I appear to have some diatoms in my tank now, after 9 months. I recently took one rock out and replaced it with one from my QT tank (no copper has ever been in my QT). That rock is a real reef rock that has been in my QT for at least 8 months, but I don't specifically light my QT. Now that it's in my DT, I have some diatoms mostly on just that rock. Is that expected? I wouldn't have expected that since that rock has been in a tank for so long, but thinking maybe it's because I didn't light the DT? Though I did have some brown algae film on my glass before I put that rock in too, though not a ton and not on any of the rocks. Just seems odd after 9 months that I'd have diatoms (and it's not cyano or dinos).
Silly diatom question
- Thread starter hllb
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A safe bet is that when you put a new surface in an aquarium, things will grow on it. It is a new habitat with nutritional opportunities for the existing microorganisms in the aquarium. A succession of organisms will grow on it until the new surface is like the old ones.
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A few thoughts.
The notion that silicates “cause” diatom growth is just handy explanation. For one thing very few aquarist know for certain that the golden brown growth is really diatoms. Second, no one knows for sure which chemical species is limiting the growth of an organism for any given instance. Silicate is a popular guess. It could be nitrate or ammonia. Third, the likelihood that one type of organism is growing vigorously while all the others are growing normally is probably incorrect. You might see a golden brown sheen and say “aha, diatoms”, while in fact some other microorganism is growing out of control and the diatoms are there only to share the bounty of its waste products along with dinoflagellates and cyanobacteria. Trying to control one organism instead of the ecology makes it frustrating to get rid of nuisance organisms.
if you have access to a microscope and you take scrapings of the surface that seem to be infested with diatoms, you will likely see many microorganisms growing but you are unlikely to see the vast bacteria populations.
