my pet peeve regarding advice common in the hobby:
all your early invasions are normal. Leave them in. Its the uglies phase, it goes away on its own
I followed that, seeded my tank with red invasive brush algae, and then had to take it down a few years later.
unacceptable start, totally opposite next round followed.
(every does that initially, its what has been circulated in the hobby. we spend twenty years developing invasion stop methods to undo the advice for the 70%~ it never goes away, do not allow your new easily accessible aquarium to get racked with invasion, simply refuse this condition, lift out your rock, and blast it off creatively. I know seven ways off the top of my head, you search some)
People are told to sit there and watch any manner of invaders totally take over a tank, then work back slowly, hopefully, hesitantly, through the water only while trying to add animals to the setup. Recipe for the reason we have massive, massive invasion and dinos and loss within the hobby from biological means not just hardware/error issues.
Once you hand guide to maturity, meaning like your garden with dandelions that require direct assistance initially then healthy grass chokes them out (corals, same) the work lessens and you can back off. if you start with purposeful invasion, you have a 70% chance of having to reinvest again at one point or become part of a rescue thread. Don't own a system so large or so densely stacked that you can't simply guide it into looking great vs letting it wreck/unwreck
*where possible, you just lift up the rocks out of the water, kill off the algae, nothing is harmed, and you save yourself a thousand bucks
Cycling is for bacteria it has literally nothing to do with letting your tank get overrun with algae or cyano. *we see those invasions and tank -losses- with ANY aged system, any tank can get the uglies at any time, when the tank is new you have the easier time hand guiding it vs when it’s packed in coral
