Mystery Brown Algae. Dino?

In the 11+ years I've been in the hobby, 10% weekly has always been the gold standard for water changes. Recently, with more advanced filtration some people have started doing less, personally, 10-15% always gives me the best coral growth and overall health (and least algae )

As to the algae, I would guess it may be a type of Cyanobacteria.

 

Yup! Looks exactly like that! And oddly enough, I have the same problems they do with it...only on base rock, only where the light is strongest, and its like its got a 3d texture.

That is the only page, out of the hours I've searched, that resembles what I've got!

Very nice call Corailline! If you could find an ID, that would be amazing!! I would greatly, greatly appreciate it!!

And I'm pretty sure its not a type of cyano cuz I've researched about every type I could find and never found a match to any....but I could be wrong though.

 

Sorry no luck thus far.

 

In the 35 years I've been doing it, it's per month. Same as Shedd Aquarium, Georgia Aquarium and others. Doing a weekly water change is something that LFS's came up with about 15 to 20 years ago in order to sell more materials. Nothing more.

It's like oil changes. In the old days, you were supposed to change your oil every 12,500 miles. Now they tell you to do it every 3000. It's BS. With most of the advanced oils today, you can do 15 to 20,000 miles with ease. They just tell you that to sucker you into spending more money. In fact, the EPA is trying to get a bill passed to push that back because it's completely unnecessary and just waste oil by the boatloads. Literally.

 

Everyone's tank is different. What may work for you may not work for the next person. I have always read 10% biweekly WCs or 20% monthly. IMHO I think the 10-15% weekly came into play when people wanted to keep their water pristine for SPS corals. Everyone knows that some people even go months without WCs. It's all a personal preference. Sorry for going off topic.

 

No need to apologize. I'm actually rather interested in this. The reason I started doing weekly changes was because it seemed like when I'd go bi-weekly, I was cleaning the algae off the glass a lot more. Weekly changes keeps it to where I might only have to scrape the glass once every couple of weeks, so I figured I was doing right lol. I'm going to try and fight the urges and start waitin 2-3 weeks between changes now and see how that goes lol.

I'm still very novice to the world of saltwater as I've only been a keeper for about a year and a half and am always learning something new! I enjoy reading stuff like this

 

Then you will have to follow the 3reef motto, "Go Slow, Let it Grow".

 

There's one other thing I was curious about... Is it true my skimmer is just way to big for my tank? It's rated for 210g and I've got about 150g total volume. Everywhere I read said to get a skimmer rated for double your tank size, so I wanted something at least rated for around 250g. And plus I'm going to go predator eventually and wanted somethin that could keep up and have a little head room. It's the Bubble Magus NAC-77 with dual Atman 2500 pumps. And I ditched the mesh wheel impellers and went with needle wheel because i had 4 mesh wheels break in 2 days...

 

You should be aiight. I have a Hurricone Cat 3 protein skimmer running my 225 and that skimmer is rated for 800 gallons and I am pulling out major gunk.

 

I'm not really sure what oil changes have to do with our tanks.... There are lots of things in our tanks, such as trace metals that we can not test for and are toxic if they accumulate (and can increase algae by the way). They accumulate from foods and there are compounds that are hydrophilic and can not be removed any way except water changes. Now, whether or not you feel you can get away with less is an entirely different issue. There is not bacteria to speak of in the water and doing water changes with water good, clean water, matched to the tanks parameters does not "cause" algae LOL. Perhaps you can do less (although if you have algae issues, there wouldn't seem to have a strong argument for such) but doing a little extra is not going to hurt anything, as is the case with changing a little extra oil in a car.