And I just want to put it out there that I've done some more research in to the specific strains that are likely in a bacterial dosing product like MB7. If they are using one of the strains of prokaryotic heterotrophs that can form endospores, then I can see it being possible for the product to actually have viable culture inside it long term. So while I'm still skeptical as to whether or not adding a tincture of say 100,000 bacterial spores to an aquarium already populated with several trillion bacterial cells does much, I will concede that it is in fact possible, if the right strains are chosen and they are prepared in an appropriate manner and solution, for viable bacteria to still be present buy the time you buy it.

The same can not be said for bacterial supplements designed to speed up the cycle, as the nitrifying autotrophs responsible for that cannot form endospores and go in to suspended animation.

It would be all so much easier to look in to if any of these companies would publish which bacteria they're using, but I'm guessing it's more likely that I will win the lottery tonight.

Sorry, I should have been more specific. I use about 20 ml a week of MB7 in my 230g system (may be less than what Brightwell recommends). And I bought my last 2L bottle from J&L at their boxing day sale (15 0r 20% discount). I just checked, and still have about 1/2 left (keep it in the fridge). I started this bottle last Feb. So that means it costs me about $20 a year. For me, that is indeed cheap to stay cyano free, and all the other benefits that it provides.

And sorry for seeming to put down academic discussions. I find them very interesting too, and often learn something. But I also wanted to give my real experience with cyano problems I had in the past and how I conquered them. As I said, I have not had a single outbreak since I started using MB7. And a few times (not in the last year or more) when it tried to start up again, I just dosed MB7 heavily for a couple weeks, and it quickly disappeared. Interestingly that happened during a summer when I was away a lot and not able to dose MB7 regularly. While that may not be a scientific test, it was enough to convince me that it worked.

I am sure there may be other ways to lick cyano, but that is what worked for me.

Thanks for your continued research efforts into the subject. It must be a fair bit of work and it is appreciated.

I am just reporting on my experience, and don't have any scientific back-up for what worked for me. But I did see some cause and effect, which is what convinced me.

Aquarium Illusions in Edmonton usually has these items on the shelf.

haha, I can't tell if I'm wasting time horribly when I should be concentrating on my actual research in grassland ecology, or being wise in taking advantage of unrestricted access to pretty much every academic article ever written while I'm still a registered student.

for what it's worth I'm getting sick of cyano myself. I'm trying to track down some Dr. Tim's Waste Away here in Canada, so while I might publicly espouse kermudgeony skepticism, it's a relatively low risk thing to try so long as you aren't expecting miracles. Unlike a lot of the things that get sold to people in the aquarium trade (or the 'alternative' health industry, fitness industry, etc. etc.), there is a theoretically plausible basis for hypothesizing that bacterial supplementation might actually have some of the claimed effects. My skepticism stems from the fact that

a) there's no "International Aquarium Claim Certification Board". These manufacturers can claim whatever they want, but it's not like they're held to any sort of standards or quality control. I'd be far less skeptical if even one of these manufacturers would publish the species they're using, and independently confirmed cell counts you could expect to be in each bottle the moment it leaves the production line.

b) Culturing, harvesting, purifying, and packaging a bacterial culture is not a simple process, and could conceivably range in sophistication from rotting some shrimp in a glass, shaking it up really hard, then straining the fluid in to a bottle, to a highly sophisticated industrial lab or anything in between. Process matters, and none of these companies publish how they go about producing their products

c) Lots can happen along the chain of custody, and while some put expiry dates on the bottles, I've not seen any that put 'packaged on' dates on the bottles to give you a sense of how long what you bought has been out in the world before it got to you.

and d) none of this has ever been studied in any controlled sort of way (though companies often claim that they've done 'rigorous' testing and we are supposed to just believe them), so while it's theoretically possible that it works, the microbial communities in tanks are likely as complicated and variable as the microbial communities in different people's intestines. When a company claims that their product 'maintains proper microbial balance' or some other biologically meaningless marketing language like that, they are implying that they have far more knowledge about marine microbiology than is is reflected in the scientific literature, both in terms of what the species they are supposedly selling actually do, and in terms of how those species interact with the microbes present in your tank. Yes there is some high level scientific theory to justify exploring the possibility, but considering that a recent study exploring the microbes present in human bellybuttons came up with dozens of microbial species that were as yet unknown to science (an area you'd think we'd be much more familiar with than the ocean or the unique circumstance of a reef tank), the chances are good that there are dozens to hundreds of species of microbe in your tank that are also as yet unknown to science. A company claiming that they know how a tincture of a few known species will react in an environment as complex, stochastic, and specific as any one tank vastly over-estimates the current state of human knowledge.

