Diatoms.....what happened?

My tank started to go through it's diatom stage about a week and a half ago and I added 10 Turbo snails to help. Two days later, I added 10 small Blue-legged hermits late at night to help with the diatom on the sand. The next morning, my wife wakes me up telling me that the sand was ALL cleaned up. I think it's impossible that those hermits did the job considering that they barely moved an inch over night from where they were originally dumped in the tank. This morning......the sand is even cleaner than before! What can be going on?

At first my tank actually went through a cycle with just 100/lb of LS in it and then I added around 95/lb of base rock and 9.5/lb of LR. That's a lot of rock and it's only been about 3-3.5 weeks since the rock was added

Any ideas of what's going on?

 

Just because they don't look like they moved does not mean they didn't trust me. I watched 3 crabs one day spotlessly clean a clam shell I put in my 10 gallon in about 30 minutes and it was covered in green algae.

 

Normally, I would say that you might be right......but this is one of those moments where I know for sure that they didn't move. For some reason, they started to move in the morning when I went to see the tank after my wife woke me up. They were still in the same spots where I dropped hem. There weren't even sand trails to give the hint that they moved.

 

i would give the turbos my vote on chowin down the good stuff but i dont have that much experiance with them, you might want to get the garbage can ready if your crabs havnt moved an inch, i would deffinately check on them, unless you can see that they are in fact alive.

 

No no. That was yesterday morning. The hermits are unstoppable as of yesterday morning. They're doing great. As far as the snails....they never touched the sand and they have been in there for about a week. They're always on the rocks

 

I cant tell you that it was the snails or crabs for sure, but its not uncommon that diatom disappear within a day or two. Luna

 

That fast? Really? It did go from completely brown sand to completely clean in a period of two nights. Does this mean that I'm close too or possibly done with the cycling?

 

Turbo's usually wont touch the sand unless they are on the way from a rock to the glass. The hermits will help a lot. They dont really even have to be eating the algae, just them stirring about in the sand will help with the diatoms.
A lot of tanks will have diatom blooms for a year or more, so just because your tank finished its initial cycle does not mean your never going to see algae again.

 

Just last week I started a tread about this VERY same thing. I thought that it was cyano at first, but it turned out to be diatoms. My sand is TOTALLY covered with it every day, and then over night, it completely disappears. This has been occurring for the last month or so... Here is my thread about it: http://www.3reef.com/forums/algae/cyano-52321.html

I am still battling this crap (over a month later). Here is what I have observed. My tank seemed to be running without any diatoms for the first several (5) months. Then all of a sudden BLAMO! Thick Diatoms were all over the sand (during the day)... But every night around 10pm the diatoms thin down to a light dusting and disappear completely at night. Then in the morning, I have nice prisine white sand, only for the junk to return back to full power by the afternoon. I though that this may be residual light in the room from the sun, so I completely covered the aquarium in blankets to prevent any outside light from entering the tank, but it didn't help a bit. My last guess is my daily water changes.. I believe that the silicates in the salt mix are fueling these little buggers, and by 10pm or so they have exhausted their current supply, only for me to do a water change, and add new silicates into the tank. My plan now is to stop the daily water changes, and let the diatoms come.. and hopefully go. Anybody have any other thoughts?

 

I know that the algae is and will mostly always be an ongoing ordeal. That's understood. I just didn't think it could be gone that quick

It woud be a good idea to cut down on those water changes your doing. I however don't have any algae blooms. They just dissapeared.

BTW......... I last tested my water about 4 days ago and the only thing I had high was my nitrates which were @ 20ppm. I just tested it and it is between 5.0 and 10ppm. Nitrites are @ 0ppm, Phosphates are @ 0 and the ammonia is @ 0 also.

I double test everything and all results are the same both times.