Embarrassing Cyano

[Minnesota Mike]

Hey everybody, so I do clean my tank a lot but everytime I suck this Cyano up it seems to come back worse. Was hoping not to use a chemical in there and wasn't sure if a orange goby would even touch it. I have a Maxspect Gyre XF330 on at about 75% speed (1,750 gph) in a 75 gallon tank. I think I'm pushing enough flow but obviously I am no expert looking at my tank. Levels seem to be fine and I'm usually doing a 10 gallon water change every week or a 15 - 20 gallon if I go 2 weeks. Any help I would love and appreciate! Thanks

 

[IKD]

Cyano usually persists with excess nutrients. How much are you feeding a day? Do you run a skimmer?

 

[John08007]

In my experience you gotta lower your phosphate.

 

[eric.tech]

Chemiclean will nuke Cyano and not cause harm to the tank inhabitants if used properly. The only big caution is you must increase to oxygen supply while in use. Granted, if there are underlying nutrient issues, it may come back in the future. Oh and your skimmer will go nuts while treating with this. I just popped the skimmer cup off and let it add O2 to the water.

 

[Minnesota Mike]

Cyano usually persists with excess nutrients. How much are you feeding a day? Do you run a skimmer?

Yeah I do have a HOB skimmer and I am feeding on average 1 frozen cube of bryne shrimp a day

 

[Minnesota Mike]

In my experience you gotta lower your phosphate.

How does a person lower phosphate?

 

[W1ngz]

You need to put a finer point on what 'levels seem to be fine' means, with numbers. Cyano is a symptom of something that is very much not fine, but not hard to fix.

Chemiclean is a good solution to this, provided you also give the sand a thorough vacuuming before and after, siphon out what you can and big water change after the treatment.

Follow up with nitrate and phosphate testing and GFO if you need it to manage the phosphates.

Take the HOB skimmer offline while you run chemiclean and make sure to do a big water change or it will overflow your skimmer.

 

[eric.tech]

You can try running some GFO in a reactor to address phosphates and use Red Sea’s NoPOx for nitrates, but use them wisely as you don’t want to strip your water of all nutrients and throw off the nitrate/phosphate balance. When using GFO and/or carbon dosing, test your water often with a good quality test kit until you find a happy balance. As mentioned by others Chemiclean is a good bandage, but you want to sort out the cause so the slimy scourge does not return.

 

[Minnesota Mike]

Age. 7 months
Size. 75 gallons
Lighting. 48in coral life seascape light in back
. 2 of the 30 inch coral life lights in. front that were given to me.
Parameters. Nitrite I'm looking around 0.5. ppm. Nitrate looks like 0.
Ammonia. 0
Salinity. Looks like 1.025 also I do a 50% water change every beginning month and 10% every week in between so for what I've been told I really don't have to worry about my calcium levels or alkalinity levels then.

 

[John08007]

How does a person lower phosphate?

I use gfo in a reactor, believe they also have phosphate sponge media that you can put in a media bag in a high flow area. You d9nt want to bring it to zero

 

[Triggreef]

To play devils advocate GFO is no good. In your system looking at the pictures there is probably nothing that it would hurt. But as you learn and desire to get cooler harder to maintain coral you'll want to no longer use that stuff.

For now use a small diameter (3/8) hose and siphon out what you can. As others said nutrients are the main cause. But lighting can and will also cause this, and fuel it. Limit your light to 6 hours per day and watch it dwindle away with a little better maintenance. Increase water changes and stay on schedule. Go to a more blue or all blue light spectrum will also help avoid nuisance algae. If all else fails black trochus snails in large numbers will eat that off your rocks, but not sand.

 

[John08007]

Age. 7 months
Size. 75 gallons
Lighting. 48in coral life seascape light in back
. 2 of the 30 inch coral life lights in. front that were given to me.
Parameters. Nitrite I'm looking around 0.5. ppm. Nitrate looks like 0.
Ammonia. 0
Salinity. Looks like 1.025 also I do a 50% water change every beginning month and 10% every week in between so for what I've been told I really don't have to worry about my calcium levels or alkalinity levels then.

