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Cyano bactiria


Jeramy

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I am at a loss for what could be causing this. About a month ago I had a cyano out break in my tank. My phosphates then were ate .1 and my protien skimmer was off line. I did a large water change and hooked the skimmer back up and with in a few days it cleared up. Now just yesterday I noticed it has started to come back (flame) I tested the water and my amo 0 trite 0 trate 0 phos 0 I tested the nitrates with 2 diffrent kit and both came up with 0 or at least undetectable by the test I was using. My ph is 8.0 have always had troble getting that to stay any higher. my salinity is 1.026 and my temp is steady at 77. I have good flow in the system a 250 gph pump in the display and a 135 gph pump in the filter. My light is 12 on 12 off with ecoxotic leds 2 white 2 blue and have a light on the fuge that runs at night 5,000k compact flourecent. I dont know what I am doing wrong to keep getting this cyano but it is really frustrating (flame)

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Cyano is like the herpes of aquariums. It comes and goes at a moments notice.

 

There are lots of treatment options and they don't always work making cyano particularly annoying. I suggest using the least invasive techniques first (siphon it out, powerhead right on it, flip or reposition the rock it is on, shut off the lights, feed less, etc.). You just have to remember that most of these only treat the symptom and something else may pop up when the cyano dies off.

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Depending on the size of the tank you could need some more flow. Every time i've had it i reduce my lighting about 2 hrs for the day and add a powerhead and it goes away. If its the biocube you're talking about then with my experience with nano's I would do a 3-5g water change weekly. Never had any issues doing this.

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I've been thru bad cyano outbreaks in the past. The first time was horrible. It covered everything and plagued my tank for about 8 months. I siphoned it out daily, did 25% WC every couple days, basted it off rocks and corals daily, cleaned pumps every 2 days, increased my skimmer size, added GFO and carbon, tried carbon dosing, increased flow, changed RO filters every month.......I mean if there is a "cure" for cyano like the stuff posted above I had tried it. In the end, it finally went away on its own. But, like I said I did struggle for 8 months with this stuff. I almost quit the hobby because of it.

 

This last time I started getting it and again I did everything possible. I simply did not want to battle it for 8 months this time, so i dosed some chemiclean. Cleared it right up and haven't seen a speck in about 2 or 3 months now.

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Use some red slime remover stuff worked great. I had some cyano Problems and garret sold me red slime stuff. At first i was skeptical about my corals but everything turned out great in 1 day everything was gone and hasn't came back since.

 

 

Same here, this stuff works great and i've never had any issues with my corals/fish/inverts using it. Only issue is that your skimmer has to be off and when you turn it back on it goes bonkers for a day and overflows the collection cup, but aside from that I love the stuff!

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Isn't Chemi-Pure Elite just a mixture of carbon and GFO?

 

It has some resin too if I remember well. I opened one out of curiosity some time ago.

 

As suggested try with lights off, syphon, increase flow a little and give it some time, say a few weeks. If it doesn't go away you might consider to use some chemicals, depending on the history of your tank (age, filtration) and your goals: what are you doing with it, for instance if you are trying to breed something and you don't want to interrupt that process right now. If you have something going on, you might wait a little more before to dose. But you have to be diligent with maintenance and cleaning. Read: you have to be a syphon ninja.

The first thing to do is to be sure that it is cyano. No one can tell by eye, neither the most experienced marine biologist. It could be dinoflagellates or many other things. It should be cyano, it is one of the most common nuisances (from an reefkeeper point of view). I always tell people to get a microscope: even the $30 that you find at toy's r us will work for your investigations.

The second thing to do should be to find the cause, but with cyano most of the time there is no cause. In fact a lot of experienced reefkeepers that replied your thread had cyano even if they really know how to run a reef tank. It is always there and it will come out.

Keep in mind that there are a couple of things that Mr Cyano hates: low ph, high alk and low temp.

Good luck

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I suspect that cyano outbreaks in well-run tanks with extremely low or zero measurable macronutrients are tied to nutrient levels in the substrate rather than the water. Specifically, I suspect that phosphorus accumulation in the substrate is key.

 

Most hobbyists are aware that cyano can fix its own nitrogen and therefore has a major competitive advantage in low N conditions. But it's more complex than that (...ain't it always?). It's not simply low N but a low N:P ratio (less than 16:1) that is advantageous to cyano. There are two ways to drop the N:P ratio: either reduce N or raise P. Most hobbyists want low-N environments for the good health of our livestock and do everything we can to that end, so that's half the problem right there... The other half is that cyano can raise P by extracting it from the substrate -- or, more accurately, by creating conditions which allow P to diffuse out of the substrate at night.

