Chaeto dying, algae starting to take over

About two weeks ago my football size chaeto started to lighten up and get some bubble algae on it, so I turned off my sump light for about 3 days. The large chaeto ball ended up dying and when I pulled it out it was a soft, slimy nasty mess. Got a new batch from the LFS that lasted about a week before dying off again. A few days ago I posted about the large amounts of kelp looking algae growing on my rocks in the DT and a few people suggested I pick up some emeralds to help. They’ve been eating, but not quickly enough to keep up with growth I’ve since noticed several new patches of dark red powder on the sand and one particularly dark black patch on a corner of a rock (as shown with the green arrow in the picture). My mangroves are just doing whatever.. all of them are turning black from the tops down and look awful, but two are actually growing roots very quickly so we’ll see. Mangroves are about two months old. There is now some bubble algae forming on the refuge walls and lots of short to medium length light brown hair/web growing on the refuge walls and rocks.

I’ve been running carbon in my hot magnum canister and GFO and Purigen hanging in the sump in medium flow. About a week ago I also thought it would be a bright idea to put my filter sock with the GFO on my drain pipe so the water coming out would blast the GFO.. hmmm, took me a few days to notice several things starting to turn a burnt orange color. Realized I was probably grinding the GFO and spreading it all around the tank. So I put it back in the medium flow area. I ordered a BRS reactor this morning and will run the GFO and Purigen in there starting Thursday.

I also just made the switch from tap water (bring on the lashings) to RO/DI. I have made two 40% water changes and plan on doing at least a total of five over the next couple weeks.

I originally attributed some of the extra algae growth to my new ATI, UV and KZ bulbs, but at this point I’m sure I have much bigger underlying problems. My tests from today are below, but I was surprised to see my nitrates so low. They’ve usually been between 20-40ppm and today were barely 5ppm. My P04 has never had a reading higher than .1 even going back to the 1st week of startup. I know that test is horribly inaccurate and can be very misleading though. I thought I’d at least see a comparative difference from time to time.

Tank born 2/1/11
46 gal bow, 17gal sump/refuge
50lbs pukani rock
70lbs sand
Oceanic salt

Livestock - 1 gold coral banded shrimp, 2 cleaner shrimp, 2 emeralds, 4 hermits, reefcleaners CUC (LOTS of snails), 1 green chromie and 1 black and white clown.

Coral frags – Favia, Chalice, Frogspawn, Candy Cane, Duncan, ORA green birdsnest and a pink birdsnest. All doing well and looking great.

Feeding – I feed Formula 1 & 2 flake, moderate to sparingly. Sinking crab pellets for the shrimp. Maybe once a week a quarter cube of rinsed frozen brine or other mix for the corals and fish, but target fed with a homemade 2’ turkey baster. Will also carefully spot-feed Reef Chili to the coral 1-2 times a week.

Lighting – 4xT5HO. 2xblue plus, Fiji purple and super actinic. Actinics run 10 hours/day, daylights run 7 hours. Moonlights off from 1:30am to 6am. Sump light from 10pm-6am.

Flow – two Koralia 750’s, 400gph return pump and about 150 from the HOT Magnum canister gives me about 45X flow. Don’t have many dead spots, but the two ends of the tanks are somewhat slow. Reef Angel handles wavemaker duties for the Koralias

Zero medications used

Temp – 78.7
pH – 8.2
SG – 1.026
KH - 2.4ppm
Ca - 450
Mg – 1240
NH4 – 0
N02 - .005 (LFS has tested zero nitrites for 2 months now. My test kit has never given absolute 0)
N03 – 5
P04 - .1

Am I missing anything?

 

Some more pics of the sump/refuge. In the first pic you can see the little remaining chaeto that died today. I had picked off all of the dead stuff and left what little deep green stuff was left.

You may see a few small patches of green ulva lettuce in there that's staying alive just fine. Not really growing much though. It's as old as the mangroves, about two months.

 

I would work on getting your nitrates and phosphates down. Manually remove as MUCH algae as possible to export the nutrients that are bound up in the nuisance algae that is there.

I also believe that mangroves in our reef tanks can cause problems if they start dying and leaching nutrients back into the tank. They are finicky plants, and I got rid of mine because I could not tell when they were doing well or not... mine grew a ton of roots and would grow leaves, but the leaves would drop off quickly... maybe this is natural growth, but I didn't know enough about them, so I decided to get them out. Just my experience, YMMV.

 

I'm hoping the BRS reactor and GFO will help with the P04. Nitrates at 5 isn't bad is it?? I'll regenerate my Purigen before putting it in the reactor too. I'll also try to pluck as much of the kelp looking algae off as well as siphon out as much of the red powder stuff as I can. I already sucked out a bunch from the sump but looks like I'll have to get more.

 

The problem could be your choice of bulbs. the four bulbs you have listed are more supplemental. imo you need full spectrum bulbs like aqua blue specials as opposed to the blue plus.

what lighting do you have over your fuge?

 

throwing this yout there, you might be trying to do to much at once.

new this and new that is good in the long run but changing so much at ont time is terriable for the tank.

my nitrates were at 160ppm forever untile I got a test kit with all my creatures doing well and I can say that at .5ppm is fine.

The bulbs could be an issue but then again Im using leds.

the purple stuff on the sand and rock will go away over time if you turn the lights off in the DT for a day or two, but make sure to keep the sump light on like normal.

The cheto might be dying because there is to much competition for nutrients between the mangroves and the alge but there is always so much that can go wrong you just kind of have to take it on stride.

all in all you tank looks good IMO

 

That’s what I originally thought about the bulbs, but went with that combination after several other members posted positive results with it. My corals responded extremely well to the change. The candy canes get even fatter, frogspawn even larger and the duncans look amazing. I suppose I could swap out a bulb or two with something else at some point. One of my LFS stocks ATI and UVL.

The sump light is a clip-on fixture with a 100w equivalent CFL 6500k I believe. My original chaeto grew like crazy, expanding 3-4 times original size under this light before it started to suddenly die off a few weeks ago.

Other than the bulbs I hadn’t really changed much before this stuff really started to creep up.

Thanks for the feedback

 

i have just always heard of older bulbs causing algae growth and wondered if the new bulbs might have had the same effect. then the algae in your DT out competed your chaeto......just a guess.

 

Nitrates at 5 ppm is not bad, but that doesn't mean that there aren't nitrates bound up in the nuisance algae.

Do you use RODI for your source water? Have you tested it for 0 TDS?

What is the flow like through your fuge?

 

Didn't know nitrates could be bound up in algae too.. excellent point. That may explain why they're testing lower than ever now that I have more algae in there than ever.

I started the tank with tap (probably the one biggest thing I would change), but just got my BRS RO/DI unit couple weeks ago. I'm making some water up right now actually, but so far I've done two 40% water changes. I plan on doing a total of five to get all but about 5% of the old tap water out. 6 TDS in, 0 out is what is indicated on the meter.

Sump is 3 chambers, with skimmer on left, return in the middle and fudge on the right. Overflow drain is divided and the fudge side has a ball valve for the flow. I have it throttled back to a slow flow.

I don't have time to do a full water change today, but I plan on trying to manually pick out as much of the kelp lookin stuff, dead chaeto in the sump and siphon out as much algae as I can too. My lights have been off and I can tell my coral isn't very happy.