Algae on sand

[FireWater]

Hey everyone, I am new to this whole salt and reef thing. I need advice on something to help me with severe algae and debris on the sand. My tank is about 3 months old and it is an Oceanice Biocube 29. I have been looking at snails and an Orange Spot or Orange Diamond Goby. Heard snails can undermine stability of the live rock and gobies eat all the beneficial micro critters. Who has the answer for me?

[Headless_donkey]

Go with the goby. I have onw and he will clear up your sand within a day. the only thing is they move alot of sand around and can bury things or cause rocks to shift

[SuperXdude]

don't get an engineer goby...they earn thier name well.

[jroescher]

Depends on the size and type of snail. Small nassarius snails are great. Big turbo snails are extremely good at mowing down algea, but are also pretty strong and can push a decent size rock around.

You should look into a "refugium package" or 'clean up crew' package of various snails and crabs. Several of the sponsers have some good packages made just for what your describing.

[GaryP]

First I would say to look at your water chemistry. High phosphates are the cause of the algae, not a lack of a clean up crew. Don't get me wrong, a clean up crew will help, but in my experience, nanos are often plagued by algae problems because they lack a lot of the filtration equipment that larger systems have. The only real solution for most of these systems are large freqesnt water changes. Water changes are not really all the effective as a means of controlling excess nutrients, but unless you can add some filtration its about the only thing you got. If you system has a place for adding filtration media, I would suggest using some phosphate absorber in addition to the carbon that is probably already there.

Also, what kind of algae is it? Green hair alage, red cyano, diatoms? You said you are new, but not how long the system has been up and running. Algae blooms are usually part of the sytems cycling and maturation. Different algaes can have different causes but in general all are the result of excess nutrients, especially phosphates.

HTH

[Ping]

Micro critters are very important in our systems. In a small system anything that picks at the sand will wipe out the population. Astrea snails are very helpful as cleaners.

Tell us more about your system so we can help further.

Do you have a protein skimmer.
Temp.
Salinity
ammonia
nitrite
nitrate
flow making devices

As gary pointed out, small systems are not forgiving. A lot of things can be recommended to fix problems short term (gobies) but may cause another problem down the road.

[matt]

If your tank is only three months old, it's pretty normal to have algae blooms. Getting the clean up crew package is a good idea; you especially need bristleworms, some assorted snails, and a few (only a few!) small hermits for a tank your size. I'm assuming you have the sugar-sized fine grain aragonite sand, a couple of inches deep? You might have a look at Ron Shimek's small book "Sand bed secrets" to get an idea of how a sand bed works. Although your tank is probably too small for a true de-nitrifying deep sand bed, the principle of keeping a community of sand bed fauna that keeps the sand clean and oxygenated is the same. Just make sure you have enough depth so that bristleworms can tunnel in the sand. Also, have a look at inland aquatics, GARF, and IPSF websites; they sell "kits" of animals that will populate a sand bed. In particular, the inland aquatics "invert sand" is really good stuff; you could get a few pounds of that and maybe 10-20 bristleworms and you'll have a good start.

Probably the algae you're talking about is a dark red "blanket" that covers part of the sand and sometimes gets a lot of bubbles under it, almost lifting it off the sand. That's cyano bacteria which is very normal for a young tank. You should try to siphon this stuff out as it forms, eventually when you have the right balance of sand critters and your tank is more mature it will go away. I would not add any fish for now.

[FireWater]

Thank you to everyone that answered. When I first posted I guess I forgot some things. Water parameters are good, temps run between 74 and 76, and everything appears to be established. I already have 3 red leg and 2 blue leg hermits along with 2 emerald crabs, a starry blenny, and an astrea snail in the tank. I have been trying to research protein skimmers for the nanos ,b ut not having much luck. I am running some kind of extra filter medis that is supposed help act like a skimmer. Sand is very fine grain and the algae on it appears to be the red cyano that ya'll mentioned. I did impulse order two signal gobies today. Hope it will be a good purchase, from what I read they work great at sifting the substrate. I also purchased two nassarius snails. Along with all this I am currently looking at test kits for the home. I would like to thank everyone again.

[Willow]

Hey guys.. correct me if I'm wrong.. but doesn't cyano hate high flow?.. Seems to me it prefers areas of the tank where there is low water flow... (I could be wrong...)
So.. IF that's the case.. maybe a powerhead directed at it?

[urban79]

if you read about it. It really doesnt matter if it high flow or not. It just wont settle. I have a high flow tank. I battle it all the time.

[matt]

Thank you to everyone that answered. When I first posted I guess I forgot some things. Water parameters are good, temps run between 74 and 76, and everything appears to be established.

A couple of things; what do you mean by "good"? First off your temp is too low if you're trying to have a reef tank; go more for 78-80. There are all sorts of things you can't really test for and all kinds of residual instability in a 3 month old tank, unless all your rock and sand came from an existing reef tank. I'd be pretty cautious about adding any fish until your cyano blom subsides, although it probably doesn't make that much of a difference; my current tank was fishless for at least 3 months, during which time I had a cyano outbreak despite the fact that I had almost entirely cured live rock, really high flow, and an efficient skimmer that's oversized for the tank.

[Willow]

if you read about it. It really doesnt matter if it high flow or not. It just wont settle. I have a high flow tank. I battle it all the time.thanks for clearing that up for me.. lol.. and i had read the it didn't like high flow.. just wasn't sure how accurate that was!

[FireWater]

Like I said before I am new to this whole thing and I am learning as I go and researching as much as I can. I will try to get some accurate #'s on my water paramaters. Temp and conditions were "good" as tested by two different LFS on 4 occasions. I did a water change and full clean last night to remove as much as I could and it appears that what I have for a cleaning crew are getting quite a bit of the hair algae and other algae in the tank.

[urban79]

where did you get your live rock from. Alot of time is from the live rock you get. Cause me and my wife have the same everything. BUt my tank I got rock from alamo(I know IM dum) I fight it all the time. MY wifes tank nothen and I got her rock from other store. but we use the same r/o water and but we use differnt lights but mostly the same kinda wattage. I think it mostly came from the rock.

[FireWater]

Thanks again for responses. I got a hold of a test kit and will check everything myself versus going to the LFS for a while. The cleaning last night will hopefully help and I guess I will weather it out and see what happens.

[matt]

It's really good that you're testing yur own water rather than taking samples to the store, but you should keep in mind that test kits will only give you a general view of some of the more basic water chemistry parameters, and also that there is a real difference between certain test kits. For example, you could test zero for phosphate and still have plenty of phosphates to fuel an algae bloom, and most hobbyist quality nitrate tests are not very accurate at the low end. In particular, lots of new reefkeepers assume that if the fish store says your nitrogen compounds are "fine" meaning no ammonia or nitrite, then everything is go for stocking. But, the bigger picture is that there's a slow maturing period of several months in any new tank during which you should be very cautious about adding to the tank's bio-load. Usually there's so much die-off from new live rock that the whole system is in chemical flux, often times below the threshold of test kits but definitely toxic enough to affect livestock, for a long time until a new population of microscopic (and visible) critters is established and taking over the energy processing chores of the system.