cyano battle lol

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by wreck

thanks for the replies.

i added chemi clean last night, took the cup off my skimmer and also added 2 airsrtones. man do i have micro bubbles in the display tank now lol. can i put some filter floss in the last baffle of my sump inorder to keep micro bubbles out of my display?

I don't know if I'd worry about the bubbles, it's only a couple of days and they won't hurt anything, but I don't see any harm in the filter floss if it's bugging you. The reason you have to stop skimming is because there's literally not a setting low enough on your skimmer that will stop it from overflowing with that product in the water, not necessarily because of the filtration aspect (though I'm sure that's part of it).

Once the treatment is over and you've done the water change, your skimmer is likely still going to go nuts for a while. I've only used it on this tank once, but after the water change I had to set my skimmer on it's lowest setting and still had to empty the cup a few times a day to get it to settle down.

It would be a good idea to think about adopting a a strategy now to intentionally deal with nitrates. If yours hit 15 (I'm assuming that's measured in ppm), then the tank is producing more of it than it can naturally consume. I mentioned that cyano can grow in low nutrient environments, but it certainly doesn't mind high nutrients either! If you're only relying on human muscle power through water changes and whatever anoxic zones you might have in your rock and sand to do all your denitrifying, you'll need to be very religious about water changes for them to keep nitrates under control long term. Keep in mind that a 20% water change will only drop your nitrates from 15 to 12ppm, and dropping your nitrates to 5ppm in a single shot would require a 66% water change with nitrate free water. If you're going to continue using water changes as the primary tool to address nitrates you'll need to figure out your weekly rate of nitrate production (which will be complicated by any nuisance algae or cyano that will most certainly be taking some of it up), and make sure that your weekly or biweekly water changes are a greater percentage of your system volume than the percentage increase in nitrate concentration each week. There are a bunch of different methods for controlling nitrates in an automated way that work round the clock whether you're on top of water changes or not, but I might suggest not starting any sort of carbon dosing regiment (either solid or liquid) until you've seriously beat back the cyano problem. Adding excess organic carbon to a tank with high nitrate and well established cyano bacteria would be a little like trying to put out a fire by dousing it with gasoline.

Anyway good luck. If it really is cyano, you should see drastic results by tomorrow.

[wreck]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I don't know if I'd worry about the bubbles, it's only a couple of days and they won't hurt anything, but I don't see any harm in the filter floss if it's bugging you. The reason you have to stop skimming is because there's literally not a setting low enough on your skimmer that will stop it from overflowing with that product in the water, not necessarily because of the filtration aspect (though I'm sure that's part of it).

Once the treatment is over and you've done the water change, your skimmer is likely still going to go nuts for a while. I've only used it on this tank once, but after the water change I had to set my skimmer on it's lowest setting and still had to empty the cup a few times a day to get it to settle down.

It would be a good idea to think about adopting a a strategy now to intentionally deal with nitrates. If yours hit 15 (I'm assuming that's measured in ppm), then the tank is producing more of it than it can naturally consume. I mentioned that cyano can grow in low nutrient environments, but it certainly doesn't mind high nutrients either! If you're only relying on human muscle power through water changes and whatever anoxic zones you might have in your rock and sand to do all your denitrifying, you'll need to be very religious about water changes for them to keep nitrates under control long term. Keep in mind that a 20% water change will only drop your nitrates from 15 to 12ppm, and dropping your nitrates to 5ppm in a single shot would require a 66% water change with nitrate free water. If you're going to continue using water changes as the primary tool to address nitrates you'll need to figure out your weekly rate of nitrate production (which will be complicated by any nuisance algae or cyano that will most certainly be taking some of it up), and make sure that your weekly or biweekly water changes are a greater percentage of your system volume than the percentage increase in nitrate concentration each week. There are a bunch of different methods for controlling nitrates in an automated way that work round the clock whether you're on top of water changes or not, but I might suggest not starting any sort of carbon dosing regiment (either solid or liquid) until you've seriously beat back the cyano problem. Adding excess organic carbon to a tank with high nitrate and well established cyano bacteria would be a little like trying to put out a fire by dousing it with gasoline.