 

In anoxic (low oxygen) and anaerobic (zero oxygen) water, a fundamental aspect of the water's chemistry changes, permitting nutrients that aren't normally soluble to become so. Under anoxic/anaerobic conditions in the water within the substrate (known as "pore water" or "interstitial water" because it occupies the spaces between the individual grains of sand and silt) the solubility of some nutrients can be such that their concentration can potentially reach hundreds or even thousands of times that measured in the overlying water.*

 

This is the source of what is colloquially known in the hobby as "the deep sand bed nutrient time bomb": at some point, the concentration of nutrients in the substrate will max out, and it will stop absorbing them. When this nutrient sink suddenly stops working, what appeared to be a balanced system will begin to accumulate nutrients and crash. Calling it a "bomb" is fundamentally misleading: nutrients aren't expelled from the substrate; rather, the substrate simply stops absorbing them. Back In The Day, this was known as "old tank syndrome" among hobbyists. It occurs when the substrate becomes saturated with phosphorus.

 

The depth below the surface of a tank's substrate (or a DSB) at which oxygen becomes depleted is directly related to the grain size of the substrate. Smaller grain sizes become anaerobic at shallower depths because the grains pack tighter and interstitial spaces are smaller, which restricts the diffusion of oxygen into the substrate, and the exposed surface area per unit volume is greater, so there's more space for bacteria to colonize, and it's bacterial respiration that's consuming the oxygen. At what depth in the substrate this change in water chemistry occurs is also highly dependent on whether or not critters are turning over the sand or mud, but the trend toward finer sand in display tanks facilitates it even in shallow sand beds. (...FYI, that's also how "miracle mud" works. And it's worth noting that some nutrients, including phosphorus, can adhere directly to substrate particles when in soluble form, so substrates with a high surface-area-to-volume ratio -- ie, a small grain size, like fine sand and mud -- make the best nutrient sinks.)

 

The availability of this reservoir of soluble nutrients not far below the surface of the substrate makes it a biological hot spot. It's an interface between two different environments, analogous to the intertidal zone or the littoral zone of a lake. In the wild, mats of algae and bacteria will often grow in both FW and SW just above the substrate. These communities thrive by maintaining a pocket of anoxic water underneath the mats, allowing nutrients to diffuse up out of the substrate -- though only at night because photosynthesis oxygenates the water, and oxygen makes the nutrients (most notably phosphorus and iron, for those of you playing along at home) insoluble again. FWIW, I suspect that some freshwater aquatic plants can pull off this trick, as well.

 

Cyano has been a prime mover in the creation of microbial mats for billions of years, and that seems to be what it wants to do in our fish tanks, as well. That's why it doesn't like high flow, and that's why it goes away if you wait it out -- it will eventually deplete the phosphorus in the substrate, lose its competitive advantage over the other algaes in the tank, and die back. And when some critical tipping point is reached as phosphorus accumulates and population density increases, you get another cyano bloom.

 

 

--

 

* What's really going on is that the change in redox potential in anoxic/anaerobic conditions changes what chemical reactions are "profitable" to bacteria -- that is, it changes what reactions bacteria can extract energy from in order to survive and multiply. The highly soluble nutrients that accumulate in the interstitial water are metabolic waste products of the bacteria:

 

"The prokaryotes (bacteria) comprise the bulk of the biomass and chemical activity in sediments. ... The characteristic vertical nutrient (electron donor and electron acceptor) profiles seen in sediments are produced as a result of microbial activities, with each nutrient a product or reactant of one or more metabolic groups."

 

- abstract,

SEDIMENT BACTERIA: Who's There, What Are They Doing, and What's New?

Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences

Vol. 25: 403-434 (Volume publication date May 1997)

DOI: 10.1146/annurev.earth.25.1.403

 

 

--

 

And we conclude tonight's lecture with the obvious Q: Okay, Mr. Smarty-Pants, if cyano likes low N:P ratios, will raising N make it go away?

 

A: Yes, it probably will. Hardcore saltwater hobbyists may not be aware of this, but there's a management method for FW planted tanks called estimative index dosing which calls for maintaining a low level of N because if you permit the plants to suck all the N out of the water, you open the door to a cyano bloom.

 

Of course, raising N in an aquarium that isn't densely planted opens the door to a bloom of green algae, so if you're the type who likes to mess with water chemistry, you might try concurrently raising dissolved silicon to encourage a diatom bloom, instead. They'll outcompete green algae for P at high Si:P ratios, and pretty much all your friendly neighborhood algae eaters totally heart diatoms. Though on the other hand, diatoms colonize microbial mats and may have a symbiotic relationship with cyano, so this tactic could massively backfire...

 

Back to the drawing board, then.

