Save my tank!

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by jason604

So here's what changed. About 2-3 months ago my tank was beautiful no algae in sight and my sps were super vibrant n just pops. Till one day I saw some hair algae n just left it alone. Next thing u no it my tank was had a full blown long hair algae outbreak. It began to smother zoas n sps etc but the colours were still vibrant none he less. I bought more larger sps and had no room to place it so I have to put it at the end of my tank but I'm only running 1 16" led fixture on a 4' tank so I decided to raise my lights about 5-6" higher to make sure my new colonies had light shine on them. The very next day most of my sps all browned out right away due to the shock of light I'm sure. I lowered it a few days later back to the original height but my vibrant sps colours didn't rly come back and I was stuck with an ugly brown tank filled with long hair algae. So after seeking for advice here I tried getting a reactor n filled it with about 2" of rowaphos. Then few weeks later is when I had my semi tank sps crash. I'm thinking there's something in my rocks. I did purchase a bunch of base rock and bleach/ muriatic acid bath and put my tank water in it so it will cycle faster. I'm planning to swap all the rocks in my tank with my new rocks when it's done cycling. I'm not sure if using my old tank water is a good idea to cycle the new rocks or not but so far I only did it once and didn't change the water yet. I'm planning to drain the water and fill it with my tank water again tomorrow when I change the water or should I just make new clean saltwater for my new rocks?

I don't think there's anything in your rocks. Nutrients have to be incredibly low to inhibit the growth of some kinds of "hair" algae, much lower than most people can or want to run their tanks at. It's why it's an invasive species in large parts of the world to which it has been introduced by humans.

In nature, it's not low nutrients that keep it in check (thought that can help), but a massive cohort of herbivores that suppress it enough to favour stony corals.

Hair algae, like most things in the ocean that need to compete for limited substrate, wage chemical war on their competition. They emit all sorts of nasty alellopathic chemicals that range from halting the growth of corals, to outright killing them.

If I were a betting man, I'd say you introduced spores of a particularly nasty kind of hair algae on a coral or frag, conditions were favourable for it, you don't have anything that eats it, and now it's killing your coral. Yes, you should keep nutrients within the range of the reef you're trying to keep - something that is hard to measure with rampant growth of a problem algae as it will mask your inputs while being a better competitor for nutrients than your gfo reactor - but you also need to kill that algae.

When weeds start growing in your garden, it doesn't necessarily mean there is something wrong with your soil. It means weed seeds have made it in to the garden. You wouldn't try to leach the soil of all nitrogen and phosphorous to get them out - you'd weed it.

My suggestion is to find some AlgaefixMarine, and nuke the heck out of that algae. Nutrients aside, I bet your surviving corals will see near instant improvement once the majority of that algae is dead. Even if you do have a nutrient 'problem', you're never going to be able to properly diagnose it, or put in a system that's better at competing for them with a lush growth of hair algae in the tank. It's always the tanks with the worst algae problems that measure '0' nitrate and phosphate, which, for the record means there's not a whole of anything for GFO to suck out of the water column.