Brown sand and Bubbles
 

hello I have a questions ? Our sand bed is turnning brown And it has air bubbles on it . (a) are the bubbles Nitrate ? (B) is the brown stuff an algee? :shock:

B) The brown stuff is probably diatoms. They are common in newer setps; generally they disappear after a little while.

A) If your setup is fairly new the bubbles are likely oxygen. Established tanks with a good sand bed will also release nitrogen bubbles reduced from nitrate.

Thankyou
 

ron101 thank you for your reply :D Should I stir the sand bed or leave it alone ?

Never disturb the sand unless you really like the look of this stuff... :lol:

Can you share more about the tank?

Because of the presence of air bubbles I would suggest you have Cyano (slime algae) The color is probably reddish brown. Cyanobacter can take on many colors including black. :(

Didn't Tony have brown bubbly slime recently? Some kind of Dinoflaggelates? Yuck!! Or it could just be diatoms....I had bubbly diatoms when I first started. Good luck with that!! :shock:

The colour of this thing is nearly a rust colour. The 2 pictures were taken with 2 different settings on the camera.
1- with preset w/b to account for the blue colour from the light
http://www.members.shaw.ca/bc_grl/sand1.JPG
2- set to auto colour for w/b
http://www.members.shaw.ca/bc_grl/sand2.JPG

This is a 90 g tank and we've been running it since November. Here are the water parameters:
SG-1.025
pH-8.3
NO3-0
CA2-400
ALK- 1.94 meq/L; 5.4dKH
PO4-0
NH3-0
NO2-0
Hope this information helps. Thanks!

Hey Jeanna :D

You sure about that alk reading...looks really low :?

Looks like diatoms to me.

Yeah Em, it did look low to me.. The hubby took the readings. We are using Seachem "Reef Builder Raises Carbonates" to combat this.
AFAIK, the readings should be at 3-4 meq/9-12 dKH, correct?

Jeanna, what kind of kit are you using for the PO4 test?

looks like diatoms to me, i just had them a while ago and they turned into cyno... now both are gone and i am left with a turf algae :roll:

Steve