what's more apt to cause cyano/diatoms outbreak?

[Joel A]

so yeah.. not sure if it's diatoms or cyano yet.. it was looking like diatoms but now that brown kinda looks red and it's getting very stringy and air bubbles trapped inside, making me think cyano.

Trying to figure out what i did to cause it... and really there are two things that i've done that could have/did cause it.

The first thing i did was take my phosban reactor offline for about a week or two. Although for what it's worth, as soon as i saw the first sign of an algae outbreak i through the reactor back on right away... it's been running now for over a week, and the algae is getting worse, not better.

The other theory i have is kind of interesting... i scraped ALL of the coralline off of my back glass... that stuff was really caked on there.... took me hours over multiple days to do it. However i was kind of stupid about it, and just pretty much left most of the coralline on the sand and what not... did a small water change, but nothing really that significant... could this algae outbreak i'm fighting be due to massive die off of coralline algae since it's now just white flakes in the sand bed?


I've been doing 5-10 gallon water changes every day... and skimming good and wet... so it's bound to disappear (i hope) but i'm just wondering which one of the above culprits is more likely to have caused it?


Also, i did add another fish, but not an overly large one... and i'm still a pretty lightly stocked tank (5 fish in a 75, none larger than a 3-4" yellow coris and 3-4" yellow eye kole tang)

 

[stingythingy45]

Joel,
Isn't this tank kind of new?
Just wondering if this might be that typical cyano/diatom outbreak that happens with new set ups.

 

[Joel A]

nope... tanks been up a while, just doing a lot of recent work to it. Tank itself has probably been running for about 2 years. Recently i'm just giving it a make-over, that's all.

 

[Aquadiva]

When was the last time you check your RO/DI cartridges??

 

[stingythingy45]

nope... tanks been up a while, just doing a lot of recent work to it. Tank itself has probably been running for about 2 years. Recently i'm just giving it a make-over, that's all.

That could be it.Just disturbing nasties under the rock work and stuff.You haven't by chance fed any frozen cyclopeeze lately?I find that everytime I feed some of that I'll get a small breakout in the low flow areas.

 

[Joel A]

no cyclopeeze, and RO filters are better than good.. i've been really adamant about that particular part of things lately actually. Water is 0 tds out of the line... and about 5 or 6 after i take it out of the storage bin. All new DI resin, relatively new carbon/sediment filters as well...

i think that's def. something to do with it though Bob.... just didn't know what people thought about the coralline part of it, and whether or not that could cause an issue.

 

[kotu100]

its probably a combination of the coraline die-off and the moving everything around. usually when i move stuff around i get some cyano a couple weeks after but it never lasts long, and i dont do anything w/ the tank.

 

[delta]

Did you change your lights to the ATI fixture yet? Lighting changes are a surefire way to have the coraline issue you have.

Change out your sand bed yet? If so depending on how you did it it could fire off a huge recycle of your tank.

An over view of your parameters along with anything else you have changed might help determine cause and a course of action.

If you just changed your sand bed I would recommend not doing much except increasing flow and re-seeding the sand bed from a few different sources.
And if the Cyano(hopefully not Dino) increases go to limited lighting schedule.

 

[Joel A]

nope, didn't do the sandbed yet because i didn't want to change to much at once.

I did put up the ATI fixture a few weeks ago though, so a light increase probably didn't help.. although i doubt it caused it.

But it actually looks like it may be starting to recede a bit this morning... hopefully the diligent water changes along with restarting the phosban reactor did the trick.