Rock covered in tons of cyano

So I've got this piece of LR covered in tons of cyano. It looks like those little circles of coralline on the tank walls except its cyano.... and mixed with regular algae it looks really gross and is really dark too. Is there anything I can do to get all this cyano off the rock? I don't care if it "dies"; I have more LR in my tank which would most likely allow the bacteria to spread to that rock as well.

 

you should be able to just suck it off with a turkey baster..or just take the rock out and scrub it with a little tank water..or you can take it out and cook it for a few hours..

 

Cyano is attributed to high phosphates, nitrates, and silica as well as low flow. You can scrub the rock all you want but until you take care of the root problem it will most likely keep coming back.

 

also you can get your trates and phates down and you should have no problems with any algae..lighting starves cyano too..

did you get a piece of live rock with cyano on it or did it show up after it was in your tank??

 

yeah i got a piece of LR with cyano

 

just point a powerhead at it and that should solve the problemmo

 

what good will that do?

 

The problem with cyano, is once established, it tends not to go away on it's own for various reasons. Cyano is very ancient and has evolved a lot of adaptive mechanisms to survive just about anywhere. It dosn't necessarily need nitrate, as it can fix atmospheric nitrogen, and use of siderophores to gather iron. Also, it needs PO4 to grow, but can survive with very little as it is really good at recycling it's own stored PO4.

If you have a good skimmer though and can get the cyano into the water column, the skimmer can remove it. For this to work though, water quality needs to be high. It may not go away as water quality improves, but it won't come back if you can get rid of it. Turning the lights out for a few days can also help, but again, you need to keep water quality high and you'll still need a good skimmer to remove the decaying matter and carbon to remove any released toxins. Also, the lights out could stress other organisims, so, lights out IMO should be a last resort.

 

theres only a shrimp in there

 

What is your source water, are you using RO/DI? Are you confirming 0 TDS?

If so, my next guess is your tank is too empty to sustain the biomass. Was there fish? Or live rock, live sand etc... A lot of people think that a tank with no fish will have super clean water, however, often it's the opposite. There is not enough nutrients to sustain the biomass in the rocks, sand etc... and the bacteria, worms, sponges, protazoa, even corals etc... slowly die off keeping the water polluted. This was the case when I tried a fish less nano tank a few years ago. Once I added a few fish things improved.