What have I got here?

[cmoore806]

I noticed brown coloring on the areas of my sand that get the strongest light. I have a small patch of green algae on the rock, I then started noticing a brown tint to the top of my rock formation which I believe appears worse as the day goes on.

13.5 gallon fluval evo nano tank, dry live rock, live sand, Salinity 1.025, temp 77.4,

Tank is 26 days old, ammonia is 0, nitrite 0.1, nitrate is always showing 100 on my salifert test kits.

Last water change was 1.5 weeks ago.

Today I also checked (hanna checkers) Phosphate: 0.00, Alkalinity 7.1, Calcium 451

I added a very small CUC (four snails, two hermits) two days ago and fed a little frozen food to the tank that was leftover from feeding fish in my QT tank (new fish getting QT for a while).

Also under microscope I saw this cool looking thing (has a green color, maybe algae related??

 

[Hydrored]

Diatoms and a bit of algae, new tank syndrome. Congrats of the new tank and good job on quarantine.

 

[cmoore806]

Diatoms and a bit of algae, new tank syndrome. Congrats of the new tank and good job on quarantine.

thanks!

 

[cmoore806]

Is it too early to add a small anemone? Everything seems pretty stable.

 

[ScottB]

My LFS generally recommends 6 months of maturity before adding an anemone. Even though we may measure stable basic values, there is a lot of instability in the early months of biome development. Many organisms battling for dominance. Microfauna, algaes, diatoms, dinoflagellates, etc.

Very cool microscope pics btw.

 

[Olemiss]

that’s typical for a new tank one thing you can do that I did was dose vibrant. It can help with the diatom since it will compete for dominance.