Diatoms help

Ry1 · Jun 10, 2020

Hi guys, had my nano tank up and running around 3 week now and the diatoms are taking over. I got told they would go away on there own but ive had them over a week and i would say its getting worse not better! How long do they usually hang around.

Thanks for all your help.

brandon429 · Jun 10, 2020

If you clean them out fully no harm comes to the nano, it just looks cleaner, the cycle cannot be undone. any form of new benthic growth signifies your cycle is done; what non seneye ammonia tests say won’t factor, that’s a biological confirmation.
you are now into the options of the uglies or just using the accessibility a nano affords to just clean it all. Do a 100% water change if you want, rinse out the sand and rocks then you’ll have no diatoms. We deep clean tanks all the time as prep to moving homes. It’s no different for you, though your tank is staying there.

you can also let that + new invaders after it take over and do zero cleaning, many opt for that too. I wanted to introduce the notion of never allowing a nano to look bad from day one to day 2000, many have opted for that too and they had no invasions the whole time, they were simply cleaned out. Many people don’t want that, it’s too easy, it’s a cheat. They want gha to take over everything, we are told that’s part of the cycle. Can choose.

andrewey · Jun 10, 2020

2-12 weeks. Probably averages around 3-4 weeks.

Unfortunately, there is no way to remove all diatoms manually. They will go away in time. You can try and intervene, but you are unlikely to find much success, plus, if it were theoretically possible to eliminate diatoms from your tank, you remove an extremely valuable piece of the food chain

There are some fantastic write ups on diatoms and their role in the reef tank on reef2reef if you're interested. If you're even more interested, I can highly reccomend the textbook, "The Diatoms: Applications for the Environmental and Earth Sciences"