Anyway good luck. If it really is cyano, you should see drastic results by tomorrow.

man thanks for the detailed reply. i am trully not sure what exactly caused my problem, im guessing summer neglets and lack of water changes. also i dont have a tds meter on my rodi unit, im ordering one today aswell as new di filter and also a membrane incase mine is toasted.

what methods do you suggest besides waater changes to lower nitrates? im open to try anything.

[asylumdown]

oh there's tons, but a lot work on similar principles

Carbon dosing is one of the major ones, which can be system wide using simple easy to make solutions of either ethanol (usually vodka), sugar, vinegar, or some combination of all three. There's hundreds of threads on reef central and a bunch of articles written on how to do it, how to ramp it up, etc.

Then there's solid carbon dosing which usually means a biodegradable carbon polymer like biopellets tumbled in a reactor, though a newish product that doesn't require a reactor has come out of South Africa recently, and is the same polymer but formed in block that looks like feta cheese (never tried that one).

The logic of carbon dosing being built on the redfield ratio, which finds that ocean going plankton contain C:N:P molecules in the ratio of 106:16:1, meaning for every molecule of nitrogen consumed, 6.6ish molecules of organic carbon are also consumed. It's based off of measurements of pytoplankton, and in reality should be considered a general average (the specifics are always more nuanced than that), but aquarists have extended it potentially apply to heterotrophic bacteria as well and hypothesized that from a bacteria's point of view our tanks are organic carbon limited. Adding organic carbon in excess, so the theory goes, will allow excessive growth of heterotrophic bacteria that will consume large quantities of nitrate and some phosphate (in a ratio of 16 to 1), and those bacteria can then be either consumed by corals or skimmed out by a skimmer (hence why most suggest pointing the outflow of a BP reactor at the intake of a skimmer).

Carbon dosing has it's risks, benefits, proponents, and adamant detractors. There's hundreds of threads on all the forums about it. The risk, is that cyanobacteria assemblages also contain clades of heterotrophic bacteria which are just as good (if not better because of their commensal associations) at consuming excess organic carbon, so if cyano is present and nitrate is high, it's possible to cause a cyano explosion by starting an organic carbon dosing regiment. Paradoxically, it's exactly the effect the method is attempting produce (cyano is a bacteria that consumes lots and lots of nutrients after all), it's just not the right effect. The challenge with carbon dosing is getting the heterotrophic bacteria you can't see as a gross red slime covering everything to become dominant, then managing it in such a way that leaves enough nutrient in the water for your corals. That's not always easy to do, which is where I think a lot of the detractors come from.

Then there's systems like prodibio, zeovit, and bright well aquatic's version of zeovit. Prodibio is a probiotic system that is supposed to encourage beneficial heterotrophic bacteria that consume nutrients, as is zeovit and brightwell, only those last two also include a zeolitic substrate that's supposed to both absorb certain nutrients directly from the water as well as provide a substrate for the bacteria you want. You just have to be careful with them as they each contain as part of their core 'regiment' the dosing of an organic carbon source, only they're not nice enough to tell you on the bottles that that's what you're dosing.

Then there's things like sulphur denitrators, or other denitrator reactors that create anoxic conditions inside them to favour and feed the denitrifying bacteria that break nitrate down in to atmospheric nitrogen. Those are sort of an older technology that never really caught on in the general public for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which being the potential for them to go horribly wrong and dose your tank with hydrogen sulphide.

And then really old school are properly designed deep sand beds, which a lot of people on here wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. However, the original 'inventor' of a deep sand bed specified the use of a plenum (a void created by some permeable structure in the bottom of the sand bed) in conjunction with the sand bed that most people in modern times seem to forgo, but to me seems critical to the design

There might be other ways, and each one of the ones I listed all have people who love them, hate them, think they should be banned, and can't understand why everyone doesn't use them. There's really no right way, and each one warrants investigation so you can get a sense of how they work and what they're doing. Always keep in mind that people on forums (myself very much included) often speak in absolutes as though they know what's happening, when in reality we're all just groping in the dark and are all equally as guilty of thinking we know more about causal relationships than we really do. It's as much an art as it is a science.

