Cyano, Dino or something else?

Yes! it does disappear some with lights out and comes back fast.

I don't even drink vodka, why would I give it to my fish, hahaha! what does vodka do?

 

The test I am missing is the one I get tomorrow

 

Good job Corailline! Thank you.

 

This stuff does break up a lot during lights out, I haven't done anything yet, except did a 5 gallon water change and sucked as much of the stuff as I could. I noticed some of the stuff floating at the top of the water.

 

IMO the root cause is the low PH - cyano.

A few suggestions - if you can increase flow. Run carbon/gfo - do small wc weekly if you can. I have personally experienced a rough time in the beginning with cyano - before changing to ro water.

 

I've don't think I have seen a suggestion that cyano is directly related to pH before. Is that based on your experience, or have you seen that suggested elsewhere? It could be, although, 7.8 usually considered a reasonably high pH for a reef and I have seen cyano in tanks with much higher pH quite often, but who knows.

Or are you thinking of dinos? people do often fight dinos by raising the pH; although some experts seem to think it is the alk, not the pH itself (and it is known some species of dinos actually thrive at higher pH, but this depends on the species).

Anyways, the alk listed is equal to 12 dkh, which is pretty
high, so, the lower pH is due to excess CO2. CO2, could certainly feed nuisance algae, if there are nutrients. However, with the op listed 0 nitrate and 0 phosphate. So, I could hypothesize, that if correct, algae will not utilize the CO2, because there is insufficient dissolved N & P.

Cyano, however, does not necessarily need dissolved N & P. Some species can fix nitrate (produce nitrate from dissolved nitrogen gas), and all marine cyano studied to date, have been found to live in bacterial mats, along with other bacteria that do fix nitrate. So, nitrate probably doesn't matter for cyano. Furthermore, Cyano and dinos may consume fish waste and detritus for nitrate and phosphate, which would not show up in tests (actually, they may even prefer urea to dissolved nitrate anyways). So, if you have low dissolved N & P, and excess CO2, it's possible that there is no competition for the CO2, as other algae probably can't utilize it, due to low dissolved N & P. The cyano/dinos can because they can utilize other sources of N & P.

However, usually there is lots of CO2 available, so I tend to discard CO2 as being a limiting factor. There may however be other trace elements that we are not thinking of that may have some limitation.

Cyano/dinos to me, usually means there is excess fish waste, not being removed. So, making sure that you are siphoning/removing waste is important one way or another.

I do find it troublesome that the salinity is 1.022, this is very low, too low for corals, but I am exactly not sure how it would influence cyano/dinos.

For pH, I would not try to raise the pH by adding a "buffer" (alkalinity), as this will raise your alkalinity, which is high already. Fresh air is probably best. Adding a air hose to your skimmer, run to the outside can help (or opening a window if warm. Again though, it isn't clear to me that CO2 is really related to cyano or dinos though, as, even at higher pH levels, there is probably lots of it in your system.

As mentioned though, detritus and fish waste are the big ones for cyano. Having a little nitrate can help too, as this may allow other algae to out-compete the cyano. However, other algae can be bad. Diatoms work really well, but you need to silica, which most people try to avoid. I don't think you would want the cyano turning into green hair algae though for example. Filtering fish waste, buy running skimmers and GAC should help. GFO can help reduce phosphate. Adding snails, such as nasarius snails and other detritivores, can ruduce fish waste further, helping to make it more soluble, where it can be removed via water changes, skimming and GAC. Also, don't hesitate to lightly siphon the sand and rocks when doing water changes. And increasing flow to prevent dead-spots is always key.

 

I just completed my 1st magnesium test using Red Sea Mg pro test kit and it showed my Mg to be below 760 ppm

 

Will I have only 3 fish, small fish, I cut their feeding to once a day. I cut the MH lights and using only have of my T'5 lights, even then the stuff had thickend every where, they seemed to have lost the hair/stringy appearence and now mostly just a thick mat.

 

newvid - YouTube

My tank 3 months later.

 

looks great! How dd you get rid of it?