points a through d do not necessarily mean they don't do what they say they do, or don't have value, but they're good reasons to remain skeptical. As I said, if it works for you, keep doing it, and I'm about to try my own little anecdotal experiment as well because I don't really see a reason not to. Hopefully it works and my cyano vanishes completely. But I know there's too many variables, both inside my tank and in the wide world surrounding that product's production for me to either say it was the product that did it, or expect similar results in the future.

Bah. I have no idea what I'm talking about. What was this thread about again?

Well its been 48 hours and whamo that chemiclean kicked the s@#t out of the cyano. Now for a water change. Will keep posting back and will add photos

Huh?
 

Love it! Brilliant!

I have been fighting red slime for six months now, I've done everything.

25% water changes every four days
Bought a new skimmer rated twice my tank
Bought a phonsban reactor
Added 3 more power heads
Treated the tank (worked for a bit) then killed all my pods and death to my mandarin. :(

It has slowed down growth but still comes back

That's great. Yes, Chemiclean definitely works. Now your challenge will be to keep it from coming back. Good luck.

Catherine, was just wondering further how my costs with a 230g system are only $20/year, while you were looking at $40/ mo with a 600g system. The Brightwell instructions state no more than 5 ml/50g/week (not per day) for a stable, low nutrient system. So, if I do the math on your tank, the costs should be less than $80 for a full year.

And remember these are seed bacteria, so Brightwell says this dosage can be decreased by a further 50% over time to maintain a stable, low nutrient system. I think this means that you need to keep your nitrates and phosphates low. But even with your very large 600g system, your costs could be less than $40 per year. So again, I do consider that cheap, considering all the benefits (not just cyano prevention) that MB7 provides.

Well cyano is gone. Nitrates after a 20 gallon wc are 10 ppm. Skimmer is bonkers loll.

How long should I wait to do another wc?

Well cyano is gone. Nitrates after a 20 gallon wc are 10 ppm. Skimmer is bonkers loll.

How long should I wait to do another wc?

25% ever 24 hours over three days then start pouring out the skimmer in the sink till it returns to normal. That's what I did anyways . I also blew my rocks off each time to get the dead stuff the cyano had suffocated into the siphon . Then cleaned any power heads , return pumps and glass.

Then have fun preventing it from coming back ...
I don't have a lick of algae but I still get carpets of cyano if I'm not carefull

Forgot to dip a frag a few weeks ago bam out break

I'm so sick of dosing that I just manually fight it.. Sick of loosing skimmers

Well, well, well. Guess who is having a re visit with cyano. Good times...not.

I just beat it without using chemicals !! One week cyano free

Im close to a week now aswell.

I know in forum world this thread is getting long in the tooth, but I want to add that I also appear to have beat cyano. Also, I want to walk back further some elements of my earlier criticisms of bacterial supplementation.

1 - I did a two course back to back treatment of chemiclean, and that appears to have wiped the cyano completely out.

2 - I started using MB7 right after the chemiclean treatment using the 'start up dose', which in my tank works out to approx 70-75ml of MB7 a day. Let me tell you that burns through a bottle right quick. Earlier I had said that I was suspicious over whether or not anything was actually alive in those bottles, but after dosing such large amounts of MB7 I've noticed some novel changes in my tank - first, my glass has been getting coated in this hazy, hard to wipe off film. Not your normal film algae, but something that seems more tenacious. It builds up quickly, going from crystal clear to looking hazy sometimes overnight. It takes quite a bit of persistence with the magfloat to get it off. Also, my skimmer's behaviour has completely changed. It's hard to really describe, but the foam column is much taller than it used to be. I've had to dial it way back because it now overflows if I set the water height in the same place I used to. The past two times I've cleaned the skimmer cup, the neck of it has been coated in this thick, whitish/clear slime that peels off of it in sheets below the line where the actual brownish/black skimmate gunk starts. It's strangely difficult to get off, you need to rub really hard near the edge of it to get a strip you can peel off started, it doesn't dissolve away like normal skimmer gunk just by running your fingers over it. That's never happened before.