[wreck]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

oh there's tons, but a lot work on similar principles

Carbon dosing is one of the major ones, which can be system wide using simple easy to make solutions of either ethanol (usually vodka), sugar, vinegar, or some combination of all three. There's hundreds of threads on reef central and a bunch of articles written on how to do it, how to ramp it up, etc.

Then there's solid carbon dosing which usually means a biodegradable carbon polymer like biopellets tumbled in a reactor, though a newish product that doesn't require a reactor has come out of South Africa recently, and is the same polymer but formed in block that looks like feta cheese (never tried that one).

The logic of carbon dosing being built on the redfield ratio, which finds that ocean going plankton contain C:N:P molecules in the ratio of 106:16:1, meaning for every molecule of nitrogen consumed, 6.6ish molecules of organic carbon are also consumed. It's based off of measurements of pytoplankton, and in reality should be considered a general average (the specifics are always more nuanced than that), but aquarists have extended it potentially apply to heterotrophic bacteria as well and hypothesized that from a bacteria's point of view our tanks are organic carbon limited. Adding organic carbon in excess, so the theory goes, will allow excessive growth of heterotrophic bacteria that will consume large quantities of nitrate and some phosphate (in a ratio of 16 to 1), and those bacteria can then be either consumed by corals or skimmed out by a skimmer (hence why most suggest pointing the outflow of a BP reactor at the intake of a skimmer).

Carbon dosing has it's risks, benefits, proponents, and adamant detractors. There's hundreds of threads on all the forums about it. The risk, is that cyanobacteria assemblages also contain clades of heterotrophic bacteria which are just as good (if not better because of their commensal associations) at consuming excess organic carbon, so if cyano is present and nitrate is high, it's possible to cause a cyano explosion by starting an organic carbon dosing regiment. Paradoxically, it's exactly the effect the method is attempting produce (cyano is a bacteria that consumes lots and lots of nutrients after all), it's just not the right effect. The challenge with carbon dosing is getting the heterotrophic bacteria you can't see as a gross red slime covering everything to become dominant, then managing it in such a way that leaves enough nutrient in the water for your corals. That's not always easy to do, which is where I think a lot of the detractors come from.

Then there's systems like prodibio, zeovit, and bright well aquatic's version of zeovit. Prodibio is a probiotic system that is supposed to encourage beneficial heterotrophic bacteria that consume nutrients, as is zeovit and brightwell, only those last two also include a zeolitic substrate that's supposed to both absorb certain nutrients directly from the water as well as provide a substrate for the bacteria you want. You just have to be careful with them as they each contain as part of their core 'regiment' the dosing of an organic carbon source, only they're not nice enough to tell you on the bottles that that's what you're dosing.

Then there's things like sulphur denitrators, or other denitrator reactors that create anoxic conditions inside them to favour and feed the denitrifying bacteria that break nitrate down in to atmospheric nitrogen. Those are sort of an older technology that never really caught on in the general public for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which being the potential for them to go horribly wrong and dose your tank with hydrogen sulphide.

And then really old school are properly designed deep sand beds, which a lot of people on here wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole. However, the original 'inventor' of a deep sand bed specified the use of a plenum (a void created by some permeable structure in the bottom of the sand bed) in conjunction with the sand bed that most people in modern times seem to forgo, but to me seems critical to the design

There might be other ways, and each one of the ones I listed all have people who love them, hate them, think they should be banned, and can't understand why everyone doesn't use them. There's really no right way, and each one warrants investigation so you can get a sense of how they work and what they're doing. Always keep in mind that people on forums (myself very much included) often speak in absolutes as though they know what's happening, when in reality we're all just groping in the dark and are all equally as guilty of thinking we know more about causal relationships than we really do. It's as much an art as it is a science.

thank you for taking the time to write this up, much appreciated!! i have some research to do now hahha, but that is part of the fun.

