About to fire my CUC

mkroher

Member
I would lay them off, but there's plenty of work to be done! Rock rock rock.. they spend all their time on the rocks.
What critter(s) can I get that will concentrate on the algae that's growing on the sand? Will a lawnmower blenny help? More snails and hermits? I notice my tang nibbling on it occasionally, but he's not stupid.. he knows he has his meals coming. (I keep him fat)
I have a handful of snails and hermits.. I think 40-50 total among all of them, but I think I need a lot more, but they'll probably just gnaw on the rocks like the rest of them.
It's a 75gal. Oh, and brand new bulbs have been ordered as well.
 

oscar1129

Member
Originally Posted by mkroher
http:///forum/post/3167823
I would lay them off, but there's plenty of work to be done! Rock rock rock.. they spend all their time on the rocks.
What critter(s) can I get that will concentrate on the algae that's growing on the sand? Will a lawnmower blenny help? More snails and hermits? I notice my tang nibbling on it occasionally, but he's not stupid.. he knows he has his meals coming. (I keep him fat)
I have a handful of snails and hermits.. I think 40-50 total among all of them, but I think I need a lot more, but they'll probably just gnaw on the rocks like the rest of them.
It's a 75gal. Oh, and brand new bulbs have been ordered as well.
I have a Sleeper Banded Bullet Goby. It does really well. Reef safe too.
 

flower

Well-Known Member
Originally Posted by mkroher
http:///forum/post/3167823
I would lay them off, but there's plenty of work to be done! Rock rock rock.. they spend all their time on the rocks.
What critter(s) can I get that will concentrate on the algae that's growing on the sand? Will a lawnmower blenny help? More snails and hermits? I notice my tang nibbling on it occasionally, but he's not stupid.. he knows he has his meals coming. (I keep him fat)
I have a handful of snails and hermits.. I think 40-50 total among all of them, but I think I need a lot more, but they'll probably just gnaw on the rocks like the rest of them.
It's a 75gal. Oh, and brand new bulbs have been ordered as well.

Sand siftng goby...that's what I got, and now my sand is beautiful.
 

btldreef

Moderator
^^^ That's a great sand sifter!
I'd recommend that or a diamond goby. You need to have a covered on the top of your aquarium, though, they're jumpers. What kind of algae is on your sand bed? Diatoms (brown) or cyano (red/maroon/purplish) or green?
What kind of snails? Many don't like to cruise on the sand. Ceriths do.
I think I should fire my hermits as well, they're always on the rocks.
How old is your tank? If it's established you may also want to try sand sifting starfish. I love mine.
 

mkroher

Member
Originally Posted by BTLDreef
http:///forum/post/3167901
^^^ That's a great sand sifter!
I'd recommend that or a diamond goby. You need to have a covered on the top of your aquarium, though, they're jumpers. What kind of algae is on your sand bed? Diatoms (brown) or cyano (red/maroon/purplish) or green?
What kind of snails? Many don't like to cruise on the sand. Ceriths do.
I think I should fire my hermits as well, they're always on the rocks.
How old is your tank? If it's established you may also want to try sand sifting starfish. I love mine.
it's green algae. I have a mixture of turbo and nassarius snails. I heard that a sand sifting starfish can starve after a while.
 

spanko

Active Member
How big is the tank and how many Nassarius do you have?
I like Nassarius, Cerith and Florida Fighting Conch. Try to stay away from fish and starfish that sift the sand becuase the eat the good flora and fauna in the sandbed. Plus the fish tend to spit sand all over the place.
 

mkroher

Member
Originally Posted by spanko
http:///forum/post/3168051
How big is the tank and how many Nassarius do you have?
I like Nassarius, Cerith and Florida Fighting Conch. Try to stay away from fish and starfish that sift the sand becuase the eat the good flora and fauna in the sandbed. Plus the fish tend to spit sand all over the place.
75 gallon.
i have 10 Nassarius, and 20 turbos, the rest are hermits. What do you think Spanko? I trust your judgement and I'll order up whatever you suggest.
 

oscar1129

Member
Originally Posted by spanko
http:///forum/post/3168051
How big is the tank and how many Nassarius do you have?
I like Nassarius, Cerith and Florida Fighting Conch. Try to stay away from fish and starfish that sift the sand becuase the eat the good flora and fauna in the sandbed. Plus the fish tend to spit sand all over the place.
I have heard a lot of people say this about goby fish (I dont know about starfish). Mine has never disturbed nothing but the very
top layer. It doesent "spit" either. It sifts. My sleeper only is about .5 inch away from the bottom when he discharges the sand so it goes straigt back on the sand bed. I think they are great, keeps algea off my sand.
 

