and do not start growing until later so that they usually go unnoticed. But, very suddenly, within a few days they grow explosively and the whole aquarium decorations covered with an ugly, slimy coating. These algae emit substances which very effectively impede the growth of other algae or even kill them. Moreover, they are very harmful for many other inhabitants of the aquarium.

It is really very difficult to get rid of these slime algae. We can try to remove them mechanically, i.e. by brushing and then siphoning them off. Yet the aquarium decoration will soon be covered by them again....Once they have spread in the aquarium, it is mostly too late. Obviously, there is no safe therapeutic method to fight slime algae without doing harm to other organisms at the same time. Adding antibiotics to the aquarium, e.g. Tetracycline or Erythromycin, will kill the algae....As a matter of principle any sort of medication should be avoided in the coral reef aquarium. The effects it might have are completely unpredictable and often completely different from what was expected....

Slime algae seem to appear most easily in unstable aquaria or in tanks that were subjected to sudden changes of the milieu, e.g. when a large number of animals is introduced within a short period of time, or when the quality or the quantity of light changes considerably.

A number of observations suggest that stable aerobic conditions with a sufficient supply of oxygen impede the growth of slime algae to a certain degree. This has, however, not yet been proven. We think that problems with slime algae are usually due to the accumulation of nutrients and biological imbalance.

Red slime algae are closely related to the bacteria. It is possible that a change of the normal bacteria flora may result in an intensive growth of red slime algae.

It has been shown that slime algae can grown even at a redox potential of far more than 400 mV, a potential which indicates highly aerobic conditions which can be reached by ozonisation. On the other hand, there have also been some reports that an increase of the redox potential stopped the algae growth.

It may be some consolation for us to know that the slime algae can also disappear by themselves as suddenly as they appeared."



Quote:
Medicating IS a quick fix, it will only come back, and I don't think subjecting corals (creatures which we have an infinitely acute understanding of) should be subjected to the chemical burdens of our degraded ability to care for them in a captive system.

I agree. Medicating is a quick fix, and it's not without risks. But leaving the cyano in your tank is also a risk. There is no good solution here. Medicating will kill the cyano. It might also have adverse effects on the reef tank. Of course, it also might not. We just don't know. As I've said before, some people have had success with water changes, limiting feeding, increasing flow, increasing O2, etc. Often, none of these methods work. The key point that most folks don't understand about cyano is that it is a bacteria-like algae. Antibiotics, when used properly, will eradicate the cyano bacteria. I disagree with your statement that cyano will return after one finishes a course of antibiotics. This presumes we know what causes cyano, or at the very least, presumes that there is some unknown persistent condition that causes cyano which will still be present after the meds are used. If one is willing to admit that the etiology of cyano is unknown, then it is easy to see how meds might be a quick and permanent fix.


Quote:
I would argue that it is the least that we can do to at least try non-abrasive methods of treatment for the growth and understanding of our community which is both driven by motives of science and leisure.

I just don't think you can dismiss these problems so easily I guess.

I would agree with this if we knew of effective non-abrasive treatment methods. But we don't, so I disagree here as well. If your tank is over-run with cyano and you spend months trying a variety of 'non-abrasive' methods which have no proven track record of success, you could be hurting your tank more than if you had just used antibiotics from day 1. If you knew you had strep throat, would you try a bunch of herbal remedies first before taking an antibiotic? Maybe. Maybe not. This is going to depend on your risk-tolerance.

I don't begrudge anyone for not wanting to medicate their tank. But I also think it's rather naive to outright dismiss a risky but successful treatment in favor of a no-risk, less-successful treatment, particularly when the cyano has such a detrimental effect on your reef. Of course, if the cyano was simply unsightly and not harmful to your reef, I would always advocate trying the "safer" less-successful methods first.