Diatoms from H__L

Okay, pretty sure I have a diatom problem, brownish/yellow algae on the lower rocks and on the sand.

I've adjusted flow to try and get more water moving in the area, but is there anything proven to eat this nastiness?

 

How old is your tank?



luna

 

copepods do... is your tank new?

 

my yellow tang cleared up all my rocks within a week. i'm not sure if this is common behavior though. u need a big enough tank to keep a tang though.
my blue legged hermits scraped a few small patches clean too.

 

if it is diatoms Chris
you dont have a problem, you just have a brief period of cocoa powder coated rocks, sand and glass etc

it goes away within a short space of time ( 3 - 6 weeks) without any intervention on your part

it builds its skeleton using silicates which it gets from new plastics, tap water, some sand types etc and once these are used up , bye bye diatoms

if your using tap water, then if your tap water contains silicates , diatoms can hang around longer

Steve

 

The tank is about 7 weeks old, I used mostly rocks from an old tank I had going hence the fact that I have fish (engineer, yellow tail damsel, and blue stripe maroon clown). I used beach sand from the keys for my substrate, using RO water. I think the beach sand has a lot of silica in it, so I hope this wont be long term problem.

Some of the diatoms are on a few of the zoo polyps that I have that havent opened in a few days. (10 polyp frag, about 5 dont open too often).

I'm running my 175W MH light 14 hours, is that too long? If I do shorten the photo period, could I run it split? i.e. 2 hours in the am then whatever number of hours in the afternoon with a few hours off in the middle?

 

I run my MH 10 hrs a day. I dont think that beach sand has silicates, I think that you havent finished with your cycle period or not keeping up with your maint.


luna

 

Here is a current picture. Its really bad, do they make silica remover? My phostphates are 0 and I'm using RO water to make salt, not one drop of tap in the tank, and I'm changing out about 10% weekly (and this weekend when I did it I siphoned away about 90% of the diatoms, only to have them return within 2 hours)

 

Your tank is only 7 weeks old, your still in the cycling period. They will go away by themselves. If in the next 5 weeks it doesnt go away, then you may have a problem.


luna

 

Should I bother doing anything to remove them, like siphoning them off or anything. I'm just worried the sand I bought was like the 99% silica sand they sell at home depot or something, just repackaged and sold as "beach sand" I think that would have my problem going on just about forever.