Red Slime or Hair Algae or ??????

[ensquire]

Have had this tank running for 4 weeks like this as I decide how to replumb it and all has been good until earlier this week. The tank was acquired from someone that didn't take care of it, and was covered with this same infestation. But when I got it , I took it all down and stored the rock in old water for almost 3 weeks. I set the tank back up a month ago and the rock looked like it was mostly dead, but it had a few good looking pieces that started to revive all the rock, and then this came back.

Water parameters are:
Temp - 28
SG -1.027
NO2 - 0
NO3 -10 mg/l
NH3 -.01 mg/l
KH - 100 mg/l
Ph - 8.4
Phos -1.0














I'm tearing it all down again and adding another feed line maybe a herbie, but should I treat this now , before putting the rock in a rubbermaid with powerheads and heaters ? What is it ?

[reefwars]

cyano bacteria blow off what you can and throw it in your bin it will be fine if thats what your planning. basically theres dieoff in your tank and excess nutrients and that stuff loves it, lots of flow and water changes can help but it works best if manually removed.it will come and go throughout your systems life but shows when there are problems like something dies, excess of nutrients,too much light or poor water quality.if left be it can get worse but if you tackle it now it will go away with a little love.you can use things like red slime remover but im not a fan of liquid fixes best thing is to find out what the causes are and based on your parameters you have a few problems.


nitrates need to be as close to zero as you can get them they dont have to be zero but the lower the better

phosphate has to be zero.... if theres any at all youll get algae blooms and then other problematic algaes.

salinity does best at around 1.025

would raise your alk just a tad but thats not your problem so forget that for now.


when a tank has its water parameters all over the place its then " unstable"untill its stable youll see alot of problems like this and they can and will get worse. first you need to solve these problems and then youll see a difference using ro water , lots of flow, and manual removal.

cheers and theres lots of great threads on here regarding cyano and brown algae

[ensquire]

Thanks reefwars, best of luck on your move.
I will clean and store the rock do a few water changes and get these numbers balanced out. Not set up for ro water so I guess that needs to be addressed.
Guess Im off to do some reading.

[reefwars]

Originally Posted by ensquire

Thanks reefwars, best of luck on your move.
I will clean and store the rock do a few water changes and get these numbers balanced out. Not set up for ro water so I guess that needs to be addressed.
Guess Im off to do some reading.

thank youy very much ro water is nice to use for obvious reasons but at minimum put prime in the water. are you sure your test are done right 1.0 seems awfully high for phosphate ??

[ensquire]

Nutrafin test kit and I'm color deficient, but will test again with better set of eyes.

[ALang]

When you stored the old rocks, did you have heavy waterflow throughtout the bucket? Did you do water changes for the rocks? If not, then it may very well be that the LR inhabitant has suffocated/died, and now showing up as cyano-bacteria (red/ green slime algae).

What about your sand? Was it the old batch, or did you replaced the sand? Could very well be die-offs in the LS as well that's contributing to the out-break.

So lots of water changes, lots of water flow, and if you have it, hook up/borrow a reactor and load it with GFO to help combat the high Phosphate load.

If the sand is the old batch, you may want to discard it all and start with new. Happened to me when we moved, too, lessons learned the hard way.
Good luck.