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#$%^% red slime.......

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algae blue canister filter corals crew dead feeding filter filtration fish green hair algae jbj large lighting par plant problem red reef remove tank tanks temperature water changes
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#61 ·
What's up with all the hatred? People on this board need help not more problems/fighting. That's all I'm going to say about this.

Now for the actual question/problem:

Red slime will never go away completely, somewhere in every tank there is some red slime. It's your job as a reef owner to maintain your tank to a level that is acceptable to you and to what your planning on seeing in your tank. I have noticed blooms every now and then and yes it is directly related to equipment failure or husbandry failure. I have successfully kept mine a bay for a long time until recently it has begun to bloom again. Top off water must be clean, 100% clean, lights must be in good shape and not old. Since cyno is a bacteria lighting does not play as much of a part in stopping the growth of cyno clean water and good husbandry skills have much more of a factor. Keep the maintenance going or you'll pay for it, trust me.

My routine if cyno breaks out:

1 – check levels in tank and mix new water. Check TDS meter.
2 – check my log book for references when it happened before and what might have caused it.
3 – clean the equipment. Skimmer, pumps, etc.
4 – Start up the old trusty HOT magnum and get it running. This step is crucial in my process. Before doing a water change I start running the HOT Mag. I then shut off my sump system to stop kicked up parts from getting down there. I then take some flexible tubing and stick it into my HOT input. Vola, you have a great cyno eating vacuum. Works great on bubble algae too. Watch out because this has high sucktion, you will suck up corals like zoos, so be careful. With the micro filter in the HOT, cyno really doesn't get through so I start by sucking up the cyno off the rocks and in corners, off the substrate, etc. Rocks and what no do not make it to the impeller on my model so I don’t have to worry about it breaking anything, so I suck up a light layer of rocks off the substrate (NO DSB in my display). Once this is complete I then kick up the tank a bit with a powerhead and use the HOT to suck out all the floating nasties. Remove the filter and CLEAN VERY WELL. You don’t want to re-pollute your tank later.
5 – do the water change.
6 – REPEAT after 1 week.

Now I do know that removing the cyno is VERY important and not letting it "settle" anywhere in your tank is equally important (current changes). Remove as much as you can then every day turkey baste the rocks well to break the cyno off and catch it with a net or something. Keep this up along with WEEKLY water changes that you should be doing anyways.

On a side note everyone always says to do a hundred different things, change your lights, try different water, etc. MAKE SURE YOU WRITE YOUR STEPS DOWN and DON’T do them all at once because you wont really know what caused it. Try different things slowly. Up your maintenance schedule and try that for a few weeks, then try the RO system for a few weeks, then try something else. You might find its just poor husbandry skills and you just saved a boat load of cash.

Good husbandry skills will prevent almost all disasters.

BTW - I have a bottle of Red slime remover and never used it. Before it arrived I cleared up my problem using the steps above.
 
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#62 ·
tikki, you repeted what we said for the most part. Nobody was hating on anyone. We had a pretty good discussion going without getting nasty. What you laid out as an outline is real close to what I was argueing the whole time.

But, thank you. And I'm not being hatefull. I just thought we I should point out that no one was offended for the most part by this thread.
 
#63 ·
Oh thats cool. As you can see I didnt want to comment too much on it. I hope my routine helps.
 
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#65 · (Edited)
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#67 ·
Why is temporary relief bad?

I am reading all the anti-chemical advice on treating this, and I am very confused. Yes, it is a bandaid for a bigger problem, but so are tourniquets on large wounds. It will not cure the problem, nor will it address the cause, but it will hold everything over until the problem is solved. If red slime is covering everything, choking the corals, then what is the harm in eliminating it, temporarily, with maracyn, while adjusting the other elements at the same time? Adjust lighting, that will take several days for the change to occur. Reducing nitrates, the only thing that will do is slow down the progression, not stop it, cyano reproduces asexually under high nitrates, it returns to sexual reproduction under normal conditions. Adding water flow, well I have had cyano grow on the output of my powerjet... at that location obviously waterflow was not the problem, granted, there was a dead spot in the tank that the outbreak started in, and once its in the tank it spreads, but increasing waterflow won't get rid of it, it will prevent it from coming back. Reducing excess nutrients, well aside from a total water change, you won't get rid of all the nutrients in your system, so that will take days for things to outcompete the cyano. What I am getting at is no, maracyn won't cure the problem, but I personally would rather but a large bandaid on a cut while on my way to the hospital than take steps to prevent the cut from happening again.
 
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#71 ·
Re: Why is temporary relief bad?

Applying a band-aid to a wound on your body doesn't wipe-out your local sewage treatment plant. :)

Erythromycin will disrupt the bacterial processing of N.

Also, though reducing NO3 won't eliminate cyano in your tank, it will make it relatively less competitive. It's actually absolutely possible to have an N-limited tank. I'd guess that many of the green alga might be more effective at cycling N than cyano, so if we reduce it enough, and if it's very tightly cycled (and kept out of the water column and unavailable to cyano), then we will probably do better in keeping cyano from encroaching on corals.

