Algae fun=(

[heedicus]

ok watch out this may be a long post, but read it and give me your two cents =)

So i seems to haves algae. Its a constant problem i have had the entire time i have had my system up (50 gal december). my parameters, ammmo nitrite, phosphate, silicate, ect are at 0 and nitrates are at a little under 5. the tank is not in sunlight but i think at some point in time it must get sunlight because that has to be a contributing factor to the algae. luckily enough it will be moving next week to GFs house and wont have any sun at all. the lamps are only 2-3 months old(4 55watt pc).
I bought the tank used for $50 and started from there with CC and an emporer 400. since then i have ditch both for 45 lbs of LR and a 5 in DSB. I had problems with algae before the dsb and have problems with it after. i dont overfeed my tank, there is one damsel and one lawnmower blenny. there is one colony of polyps that were doing terrific till this last week and a condy anemone that seems to be doing fine.
yet i come home from work and my tank literally looks brown. i think its diatom algae but i am not sure. I bought a RO/DI in hopes it would help but hasnt really.
I know that tanks go through an algae bloom cycle but i never seem to go anywhere but with more algae. All critters till this last week were doing great (the polyps are the only ones struggling now). I have a cpr backpack skimmer and the lights are only on 10 hours a day. i have 2 175gph powerheads and one 275 gph powerhead so there is lots of water movement.

there are a couple wierd things in my tank though. a lot of the sand is turning black. and not just deep in the bed, all the way to the surface. it only happens on some spots but the patches are a couple inches wide and go a couple inches deep.
even if i clean of the algae off the sand every day, by the next day there is a new layer. i have a power head sweeping across the sand bed but the algae still is established.
the weird thing too is that i have another tank (20 gallon 2 months running). that i used the same sand and water with that is a bout four feet away from the big tank that has no algae problems to speak of. i know its a young tank but the big tank had already started the algae fun by 2 months.
could the tank itself had some chemical or something in it that is causeing the algae or the black sand? is there anything else anyone thinks i can do??? should i start the tank over? should i start the tank over in a new tank????? i love this hobby but this everyday problem is wearing on me.

so i have brown i think diatom algae everywhere,
what should i do???
thanks
tren

[Allan W]

I'm new to the hobby but I will throw my 2 cents in here for what it's worth :)

When I first cycled my tank I almost immediately had a similar brown algae covering EVERYTHING. I determined it was in fact a diatom bloom in my case and the thing that solved it for me was getting some reef janitors from GARF.org here in Boise. I have a 75 gal. tank and they sold me a combination of snails and hermit crabs that litterally cleaned the entire tank of the diatoms in less than a week. I haven't had the brown stuff back since. For my size tank they recommended I get 112 critters, at $1 each it was a tad spendy, but you could get less than the ammount they recommend and I am sure it would help.

Geothermal Aquaculture Research Foundation
1321 Warm Springs Av BOISE ID 83712-8026 (208) 344-6163

Give them a call, I'm sure they can help you out with the janitors. As for your black spots in the sand ... maybe a cyanobacteria outbreak? /shrug Can't help you there, never seen that :)

[deucejimmo]

heedicus
the brown algea is more than likely diatoms. The only way to get rid of them is to rid your tank and water of silicate. Your RO\DI should take care of a lot of silicate but probibly not all of it. as for the green algea , an urchin can do wonderful things for tanks that hair alges problems. One thing you didnt talk about was Phosphate, which is a major algea food. I am not a big fan of hermit crabs for algea erratication. I think they can do more harm than good. Snails do not eat green algea, however, they are diatom eaters and can help decrease the amount of glass scraping you have to do .


good luck.

[heedicus]

Thanks jimmo
well i have moved the tank from my exhouse to my gf house and when i did that i swapped out the sand bed. I had a talk with dr ron and he sugguested i try the dsb thing again. I didnt use enough ls to seed the bed and apparently it just sucked up all nutirents in the tank and was baaaddd news. but with my new sand I got a ipsf ls activator kit. great deal and great product big fan of that company. needless to say tank much happier. i did get two hermit hitchhikers with the ls. They are both pretty small and i cant decide whether to throw them out or not...

[wticknor]

Heedicus,

I agree with Allan W. From your detailed description, it sounds like we have tanks with similar parameters (tank size, lighting, etc.). I, too, experienced a problem with crazy brown algae (diatoms) covering the rock and sand. Though I never had 'black' patches of sand, there were some large patches of brown.

At the time of my problem, I had a shallow sand bed (had been torn between sand and eggcrate, so I was trying to split the difference..a bad idea), and no hermits (hermits had been eating my white sand stars and so I got rid of the hermits...another bad idea). Since then, I got a ton of blue-legged hermits only (almost 1 per gallon), got rid of the white sand stars, increased to a 4'' DSB, got a couple of green emerald crabs, and a wide variety of snails (about 20 turbos, 20 margaritas, 15 cerith, and 10 astrea).

Janitors are doing a great job keeping everything super clean. No more evidence of diatoms, hair algae, or cyano and coralline is growing like crazy. This may not be the only solution, but it seems to have worked quite well for me so far. Good luck.

- Bill

[deucejimmo]

Heedicus
Dont worry about the few hermit hitch hickers .