Return of the red slime...

[MedicalRower]

Hello.

I have a 36G tank that has a repeat red slime problem. I treated the first time, several months ago, with chemiclean red slime remover with a great outcome. In the interim, my tank lost power for a few days and crashed, killing everything. After cleaning and rearranging and cycling again, my tank is up and running (new fish in quarantine!) and ready for some action - except that the red slime has returned. I treated twice in the last 5 days with the chemiclean and it had no effect this time. I have tried the darkness "cure" in the past to no effect. I have also siphoned off all of the slime I can get to with my turkey baster. I modified my clean up crew today, so now it has 14 fuzzy chiton, 20 hermits, many nassarius, a bunch of ceriths, and 2 emerald crabs. Do any of those guys eat cyano?

Does anyone have any other thoughts/treatments?

Thanks,
Jessica

[Neptunes World]

Throw some sponges in the tank for a week or three. Then go fish only tank with the seeded sponges, take out sand and rock and cook your rock and sand and then add it back.

I would also pull 10 hermits and keep about 12 nass snails. Remember, they add to the bioload also even though they help clean. You are the one that really has to do the husbandry, or, in this case, the wifey-ey

[MedicalRower]

I am not sure that I follow. All I have in the tank right now is the rock, sand, and CUC (and the cyano, of course).

Are you suggesting that I take everything out of the tank, boil it, and then put it back? Isn't that essentially what I did after my tank crashed 6 weeks ago? Despite the presence of the filter sponges, won't I still have a massive cycle because of all of the bacteria I would be killing? I am sorry if that sounds skeptical, but I am having a lot of trouble understanding how this approach would work. It is, however, entirely possible that I am misunderstanding you.

Jessica

[catfisher]

How old are your bulbs?

[MedicalRower]

6 or 7 months. 4x31W T5HO with 2 LED moonlights. 2 of the 4 bulbs are 10k and the other 2 are actinic.

[Decadence]

Syphon everything you have access to and then run the tank in darkness for five days. This means cover the tank so room or sunlight cannot get in either. This method will kill the cyano because it can't photosynthesize. You probably have quite a deal of nutrients leaching out of your live rock after the mass die-off. A refugium packed with macro algae will help deplete the nitrates and phosphate from the water column as it is leached off the rocks. This isn't a sure-fire way if ridding your tank of cyano but it is likely to work. The sure-fire method is "cooking" as mentioned before.

"Cooking" entails putting the live rock in the dark in buckets for a couple months with extreme flow around them to pull all of the phosphates out of the rocks, changing the water often.

[Neptunes World]

First off, adding chemiclean does nothing to"clean your tank", it just makes the cyano go away, but, it is still in yur tank in another form. ALL matter on this earth never goes away, it just transforms into something else. So, lets say you have 10lbs (just for an example) of goo in your tank. Your tank looks red with cyano. You dose, it looks like it goes away and now you actually have 10.5 lbs of goo because you added more stuff to the tank. It didnt go away, it converted. A lot of that, if not all, went into the sand and rock (depending how porous it is). When your tank croaked, all that extra junk went into the sand and rock. Unless you soaked and cleaned everything in a dishwasher (impracticable for various reasons), all that nasty goo attached itself to rock and sand. You might have cleaned some, but, as you can see, there is so much there that even chemiclean cant get rid of it.

you ever drain your tank down to see the sides with slime? Thats your poop eating bacteria. Its on the glass, sand, in the rocks and everywhere else. Throw a sponge in there and let it soak for 3 weeks and it too will have a coating of bacteria. You can then take out your rock and sand and cook away because the sponge will be eating the waste. Check out/research posts on cooking the rock. Cook your rock and sand and then put it back in the tank. Watch your feedings, stay away from red/yellow lighting and you should not have any problems for a while if at all.

Your clean up crew poops also. If you have a lot of poopers, then they are just gonna poop out the algae thats causing high nutrients, its kind of a vicious circle. You have to take OUT the bad suff, unless your gonna follow them around with a snail and crab pooper scooper upper. :eek2: :o

[sponger0]

The fact is you still have the same nutrients leaching from the rock that cause the problem before. Nuisance algae needs phosphates and nitrates to grow. Turning the lights off doesnt get those out of your tank. So it will continue to return unless you address the issue.

Water changes weekly and syphoning out the cyano worked well for me. Actually worked better than anything else. It took me 3 months before I won the battle. Its been 4 months and the stuff has never returned.