cyano battle lol

[kien]

^ Translation: you're ****ed. Don't fight it.

[asylumdown]

hahaha! when it comes to cyanobacteria... I'd say you might be right. If you vacuum as much of it out as possible before you hit the tank with chemiclean, you might be able to beat it back, but it's what comes after that I think we have very little control over. Some people would say to start dosing your tank with one of the pro-biotic solutions available on the market today like microbacter (that's a real thing right?) or Zeoback or something, but I'm uuuuber skeptical of any bacterial supplement that hasn't been refrigerated along it's entire chain of custody. I've tried looking at a few under my microscope and I've never seen anything in those solutions that one could clearly say is alive. Even if they were alive by the time you added them to your tank, the microbiology of bacterial competitive regimes are way too complex and poorly understood for anyone claiming that bacterial product X produces Y effect to have much empirical backup.

At the end of the day, you can't have a problem with problem algae unless you have a problem algae. Why do some tanks get overrun with gross cyano while others look pristine even though they have the same testable parameters? I'd argue part of it is that the species that compose the cyano mat were introduced to one and weren't to the other. If the water can support coral, it can support algae of some kind, but what algae you will have depends as much on the stochasticity of unintentional contamination as your particular nutrient profile.

Ultimately all you can do is try to keep your nutrient profile within the parameters of the system you're trying to emulate and hope for the best lol.

[intarsiabox]

The only time I've ever gotten cyno on my rock is when I have a sand bed present. I've taken the same rocks and coral out of one tank and put them into a bare bottom tank and that is last I ever see of the cyno. I am in the process of setting up a new tank and am having trouble deciding to go BB or not as I love the look of a shallow sand bed but also enjoy not ever having cyno.

[wreck]

thanks for the replies.

i added chemi clean last night, took the cup off my skimmer and also added 2 airsrtones. man do i have micro bubbles in the display tank now lol. can i put some filter floss in the last baffle of my sump inorder to keep micro bubbles out of my display?

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by wreck

thanks for the replies.

i added chemi clean last night, took the cup off my skimmer and also added 2 airsrtones. man do i have micro bubbles in the display tank now lol. can i put some filter floss in the last baffle of my sump inorder to keep micro bubbles out of my display?

I don't know if I'd worry about the bubbles, it's only a couple of days and they won't hurt anything, but I don't see any harm in the filter floss if it's bugging you. The reason you have to stop skimming is because there's literally not a setting low enough on your skimmer that will stop it from overflowing with that product in the water, not necessarily because of the filtration aspect (though I'm sure that's part of it).

Once the treatment is over and you've done the water change, your skimmer is likely still going to go nuts for a while. I've only used it on this tank once, but after the water change I had to set my skimmer on it's lowest setting and still had to empty the cup a few times a day to get it to settle down.

It would be a good idea to think about adopting a a strategy now to intentionally deal with nitrates. If yours hit 15 (I'm assuming that's measured in ppm), then the tank is producing more of it than it can naturally consume. I mentioned that cyano can grow in low nutrient environments, but it certainly doesn't mind high nutrients either! If you're only relying on human muscle power through water changes and whatever anoxic zones you might have in your rock and sand to do all your denitrifying, you'll need to be very religious about water changes for them to keep nitrates under control long term. Keep in mind that a 20% water change will only drop your nitrates from 15 to 12ppm, and dropping your nitrates to 5ppm in a single shot would require a 66% water change with nitrate free water. If you're going to continue using water changes as the primary tool to address nitrates you'll need to figure out your weekly rate of nitrate production (which will be complicated by any nuisance algae or cyano that will most certainly be taking some of it up), and make sure that your weekly or biweekly water changes are a greater percentage of your system volume than the percentage increase in nitrate concentration each week. There are a bunch of different methods for controlling nitrates in an automated way that work round the clock whether you're on top of water changes or not, but I might suggest not starting any sort of carbon dosing regiment (either solid or liquid) until you've seriously beat back the cyano problem. Adding excess organic carbon to a tank with high nitrate and well established cyano bacteria would be a little like trying to put out a fire by dousing it with gasoline.

Anyway good luck. If it really is cyano, you should see drastic results by tomorrow.

[wreck]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I don't know if I'd worry about the bubbles, it's only a couple of days and they won't hurt anything, but I don't see any harm in the filter floss if it's bugging you. The reason you have to stop skimming is because there's literally not a setting low enough on your skimmer that will stop it from overflowing with that product in the water, not necessarily because of the filtration aspect (though I'm sure that's part of it).

Once the treatment is over and you've done the water change, your skimmer is likely still going to go nuts for a while. I've only used it on this tank once, but after the water change I had to set my skimmer on it's lowest setting and still had to empty the cup a few times a day to get it to settle down.

It would be a good idea to think about adopting a a strategy now to intentionally deal with nitrates. If yours hit 15 (I'm assuming that's measured in ppm), then the tank is producing more of it than it can naturally consume. I mentioned that cyano can grow in low nutrient environments, but it certainly doesn't mind high nutrients either! If you're only relying on human muscle power through water changes and whatever anoxic zones you might have in your rock and sand to do all your denitrifying, you'll need to be very religious about water changes for them to keep nitrates under control long term. Keep in mind that a 20% water change will only drop your nitrates from 15 to 12ppm, and dropping your nitrates to 5ppm in a single shot would require a 66% water change with nitrate free water. If you're going to continue using water changes as the primary tool to address nitrates you'll need to figure out your weekly rate of nitrate production (which will be complicated by any nuisance algae or cyano that will most certainly be taking some of it up), and make sure that your weekly or biweekly water changes are a greater percentage of your system volume than the percentage increase in nitrate concentration each week. There are a bunch of different methods for controlling nitrates in an automated way that work round the clock whether you're on top of water changes or not, but I might suggest not starting any sort of carbon dosing regiment (either solid or liquid) until you've seriously beat back the cyano problem. Adding excess organic carbon to a tank with high nitrate and well established cyano bacteria would be a little like trying to put out a fire by dousing it with gasoline.

