Friday night Karma contest

If you don't know me I am Crimson Ghost (John really) – opinionated, confrontational and all around good guy !

I am going to post a Friday night question, puzzle or whatever...each friday night – this will be open to all those with 12 months or less experience For all those over this threshold….bite your tongue please. Saturday morning after 10am eastern time will open thread to all others. I'll admit, this first one will be easy -- I promise they will get trickier in the coming weeks !

I am going to post in general since the goal will be education. All entries will be awarded Karma from me – however, I ask that all of our resident knowledgeable please award your karma points to what you consider the best (most accurate) answer.

For this problem, any missing information (such as a protein skimmer) can be assumed not in use.

Tonight’s:

I have had my reef tank set up for 5 months and I have an out break of hair algae – what do I do, why did this happen to my tank?

55 gallon reef

I feed my fish every day

2 blue tang, 2 pipe fish, 1 bicolor dottyback, 2 blenny’s, 1 watchman goby, 1 Auriga Butterfly, 2 firefish, 1 coral beauty and 1 hawkfish, 3 Kauderen Cardinal’s and 1 Fairy Wrasse.

Various soft and hard corals

40 pounds fiji live rock – wet dry sump with a protein skimmer.


I use RO/DI for evaporation replacement. And run a canister filter with activated carbon. My water test's "ok" with the following:

Calcium 280
Alk 9 dkh
Temp 77
Salinity 1.025
Ph 8.2
Mag 950
Phosphate 0
Nitrate 0

I have followed the advice of my LFS !! (hehe) *big asz evil grin*

 

I sea the problem, lol

 

I'd say raise your cal and mag. maybe your lighting period is to long or older bulbs. over stocked with fish. lack of a CUC. lack of good flow in tank. cut back on feeding every other day.

 

too many phosphates feeding algea, solution is to change all the water, and kill algea by using a bleach dip.

 

major problem you have there CG. I want to play too.

 

Good one! Let's see some answers!

 

Umm, soooo much wrong

Way over-stocked. Like 3x overstocked. A 55g tank isn't big enough for one tang, let along 2.

Any algae is a nutrient problem, and feeding that many fish in that small of a tank, you have a nutrient problem. PO4 are zero because the algae is sucking them all up.

The tank badly needs a CuC. Blue leg hermits would help cut the algae down. A turbo snail or two wouldn't hurt.

Ca and Mg are way too low. Raise them, stat. Don't raise too much too quickly though, you'll shock the tank. See the water chem forum.

How often is the media changed in the canister? Probably not often enough. I wouldn't even use a canister here. Use a media reactor to run carbon, if that's all you're using it for.

How old are the light bulbs? They probably need changing too. Older than 12 months, they shift to the red spectrum, and fuel algae.

Take care of the nutrient issue/bio load, get a CuC, change your media regularly (and light bulbs too), and the problem should fix itself.

 

Oh, should add that I don't believe a zero nitrate reading. Get another test kit.

 

First that seems like a lot of fish for a 55 gallon tank, and my suspect would be the lighting cycle. So reduce number of fish and lighting cycle?

 

That tank is way overstocked, so I am going to say overfeeding is an issue. Cut back on your feeding to every other day. Also there was no CUC mentioned. I would invest in one stat!