Yes, all of it lol. It all happened overnight. Everything was going along fine then all of a sudden the rocks are all green, the sand is green on top and brown down below (should I try to vacuum it?) and the film on the glass. I had a clean up crew of 20 snails and they all died just before this happened.
Is it possible your tank isn't fed enough and the snails starved? The dead snails decaying may have released the nutrients to allow stuff to grow.
Yes, that's definitely possible... It makes sense. Any suggestions for what to do about the algae I have now?
Enjoy it?
I would stop adding ammonia. A water change wouldn't be a bad idea. Once your nitrite gets a bit lower I feel you would be fine adding fish.I am cycling a tank. I can dose the ammonia up to 2 ppm and it drops to zero in about a day. I’ve done this three times over the last week.
My nitrite reading hasn’t seemed to change at all. I’m using an api test kit and nitrites are still a deep purple color.
Thoughts? Should I dose the ammonia back to 2ppm when it hits 0, should I let it sit at zero a couple days and see what the nitrites do, or should I do a sizeable change to try lowering the nitrites?
saturday night
dosed back up
sunday night
monday night
Is the algae going to hurt my fish?
Nope. Dinoflagellates (brown snotty looking stuff) can release toxins but many fish will eat various algaes.
My lfs taught me how to cycle a tank wrong. I’m wrong for not doing research and listening to them but I already have 4 snails and a frogspawn and gsp in here because they reccomended me to get themI have diatom on the sand copepods everywhere growing randomly
It's normally very arbitrary. You won't have any idea where your nitrates are until your nitrites go away and for me, that drives if I recommend a water change or not. Since you already have livestock in your tank, a water change won't hurt but I doubt it is needed. Nitrites are not nearly as harmful in a salt water tank as they are for fresh water. Normally, I only recommend a water change at the end of the cycle if nitrates are very high.
Mixed answers are common because there a lot of ways that will work to get you to a good end result.
They may not have taught you wrong. They have a much better idea of where your tank is at than can be covered in a generic article. If you want another opinion on how to do it, I recommend reading this.
API test kits will commonly read 0.25ppm ammonia even when it is zero. I think those numbers look good. I would dose ammonia up to 2ppm and give it another go.
My nitrites and nitrates are both sky high. They’ve been the same for the last 5-6 days
You need to add a good size CuC so that the algae will be eaten. Without that, the algae will continue to grow. You may also benefit from vacuuming out the sand. Your tank is well beyond the cycling/startup phase at this point. You are just a little behind where most people would be when it comes to stocking it.Any idea how long the algae will last? It's getting worse everyday.
Your nitrates may not be high, you won't get a good reading if you have nitrites in your water. Nitrites tend to drop much more slowly in some systems than others. What you are seeing isn't unusual. Just give it another week or two. If you don't want to wait you can add a bottled bacteria product.
Everybody is telling me to do a 30 percent water change to see if anything drops
You can and it won't hurt anything. Not sure how helpful it will be or what it would accomplish other than removing 30% of the nitrites. It won't make the remaining 70% drop any faster.