[Reef Pilot]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

Carbon dosing has it's risks, benefits, proponents, and adamant detractors. There's hundreds of threads on all the forums about it. The risk, is that cyanobacteria assemblages also contain clades of heterotrophic bacteria which are just as good (if not better because of their commensal associations) at consuming excess organic carbon, so if cyano is present and nitrate is high, it's possible to cause a cyano explosion by starting an organic carbon dosing regiment. Paradoxically, it's exactly the effect the method is attempting produce (cyano is a bacteria that consumes lots and lots of nutrients after all), it's just not the right effect. The challenge with carbon dosing is getting the heterotrophic bacteria you can't see as a gross red slime covering everything to become dominant, then managing it in such a way that leaves enough nutrient in the water for your corals. That's not always easy to do, which is where I think a lot of the detractors come from.

You know, controlling nitrates (with bio pellets) and preventing cyano is actually very, very simple. That is, if you use Brightwell's MB7. Very cheap, and helps make your water and tank look very clean. As I reported earlier in this thread, and on others, I have not had a cyano problem since I started using this a couple years ago.

It is almost frustrating for me to keep seeing these threads about cyano (and bio pellet issues) and how academically complicated this issue is, when in reality it is so simple and easy to control, from a practical user perspective. There may be other remedies, but I do know that MB7 is a sure fire one.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

You know, controlling nitrates (with bio pellets) and preventing cyano is actually very, very simple. That is, if you use Brightwell's MB7. Very cheap, and helps make your water and tank look very clean. As I reported earlier in this thread, and on others, I have not had a cyano problem since I started using this a couple years ago.

It is almost frustrating for me to keep seeing these threads about cyano (and bio pellet issues) and how academically complicated this issue is, when in reality it is so simple and easy to control, from a practical user perspective. There may be other remedies, but I do know that MB7 is a sure fire one.

I think it's definitely worth trying out, but I'll be honest I've looked at several bacterial supplements under a microscope before (Dr. Tim's, zeobak, and one other brand that was spawned from one of the fish tank reality shows), and with the 40x 400 power lens, I couldn't see a single thing that could be construed as alive. I saw lots of what looked like organic debris, but there was no movement of any kind, and nothing that looked like a cell. It's entirely possible that my scope doesn't magnify enough as some prokaryotes are really very small, but when I look at something like cyanobacteria, or a dollop of dinos under the microscope, it's a veritable cacophony of cells, movement and life.

I've never looked at MB7 under the scope, but I know that in academic institutions, live biological samples like bacteria would never ever be stored at room temperature in a completely sealed container for any length of time. Even if they're added to a nutrient rich substrate, at room temperature they'd be dividing at an exponential rate. After a week the chances that they wouldn't have consumed all of their food and all available oxygen and suffered a total population collapse would be very, very low.

By the time you buy it at the store, you have no way of knowing how long it's been since it was packaged, what sort of temperature fluctuations it's gone through on its way to you, or really even what sort of fluid the bacteria have been added to. I'm not saying you won't get some bacteria, but the scientist in me cringes a little every time I see those bottles of zeobak collecting dust on the shelf at the LFS that is usually between 25-28 degrees with 99% humidity.

If the relatively small, low resource aquarium companies have figured out a way to put bacteria in to suspended animation indefinitely at room temperature and the best funded labs and universities on earth haven't, I'd be very, very, very shocked.

[Reef Pilot]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I've never looked at MB7 under the scope, but I know that in academic institutions, live biological samples like bacteria would never ever be stored at room temperature in a completely sealed container for any length of time. Even if they're added to a nutrient rich substrate, at room temperature they'd be dividing at an exponential rate. After a week the chances that they wouldn't have consumed all of their food and all available oxygen and suffered a total population collapse would be very, very low.

Well, they do say to refrigerate after opening the seal, and I do. Not sure exactly how it works, but must be something alive in there. If you have cloudiness in your tank for some reason (like cleaning your sand), it will clear that up in hours (did that a few times) and make your water crystal clear. Also clears up mulm and bio pellet clumping. Without it, you will have a real problem trying to get your pellets tumbling properly.