Sure your nitrite is not 0? Did you just add a bunch of fish? I believe that should be 0 once your cycle is complete. I havent checked my nitrite, ammonia since the cycled the tank.

 

[NS Mike D]

No one knows for sure why cyano precipitates and mats up, but there are two scenarios when it' usually occurs , one more likely than the other.


Low to No NO3 with PO4 present. This is the most likely scenario and since we run new tanks with much lower NO3 and PO4 than with new tanks to hold off nuisance algae. Cyano is more resourceful than corals and so when NO3 is very low or non existent, the cyano can get nitrogen for other sources and synthesize it with PO4. This is also common when one begins carbon dosing and bacteria deplete NO3 faster than PO4. Often they will run GFO when initially carbon dosing to reduce PO4. If NO3 is very low, feed more (for NO4 dose), that should reduce PO4 and the coral use up both.


High NO3 and PO4. macro algae, more corals, less feeding. Nutrients are being added faster than the uptake.

Regardless of how you will deal with this, syphon it out as much as possible. If you kill it, it will only release it's NO3 and PO4 back into the tank. If you blow it off the rocks and sand, IMO, it will only spread.


Cyano can disappear (well its ever present in the water column so lets say it reduces an goes back to it's floating form) on it's own, and many reefers that it comes and goes without any changes or treatments. New tanks will likely need fixes.


Since you clean your tank a lot, let's start buy ruling out that your tank may be too clean

What are your NO3 and PO4 levels and what test kit do you use?

 

[NS Mike D]

Sure your nitrite is not 0? Did you just add a bunch of fish? I believe that should be 0 once your cycle is complete. I havent checked my nitrite, ammonia since the cycled the tank.

whoa. there is no reliable home test kit for Nitrite. Given the tank age, let's assume he's cycled and that number is test error.

0 Nitrate would be a common culprit, but without knowing what test kit is being used, we do not have a reliable number as well (but I am leaning this way). We also need a reliable PO4 number


API test kits are not reliable for PO4 and NO3 for reef tanks. Rea Sea and Siefert are the more common ones for this hobby


If your NO3 is near zero and you have PO4 we have a reasonable culprit and would highly recommend bring these numbers in line with generally acceptable targets before radical steps that might cause more harm than good.

fwiw, Red Sea recommends NO3 at 1-2ppm and PO4 at 0.08 - 0.12 ppm for mixed reef tanks

 

[Tahoe61]

Vacuum what you can, add extra oxygenation if you do not have a skimmer, treat with chemclean, do recommend water change, stop worrying about it.

 

[mitch91175]

Like other have suggested you can do Chemiclean without harm to your system and it works really well. Then you will have to get so BO3 in the system or it’ll keep coming back after a few months.

Adding more bio load can help as well, meaning more fish but don’t go overboard. You feed a little more and that’ll help increase NO3. If you are doing any carbon dosing stop that until after you get the Chemiclean treatment done. An alternative to get PO4 down is Lanthanum Chloride. If you started outwith dry rock it’s possible that it is still leeching PO4. Alsothe sand in system need to mature to help the biological process. Until then in my opinion sand beds are useless until they get to that point. I’ve personally just removed sand and that’s helped me tremendously with controlling nutrients.

whatever you do just do not freak out and go overboard. It’ll cause more harm than good.

Also maybe you want to look at your lighting and photoperiod. Cyano will grow the more light you give it until you get your parameters in check. With what you have in your tank ATM, a shorter photo period can help some as well until you get everything nutrient wise in line. Looks like you run a lot of whites. Maybe eventually look at better lighting source and add some blue to the tank. That won’t solve your problems but will help minimize some uglies.

Also maybe consider altering your maintenance schedule to doing water changes less frequently. Doesn’t seem like you have much love stock so you could potentially be wasting money if you are doing to frequent water changes.

Lastly running an appropriately sized UV sterilizer can assist in removing Cyano from the water column. When I’ve faced Cyano in the past, I did the following:

1. Chemiclean treatment. Kept slimmer running just adjusted the flow rate to the slimmer to keep oxygen levels. Also I run a Sochtin Oxydator.

