Need Advice on a few things....

[cmc3502]

So I have a month old tank that I started off with 13lbs cured live rock and 11 pounds of cured base rock. I also got live sand. After buying all my water and watching my tank go through a very small brown diatom outbreak, I started getting fish. I'm fully stocked up on fish now with a yellow tang (he'll probably go in time being that this is a 40 gallon), 2 tomato clowns, foxface and a 3 stripe damsel. I also added 8 snails (the kind that burying themselves in the sand) and recently a small patch of yellow polyps.
Heres my questions:
1) the yellow polyps are a little brown, but they are opening up and moving a little. Should they be brown?
2) there is green "dust" on the glass. Not enough to see from 4ft away, but up close I can see little dots of it.
3) the yellow tang will sometimes circle around the tank over and over again. Is this normal?
thanks

 

[xdave]

Well if you are brand new to the aquarium hobby, as in never had any tank before, then I guess that green dust is algae. Start scrapin !

You have just discovered your new purpose in life, that is until you start trying to get rid of the snails

 

[cmc3502]

so is this a daily thing? the alge scrapping?

 

[ogren1]

1. Give em a little time.
2. Algae...get a mag-float and scrape it.
3. 40 gallons!!....poor tang!! Go give him away, that tank is wayyy to small for him!

 

[cmc3502]

bump

 

[xdave]

Algae is beneficial, its only a problem if you get real black looking stuff. I usually scraped my home tanks every 2 weeks or so, and only the parts where you'd look in at. It will grow less as more bacteria builds up in your filter system. Mag float scrapes are great, unless your tank is acrylic. They do make them for acrylic, but all you need is 1 little pice of gravel on it to ruin the tank.
Sorry, didn't mean to laugh but I worked at a distributor with well over 1000 tanks, and I also was the fish dept manager at a store with about 150. The store tanks had to be spotless at all time.