Green Algae but not hair algae

[Scubajoe1]

So I am at 1.5 months on my cycled tank. I am seeing some bright green algae on the rocks and sand but this is easily blown off with a turkey baster. I see a quite a bit of detritus coming off the rock too. I am guessing this is just the next phase in my tank maturing?

Also does anyone have any good method aside from a turkey baster to get the crap off the rocks? I would like to have a water pick that actually sucks it up too and filters it all through a 200 micron bag. Sounds like a product for shark tank because I cannot find any good solutions out there.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

ScubaJoe

[Scubajoe1]

By the way nitrates are at 0 ppm, phosphates at 0.03 ppm, Ca at 440 so quite low in the nutrient department.

[cloak]

Sounds like Cyanobacteria. This doesn't always have to be the maroon/burgundy color were all used to. Check this out.

http://www.reefcleaners.org/nuisance-algae-id-guide

[Scubajoe1]

Does look like green cyano based on other web pics. any suggestions for getting rid of it? I already have close to no nutrients in the tank based on my red sea pro nitrate and hanna phosphate kit as well as verifying those values with the local aquarium store.

[asylumdown]

1.5 months isn't even a sneeze. I don't think you should be worrying about it too much.

Did you start the tank with dry rock or live rock? If 'live' what was the source and what were it's transport and storage conditions before you got it?

[Scubajoe1]

Dry rock and fishes cycling.

[CStrickland]

Sometimes the dry rock comes in with a bit of phos in it. If it's in certain spots you can wiggle your powerheads so there's more current there, sometimes that helps. Also some larger vinyl tubing, like 3/4" airline can be used as a siphon for water changes. It's good for poking it off and sucking it out.

I made a sand rake for the end of my diy Python out of an old hair clip, works good. Maybe a water pic is next :)

[asylumdown]

Yah you've got a ways to go. Dry rock is awesome. But it's takes time to mature.

Where I live there's lots of energy development, which means tons of well-pads cutting up native grassland all over the province. When they're done with a well-pad, they remove everything, bring in fresh topsoil, and re-contour everything to try and make it look "natural" again. It literally looks like a 100mx100m patch of bare-dirt that's just been prepped for sod cut in to the middle of the prairie. That's pretty much an exact analogy to dry rock.

In the first growing season, you'll get maybe one or two species of hyper aggressive "weeds" that will cover the entire site, sometimes growing up to or 7 feet tall. You can almost see it from space it looks so different from the grassland around it, and underneath the weeds you still see tons of bare dirt and there's little diversity. In the second growing season, those weeds are still there, but don't get as big, and whatever the site manager has seeded, plus blow in from the prairie around it will start to add new plants to the mix. Over time, the slower growing 'climax' plants get big enough to crowd out the fast growing early colonizing weeds, and a more stable, diverse matrix or plants takes over. If the site is managed well, 10 years later you'd need to be an expert in grassland ecology to be able to tell where the well-site ends and the 'native' grassland begins. These sorts of successional cycles form the basis of a large part of ecology and are analogous in many ways to what happens in a new tank with dry rock.

Things happen faster in a reef tank, but honestly not by much. I'm approaching 3 years with this tank and my 160 pounds of dry rock has only really started to be indistinguishable from the 60 pounds of live rock I added to 'seed' system in the last 6-8 months. In the first year my dry rock was first covered in diatoms, then successive phases of different macro, micro, and hair algaes that would become extremely dominant to the point where I thought I was failing at reef keeping, but have all more or less dropped out of the assemblage entirely by now. I freaked out about a lot of it, intervened in some of it, but what really seems to have done the trick was nothing more complicated than time.

My point is - be patient. If it's a real problem that needs your intervention it will become obvious in time, but assuming you've got the right practices in place it's more likely just a phase your tank will go through on it's own.

Most tanks that are less than a year old can attribute most of their problems to being less than a year old, IMO.

[Scubajoe1]

http://s87.photobucket.com/user/Scuba_joe/media/Cleantank_zps4af5971a.jpg.html?filters[user]=142462438&filters[recent]=1&sort=1&o=0

Managed to clean all the rocks and sand up for now. Purple hue is from the LEDs but there is coraline algae spots on most rocks. Was previously living fuji rock but long since dead.