Desperate For Help

I'm with civic on this one. I'm not a fan of chemicals unless I fully understand them and have a specific reason for them. Have you considered the chemicals you are adding may be why the corals are unhappy? Water changes are the best way to normalize the water chemistry.

 

Corals didn't begin to lose color until the algae took over and I ran the tank with lights off for three days. Now the phosphates and nitrates are too low and starving my corals.

 

I still contend it is not bryopsis. Most bryopsis have some parts of the growth that look like fern leaves. From his two pictures, I see zero evidence of these leaf ends. I'm sure there is a type of bryopsis that does not contain these fern-like pieces, but I have yet to encounter it. Raising Mg will not hurt anything necessarily, but it can cause issues with SG and Alk/Cal balance, and I believe this could cause more damage to your SPS since they are in a fragile state. I would continue to scrub and manually remove the algae. Get a lawnmower and some big hungry turbo's and give it a week. Keep dosing the amino's to try an raise nutrients for the SPS. If nothing changes in a week, or the SPS worsen, then give the Kent Magnesium a shot. Must be Kent though to kill off possible byropsis.

And I've found levels need to be quite a bit higher than 1550 for Mg to battle the bryopsis I've had before. I had to raise to 1800+ before I started seeing recession. Good luck Ricky.

 

I have unfortunately.If its not bryopsis why would his sea hare not eat it? Ime seahares will mow down lots of forms of gha but not bryopsis

 

The only thing my sea hare ever tried to eat was an MP40. The Vortech took a bite outta him. Let's bust out the microscope!

 

LMAO!Absolutely!!!!All my sea hares immediately tried to kill themselves in ph's or overflows until i protected them.Heres a good pic of bryopsis.As you can see it does not have discernible fern like appearance when a close up or microscope is not available.
http://www.3reef.com/threads/ultimate-nuisance-algae-thread.58657/

http://www.reef2reef.com/threads/a-...atic-algae-and-the-means-to-control-it.87351/
post #4
There are also several species that are so thin the fernlike fronds are almost invisible except with a microscope.
If I remember correctly i never raised mag. over 1600 but for some reason Kents worked brs mag did nothing.From what I have heard/read this is due to some ingredient specific to that product.Others have reported success using Continuum.

 

I came home from work and nothing else died or turned "whiter". I tested the water again after removing the GFO and ROX 0.8 carbon.
Alkalinity – 8.0 (Salifert) 7/19 exp.
Phosphate – 0.05 (Hanna) 3/17 exp.
Nitrate - 0.00 (Salifert) 6/16 exp.
Nitrates didn't budge even after adding amino acids and feeding frozen food but the phosphates did go up a little. I guess I will be purchasing Seachem Flourish to raise my nitrates. The alkalinity did drop even with the dosing pump still running so hopefully that means the corals are still uptaking it and growing/recovering.

 

you might already see an improvement with those values of phosphate. personally i would not rise it further though. to my understanding Po4 is one of the building blocks for tissues in corals and should be kept around 0.02?

 

There is a lot of great advice in here, but not a lot of it is specific to Zeovit so I'll try to add some looking from the point of view of that system.

Your system is out of whack and primarily because you suffer from the disease I suffer from. The need to keep doing something. It sounds like you still have the zeolite in the system, but aren't dosing anything to support it. That is removing ammonia and pushing your nutrients out of balance. Add some leaching live rock and disabled removal mechanisms and you end up with problems.

If you want to give up on Zeovit, go for it. I like the system, but I'm not particularly attached to it. There are other systems that work fine too. You should, however, chose a system and go with it. If that choice is Zeovit, you need to restart the Zeostart. For starters, it contains nitrates. By combining carbon with nitrate, it ensures a low level of nutrient in your tank and avoids the phosphate removal problems some other carbon dosing regimens have. I would dose at the low end of the recommended dose.

When I had this problem, I yanked out every rock with the slightest bit of hair algae on it, tossed it and replaced it. For obvious reasons, that is not the correct solution. The correct solution is to dose ZeoStart, Zeolite, Zeobak, and Sponge Power in accordance with the directions until it all dies off. It will, it just requires patience. The rock has to leach everything out of it and once it does the population will collapse.

I'm not gonna lie, yanking it all was very satisfying though. When I did, I also went back to dosing the big 4 above. Combined with clean rock (I cooked it), this time the algae did't grow back.

 

Should I also remove the GFO and watch the phosphates go up or keep it in there until everything is under control? I did start dosing ZEOstart3 three days ago and the nitrates have not gone up at all. I have tested the ZEOstart before with my nitrate test kit and it contain nitrates but it did not make my levels go up when dosing. I smelled the bottle of ZEOfood7 and it smells a lot like vinegar. ZEOstart3 and Sponge Power only have a hint of the same smell. A friend of mine believes that ZEOstart3 is sodium nitrate and citric acid.