Hey guys, I've had my reef tank up and running for about 16 Months now and everything has been fine. Recently I had my gfo out of commission for a week while I replumbed it. It was down for so long because I thought I had the right elbows and cut the tubing apart only to find it leaking all over and had to order new elbows from brs. In that week's time I got a horrible red slime outbreak. This stuff is all over my refugium, all over my sand and starting to cover my rocks. I'm worried it's gonna start covering corals soon! I tried to siphon it all out, even in the rufgium and while it did work for a few days it comes right back. My tank is mostly softies and lps but I do have a few pieces of monti and stylo as well. What should I do? I was thinking about covering it with the lights off for a couple days but I don't want to harm the corals, please help! :headwally:
How to get rid of red slime in a reef tank?
- Thread starter DJasak
- Start date
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Sciencing Daily
Lights off for a couple of days won't hurt the corals. If you go that route I would do some large water changes first to make sure the water is pristine and siphon out as much of it as you can. Do the lights out and then be prepared to do another large water change while siphoning out the remainder.
It's called cyanobacteria, a normal 'phase' of a tank with a bit too much nutrient: how's your skimmer?
Skim efficiently, turn the lights out 3 days a month, 4th day on blues only. And don't go crazy on feeding. Also---the stuff grows like mad if the light spectrum is going 'off' or if oblique sunlight can reach the tank.
Skim efficiently, turn the lights out 3 days a month, 4th day on blues only. And don't go crazy on feeding. Also---the stuff grows like mad if the light spectrum is going 'off' or if oblique sunlight can reach the tank.
I have a reef octopus hob classic 90, on my 45 gallon tank, gfo is back up again, think I'm gonna try the lights out/water changes approach first before I introduce any extra chemicals to my tank. When I siphoned out the first wave of it I moved half my rocks and got under the rocks too, maybe this time I'll do the other half. Will also be doing some water tests tonight before the water change and I'll post the results...other thing I noticed which may be what caused the over flow of nutrients is I recently added 2 serpent stars and a bunch of snails. I drip acclimated the stars but just tossed in the snails which I normally do for snails and they've been fine, but this time a lot of them died within a day or 2. And I've only found 1 of the 2 stars. The 1 that I found looks very healthy but the 2nd one is nowhere to be found. Other thing I can think of is I did add a baby fox face and baby blue jaw trigger to the system 6 months ago and are starting to out grow the tank, might b time I either rehome them or upgrade. I did plan to upgrade systems when I bought them but life got in the way and it never happened.
juniorrocketdad
New member
Lights out works great first do water change twice a week for 2-4 weeks than do a blackout for at least 24 hours this worked for me extremely well and my water was super clean from the water changes so no algae came back for a while other than choraline
