Gas Trapped Under Algae?
 

Hi all,
I'm having some issues with some algae and I noticed today that under the algae on the sandbed there is trapped gas. I poked a hole in a section of algae and quite a few bubbles came out. Should I be worried about this? My sand bed is only about 1.5-2 inches. My tank is a 40 breeder that's about three months old. It's currently stocked with meteor shower cyphastrea, a nice colony of zoanthids, a blue tuxedo urchin, two astrea snails, one nassarius snail, three margarita snails, and three cerith snails according to my most recent count. I don't have a sump. I run Blue Life Fx PRO and Poly-filter in a HOB filter and have a black box for my light.

Picture?

I had a very similar algae on my first fowler tank years a go..

Really really thick algae? Like a golf corse green?



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The gas is totally normal.. Sounds like you might have some green cyano if its a mat capable of being pierced.
The gas can be oxygen being released because of the photosynthesis happening with the algae or nitrogen gas from other bacteria processing nitrates

Seconding cyano, but a picture would really help us confirm that. How old is your tank?

I've had the tank for about three months. The algae is also pretty thick. Today I noticed my zoanthids weren't opening like usual and I noticed some long stringy brown algae on them. Attached is what my zoanthids usually look like, what they look like today, and a patch of algae (which is on the rocks too). Thanks for all the help!

Seriously?? Haha...welcome to a normal new tank with a very..very..very minor and normal algae issue...
So minor...

Post your water parameters so we can check them for issues..
You can certainly increase your snail count quite a bit too

My water parameters are:
Nitrates- 0
Phosphate- 0
Ca - about 550
Alk - 7.3
Salinity - 1.026
Temp ~ 78
I have no idea why my calcium is so high. I use reef crystals and water changes as an attempt to keep things stable. I do plan on getting my snail count up here in the next few weeks.

+1 the calcium level has no barring on the algae, at least not cyano

For being a reef crystals(RC) user the only think that looks out of wack is the alk..
RC should mix up with an alk of like 13..
But an alk if 7.3 is just fine and in the acceptable range of 7-11dKH..
Its just not normal for using RC salt.. But I've seen lots of users having low results with RC lately.. Not sure if its a salt mix problem or just lots of user error.. It was always stable for me but I switched to regular IO over a year ago so I have't tried it lately..

But all your other numbers are totally fine and you don't have any issues.. and you certainly don't have a bad algae problem at all.. Just a normal new tank going through a very minor "ugly stage"