davidsea

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need some help!!!! Red slime ??????? no2 & no3 are 0.
40 gal. reef. 50lbs lr 30 lbs sand up over a year. Never had before iin my tank. Bio. load light to med. New light on tank one month ,two weeks later red slime. Did two 50% water changes 2X Scurb lr to clean off and pick all i can off of 1" sand bottom. Need some HELP!!!!!!! Making me crazy
1 clown 1 small sc benny
1 6line wrasse
2 yel. tang small & med
1 yel. gobie
Mush., colt coral, LTA 8" open , hammer head coral all looking good
CRP skimmer
reactor with chemi-pure elite & poly pad
Current Orbit light 150mh &2 96w at.
2 power heads on wave maker for cir.
 

bizarrecorals

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Search for some other threads here, theres a lot of good info.

It might help if you list your water perimeter.
Do you use R.O. water for water changes?, check your phosphate and nitrate. By setting up a refugium will help a lot.
 

DCG1286

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How much are you feeding your fish? IMHO ... your bioload is not on the light to med side ... 2 Yellow Tangs in a 40G ... one too many ... I am not one of those that will argue what you put in your tank ... that is your choice ... but Tangs grow very large ... very quickly ... swim a lot ... poop a lot (excess nutrients) ... a 40G tank just can't handle that. Just a thought .

+1 to the questions bizarrecorals asked.
 

SevTT

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need some help!!!! Red slime ??????? no2 & no3 are 0.
40 gal. reef. 50lbs lr 30 lbs sand up over a year. Never had before iin my tank. Bio. load light to med. New light on tank one month ,two weeks later red slime. Did two 50% water changes 2X Scurb lr to clean off and pick all i can off of 1" sand bottom. Need some HELP!!!!!!! Making me crazy
1 clown 1 small sc benny
1 6line wrasse
2 yel. tang small & med
1 yel. gobie
Mush., colt coral, LTA 8" open , hammer head coral all looking good
CRP skimmer
reactor with chemi-pure elite & poly pad
Current Orbit light 150mh &2 96w at.
2 power heads on wave maker for cir.


Alk's often the culprit.
 
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Well, your nitrates are probably not zero. Did you test for phosphates? Because those are probably not zero either.

How often do you do water changes? Frequent water changes can minimize red slime algae.

What kind of powerheads are they? I found myself battling cyano once and my parameters were relatively good and just upping the flow did the trick. Cyano tends to settle where the flow is low. You might want to turn both powerheads on full blast and see what that does.

And I would agree that 2 yellow tangs in a 40g will be bad news in the long run. Aside from the fact that they poop a lot (=more nitrates in a 40g), as they get bigger and older, they will start to fight as 40g is really too small for just one. I would suggest re-homing the larger of the two and you could keep the little one until it gets bigger. Just a suggestion though - beat up, stressed out fish are not attractive. :)
 

bizarrecorals

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+1 Ellebelle

use ro/di with water changes, by using tapwater, you are just putting phosphate back in, setting up a refugium will help too.
 

SevTT

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Red Slime is cyano. Chemiclean makes a Red Slime remover that works very well. You have to make a large water change after you use it so keep it in mind.

Eeh, I'm leery of putting antibiotics into my tank. Cyano is generally a sign that something's wrong, so you want to eliminate whatever's wrong first. THe tank's about a year old -- maybe the RO/DI's exhausted if the cartridges haven't been changed, and phosphate's making its way in?


IN the meanwhile, if it's out of control, suck the biggest mats off and give the tank 24-48 hours of no lights. (WARNING: may cause anemones to roam.) That should knock it back a great deal and give you some time.
 
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Eeh, I'm leery of putting antibiotics into my tank.

