Algae Identification

[Gator_Reefer]

we sure have used this work example a lot lately hows updates

Looking good, clean rocks and 100% algae free still.

Corals still look a little irritated but unsure if related to the cleaning job. Im hopeful they’ll get better PE as they get settled in.

 

[brandon429]

Ok perfect sounds great, they should emerge stronger than normal based on prior patterns, you were able to lower light intensity a bit down from norm is that right

 

[Gator_Reefer]

Ok perfect sounds great, they should emerge stronger than normal based on prior patterns, you were able to lower light intensity a bit down from norm is that right

Yes, took it down to 20% for several days, from previous 45% intensity

 

[brandon429]

Pest, eggs of some sort, something else?

Anyone know what this white spiral looking thing on my rock is? Noticed it today. Not sure if pest of some sort, or eggs laid by a snail perhaps?

www.reef2reef.com

Team

Look at Gator's rocks, for a monthslong outcome track as of July 2021

rip cleans are powerful tools to undo reef tank eutrophication.

 

[brandon429]

I use this thread to show others the power of rip cleaning but at 5 pages we want to only feature the best of the best here

we dont want a ten page thread it scares off new readers, even 5 pages is pushing it.

not halfway cleans, true rip cleans from someone so resolved they're not playing around, and last nite another was made here

Algae/Cyano Issue Not Improving, Help Please?

Hi all, I have a Red Sea Reefer 250 that has been up and running for 8 months now. My issue is a strange black algae\cyano growth that has plagued me for the last two months+. I have been treating as follows: cleaning gravel twice weekly 20% water changes twice a week Addition of beneficial...

www.reef2reef.com

thats a flagship example of kicking cyano out with the dishwater. well done

UKR33f3r​

 

[Frostynipps]

this is standard eutrophication you'd be amazed at what test rocks, and some peroxide detailing would do for the rocks above. the sandbed having its waste removed, removes the cause too/resets your params back to what the bag of salt you use would be. here's work examples:

Reef2Reef Pest algae challenge thread hydrogen peroxide

What you are really in for: Hand cleaning, hard work siphon and rasp-removing of accumulations and invasions outside the tank and doing massive water changes is 90% of this thread, peroxide is 10%. We almost never dose peroxide into the tank water, this is a you-work-physically-hard as catch-up...

www.reef2reef.com

if you apply whats in that thread, you have no more algae. Resist the temptation to dose stuff to the water and begin the one thing missing this whole time: surgical disallowance of the target and not storing up detritus in rocks, and on sand. Dont think this has to do with params, uglies, or anything else. its pure allowance caused, and pure disallowance fixed. every inkling will drive you away from actual work, and into more waiting plus adjusting something, but that wont do

the opening line above is that fully invaded reefs are a matter of choice, not biology. lets test that tenet

unchoose this/easy. getting clean is just about resolve

the prevention of growback is all the detail steps and param changes and clean up crew balancing etc.

do not use fluconazole here, it will rob you of your will.

"do not use fluconazole here, it will rob you of your will." what do you mean?

 

[brandon429]

Frosty it means dosing fluconazole is the opposite of the dedicated work we do here, we are removing waste which is often a causative of plant invasions. Dosing fluc adds to the waste mass by killing plants that are left to degrade in rocks and sand. There are some exceptional jobs I would endorse use of fluconazole such as the 17 thousand gallon home reef, imagine rip cleaning that lol. for this thread we will never see fluconazole applied to the before rip clean condition. If someone wants to use it as growback prevention, in a rip cleaned reef, that’s fine.


When someone does a rip clean once they never forget how well it works, they have a new ability, a new will to command the tank as a whole vs just buy things and add to the water and hope/cross fingers and wait. Here in this thread, tanks have been commanded to comply, they’re not coaxed or asked to.


Shadow_k


You have created a complete rip clean guide start to finish, and your after pic is 1000% clean, zero cloud skip cycle reassembly we'd like to feature your recent rip clean done in chat here, well done.

you absolutely did not hesitate to rinse effectively, you used no bottled bacteria in your rip clean after assembly, a perfect skip cycle was earned here and if others copy your work their reef cleaning will go smoothly.

This thread is for the best of the best; we want one simple read, in this case a mere five pages so that anyone wanting to run a rip clean can have a guide that matches multiple tank presentations. Yours is another control against cyano and maybe dinos mixed in...not sure but the matted growth shows the hallmarks of both. We dont focus much on identification here because identifying the organism isn't going to alter our course of action, all rip cleans run the same way.