Anyway good luck. If it really is cyano, you should see drastic results by tomorrow.

man thanks for the detailed reply. i am trully not sure what exactly caused my problem, im guessing summer neglets and lack of water changes. also i dont have a tds meter on my rodi unit, im ordering one today aswell as new di filter and also a membrane incase mine is toasted.

what methods do you suggest besides waater changes to lower nitrates? im open to try anything.

[asylumdown]

oh there's tons, but a lot work on similar principles

Carbon dosing is one of the major ones, which can be system wide using simple easy to make solutions of either ethanol (usually vodka), sugar, vinegar, or some combination of all three. There's hundreds of threads on reef central and a bunch of articles written on how to do it, how to ramp it up, etc.

Then there's solid carbon dosing which usually means a biodegradable carbon polymer like biopellets tumbled in a reactor, though a newish product that doesn't require a reactor has come out of South Africa recently, and is the same polymer but formed in block that looks like feta cheese (never tried that one).

The logic of carbon dosing being built on the redfield ratio, which finds that ocean going plankton contain C:N:P molecules in the ratio of 106:16:1, meaning for every molecule of nitrogen consumed, 6.6ish molecules of organic carbon are also consumed. It's based off of measurements of pytoplankton, and in reality should be considered a general average (the specifics are always more nuanced than that), but aquarists have extended it potentially apply to heterotrophic bacteria as well and hypothesized that from a bacteria's point of view our tanks are organic carbon limited. Adding organic carbon in excess, so the theory goes, will allow excessive growth of heterotrophic bacteria that will consume large quantities of nitrate and some phosphate (in a ratio of 16 to 1), and those bacteria can then be either consumed by corals or skimmed out by a skimmer (hence why most suggest pointing the outflow of a BP reactor at the intake of a skimmer).

Carbon dosing has it's risks, benefits, proponents, and adamant detractors. There's hundreds of threads on all the forums about it. The risk, is that cyanobacteria assemblages also contain clades of heterotrophic bacteria which are just as good (if not better because of their commensal associations) at consuming excess organic carbon, so if cyano is present and nitrate is high, it's possible to cause a cyano explosion by starting an organic carbon dosing regiment. Paradoxically, it's exactly the effect the method is attempting produce (cyano is a bacteria that consumes lots and lots of nutrients after all), it's just not the right effect. The challenge with carbon dosing is getting the heterotrophic bacteria you can't see as a gross red slime covering everything to become dominant, then managing it in such a way that leaves enough nutrient in the water for your corals. That's not always easy to do, which is where I think a lot of the detractors come from.

Then there's systems like prodibio, zeovit, and bright well aquatic's version of zeovit. Prodibio is a probiotic system that is supposed to encourage beneficial heterotrophic bacteria that consume nutrients, as is zeovit and brightwell, only those last two also include a zeolitic substrate that's supposed to both absorb certain nutrients directly from the water as well as provide a substrate for the bacteria you want. You just have to be careful with them as they each contain as part of their core 'regiment' the dosing of an organic carbon source, only they're not nice enough to tell you on the bottles that that's what you're dosing.

Then there's things like sulphur denitrators, or other denitrator reactors that create anoxic conditions inside them to favour and feed the denitrifying bacteria that break nitrate down in to atmospheric nitrogen. Those are sort of an older technology that never really caught on in the general public for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which being the potential for them to go horribly wrong and dose your tank with hydrogen sulphide.

And then really old school are properly designed deep sand beds, which a lot of people on here wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. However, the original 'inventor' of a deep sand bed specified the use of a plenum (a void created by some permeable structure in the bottom of the sand bed) in conjunction with the sand bed that most people in modern times seem to forgo, but to me seems critical to the design

There might be other ways, and each one of the ones I listed all have people who love them, hate them, think they should be banned, and can't understand why everyone doesn't use them. There's really no right way, and each one warrants investigation so you can get a sense of how they work and what they're doing. Always keep in mind that people on forums (myself very much included) often speak in absolutes as though they know what's happening, when in reality we're all just groping in the dark and are all equally as guilty of thinking we know more about causal relationships than we really do. It's as much an art as it is a science.

[brotherd]

I have used Chemiclean. It works but is a temporary solution for sure. And...it made my skimmer very angry literally 90 seconds after dosing the tank. I forgot to shut it off beforehand. Next time it occurs Chemiclean will be the last resort. I'd rather try to manually remove it but that is a daunting task too. No matter what, cyano is a b***h.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by brotherd

I have used Chemiclean. It works but is a temporary solution for sure. And...it made my skimmer very angry literally 90 seconds after dosing the tank. I forgot to shut it off beforehand. Next time it occurs Chemiclean will be the last resort. I'd rather try to manually remove it but that is a daunting task too. No matter what, cyano is a b***h.

You say next time, so your cyano hasn't returned yet? How long ago did you dose and how long has the tank been cyano free?