2. Tested and increased feeding. If PO4 was too high I’d run a LC treatment to bring it down while increase NO3.

3.Turned on UV after doing Chemiclean treatment for a few weeks then turned off until needed.

 

[NS Mike D]

While we are waiting to confirm that you have little to no NO3 and PO4 is above zero (a classic scenario for Cyano events), I noticed that you do 50% water change monthly and 10% weekly (different than what you said in post 1)


The 50% is a bit radical. This is what liveaquira says about water changes

As a general guideline, a monthly 25% water change is recommended. However, smaller, more frequent water changes (15-20% every 1-2 weeks) are preferable for heavily stocked aquariums or aquariums with large fish.

In searching for negatives effects of too much water changes, there was not much downside aside from instability of large swings (if the tank parameters varied from the new salt mix) and too much nutrient export

which keeps circulating back to the low numbers

 

[NS Mike D]

fwiw, I am not in the camp that chemiclean can do no harm to your system. It does rapidly deplete O2 and there are a number of cases where the O2 depletion was so rapid it resulted in a tank crash, so I caution using chemiclean.

I also, do not agree with quick fixes when there is a potential red flag staring us in the face with the NO3/PO4 numbers - which need to be verified.

If indeed, as I suspect, NO3 is very low and PO4 is present, the cyano will come right back. And the cycle of chemical treatment, huge water changes and very very low nutrients is inviting much larger problems.

This appears to be a classic example of problems caused by the ill conceived notion of starving algae in newer tanks (not to be confused with targeting lower NO3/PO4 numbers in newer tanks to give corals an advantage over the algae) . I could be wrong, but better to confirm the NO3 and PO4 numbers before embarking on a fragmented journey of anecdotal fixes.

 

[mitch91175]

No one knows for sure why cyano precipitates and mats up, but there are two scenarios when it' usually occurs , one more likely than the other.


Low to No NO3 with PO4 present. This is the most likely scenario and since we run new tanks with much lower NO3 and PO4 than with new tanks to hold off nuisance algae. Cyano is more resourceful than corals and so when NO3 is very low or non existent, the cyano can get nitrogen for other sources and synthesize it with PO4. This is also common when one begins carbon dosing and bacteria deplete NO3 faster than PO4. Often they will run GFO when initially carbon dosing to reduce PO4. If NO3 is very low, feed more (for NO4 dose), that should reduce PO4 and the coral use up both.


High NO3 and PO4. macro algae, more corals, less feeding. Nutrients are being added faster than the uptake.

Regardless of how you will deal with this, syphon it out as much as possible. If you kill it, it will only release it's NO3 and PO4 back into the tank. If you blow it off the rocks and sand, IMO, it will only spread.


Cyano can disappear (well its ever present in the water column so lets say it reduces an goes back to it's floating form) on it's own, and many reefers that it comes and goes without any changes or treatments. New tanks will likely need fixes.


Since you clean your tank a lot, let's start buy ruling out that your tank may be too clean

What are your NO3 and PO4 levels and what test kit do you use?

Whenever I’ve dealt with Cyano I never worried about siphoning just made sure I had clean filter socks, turkey bast the rocks, and let it collect the floating Cyano. Once it got to a point where I had enough just did the Chemiclean treatment. But every tank is different so you have to decide what approach will work best for your situation.

 

[mitch91175]

fwiw, I am not in the camp that chemiclean can do no harm to your system. It does rapidly deplete O2 and there are a number of cases where the O2 depletion was so rapid it resulted in a tank crash, so I caution using chemiclean.

I also, do not agree with quick fixes when there is a potential red flag staring us in the face with the NO3/PO4 numbers - which need to be verified.

If indeed, as I suspect, NO3 is very low and PO4 is present, the cyano will come right back. And the cycle of chemical treatment, huge water changes and very very low nutrients is inviting much larger problems.

This appears to be a classic example of problems caused by the ill conceived notion of starving algae in newer tanks. I could be wrong, but better to confirm the NO3 and PO4 numbers before embarking on a fragmented journey of anecdotal fixes.

Well if you have the proper equipment for your system Chemiclean will do no harm. The key phrase is proper equipment. So many hobbyist skimp on equipment and it ends up costing them in the long haul.