JBJ 20 gallon AIO dealing with a bad cyano/Dino back and forth for 4 months.I’ve tried chemicals, natural ways could not get rid of it.

here is my journey for my easy rip clean

Draining the tank after removing all the inverts , fish and corals.

Put my rocks in a bucket to swish around/scrub I did not take a picture of the scrubbing of the rock.

tank cleaned out and rinsed with RODI water

Now I tackled the sand this is My sand after 1 rinse

rinse number 75 and yes I counted haha

Rinse 120 crystal clear water mixed it with my hand and water stayed clear.

My camera doesn’t do this tank justice it’s crystal clear !


(adding in an all white shot, the most revealing shot in reefing, hides nothing, shows complete skip cycle clarity here)

 

[brandon429]

Shadow’s reef prognosis is this:


90% chance the sandbed issues stay gone a long time, 10% chance they come back and topical light hand guiding is needed. Typical algae and at times cyano might attach to rocks, they’re new and working on taking on coralline so that’s expected. But as of now, future gardening jobs here will not send cloud and waste flying around the tank, being rip cleaned means expected future hand guiding runs smoother. A new rip clean has been added above in our ultra exclusive cherry picked rip clean work thread. If I’m adding a work example to this particular thread it’s because they did exceptional work. Shadow has for the first time counted the number of rinses it takes a common sandbed to become compliant. 120 rinses? I wish I had a way to move that to page one first read lol even though this isn’t my thread. 120 rinses is dedication, that’s specifically what I’m talking about regarding human resolve, that's complete command with procedural steps clearly shown. detritus and invasion was forcefully removed from the substrate here. Adding no bottle bac shines light back on updated cycling science that says live rock bacteria is all any reef needs, we specifically did not buy or add bottled bacteria in any job we do in this thread.

old cycling science is specifically causing the loss of thousands of reefs that are months/years beyond cycling because old cycling science says any loss of systemic bacteria is harmful and causes mini cycles, and the takeaway would be that rip cleaning would kill tanks vs fix them for an upcoming fifty pages. Rip cleans save reefs that are eutrophic and heading for loss.


Old cycling science harms the hobby and keeps folks into buying repeated doses of bacteria out of fear and doubt, new cycling science helps the hobby and never the two will meet or agree on any aspect of cycling a reef tank that's for sure.

 

[brandon429]

I give my word Shadow_k’s picture succession above has generated the most rip clean requests ive seen in direct requests. That succession pic set has saved twenty tanks and I’m waiting a while to see who was the most thorough. Unless someone wants to golden buzzer it, go right ahead, dude above rinsed 129 times lol


great job


this thread in its ideal state can’t be anything but the sheerest example of rip cleaning that humans can do. Instead of fifty pages of dang good A grade rip cleans, available, we got five pages of the genetic double expression A++ sorry it’s 1% of the population included. Among rip cleans there has to be a gradient


here would be the golden buzzer ones.

weeks after rip clean update from today on Shadow's tank

 

[Jonas Bergkvist]

This is algae that should be easily reduced with liquid vibrant.
Other option would be a combo of : Conch snails, turbo snails, astrea snails and trochus snails. Also a sea Hare should mow this right down

I guess Vibrant would help, but then i think the Aquarium will be super cloudy afterwards? It would take some real effort to get rid of all the algae floating around = nutrients.

Had an acquaintance do that and the tank looked like **** for like three weeks. It got stuck everywhere and was a complete pea-soup-mess.

I like the more natural approach with a sea hare. And manual removal of the algae.

 

[brandon429]

Team of recent posts here

read this thread start to finish

it’s not for vibrant or anyone’s doser


these are the top rip cleans in the world in this post, it’s not for anyones doser or vibrant or fluconazole etc, I’m asking/ begging folks please don’t take a rip clean work thread, solely results pics driven, and sub in non rip clean options

Vibrant Killing Corals..

