fuzz id

[shoo]

Hoping somebody could help id this fuzz on my rocks. Was only on a couple spots but it's starting to cover all the rock and accumulate detritus.



Thanks,
Shawn

 

[shoo]

Hoping someone can help with this. It's getting worse and now its starting to have cyano grow on top of it.

On a positive note my clinician are spawning. Wish they'd clear off all the rock instead of just the one spot.

Thanks
Shawn

 

[gurumasta]

I researched and all I could find is white hair algae or some sort of biofilm. In this link he said that a white short spine urchin took care of his:

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2467702&highlight=white+hair

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2482829

Does that look like the same stuff?

 

[Chris A.]

Are you dosing carbon?

 

[Chris A.]

I love how they blamed Marco rock for the algae lol

 

[shoo]

gurumasta, it does sort of look like those. it started off short and if you take a turkey baster to it the longer stuff blows right off but a short white layer stays.

Chris, no carbon dosing. I was going to start but this started and I read about things like this happening with it so I've held off. Tank is around 2 years old so I doubt it's suddenly the rocks doing something. I also don't know what type or where the rock is from other than tropical isle.

Also I took a frag out of my display tank and have infected my qt as well. That has no rock in it, bad lighting and I don't feed it either so I'm at a loss.

Thanks,
Shawn

 

[aresangel]

What kind of lights do you have and what is the age of the unit or bulbs?

I would attack it the old fashion way. Frequent water changes with some rock scrubbing with a tooth brush or similar bristle brush.


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[shoo]

The tank is a Coralife Biocube 29 with a Rapid LED conversion on it. The leds are only 14 months old.

I've been trying the old fashion way for a few months without any luck. The long stuff comes off easily but the short stuff is almost impossible to remove. I've been doing weekly 15% water changes for at least 2 months and it doesn't look like anything has changed. (I did slack on the water changes this spring which didn't help I'm sure.)

After looking at some similar threads an urchin sounds like it did the trick and some people noticed it show up when they upped their lights. Looking at my notes it got bad when I bumped my lights up so maybe a black out period would help. I didn't think it'd be photosynthetic since it's white but that's an easy thing to test out.

The only 'algae' I've found that looks like it is Calotrhix. Though I haven't found any real guides to getting rid of it.

Shawn

 

[shoo]

Forgot to mention, I tried chemiclean on it thinking maybe it was cyano but it didn't really do anything to it.

Shawn

 

[gzr918]

Are you running a skimmer? What's your flow rate like

 

[aresangel]

I don't think the biocube has a scammer. You might want to try getting a nano skimmer in the back.


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[shoo]

Running an Aquatic Life skimmer in the first chamber and I recently bought a tunze 9001 for the second but haven't had much success with getting that working. I'm also running phosban to try and keep my phosphates low.

I'll have to look at the actual model numbers but I have the stock return pump and a jaboa and koralia power heads.

S

 

[gzr918]

What is your stock list too? I'm just thinking that a combination of underwhelming skimming and water movement leads to the aggregation of biofilm

 

[aresangel]

Gzr918 brings up the idea of water movement. Let us know how the urchins work out. I am stumped. It almost looks like a rotting snail to me. But all over? Unless your live rocks went dead? Sorry for the questions and speculation. I wish I could help more!


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[gurumasta]

Running an Aquatic Life skimmer in the first chamber and I recently bought a tunze 9001 for the second but haven't had much success with getting that working. I'm also running phosban to try and keep my phosphates low.

I'll have to look at the actual model numbers but I have the stock return pump and a jaboa and koralia power heads.

S

Did you have the algae prior to running the phosban? What are phosphates at?

 

[shoo]

I have 2 clowns, 2 clown gobies, 2 fire fish a watchman goby and pistol shrimp, emerald crab some hermits & snails. Biggest ones by far are the clown fish and even they're pretty small.

I'm actually running phosguard and have been for a year or so. I had a hair algae out break last spring but it went away when I stepped up my cleaning crew. It was testing 0.00 ppm of phosphate with my hanna checker but that seemed implausible. Turns out the reagent was expired. The new reagent says I have 0.18ppm of phosphate.

Shawn

 

[shoo]

Here's a 100x and 400x pic of the white fuzz from my son's microscope.

Shawn

 

[shoo]

Here's a 400x pic of the red slimy part. These guys are very motile.

 

[TopheReef]

Red slimy part is dinoflagellate Amphidinium sp.

 

[TopheReef]

At first look at the white stuff I though it was actually dinoflagellates however, I was thrown off when I saw the 400x photo of those "threads".
From a far (if it's not Dinos) It may be some type of bacteria or fungal thread like structure...