spanko

Active Member
Originally Posted by mkroher
http:///forum/post/3168059
75 gallon.
i have 10 Nassarius, and 20 turbos, the rest are hermits. What do you think Spanko? I trust your judgement and I'll order up whatever you suggest.
I would add another 20 Nassarius, 30 Ceriths and 2 Florida fighting conchs to that tank if it were mine and see how the sand looked after a month. (Nassarius are primarily carnivoris eating the meaty parts of the detritous mostly under the sand, Ceriths primarily herbivorous and the conchs stay on top of the sand eatling algae and diatoms)
Please don't do it just because I say so though, take in as much information as you can and make your decision from that.
 

ophiura

Active Member
Adding another fish will frequently not resolve the ultimate cause of your algae, and I strongly encourage you to figure that out before just adding something.
What is your nitrate, phosphate level? How old is the tank? Many tanks naturally go through this stage and then it dies off. In older tanks it is a sign of other issues. It could be lighting as well. There are many causes to algae problems. Unless you have a balanced solution, it will just crop up somewhere else.
 

mkroher

Member
Originally Posted by ophiura
http:///forum/post/3168203
Adding another fish will frequently not resolve the ultimate cause of your algae, and I strongly encourage you to figure that out before just adding something.
What is your nitrate, phosphate level? How old is the tank? Many tanks naturally go through this stage and then it dies off. In older tanks it is a sign of other issues. It could be lighting as well. There are many causes to algae problems. Unless you have a balanced solution, it will just crop up somewhere else.
It's a new tank, running about a month. Nitrate is at 0 (or undetectable). I'm not testing for phosphate (yet). The light is the only used piece of equipment, so we ordered new bulbs last week, and should be arriving shortly.
 

spanko

Active Member
I'm sorry, I thought this was an established tank. Your tank is going through some of the normal things a new tank experiences. That being said I would still up the CUC to the levels I previously posted. Here is a read for you on the maturing of a saltwater tank to help you know what is happening in the tank.
When you get a tank, you start with no populations of anything. You get live rock to form the basis of the biodiversity - and remember that virtually everything is moderated by bacteria and photosynthesis in our tanks. So liverock is the substrate for all this stuff, and also has a lot of life on it. How much depends on a lot of things. Mostly, marine animals and plants don;t like to be out of water for a day at a time...much less the many days to sometimes a week that often happens. So, assuming you are not using existing rock form a tank, or the well-treated aquacultured stuff, you have live rock that has either relatively free of anything alive, or you have live rock with a few stragglers and a whole lot of stuff dying or about to die because it won;t survive in the tank. From the moment you start, you are in the negative. Corallines will be dying, sponges, dead worms and crustaceans and echinoids and bivavles, many of which are in the rock and you won't ever see. Not to mention the algae, cyanobacteria, and bacteria...most of whcih is dead and will decompose, or which will die and decompose. This is where the exisitng bacteria get kick started...
Bacteria grow really fast, and so they are able to grow to levels that are capable of uptaking nitrogen within...well, the cycling time of a few weeks to a month or so. However, if you realize the doubling time of these bugs, you would know that in a month, you should have a tank packed full of bacteria and no room for water. That means something is killing or eating bacteria. Also realize that if you have a tank with constant decompositon happening at a rate high enough to spike ammonia off the scale, you have a lot of bacteria food...way more than you will when things stop dying off and decomposing. So, bacterial growth may have caught up with the level of nitrogen being produced, but things are still dying...you just test zero for ammonia cause there are enough bacteria present to keep upwitht he nitrogen being released by the dying stuff....does not mean things are finished decomposing.
Now, if things are decomposing, they are releasing more than ammonia. Guess what dead sponges release? All their toxic metabolites. Guess what else? All their natural antibiotic compounds...prevents some microbes from doing very well. Same with the algae, the inverts the cyano, the dinoflagellates, etc. So, let's just figure this death and decomposition is gonna take a while. OK, so now we have a tank packed with some kinds of bacteria, probably not much of others. Eventually the death stops. Now, what happens to all that biomass of bacteria without a food source? They die. Ooops. And, denitrification is a slow process. Guess what else...bacteria also have antibiotics, toxins, etc. all released when they die. But, the die-off is slow, relative to the loss of nutrients, and there is aleady a huge population...so you never test ammonia..."The water tests fine"
 

