Brown Slime On Substrate

[BHLOZEK]

I've had this brown slime on my tank subsrate for a while now i know it is some type of algae but do not know what is causing it or howto get rid of it my nitrite is 0, nitrateis 0 and ammonia 0 PLEASE HELP
How do i get rid of it?

[Blake]

How old is your tank?

[naser]

you would have no alge if your tank was really at zero.........

[BHLOZEK]

Actually that is not true there is many other elements in water that alagae can consume as food JUST HELP PLEEZZ

[MarieK]

Sounds like the hated red slime- cyanobacteria. Is it on your rocks too? Slime is related to silicates in your tank. Do you use ro/di water and have you tested that ro/di water(those canisters/filters need changed periodically. Skimmer? Kalkwasser or calcium ractor? I found if all those bases are covered, it should help. I also got a yellow headed goby during my slime problem and he does great for keeping that sand stirred up. Try to remove as much of the slime as you can from the layer of sand (I used a turkey baster and net for the worse areas. ) Good luck and let me know how it goes. (As soon as you get that solved, it tends to be something next- Reefers love the challenge.)

[Doug1]

While there are a few other minor nutrients that contribute to plant growth it takes an abundance of Nitrogen and Phosphorus in the forms of ammonia, nitrite, nitrate and phosphates along with adequate light to promote algae growth. These are the main nutrients that build up do to the feeding and waste reduction cycles. That your tests reveal nondetectable levels lead us to conclude that hobby test kits arent anywhere as sensitive as lab grade tests and that the abundance of slime algae is pulling the nutrients from the water and binding them yup in the cells causing growth.
You could go an a nonstop campaign to change massive amounts of water, using top quality RO/DI, reduce feeding and cut back on lighting. This would work but may be very stressful on the corals and other critters. Best approach is to insure that your water is very pure, watch feeding and manually remove as much of it as you can. As the input is balanced with the export, either by more detrivores and supporting infauna, more desirable algae cultivation and more aggressive skimming, it will balance out and the unwanted slime will diminish

[tdwyatt]

What Doug posted is on the mark. There is a post in the archives that details a lot of the information and processes that lead to cyano outbreaks, as well as other nuisance Algal outbreaks.

High silicates are conducive to DIATOM outbreaks, and the silicate is usually organosilicates as opposed to silicon dioxide (i.e. sand, although much of the literature mistakenly identifies silicate sand as the problem/source). Although normal beach sand is made up of silicon dioxide, that form of silicone is not a significant source of silicon in a form that diatoms can use it, but many water supplies DO provide the organosilicates (freshwater river mouths supply a good deal of the bioavailable dissolved organosilicates) that diatoms need to form the 2 halves of their shell, and most RO/DI units will remove a good deal of the organosilicates. Plain silicon dioxide is just not soluble enough to be bioavailable to diatoms. Remember too, the aquarium glass itself is nothing but high quality fused silicon dioxide...

Btw, if you have diatoms, they appear as a brown dusting throughout the tank, usually easily blown around the tank by water currents. One way of removing the organosilicates it to remove the diatoms (and their locked up silicates): suspend the brown material and filter the heck out of the tank water. This will remove the diatoms from the water column, and they can be discarded along with the filter material/element. Just make sure to only use RO/DI water for top off and water changes/seawater mix.

I have included a part of the article on cyanobacteria below:

As far as the Cyanobacter goes, I concur with the statements about this being only one of the factors that influence blooms. Aquaria that have problems with cyanobacter species usually have a combination of not only chemical/nutrient problems, but also physical and biological problems varying from lack of competition for nutrients to too long a photoperiod. Usually all the factors that influence cyanobacter spp. growth is present, but some increase in one factor may be the key to producing a bloom.