I have had the cyano try to start up a few times, and I just increased the MB7 dosage for a week or so, and it would clear up. I think they say it seeds beneficial bacteria (whatever that is) which out competes the cyano.

So, just giving you the non-academic practical experience view... It definitely works for me.

[waynemah]

I had a huge cyano problem recently. I busted out the best YOLO tune I could find and dumped 300G ChemiClean treatment into my sump. Pulled the skimmer cup off and turned the carbon off. Within a day it was all gone and everything was still alive. Once I turned the carbon on and skimmed the Checmiclean out the corals were back with excellent polyp extension and fish were eating as usual.

I'm very picky about my water. The Phosphates and Nitrates were barely detectable, but I still had carpets of this stuff... If it comes back, I'll just Chemiclean the thing again. It was just microbubble fest for a week.

[michika]

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

You know, controlling nitrates (with bio pellets) and preventing cyano is actually very, very simple. That is, if you use Brightwell's MB7. Very cheap, and helps make your water and tank look very clean. As I reported earlier in this thread, and on others, I have not had a cyano problem since I started using this a couple years ago.

It is almost frustrating for me to keep seeing these threads about cyano (and bio pellet issues) and how academically complicated this issue is, when in reality it is so simple and easy to control, from a practical user perspective. There may be other remedies, but I do know that MB7 is a sure fire one.

"Cheap"? Right...cheap is relative don't forget.

Per the Brightwell page for dosing instructions; high nutrient is 5mL/25g for the first two weeks, then you switch to the low nutrient dosing levels which is 5mL/50g. Currently my tank has a volume of 600g, soon to be about 750g. Using the 600g number on a large tank like mine I'd be dosing in EXCESS of 120mL/day at the initial dosing recommendation and then about 60mL/day. A 2L bottle is $40.10 at JL (excluding shipping and taxes). A 2L bottle will last me 16.66 days at the high nutrient dosing amount. The lower dosing would last a little more then a month; 36.36 days. Therefor I could expect to have a fixed monthly cost of $40 + shipping & taxes. That isn't particularly economic. Add in the fix costs of running your tank (utilities, food, salt, etc.) and you can be easily paying out a large monthly cost for your hobby enjoyment.

To conclude when we talk about "cheap" we need to recognize that its a relevant term in comparision to systems, economics (prices at LFSs, accessiblity, etc.), and feasibility. What is realistic for someone isn't realistic for another.

Also remember a lot of these threads are people advising others of their experiences. Advice is often just a regurgitation of things that have worked for others, but isn't necessarily based on hard facts or provable science. Just because something worked for you is not a guarantee that it will work for someone else.

Additionally asylumdown has provided us all some great academic based responses in regards to cyano. I think it really does put much of the discussion into black and white terms when it comes to why some tanks may have cyano and others don't. I suspect that those points are the ones most often missed when we talk amongst ourselves in the reefing community about solving this issue when it appears.

Disclaimer: I have cyano, I've had it since I missed ONE water change during the Southern Alberta floods. I've tried Coral Snow, bacterial dosing (Zeobak)increasing my water changes, amending the flow patterns in my tank, and doing absolutely nothing. And you know what nothing has worked. I bought many products on the recommendations of others because it also worked for them. So there you go, why I felt the need to chime in.

/devil's advocate moment.

[asylumdown]

And I just want to put it out there that I've done some more research in to the specific strains that are likely in a bacterial dosing product like MB7. If they are using one of the strains of prokaryotic heterotrophs that can form endospores, then I can see it being possible for the product to actually have viable culture inside it long term. So while I'm still skeptical as to whether or not adding a tincture of say 100,000 bacterial spores to an aquarium already populated with several trillion bacterial cells does much, I will concede that it is in fact possible, if the right strains are chosen and they are prepared in an appropriate manner and solution, for viable bacteria to still be present buy the time you buy it.

The same can not be said for bacterial supplements designed to speed up the cycle, as the nitrifying autotrophs responsible for that cannot form endospores and go in to suspended animation.

It would be all so much easier to look in to if any of these companies would publish which bacteria they're using, but I'm guessing it's more likely that I will win the lottery tonight.