a few days of darkness ok for my sps tank?

I siphoned as much as possible off the sand bed a few days ago, and it was barely come back on the sand bed. The stuff on the rock is much harder to get off and is layered on more thickly where it was popped up
 
I used to do it once every 2-3 months. All my sps did great. I bet you, as I did will experience a shotgun style grow of ur sps for about a week after. Every time I did it my sps went nuts with growth for about a week after
 
So was mine, it began to die on day four and was gone by the end of day five. Your corals will be fine.
 
From past experiences red algae is a bacteria and is not directly from PO4 I always have used red slime remove with no ill affects to my sps.....just my opinion
 
I recently was battling slime algae and used the product Red Cyano RX and had great success.

Was scared after the first day and water got crazy cloudy, but after a nice size water change and adding a filter sock to help clear the water up again everything is good to go. And I also have a SPS dominate tank.
 
Watch your PO4 level and make sure it doesn't drop too fast. I did a 3 day lights out while running a GFO reactor and had a small frag STN out of no where. I think it was from the rapid drop in PO4, possibly a drop in Alk but I didn't notice any. Just monitor it, preferably daily.
 
I have been fighting this for a year! After good healthy water changes and scrubed off as much as I could, new live substrate and parameters in check, the " Black out " is what did the trick! I actually have been doing two days on 1 day off for over a month now, all coral and clams happy with plenty of growth and red slime is gone...
 
So after 4 full days the slime is still lingering...I may have to leave the lights on for a week or so and try another black out to get the last of it. I'll siphon off a lot of it this weekend as well.

edit: also...great news...Found a ton of red bugs on my largest acro after the days of darkness. they must have reproduced like crazy. Its on its own half of the tank, and I see none on any other acro in the tank. Anyone got a suggestion for a good coral dip?
 
Last edited:
So after 4 full days the slime is still lingering...I may have to leave the lights on for a week or so and try another black out to get the last of it. I'll siphon off a lot of it this weekend as well.

edit: also...great news...Found a ton of red bugs on my largest acro after the days of darkness. they must have reproduced like crazy. Its on its own half of the tank, and I see none on any other acro in the tank. Anyone got a suggestion for a good coral dip?

Following along as I have some ugly lingering cyano as well in my SPS and my wife asked what all that "red" stuff was on the sand last night!

As far as a coral dip for red bugs, I have heard some good success using Bayer Complete insect killer as a dip for red bugs. I personally have not had red bugs so I have no actual experience with it.
 
I really hope I can kick this stuff. Half my lights are running today and itll go back to full tomorrow. As soon as they were on for an hour I noticed some spots that were starting to turn that evil red again...
 
I've always used chemiclean with no issues for cyano. I rarely get it, but when I do, a dose of chemiclean per the instructions and problem solved.
 
I may end up trying chemiclean. This slime is starting to grow on my ora frags and my cali tort. This is really starting to tick me off lol
 
It is wicked stuff. If fours days didn't knock it out, then it may be time for chemiclean. The redbugs are never fun, I had my bout with them years ago and did the Interceptor treatment on the acros and beat them.
 
you have to go inteceptor route and clean the whole tank of red bugs, I would suggest doing this when you do the chemiclean as you need your skimmer turned off for both treatments and a large water change

Make you sure you do a follow up treatment of the inteceptor to get the eggs. I have done the inteceptor treatment before for red bugs and I did only one the first time and they came back. Second time I did the follow up and no more red bugs. All my hermits and shrimp survived the treatment, so for my case, it was not necessary to remove all inverts
 
Well bad news. My tank looks like hell. I think I may have let my params slip to low during the black out, and all of my sps look stressed and so do some of my lps. Any ideas? I dosed last night and I'm going to test nitrates/nitrites/ammonia today to see if I can rule those out. I don't think its any of those though, as my fish all look perfectly healthy, and my new randalls goby finally ate today after 4 days of hiding. I may have lit them to long yesterday. My morning/night lights were on for around 8 hours, and for today I dialed it back to around 5-6. I think the issue is that my morning night lights are blue plus, which are known as the bulb that produces the most par. My plan as of right now is just to test and rule some stuff out, dose my params back up, and slowly bring my lights back to full strength so I don't stress the corals out like I did yesterday. Any other suggestions?
 
Well bad news. My tank looks like hell. I think I may have let my params slip to low during the black out, and all of my sps look stressed and so do some of my lps. Any ideas? I dosed last night and I'm going to test nitrates/nitrites/ammonia today to see if I can rule those out. I don't think its any of those though, as my fish all look perfectly healthy, and my new randalls goby finally ate today after 4 days of hiding. I may have lit them to long yesterday. My morning/night lights were on for around 8 hours, and for today I dialed it back to around 5-6. I think the issue is that my morning night lights are blue plus, which are known as the bulb that produces the most par. My plan as of right now is just to test and rule some stuff out, dose my params back up, and slowly bring my lights back to full strength so I don't stress the corals out like I did yesterday. Any other suggestions?

Water changes always do wonders
 
I think I dropped the phosphate to fast. All of my corals are fine except three of my largest sps, which appear to be bleaching/stn-ing. If thats the onyl loss I get then I can handle that. As of yesterday I thought my losses would be much worse. Im doing a big water change tomorrow for sure.
 
Back
Top