this month is the beginning of my 4th month since i started my new tank. i went through the diatoms,then the hair algae, then bubble algae and a week and a half ago i started to get cyano. it got so bad it covered everything with a thick red slime. i have my lights on from 10am to 10pm. the funny thing is i noticed that the red slime was thick in the mornings to early afternoon but after about 7 hours of light in the tank the cyano would be gone, or at least the red visible slime was gone in the evenings. i was wondering why this was and then i read an article saying that cyano thrives under yellow light and not the bluish spectrum provided by our reef bulbs. I realized that i have been leaving my curtains open and direct sunlight would hit the tank for a couple hours early in the morning each morning. My nutrients were always low. i guess the absence of other algae as well as the spring morning sun started causing it to grow. since i closed my curtains in the mornings the cyano started to die off and within 2 days only a few small patches were left. i notcied that my emerald crab and blue legged hermits eat the cyano but not enough. my fighting conch grabs it from the sand bed and trys to stick it to its own shell but wont eat it. i also noticed that there was no cyano growth under my ball of chaeto and under my red branching macro algae. if you dont want to syphon out all your sand perhaps you could try covering it for a while by weighing down some macro on top of it?
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04-03-2008, 06:15 AM
Hybrid Mode
