Cyanobacteria Attack!

[blindskate]

So, I'm sleeping last night and my dad calls me at 8:42 ...and says "Your Red Algae is out of control, I'm going to put your fish in the ten gallon and ciphon it all out and do a complete water change"....8-O. WHOA! hold your horses cowboy, you will not! Yea..let's put 6 fish in a ten gallon that already has one fish in it. Talk about gasping for air....

Anyways, I said "no!..i'll be there in a minute".

Backtrack. Since this "cyanobacteria problem" I've been using cyanobacteria treatment and changed my water. So, it got worse.

I ran to my work and bought a ciphon hose and some filter pad that you cut yourself.

I went home and took the two yellow fish with black stripes and put em in my 10 gallon with my 3 stripe damsel.

well, me and my dad took out all the live sand and stupid slate flat rock and took it alll out and filtered the water and now its great! (mind you..no fish have died). the bacteria was all up in the live sand and rocks so i had to rid of them. now its crystal clear with buffer and filter pads and i bought an air pump for a little more flow of water, thoguht it would be a little advantageous.

so...ive decided no more flatbed rocks..and now i just have marine sand. not live.

 

[Devilishturtles]

A few posts ago I thought you said your cyanobacteria problem was all taken care of... did it magically dissapear and come back?

 

[blindskate]

sure did

 

[blindskate]

i never got it off the rocks n stuff, i had a huge cave, it went away but came back

 

[roka64]

If you replaced your substrate and rock, you will probably need to cycle your tank. Is this the 90 G tank?

 

[blindskate]

haha 20g

 

[ccCapt]

You can clean it all you want and it will keep coming back until you clean up the nutrients in the water. Use only RO/DI water, weekly or more pwc's to lower nutrient levels and nitrates, gfo to remove phosphate and no flake food.

 

[blindskate]

i do use ro water from my lfs. i did a complete water change, its just cycling now

 

[blindskate]

and i never use flake food, only frozen

 

[lando]

How do you prepare the frozen food? Maybe it has been addressed but what is the PO4 of your source water?

 

[cmor1701d]

The frozen should be thawed, rinsed with RO in a strainer and then fed. Frozen generally has quite a bit of PO4 in it too. You can also increase flow to the areas where you first see it take hold it doesn't get the chance to start. Adding some macro algae to a sump to help cut down on the nitrates will also help, but I believe the cyano will be the fist algae to consume the 'trates.