I have to assume that those two changes, both on the glass, and in the skimmer, are bacterial biofilms. I've never had them before, and they's so obviously different from what I'm used to seeing in my tank I have to conclude they're coming from the heavy dosing of MB7, as other than the killing the cyano that's the only thing I've changed. There's obviously something living in what I'm dosing. It's kind of a PITA (it took me over 10 minutes to clean the skimmer cup last night when it normally only takes 3), so I'm hoping it stops happening once I go down to the normal 'maintenance' dose of MB7 (which should be soon, I didn't actually note the date when I started. Oops).

On the 3rd day of my two part chemi-clean treatment, measurable phosphates in my tank spiked to 0.05ppm, which leads me to believe that the cyano had sequestered a fair amount of it and was consuming nutrients before my GFO/pellet reactor could get to it. Some of my 'coal mine canary' corals also rapidly began browning out. I've been changing my GFO weekly since to drive the phosphate levels as low as possible and now most corals are back to their 'low nutrient' colours, and I'm consistently testing 0.00 phosphate on the hanna checker with no cyano growth anywhere in the tank.

We'll see if it ever comes back, a couple weeks obviously isn't a very good predictor of success, but so far so good.

I've also been hit hard with Cyano and was trying to lower my nutrients to get rid of it. My nitrates are at zero now, however the phosphate levels are still high.

I plan on using chemiclean to get rid of Cyano and then change up the media quantity of GFO (I think I was very conservative with GFO media I used initially).

I'll keep you posted on my success and faliure as I progress!!

Hmmm, have never seen that. Having said that, I haven't used the heavier dosage for a couple years now. But I would cut back the amount now and go to the low nutrient dosage, and then later half that again. Sounds like you have some kind of extra bio activity happening, though.

Yah I looked at the dates from the other thread, I think I'm almost exactly at 2 weeks. Today is the last day I'll do the heavy dose. The films are annoying, but the tank has never looked better so I can't complain too much.

So Im treating my stupid eggcrate for cyno. How does that happen? I dont have any until I sit all my frags on eggcrate?

Couple questions. Can cyno be transferred from other corals, frags, added?

Im ordering some MB7, as per the posts here. Would that mean my Prodibio is not used then. I assume its along the same lines.

Thanks

Well, there have certainly been enough discussions about cyano lately.... But not sure where it comes from, or if it can be transferred. Have never researched Prodibio, so can't speak to that.

Like I've said many times here, though, MB7 has worked for me, and no more outbreaks for 2+ years now. Before that I had huge problems with it, similar to many others here.

You do have to kill the cyano first with Chemiclean (MB7 is a preventative, and will not kill cyano), then go on the heavy MB7 dose for 2 weeks, followed by the regular low dose for another month or two, and if all looks good, you can cut that in half again. Also, contrary to the instructions, I never had to shut off my skimmer, even during the heavy dose period

If you see any signs of it coming back again, go back to the heavy dose for a week or so, and then back to the regular. I had to do that a couple times at the beginning (but I had a really high nutrient tank then). But have not had to do that for a couple years now.

Thanks. I added my chemiclean

I think the last time I had cyno was on my sand about 10yrs ago. There is absolutely no reason for it in my 30g, unless its a transfer thing.

I dont know how it just happens for no reason. Unless its related to the eggcrate where it growing. None on the rock. :lol: Of course its getting on all my frags, that I blow off several times a day.

Does it take all 48hrs.....24 hrs and mine still the same ?

I left mine 3 days . After 24 mine looked sinikar but after 48 it was virtually gonzo!!

Ok thanks

Yah I didn't notice much of a difference at 24 hours either. Some bits of it will continue to die for a couple of days after you do the water change too.

I did a second dose at the 48 hour mark (after a 20% water change), but chickened out after a day, so my second dose was really only 24 hours long. No lasting effect.

And yes, for some reason cyano seems to love growing on plastic. The first place in my tank it ever appeared was on the plastic covering of one of my overflow boxes, it climbed up it like a slow moving flame. Then later I couldn't keep it off my acrylic frag rack to save my life.

I have my water change ready. Hope I dont need a second but guess if I do, it needs doing.. I never had that much cyno, as siphoned most of it off before treating.

Well its been 4 months and im still cyano free. So far chemi clean has worked for me. Knock on wood

I treated my tank starting Feb 6th and so far so good
No issues/losses etc

Good luck greg. Hope u have the same luck!!