View Single Post
Unread 06/21/2015, 06:43 AM   #1188
DNA
Registered Member
 
DNA's Avatar
 
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Iceland
Posts: 1,516
Scientists insist the main reason for various blooms in the ocean is nutrients usually brought from the depths to the surface layers. Those nutrients start in the water column as fish poo, bacteria, dead animal and algae remains as well as sand and dust. They bind and form marine snow in the ocean. Reefkeepers call it detritus , but that never falls to the depths because reef tanks don't have any.

I got this nice Cyanobacteria bloom recently and decided to give it some help.
As we know already Cyanobacteria likes to seek out the dinos and the end result tends to be less dinos.

My actions was to blow the cyano off where there are no dinos so they get sucked into the pumps get torn apart and would resettle on top of dinos if they got the chance.

I wanted to try out this fact from the scientists in my tank by removing as much detritus as possible. The only way for me to do this is to blow it off from the rocks and collect from the water column and the sandbed. I used filter socks, skimmer and sand vacuuming for this.

At the same time I did a very effective carbon filtering,with a large mesh bag tied directly on the sump return and had that in a filter sock as well to collect the dust from the carbon breakup in the high currents.

I did this for weeks since blasting the rocks will cause at least 95% of the gunk to relocate elsewhere on the rocks and vacuuming the sand would bring out amazing amounts every time. Freeing all these nutrients into the water column is certain to increase the availability of them for organisms. Still I got no drastic increase or decrease in either dinos or cyano as I should have if detritus and marine snow have anything in common.

I have experienced this nutrient migration event first hand while diving in the Red Sea. After about 30 minutes in chilling temperatures and about 9 feet visibility, in a matter of seconds the temperature rose drastically and visibility extended to hundreds of feet. This is to give some sort of indication on how dense these nutrients can get in the ocean.

The current situation in my tank has been positive since there are less dinos right now.
Of course they will be back, but hopefully I'm getting new live rock soon to add to my tanks bio diversity.

I'm not saying the scientists are wrong, but I could not reproduce their findings.


DNA is offline   Reply With Quote