6 weeks later....

[haus]

FINALLY my cycle is done!!! It seems like forever, but ammonia, nitrate, and nitrate are 0. I got a 10 snails and 7 hermit crabs to start with. What is the difference between margarita and astrea snails? I got 5 of each. The lfs also had cerinth snails, but I don't know about them at all. The lfs is waiting on a delivery of nassarius and turbo snails that I plan on getting too. Soon I want to add an O. Clown. After that I want a pink spotted watchman goby with pistol shrimp, a coral beauty, then a yellow tang. Maybe a royal gramma too, but before the yellow tang. There will also be a starfish and a cleaner shrimp that I add over time. As you can see in the picture, my tank is covered in green algae right now, but the snails and crabs have put a good dent in it so far.

 

[tecwzrd]

Looks like you cycled with the lights on 24/7 8O

I would try to siphon as much of that algae as you can using a new toothbrush and siphon close by to suck it up. It would take months for your snails to tackle all that alone.

I would definitely add some cerinth & Nassarius Snails to keep that deep sand bed stirred up.

Both the Astraea & Margarita snails are herbivores and get up to an 1”

I hope you drip acclimated them for at least 2+ hours before adding to the tank.

 

[jasno999]

I dissagree. Not sure what size tank that is but a couple of mexican turbo snails and maybe some PO4 remover and a few weeks (2-3 weeks) and I bet that would be pretty well cleaned up. Those turbos did an amazing job on my tank. Granted I have a small tank but all it means is you would have to buy a bunch of turbo snails. Jsut don't get too many cause then when the algae runs out they have nothing to eat.

But I would check my PO4 levle jsut to see what it is at. You might need to bring it down if it is high.

 

[tecwzrd]

I dissagree. Not sure what size tank that is but a couple of mexican turbo snails and maybe some PO4 remover and a few weeks (2-3 weeks) and I bet that would be pretty well cleaned up.

It’s a 55 gal both in his sig and in his

Personally I have never seen a tank that infested with algae. Even 40+ snails would take quite awhile to get it down.

po4 removers like ROWAphos could be used if necessary but using po4 free water and performing a couple of large PWC will work more quickly.

 

[roka64]

Jchillin advises go to your profile and select "view member sigs"- to see sigs....

 

[BillyZ]

Everyone has different appoaches to solving algae problems.

Here's mine; I wouldn't want to add more snails or cleaners than I'll ultimately want in my tank in the long run. Don't buy an abundance of them now just to tackle your post-cycle algae problems. They could, possibly, breed heavily given the huge source of food, but then they will quickly run out of food and then begin to die off. That die-off coud lead to other later issues.

I would get the cleaning crew you want if you had a "normal" amount of algae and I would second Tec's suggestion of a cleaning, syphoning off all that you can.

JMO


Quick question: It's hard to tell from the pics, does that algae feel slick and come off in sheets? If so, it could actually be cyano bacteria and not algae. Most snails/crabs won't touch it and would require a cleaning syphoning to remove anyway.

 

[haus]

It's not cyno, I had that before. Now the algae has deteriorated quite a bitfrom the snails and crabs eating it. They haven't really touched the algae on the dsb, but the LR is getting pretty clean at a rather quick pace for snails. I haven't been able to check this site since my original post, but I will try to get some of that algae out. I wasn't going to over do the snail population for the reason that soon the algae will be too low to feed all the snails. The cerinth and nassarius I want to get for stirring the sand bed.

 

[steve-s]

Point of fact, cyano can be variuos colors. Green slime algae is indeed a form of cyano. Looks like you have that combined with hair algae. FWIW, you can easily siphon the cyano off the top of the sand. You might lose about ¼-½" depth off the top but it will greatly speed up the process. If the algae is allowed to continue it's life cycle as is, the released nutrient will keep fueling the algaes regrowth.

Cheers
Steve

 

[Guest]

wow 8O ...ive never seen a tank with so much algae after a cycle.

 

[Brenden]

That is a lot of algae. 8O I agree with others here . You are going to have to do some manual removal. As BillyZ said throwing a oversized cleanup crew is not a good option.

 

[Saltz]

Try as hard as you can to remove that. I allowed my tank to reach that level of algae growth and soon I had hair algae all over the place and my tank was barely visible from the outside. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get it under control. Eventually my little cousin tossed a whole bottle (it was one of those fat round bottles the size of 2 or 3 regular ones) of flakes into the tank and my water turned purple (flakes were purple and I wasnt home) and then my tank was out of service (and still is). Anyways, point being I was unable to do anything about until I dismantled the whole tank (lost all my fish/corals/LR) and cleaned it out. I would recommend that you start cleaning ASAP. My biggest problem was I wasnt consistent and persistent in my cleaning and there were period of time where I didn't keep up. Start by cleaning off the glass and removing any equipment in the tank that has algae on it and thoroughly cleaning it out. "clean-up" crews do help to a certain degree but wont make much of a dent with the sand. Don't stir the sand, it will only get dirty (it will be nearly impossible to clean up) and algae will get stuck underneath in little pockets where they will die and once those pockets are exposed they will be harmful to the tank. Use a siphon hose as others have recommended and start taking it off the surface of the sand and rocks. I can guarantee that you will lose a noticeable amount of sand so make sure you have some to replace it with. If you notice hair algae on any of your rocks, throw them away and get new ones. Hair algae spreads like wildfire and once it infests the tank then you will have a hard time dealing with it. As of right now the tank doesn't look that bad compared to what I had to go through and so from experience I can tell you that it wont be too hard to bring that back to normal, but my advice is get to work ASAP as you dont want to make things worse.