Why? Aren't they made for this very situation? Ive never heard any one having a problem with this stuff if you follow the directions. And it sure beats putting vodka in. Once you have a cyano bloom in the water column it is very very hard to get rid of with just water changes. You wont get rid of all of it and the stuff that's left over will just keep multiplying.
 

mr_X

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turning off the lights won't help anything. it will appear that it has lessened, but as soon as the lights go back on it will come right back.

cyano can also be found in high flow areas as well. i have seen it in some tanks just in the high flow areas and on powerheads.

there is debate about it being caused by excess nutrients, but i believe it's the cause. waterchanges is the answer IMO/IME.

i've used the chemiclean in a pinch on a clients tank and have had no adverse reactions from it. sure, it's eurythromycin, but apparently it doesn't harm the good bacteria (don't ask me why), because i saw no spike what so ever.

you'll have to do multiple waterchanges to remove it all. your skimmer will overflow until you can remove the bulk of it.
 

bizarrecorals

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a bottle of good vodka is pretty expensive, might be easier purchasing the "right" product, keep nitarte, nitrite, phosphate low, frequent w/c should be easy to solve the problem
 

davidsea

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Thanks for all the feed back. I got UltraLife red slime remover and applied a 2nd dose as inst. Its 48hrs and 75% of it is gone no side effects on anylive stock. Makes skimmmer fill a cup a day of nasty stuff. Will wait four more days , stir everything up
and make a 50% water change.
 

ecchybridLE

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i pushed my alk to a steady 10 dkh with good flow and a cyno eating gobie. and my tank is looking so much better. had cyno on sand mostly then on the rocks a bit and the gobie took it all out for me. Holding the alk high and good flow help keep the diatoms from grasping on and spreading. good luck with it. As for the gobie that eats cyano. it might be called a sleeper gobie, but not exactly sure.
 

SevTT

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Why? Aren't they made for this very situation? Ive never heard any one having a problem with this stuff if you follow the directions. And it sure beats putting vodka in. Once you have a cyano bloom in the water column it is very very hard to get rid of with just water changes. You wont get rid of all of it and the stuff that's left over will just keep multiplying.

They're made for this situation, yes, but the fact is that the antibiotics aren't specific and have the potential to wipe out a chunk of your nitrogen-oxidizing bacteria. Vodka's actually safer, since instead of killing things while reducing your tank's ability to process nitrogenous waste, it actually causes a (minor) bloom of bacteria that specialize in consuming nitrogenous wastes. These are rapidly filtered out of the water column by your skimmer and eaten by a lot of things in the tank, too.

You have to look at what's fueling the cyano growth. This is usually excess phosphate and a combination of excess nitrogen, excess sulphur, or, I believe, a few other elements that cyanobacteria can use in lieu of nitrogen. (They're remarkably flexible little beasts, which is what makes them a pain to eliminate and what's allowed them to survive virtually unchanged since they killed off almost all extant life on the planet about 2 billion years ago.)

If the nitrogen's actually zero but you're still getting cyano growth, it's probably high phos, which can be eliminated through chemical scrubbing or nitrate dosing.
 

SevTT

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a bottle of good vodka is pretty expensive, might be easier purchasing the "right" product, keep nitarte, nitrite, phosphate low, frequent w/c should be easy to solve the problem

That's why you don't use good vodka. All you need is ethanol; Georgi will get that for you fine. ;)

Also, implying that it's not the 'right' product is wrong. Vodka-dosing, when done properly, is safer than (or the same as) many commercial products, and effective. Its method of action in reducing nitrogenous compounds is well-understood. It's an accepted and acceptable method of doing what you say; keeping the nitrate/nitrite and phosphate low.

...The only reason I don't vodka-dose is because I use acetic acid in my kalk topoff, so that provides another alternate carbon source.
 

SevTT

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turning off the lights won't help anything. it will appear that it has lessened, but as soon as the lights go back on it will come right back.

Turning off the lights can help knock back a bad bloom, or put the finishing touches on one that's mostly gone. However, you want to remove as much cyano as possible before, and when possible, during the treatment.

cyano can also be found in high flow areas as well. i have seen it in some tanks just in the high flow areas and on powerheads.

Yeah, flow didn't do much to control the cyano outbreak that I had.

there is debate about it being caused by excess nutrients, but i believe it's the cause. waterchanges is the answer IMO/IME.

I think that it's actually a combination of excess nutrients and a lack of other nutrients that other, more competitive critters like algae can use. (For example, if there's 0 nitrates and ites and ammonia, but detectable phosphate, cyano can use other things like sulfur instead of nitrate. So if you dosed your tank with epsom salts, it has another fuel source.) Also, cyano appears to be affected by photoinhibition to more of an extent than most corals; powerful light seems to inhibit or kill it while weaker light appears to bolster it. "Blasting" the tank with more powerful light could help, but of course, it could also have a significant adverse effect upon your corals.
 

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