The chemical factors for cyanobacter can have many sources, but usually center around the availability of nitrates or a nitrogen source (could be ammonia as easily as nitrite or nitrate, but usually nitrate and/or DOM in stable systems) and phosphates. At this point you are addressing one of the main sources of phosphate, in your top off water, but other sources of phosphate are readily available in your inputs to the tank: feeding (especially flake), carbon from coconut shells, and occasionally the salts for synthetic seawater mixes, although that practice has pretty much fallen by the wayside now. Many municipalities use phosphate additives to reduce the possibility of lead in drinking water. Older systems use polyphosphate resins to soften the water in areas where the raw water has large amounts of calcium present. It would be very important that you use some type of water purifier to remove these sources of phosphate. Please note that although many of the RO units have a rejection factor of 99% that often does not mean that it is removing 99% of the phosphate! Phosphate is a small enough molecule that the RO membrane cannot efficiently remove much of the substance. In many cases, you will find that the companies (check spectrapure's web site for an example) cannot guarantee that they will be able to reduce the phosphate level at all unless the water is further processed by a deionization resin column (i.e., RO/DI water), and even then, the level may be reduced by only 50 to 70% based on the input-water concentration of this ion. I would try to limit the input of phosphates, but don't be so concerned with this that you feel the need to stop feeding your fish, rather, find a way to export the phosphate. There are many ways to do this, my personal preference is to use a refugium and grow macroalgae. This removes the phosphate as you harvest (and discard) the calerpa/halamida/whatever you grow to take up the phosphate. Algal turf scrubbers do the same, although I am not a big fan of these systems. The use of a good skimmer is another way of removing these compounds, and it will reduce the levels of Dissolved Organic Materials (DOM), but skimmers will remove any phytoplankton and other particulate materials that are food sources for many of the tanks inhabitants as well. On this you need to make a decision on whether you want to develop competition for the resources or eliminate some of the overall problem by skimming. I personally have pushed my skimming to running only if the cyano gets out of hand, and I have not been skimming for almost 4 months now with little or no cyano in the display tank (DSB, 2 years old, 6" no plenum)

If you are testing for nutrients and show little or none in the water column, keep in mind that if you have an established cyano growth, as soon as you are adding nutrients to the system, the cyano will be taking them up. Another means of removing these nutrients would be to siphon up the cyano and discard it as part of your water changes. This not only removes the organism itself, but exports the nutrients that the organism has locked up as well.

As far as the aluminum oxide compounds go (phosphate sponges), I don't like them, although I have used them in the past. They have their own impact on the water column, and sarcophyton spp. will usually let you know that they don't like them by either shriveling up and shedding a coat of mucous or dying, not what I would consider a good exchange for getting rid of the cyanobacteria.

There are physical parameters that affect the growth of Cyanobacter as well, long photoperiods and water circulation. Good water circulation inhibits the growth of cyanobacteria mats, and for mats to develop, there needs to be large amounts of light. These organisms are neither plant nor animal, but have characteristics of both. They contain a red chlorophyll-like substance that allows them to photosynthesize carbohydrates in the presence of CO2 and light, but they also have the ability to capture substances for growth through a diffusion process (active transport for this organism is fairly slow, but does play a role in its growth). Slow water movement increases the likelihood that the organism will be able to capture foods, as well as the likelihood that the concentration of nutrients will be higher in still water (diffusion, remember?). With this in mind, cyano should be easily outcompeted for limited resources in a well-diversified system.

Biological competition in a well established DSB system will control most of the cyano problems listed above, as well as the removal of cyanobacteria itself, as there are many organisms that live in a diverse sandbed infauna system that consume cyanobacter spp. as part of their diet. Rob Toonen and Ron Shimek both have recent articles about this subject, as well as Sam Gamble's articles on live sand beds. Peter Wilkens spoke on the subject at MACNA this year, and suggests that one way of solving cyano problems is to find someone who's tanks do NOT have cyano problems, and get some of their sand to introduce cyano-consumers to problematic systems.

As far as ornamental fish consumers of cyanobacter spp., the stripped Bristle-toothed tang (Ctenochaetus striatus, see pp734-35 in Baensch Marine Atlas). Under the feeding aspects, Baensch lists "...C. striatus sucks the thin covering of diatoms AND poisonous blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) from the bottom, making it one of the few herbivorous spp. that can be poisonous (ciguatera)..." . As the fish keeping is not my forte, I will leave any suggestions for other cyano-consumers to Doug or Dick or Alice (Horge? Martyn? care to chip in?) Keep in mind that problems with cyanobacter blooms are usually multifaceted, and having the cyano consumed by a top-of-the-chain organism generally does not remove the root causes of the bloom from the microcosm. You need to consider putting in place some method of export of the nutrients and a limit to the import of them to deal with the problem more thoroughly.

Hope this helps, sorry for the long post.

[ 02-27-2001: Message edited by: tdwyatt ]