I'm not anti chemical, I'm just anti-using an antibiotic to control a symptom of a nutrient problem. If you MUST add a chemical to help with cyano, carefully add tiny amounts of H2O2 or KMNO4 to help bump up the ReDox, as cyano is reputedly less happy in high ORP environments.

Tom, you'll need much more than one.

Stopthemad said:
I am reading all the anti-chemical advice on treating this, and I am very confused. Yes, it is a bandaid for a bigger problem, but so are tourniquets on large wounds. It will not cure the problem, nor will it address the cause, but it will hold everything over until the problem is solved. If red slime is covering everything, choking the corals, then what is the harm in eliminating it, temporarily, with maracyn, while adjusting the other elements at the same time? Adjust lighting, that will take several days for the change to occur. Reducing nitrates, the only thing that will do is slow down the progression, not stop it, cyano reproduces asexually under high nitrates, it returns to sexual reproduction under normal conditions. Adding water flow, well I have had cyano grow on the output of my powerjet... at that location obviously waterflow was not the problem, granted, there was a dead spot in the tank that the outbreak started in, and once its in the tank it spreads, but increasing waterflow won't get rid of it, it will prevent it from coming back. Reducing excess nutrients, well aside from a total water change, you won't get rid of all the nutrients in your system, so that will take days for things to outcompete the cyano. What I am getting at is no, maracyn won't cure the problem, but I personally would rather but a large bandaid on a cut while on my way to the hospital than take steps to prevent the cut from happening again.
Click to expand...
 
#72 ·
Antibiotic usage is a very big problem I agree. Adding, 1 mg once a month, is nothing. Keflex is fed to cattle at a rate 1000's higher than that on a daily basis. As a preventative cattle are given 10,000mg of it twice a day for 10 days when being moved. That excess antibiotic is excreted and enters the same water supply as that of my 1 mg of antibiotic of tank water.
 
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#73 ·
I'm not primarily worried about development of resistance. Erythromycin is relatively broad spectrum. I'm worried about nuking more of the bacterioflora in the tank than just the cyano. Find me something that more specifically targets cyano, without disruption of the tank's bacterial N processing capacity, and I'm in.
 
#74 ·
>>Applying a band-aid to a wound on your body doesn't wipe-out your local sewage treatment plant.

>>I'm not anti chemical, I'm just anti-using an antibiotic to control a symptom of a nutrient problem.

Cyano has a different cellular composition than other green algae does. That is why it is so effective at wiping out cyano without crashing the whole tank.
 
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#76 · (Edited)
I was referring to bacteria generally (including cyano here, maybe just because I'm taxonomically persnickety) with respect to the effects of e'mycin. I was referring to chlorophyta when I was suggesting that the green alga might be better able (than cyano) to utilize dissolved N (at low concentrations) in the (aerobic) water column.

Though erythromycin is 100x or so more effective against gram-positives, it DOES have an effect on gram-negatives (such as the nitrifiers in our tanks). Just because it's not the treatment of choice for gram-negative pathogens doesn't mean it doesn't affect other bugs. I'm not suggesting that it kills the nitrifiers as effectively as it does the cyano, but if it compromises the ability of the tank to process NH3, it isn't good.

You (not Tom though :p ) are right: Erythromycin is not going to sterilize the tank, because it impacts certain bugs (like cyano) more than it does others (nitrospira/bacter/somonas, et al). But it can still have an effect on beneficial bugs.

In some cases it might be a useful "last ditch" tool to try and save the corals... but to me it's the equivalent of the old war movie scene where the good guys (the coral and the beneficial N-processing bugs), when being overrun by the bad guys (the cyano threatening your coral), call in an artillery strike on their own postition, hoping that their foxhole is deep enough that the bad guys will be wiped out, but that they'll survive.

As I think I posted here and in another thread, the best way to combat cyano is to provide conditions in which it can't compete very well:

Physically, provide lots of current to minimize relatively hypoxic layers along surfaces and to keep it from growing in mats, and temperature, salinity, and lighting that the coral prefer.

Chemically, minimize nutrients (especially dissolved in the water column, but piles of poo in areas of low flow too), and keep the ORP up.
 
#77 ·
rob you just explained in a nutshell what i was saying, except for one point , because there is such a race for space in a reef tank there should not be a worry about your BENIFICAL bugs because the cyno is stronger than which you are referring and will overtake it in the long run anyway, if u arent dilligent about correcting the problem the problem will get worse, progressivly faster than the ladder, so eliminate the problem FAST and cure the DISEASE, {bad husbandry} ;) and it will not return, I REST MY CASE:cool:
 
#79 ·
not on the same tank, it is usually a bi-product of cycling, in my tanks at least, the second time i had no choice i had my extra money for the past three years in my new tank cause i saved a crash of my {newbie} 55 g. the crash was my fault but the new tank had to go up to save my acros!!! so i dealt with the mini cycle ant the cyno was baaaad!!! so i used what has worked for me in the past
 
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