ID please, I think its Cyano (Help?)

[critofer]

Hey all,

I think I have Cyano, I came home from a vacation to see that my sand bed was covered in a red brown stuff. It only look like its on the sand. Is it Cyano, what should i do to get rid of it??? My tank is a 29 gallon with T5HO 10k and arctinic bulbs. I feed everyother day mysis shrimp cube

Thanks guys

 

[The Velvet Sea]

Looks like cyano to me. Combating it is best done on multiple fronts including a reduction in feeding, reduction in light duration, increase in circulation, improvement of water quality (reduction of phosphates), and introduction of cleanup crew (though I recommend this the least, it is better to address the cause in my opinion). Depending on the age of the aquarium, young tanks often go through a cyano phase, similar to the diatom phase, which usually passes in time with good husbandry. There are also medications (antibiotics?) since it is a bacterial growth but I have never used them and cannot recommend them.

Edit: since it looks to be growing on the sand, there could be an excess amount of locked up nutrients in the sandbed and a sand sifting critter could be helpful to get those nutrients out of the sand. It can also be growing there because that is a low flow area and cyano hates high flow, as the recommendation to increase circulation suggests. Hope that helps. Good luck!

 

[critofer]

Okay, I am going to reduce the lighting about 2 hours, lower the feeding, and get some sand sifting critters. What are good to sift the sand? I have no more room for fish in my tank.

 

[The Velvet Sea]

People rant and rave about Nassarius snails and they are definitely cool sand dwellers, but mine would just bury under the sand and sit there until I put food into the tank. Tiger tail cucumbers are actual sand sifters and are great additions to tanks I have had. I've also heard good things about fighting conch, which I plan to add to my new tank in the future once the sand bed has more life to help support it. There are also some snails that can eat cyano like cerith snails, but they are not sand sifters.

Edit: this is a highly contentious topic here, but if you don't have an extremely deep sandbed (something designed to have anaerobic areas), I am a big fan of manual sand sifting. Stirring a small section of sand yourself when you do a water change can really help to reduce organics and clean your sand. You can even use a gravel vacuum if it is slow enough. A lot of people will advise against disturbing the sand, but I'm a proponent of it, and it might be a better suggestion than adding more life to help with the cyano.

I'd also like to reemphasize flow. Changing the flow around, or adding a temporary power head in the problem area can be a huge help in discouraging grown of cyano.

 

[Floowid]

I agree with The Velvet Sea. I vacuum my sand with every water change.

 

[32mm32]

I had a problem with this stuff too, still have a tad bit left but what i did was added scarlet hermits, blue leg hermits and fighting conch. They started to remove some but I also increased water changes to help out. I also upped my flow quite a bit (old turnover was 24x new is now 60x +). I noticed the single biggest improvement after adding Pro-bio pellets and dosing microbacter7
My problem came from a combined number of issues,
Skimmer broke, pump for gfo reactor seized (unnoticed for maybe as much as a month if the pump seized right after changing media), slacking on water changes and being out of state for a month one right after the next....

I must say though the fighting conch was a nice addition.