So I had some very small spots of algae in my tank, 3 spots each the size of a nickel. I decided to test out vibrant to see what this chemical was all about. I started out with a conservative dose of 3ml for a 100 gallon tank. Well this was a horrible mistake. Within 12hrs I started to notice...

www.reef2reef.com

We need threads that are exclusive rip cleans that way we have contrast to the commoner methods

we link this to help people clearly define a rip clean from the fifty other methods they could choose. This is an assembly of the best rip cleans in the world, the only thing we add here is rip cleans done so well they can be associated with the best in the world. We want a short, concise non thirty page thread any reader can scan in five minutes


Anyone who uses vibrant risks killing their reef. Anyone who rip cleans will save their reef, there isn’t a ‘rip clean killed my tank’ thread for that reason.

@shadow_k
thank you for providing the latest example of a world class rip clean with no hesitation, fuss, or distraction you simply ripped the tank into compliance and that’s what we do here. I’ve completed ten rip cleans on file since yours and they’re updated in the sand rinse thread last pages


they weren’t added here because I saw one speck of sand in the water in their after pics heh.

 

[vetteguy53081]

I guess Vibrant would help, but then i think the Aquarium will be super cloudy afterwards? It would take some real effort to get rid of all the algae floating around = nutrients.

Had an acquaintance do that and the tank looked like **** for like three weeks. It got stuck everywhere and was a complete pea-soup-mess.

I like the more natural approach with a sea hare. And manual removal of the algae.

I havent had much of cloudiness with use of vibrant. I always recommend to dose 80% of recommended dosage

 

[brandon429]

@shadow_k


can you help get our rip clean thread back on solid ground by posting a full tank shot of your post rip reef today in the afternoon after lights have brought out those wonderful corals

I can depend on you to support our method and I appreciate that.


Recent posters remember I’m not being mean or argumentative don’t take it that way. Most algae works threads are indeed a mix of recommends and the owner picks a best suggestion


but that’s all other threads, this one is to set the highest bar possible for reef tank surgery and compare results and consistency here to other common methods

 

[shadow_k]

Sure no problem! Here are my pictures I took last night after my rip clean in September as you can see no algae on sand or corals all corals are growing no issuesso far with tank health .

i 100% back the rip clean process it saved my tank and my investment I’ll do it again if I had too no hesitation.

 

[brandon429]

Other than gemlike quality pics that appear to be of an empty reef (hovering fish need no water now that’s clarity) the other standout character is we didn’t need a second rip.

one job done right stopped the entire eutrophication process dead in its tracks.

 

[xabo]

I needed to see this thread a week ago. This was the condition of practically all of the rock in the tank:

Got rid of the corals and fish and went to work on the rock with:

 

[xabo]

Got rid of corals and fish and used this to clean the rock:

 

[brandon429]

that'll certainly remove it but yes I'd have used the dentist / targeting approach plus the peroxide simply because it leaves less of a swath of cleared space/ is more precision working around coralline areas

but it wont harm anything for that to be the original pass above, those cleared areas will be bright and reflective and may want to take on algae so keep 'em guided clean until you plant corals on them or coralline takes over.

that was truly some thick invader I have no idea what the growth is. reefs are amazing in the diversity they present, somewhere in the universe a grazer is matched to that stuff. I wanted this thread to be force first, chemicals second, water dosers none, and heck that does qualify above. nice run

 

[xabo]

This is the rock today:

What I didn't do;
1. Mist/spray the rock with peroxide......I have 35% peroxide but read that it will kill the bacteria.

2. Rinse the sand.......Tank is a 225 gal. and sand is infested with aptasia. I figure it's better to just replace the sand.

Thoughts....................

 

[xabo]

that'll certainly remove it but yes I'd have used the dentist / targeting approach plus the peroxide simply because it leaves less of a swath of cleared space/ is more precision working around coralline areas

but it wont harm anything for that to be the original pass above, those cleared areas will be bright and reflective and may want to take on algae so keep 'em guided clean until you plant corals on them or coralline takes over.

that was truly some thick invader I have no idea what the growth is. reefs are amazing in the diversity they present, somewhere in the universe a grazer is matched to that stuff. I wanted this thread to be force first, chemicals second, water dosers none, and heck that does qualify above. nice run

I've been told it's Red Turf Algae....there's thread on it here on R2R:

The red turf algae battle

Wanted to post about this in the event others start looking for ways to battle this crap -- I found it hard to find a lot of meaningful content anywhere. What my rock work looks like: My tank is more or less completely overrun with red turf algae. I have always operated under the assumption...

www.reef2reef.com

I've tried everything suggested in the thread, Turbo Snails, Urchins etc. and nothing worked.

Question, did I kill off all of the bacteria?