 

I'm not a devotee of EI dosing, but I can't help but notice that the goal of that system is to maintain 20-30 ppm N and 1-3 ppm P, and 1-2 ppm P would be close to the magic N:P ratio of 16:1 that's the break point between cyano and green algae. Get down below 10:1 and cyano has the edge; get much above 20:1 and green algae has a competitive advantage. But if you stay close to 16:1, neither group of algaes can get ahead of the other. Of course, allowable nutrient concentrations are much lower in a reef tank, but the magic ratio should be the same, as FW algaes are all descended from species that evolved in SW. And note that 16:1 is part of the Redfield ratio of C:N:P -- 106:16:1.

 

Something to think about, at any rate.

 

I always tell people to get a microscope: even the $30 that you find at toy's r us will work for your investigations.

 

Yes, buy a microscope. Useful tool to have in this hobby. And a hand lens, too.

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I've been thru bad cyano outbreaks in the past. The first time was horrible. It covered everything and plagued my tank for about 8 months. I siphoned it out daily, did 25% WC every couple days, basted it off rocks and corals daily, cleaned pumps every 2 days, increased my skimmer size, added GFO and carbon, tried carbon dosing, increased flow, changed RO filters every month.......I mean if there is a "cure" for cyano like the stuff posted above I had tried it. In the end, it finally went away on its own. But, like I said I did struggle for 8 months with this stuff. I almost quit the hobby because of it.

 

This last time I started getting it and again I did everything possible. I simply did not want to battle it for 8 months this time, so i dosed some chemiclean. Cleared it right up and haven't seen a speck in about 2 or 3 months now.

 

I am having a cyano outbreak right now. It blankets almost everything overnight, I started my chemiclean treatment yesterday, I hope it works as good as advertised...............

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Mine never reaches epidemic proportions but it never fully clears up either it seems to come and go in waves. I wonder if there is a link between it and my fuge area because it is always worst in my fuge then in the display.

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I am having a cyano outbreak right now. It blankets almost everything overnight' date=' I started my chemiclean treatment yesterday, I hope it works as good as advertised...............[/quote']

 

Definitely is, if you follow the directions you will be fine. I think adding an air stone to the tank while the chemiclean is working is the biggest thing. I still have not seen a speck since my last treatment a few months ago.

 

Mine never reaches epidemic proportions but it never fully clears up either it seems to come and go in waves. I wonder if there is a link between it and my fuge area because it is always worst in my fuge then in the display.

 

That is the sole reason i stopped using a fuge, it became just a detritus, algae, cyano sink.

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Definitely is, if you follow the directions you will be fine. I think adding an air stone to the tank while the chemiclean is working is the biggest thing. I still have not seen a speck since my last treatment a few months ago.

 

 

 

That is the sole reason i stopped using a fuge, it became just a detritus, algae, cyano sink.

 

Airstone added!!!!! I put the airstone in my fuge next to my return pump because I dont really like the idea of having it in my display. My actinics kicked on and it appears that the chemiclean is working.......(clap).

 

My system is only about 6 months old........ My fuge is a DIY creation, but it is really clean with nothing but live rock and cheato. It doesnt grow much unwanted algae hardly at all down there. im running a 24" 2 x T5 10k fixture over the cheato and it grows like wild fire

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Definitely is' date=' if you follow the directions you will be fine. I think adding an air stone to the tank while the chemiclean is working is the biggest thing. I still have not seen a speck since my last treatment a few months ago. [/quote']

 

 

See, that's the thing....Anytime someone says you have to "follow directions and you'll be fine", that raises a big red flag in my mind. I'd rather do something that is pretty much idiot proof. That's why I recommended Chemi-Pure Elite. Drop the bag in medium flow area in your sump and forget it. It is amazing stuff.

 

If I add a chemical to my tank, and there is a chance that I can screw up and kill my tank, I try to avoid doing that.

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See, that's the thing....Anytime someone says you have to "follow directions and you'll be fine", that raises a big red flag in my mind. I'd rather do something that is pretty much idiot proof. That's why I recommended Chemi-Pure Elite. Drop the bag in medium flow area in your sump and forget it. It is amazing stuff.

 

If I add a chemical to my tank, and there is a chance that I can screw up and kill my tank, I try to avoid doing that.

 

So you didn't read the directions or anything before dumping a mixture of DI resin, carbon, and GFO into your tank? You don't know how long it will last, where to put it, or what else is in it. That kind of blind dumping in of chemicals is what causes problems. Following directions never killed a tank that I know of.

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See, that's the thing....Anytime someone says you have to "follow directions and you'll be fine", that raises a big red flag in my mind. I'd rather do something that is pretty much idiot proof. That's why I recommended Chemi-Pure Elite. Drop the bag in medium flow area in your sump and forget it. It is amazing stuff.

 

If I add a chemical to my tank, and there is a chance that I can screw up and kill my tank, I try to avoid doing that.

 

It isnt the chemical the kills. Chemi-clean works as a nutrient oxidizer. The killing comes from the chemical stealing oxygen from the water column to oxidize the "sludge." Too much = hypoxia or anoxia not poisoning

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