spanko

Active Member
But, all these swings are happening...every time, they get less and less, but they keep happening. Eventually, they slow and stabilize. What's left? A tank with limited denitrification and a whole lot of other stuff in the water. Who comes to the rescue and thrives? The next fastest growing groups...cyano's, single celled algae, protists, ciliates, etc. Then they do their little cycle thing. And then the turf algae. Turfs get mowed dow by all the little amphipods that are suddenly springing up cause they have a food source. Maybe you've boght some snails by now, too. And a fish. And the fish dies, of course, because it may not have ammonia to contend with, but is has water filled with things we can't and don't test for...plus, beginning aquarists usually skimp on lights and pumps initially, and haven't figured out that alkalinity test, so pH and O2 are probably swinging wildly at this point.
So, the algae succession kick in, and eventually you have a good algal biomass that handles nitrogen, the bacteria have long settled in and also deal with nutrients, and the aquarium keeper has probably stopped adding fish for a spell cause they keep dying and they started to visit boards and read books and get the knack of the tank a bit. They have probably also added abunch of fix-it-quick chemicals that didn;t help any, either. Also, they are probably scared to add corals that would actually help with the photosynthesis and nutrient uptake, or they have packed in corals that aren't tolerant of those conditions.
About a year into it, the sand bed is productive and has stratified, water quality is stable, and the aquarist has bought a few more powerheads, understand water quality a bit, corallines and algae, if not corals and other things are photosynthesizing well, and the tank is "mature." That's when fish stop dying when you buy them (at least the cyanide free ones) and corals start to live and grow and I stop getting posts about "I just bought a coral and its dying and my tank is two months old" and they start actually answering some questions here and there.
So, ecologically, this is successional population dynamics. Its normal, and it happens when there is a hurricane or a fire, or whatever. In nature though, you have pioneer speices that are eventually replaced by climax communities. We usually try and stock immediately with climax species. And find it doesn't always work. Now, the "too mature" system is the old tank syndrome. Happens in nature, too. That whole forest fire reinvirograting the system is true. Equally true on coral reefs where the intermediate disturbacne hypothesis is the running thought on why coral reefs maintain very high diversity...theya re stable, but not too stable, and require storms, but not catastrophic ones....predation, but not a giant blanket of crown of thorns, mass bleaching, or loss of key herbivores.
This goes to show what good approximations these tanks are of mini-ecosystems. Things happen much faster in tanks, but what do you expect given the bioload per unit area. So, our climax community happens in a couple years rather than a couple of centuries. Thing is, I am fully convinced that intermediate tank disturbance would prevent old tank syndrome.
 

mkroher

Member
Nice read, spanko. The rock is from my existing tank though, so I didn't go through a cycle. The info you posted describes a post-cycle environment, which is very interesting. What do you think would be an example of an "intermediate tank disturbance"?
 

spanko

Active Member
Read it again, it goes through set up to maturity.
When you get a tank, you start with no populations of anything. You get live rock to form the basis of the biodiversity - and remember that virtually everything is moderated by bacteria and photosynthesis in our tanks...........

.......A tank with limited denitrification and a whole lot of other stuff in the water. Who comes to the rescue and thrives? The next fastest growing groups...cyano's, single celled algae, protists, ciliates, etc. Then they do their little cycle thing. And then the turf algae......

.....About a year into it, the sand bed is productive and has stratified, water quality is stable, and the aquarist has bought a few more powerheads, understand water quality a bit, corallines and algae, if not corals and other things are photosynthesizing well, and the tank is "mature."......
 

spanko

Active Member
Get the Florida Fighting Conch. I have 1 in my 29 gallon and he is incredible. He is maybe an inch long.

 

chaseter

Member
Get a maroon clown. Mine for some odd reason likes to stir up the sand around its anemone. It gets right above the sand and then starts flapping its tail like it is about to blast off into space and it goes right in the anemone:D But, the sand is pristine in about a 6 inch radius from that anemone.
I had trouble with cyano on my sand bed but I got a koralia and aimed it at the sand bed and no trouble anymore.
 

spanko

Active Member
And the reason is that the turbulence is keeping nutrients from accumulating in that area, keeping them in the water column for removal by your mechanical filtration.
 
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