Tomoko Schum
07/16/2004, 11:43 AM
My zoos and mushrooms in my 15 gallon tank are looking rather unhappy lately (not opening fully and looking small for about a month now), although leathers, star polyps, various xenia, a pavona cactus and a capnella are all doing very well. Snails, hermit crabs, mysis and pods are all looking fine, too. I tried a number of things, such as water changes and adding more live rocks, but nothing seem to help so far.
Is there a disease common among zoos and mushrooms?
This problem with zoos and mushrooms seem to have started around the time I started increasing the alkalinity a month ago due to pH going too low during the night for quite sometime. I also added a small high fin striped goby (only other fish in there is a neon goby.) Two weeks or so into the new regimen with baking soda to keep alkalinity to 8 to 9 dKH, some zoos started looking unhappy. I blamed it to the flatworm population increase and treated the tank twice with Flatworm Exit. Nothing seemed out of ordinary after a water change (per instruction.) Then red slime got heavy. I tried to siphon them out and kept pruning my macro in my refugium to encourage macro to export any excess nutrient. I finally ended up using red slime remover which took care of red slime (one and a half weeks or so after the flatworm treatment.) However, aggressive hair algae started coming in. I?fm afraid that the ecological balance in this tank is lost due to my meddling. No snails including small Mexican Turbo snails seem to be interested in eating them, so I am keeping up with hand removal. Ammonia, nitrate and phosphate have been reading zero throughout this ordeal. I suppose they are sequestered by algae as soon as they enter the water column. My macro are growing well, I also added more live rocks to the tank just in case. I also started dosing the tank with Kalkwasser a week and a half ago to keep the night time pH from dropping too low. pH is about 8.0 in the morning now and the daytime pH is about 8.2 or so (pretty stable in this range.) Alkalinity is about 7.5 to 8 dKH. My tank temp has been high (81 to 83) during the summer, but I did not have any problem last year with the same temperature range.
Tomoko
Is there a disease common among zoos and mushrooms?
This problem with zoos and mushrooms seem to have started around the time I started increasing the alkalinity a month ago due to pH going too low during the night for quite sometime. I also added a small high fin striped goby (only other fish in there is a neon goby.) Two weeks or so into the new regimen with baking soda to keep alkalinity to 8 to 9 dKH, some zoos started looking unhappy. I blamed it to the flatworm population increase and treated the tank twice with Flatworm Exit. Nothing seemed out of ordinary after a water change (per instruction.) Then red slime got heavy. I tried to siphon them out and kept pruning my macro in my refugium to encourage macro to export any excess nutrient. I finally ended up using red slime remover which took care of red slime (one and a half weeks or so after the flatworm treatment.) However, aggressive hair algae started coming in. I?fm afraid that the ecological balance in this tank is lost due to my meddling. No snails including small Mexican Turbo snails seem to be interested in eating them, so I am keeping up with hand removal. Ammonia, nitrate and phosphate have been reading zero throughout this ordeal. I suppose they are sequestered by algae as soon as they enter the water column. My macro are growing well, I also added more live rocks to the tank just in case. I also started dosing the tank with Kalkwasser a week and a half ago to keep the night time pH from dropping too low. pH is about 8.0 in the morning now and the daytime pH is about 8.2 or so (pretty stable in this range.) Alkalinity is about 7.5 to 8 dKH. My tank temp has been high (81 to 83) during the summer, but I did not have any problem last year with the same temperature range.
Tomoko