charliedarling
Community Member
Well, I now realize I’m dealing with what I believe to be Chrysophytes. I have a small 8 gallon nano I got second hand with a pair of clowns, which just came both bare rock. It’s been with me for about two months.
Everything looked super clean at first and I decided to stock some Macroalgae. All well and good, especially because phosphate was .15 and nitrates about 30.
I added a nano Kessil light and slowly ramped it up. The Macroalgae (especially dragons breath) grew like a week and colored up beautifully. After about 4-6 weeks I noticed them starting to get pale and the glass and surfaces covered in a weird film.
Being a newb I just thought eh maybe it’s just diatoms. I’ve been dealing with a big move and stress at work so although I was keeping up in my daily and weekly maintenance I wasn’t scraping the glass every day. Within 7 days the entire glass surface was coated in long strands of brownish stuff which I thought were just red algae. (Sort of struggling with pest identification).
I just got the tank moved to the new place this weekend and was able to deep clean everything. I tested my nitrates and phosphates (which had been trending down over the past 6 weeks) and realized they had both bottomed out to 0.0!
Then it hit me - this isn’t just nuisance algae. It’s got to be chrysophytes. I feel so stupid for not realizing it earlier. I definitely could have prevented it with dosing nitrates and keeping my light down.. but here we are. In the middle of the stress of moving and a lot of stress at work distracted me from how incredibly important it was to not let my levels bottom out. Oh well, I guess. I hope I didn’t just open the revolving pest door.
My plan is to leave the lights off, take the rock to the sink and scrub the hell out of it, and run some GFO for a minute while dosing neo nitro and neo phos to get those levels up.
My rock work isn’t epoxied or glued together and neither are my new corals - so I’ll have a chance to not only clean them but actually get them glued and stable so that I’m not struggling with rock work constantly falling over.
Anyways, that’s my newbie story. Will follow up with how this battle progresses. Little video below of how bad the glass got in literally only 7 days!
YouTube Link
Thanks,
Charlie
Everything looked super clean at first and I decided to stock some Macroalgae. All well and good, especially because phosphate was .15 and nitrates about 30.
I added a nano Kessil light and slowly ramped it up. The Macroalgae (especially dragons breath) grew like a week and colored up beautifully. After about 4-6 weeks I noticed them starting to get pale and the glass and surfaces covered in a weird film.
Being a newb I just thought eh maybe it’s just diatoms. I’ve been dealing with a big move and stress at work so although I was keeping up in my daily and weekly maintenance I wasn’t scraping the glass every day. Within 7 days the entire glass surface was coated in long strands of brownish stuff which I thought were just red algae. (Sort of struggling with pest identification).
I just got the tank moved to the new place this weekend and was able to deep clean everything. I tested my nitrates and phosphates (which had been trending down over the past 6 weeks) and realized they had both bottomed out to 0.0!
Then it hit me - this isn’t just nuisance algae. It’s got to be chrysophytes. I feel so stupid for not realizing it earlier. I definitely could have prevented it with dosing nitrates and keeping my light down.. but here we are. In the middle of the stress of moving and a lot of stress at work distracted me from how incredibly important it was to not let my levels bottom out. Oh well, I guess. I hope I didn’t just open the revolving pest door.
My plan is to leave the lights off, take the rock to the sink and scrub the hell out of it, and run some GFO for a minute while dosing neo nitro and neo phos to get those levels up.
My rock work isn’t epoxied or glued together and neither are my new corals - so I’ll have a chance to not only clean them but actually get them glued and stable so that I’m not struggling with rock work constantly falling over.
Anyways, that’s my newbie story. Will follow up with how this battle progresses. Little video below of how bad the glass got in literally only 7 days!
YouTube Link
Thanks,
Charlie
