question, brown slime and some brown specs on glass

Hey Ryann,

I recently been having some brown slime in my reef tank "in the sand and rocks" (in parts but not over) and well someone was telling me that it might be a bad batch of salt that I could of gotten. What do you think.
Also been getting these dark brown specks all over the acrylic that are a workout to scub off at times lol.
Water has been on the cloudy side lately and haven't been able to completely get it clear. Before the water was always crystal clear.

Here is my stocking
1 yellow tang
1 foxface lo with the dot in the back
1 hawkfish
1 Maroon Clown
1 red scooter
2 chromis
1 bangaI cardinal


2 skunk cleaner shrimp
2 large snails
3 hermits

as for corals

Candy coral
trumpet coral
Galaxea
star polyp
orange montipora
finger leather
radioactive dragon eye zoa
large bubble tip anemone

lighting high intense led lighting.

using instant ocean reef crystals.

tank has overflow which I have the skimmer in the back and also have the pads and carbon to polish the water.

This is the 100 gal

parameters are checking good.

I added a bag of carbon to help polish the water but not success.

 

How long has the tank been set up? How long are your lights on during the day?

Your CC seems VERY small, You need a lot more critters than that to keep the tank clean.

 

Blues are on for about 12 to 13 hours. 8am to 8pm and then they start dimming after that.
Whites are on about 7 no more than 8 1/2 hours.

The funny thing is that on my other 125 gal tank setup it is super clean and their is no slime, or algae build up anywhere, everything is nice and clean. I'm only starting to have this issue with this 100 gal setup. What I think is happening is that since we upped the light intensity, then tank is going thru a large diatom bloom. When we made the change from fluorescent to LED we had a diatom bloom then it cleared up nicely. Now we been increasing the lighting intensity to accomodate some corals and after we did that is pretty much when everything started.

As for the cleanup crew yeah we can go with a bigger quantity to do the job. My 125 gal setup up currently has 3 large turbo snails, 1 large hermit and 1 star fish and its really clean.

 

Yea that sounds like the problem. It will take your tank a while to adjust to the higher intensity lighting.

Up the CC and give your tank time to adjust.

Remember to higher the intensity of the lighting slowly so your corals are not harmed.

 

thanks fish4life, I just wanted to get a second hand opinion if I had the issue somewhat on the same lines as others.

This massive diatom bloom sure makes the water very clowdy wish I could do something to get it clearer sooner lol. Any ideas

 

-reduce or redirect powerhead flow

-Add some type of Mechanical filtration, it will help remove particles more quickly

-May be caused by large Copepod or Amphipod population suspended in water column.

-Reduce food (detritus & uneaten food) for Copepod's and the Fish in general

-Introduce Copepod/Amphipod eating animals

-Keep carbon filtration in the tank

Those are all of my ideas on curing cloudy water. I don't have any problems because I use a canister filter for my FOWLR tank lol.

 

funny just saw your post now and this is actually what I did yesterday.


Since this is a deep tank I redirected circulation pumps to blow more water to the front where their is a lot of brown slI'm build up. With a lot of the flow being concentrated to the front lower a lot of the slime started lifting.

I blasted the rock with a power head to knock the slime off the rock

I did a pretty big water change and sifted the sand to suck the slime off.

I do have a very large Copepod population growing in the tank, so far I have a Red Scooter Dragon that eats Copepods all day. We been wanting to add a ORA Mandarin Dragon which doesn't depend on Copepods but at this point were considering having a non Ora Mandarin Dragon in the tank to keep the copepod population down as they are producing like crazy in the back overflow chambers and within the tank.

So far carbon is till in the tank and what i'm thinking is plugging in a filter to syphone some debris off the water although I already have pads in one of the rear overflow chambers.

 

Sounds like you're on the right track.

Just to double check:
Have you added any extra sand recently?
Have you started carbon dosing this tank? My bio-pellets (and liquid carbon when I ran it) produced a brown dusty coating. Tends to happen regularly, I just use my algae magnet to rub the glass clean. The dusty brown is a result of the increased bacteria activity - could indicate higher than normal nitrates.

 

Hey Ryan,

I haven't added any extra sand.
I haven't carbon dose.

I have checked the water parameters at its worst even with really cloudy water and all parameters are normal.

When I did a water change two days ago it really cleared up the water but the brown slime returned a bit.

The brown algae dust is easy to remove with the acrylic magnet cleaner which I added a piece of filter pad in between the magnet and acrylic for ease of cleaning.

The only thing that I have a hard time taking off are this small brown specs that appear every couple days which I really need to scrub off with a bit of pressure.