Algae breakout & tiny snails?

[dime079]

Here lately I've had an outbreak of algae in my tank, i had what looked like a cyano growth in my fuge attached to the macro. Its weird because the redish algea never formed on the sand. I cut this part out of the macro, but the outbreak in the tank continues. The sand in the tank has more of a greenish/black type of algae on it. Its not long or wavy and only covers a thin layer of the sand.

Another thing i have noticed is literally dozens of tiny / sand-grain sized snails grazing along the bottom algae (I'll try and get a picture of this when I get home if i can focus on something that small). Are these extra snails increasing my bioload by enough to give me terrible algae outbreaks? Also, all params are ok according to test kit. my clean up crew used to do a good job at munching the stuff. maybe its time i got some more snails to help clean?

current cleanging crew is:
2 nass snails
2 mexican turbos
4 cerith.

I only have 1 fish (gramma) and a peppermint shrimp in the tank and only plan on having one more fish in there max.

Any ideas on what my problemo may be?

[bertoni]

The extra snails are just removing the algae for you. They aren't doing any harm.

How much macro is being harvested out of the refugium?

[dime079]

the ball of algae that i cut free was about the size of a golf ball.

[dime079]

umm, macrowise, its not too much, but not a small amount compared to the size of the fuge either.

[bertoni]

There might be more food going into the tank than the filtration can export. How much and what is being fed?

[dime079]

brine shrimp once a day or every other day, just enough for the gramma and shrimp to finish eating in about 10 min or so.

[bertoni]

For a 10g nano, I might start with 1/8 cube of frozen Formula 1 per day, as a rough idea of volume.

[webbstock]

To limit nutrients for the algae, could you skip feeding for a few days (not sure how often gramma needs to eat) and keep the tank dark? Then do a water change and filter cleaning to remove lots of the dead algae. That might let you get everything back under control.

[dime079]

webbstock, i've tried that and its a no-go. still the same thing keeps happening.

[GatorWPB]

Im battling a small outbreak of cyanobacter (red slime) and diatoms as well.
From what Ive been reading on some other forums, the frozen brine shrimp contain high phosphates and should be washed before feeding. Not exactly sure how thats done though.
Also, increasing flow will help. Ive greatly increased my flow, added 30 nassarius snails for sand movement, and will cutback or stop feeding the frozen prepared brine shrimp.
Hope that helps.

[paradicio]

What do the snails look like? Do they look similar to Astraea but smaller? Look for the collonista here:

http://www.melevsreef.com/id/snails.html

They are extremely small, and I've got an infestation of them in my tank. From what I've read they are helpful in the same way an Astraea or Turbo is, but they multiply EXTREMELY fast. In the span of a month I've gone from "oh wow, look at that crazy little snail" to having HUNDREDS of them in my tank.

The reason I ask is I've started experiencing an increase in algae as well, I did a test on my water and my nitrates have gone up from 0 to 5 (I'm suspecting it's because of the bio load these snails are putting on the tank). I will be picking them out of the tank tonight and getting rid of them. Unfortunately, because they reproduce so fast, neither of my LFS are interested in them...

I'm not really worried about the ammount of waste they are producing (I don't imagine it's all that significant), but because of their size they get caught in odd places and die (I found one when I was cleaning my pump last weekend) and then decompose in the tank.

[bertoni]

If the snails are eating algae, they're not adding to the bio-load. There are lots of ideas that might help in this article:

http://www.advancedaquarist.com/issues/august2003/chem.htm