I've had my tank up and running for a little over 3 weeks now - I used live sand and 25# of live rock from an LFS that has had the rock in tanks for months. I let it cycle for 2 weeks, and checked water parameters every other day during that time. I did get minor ammonia and nitrate spikes. But never really saw an increase in nitrate readings. About a week ago, I added a CUC (4 red tip hermits, 1 emerald crab, 2 pep shrimp, 1 skunk cleaner shrimp, 3 cerith snails, 3 marg snails, and 6 nassarius snails) and 2 small ocellaris clownfish. Once I added livestock, I put Purigen in chamber 2 and ChemiPur in chamber 3 of the stock media basket. The stock sponge is in chamber 1.
Last night I started to notice some greening of the live rock, and small blotches of green on the sand. I never saw an outbreak of brown or red algae over the two weeks - could this be the third round of cycling algae? Or might it be from excess feeding of the clownfish ... they didn't really eat hardily for a couple of days. I've been feeding the clowns mysis or brine from a syringe - I spot feed them, only squirting a little bit in at a time. They tend to get most of it, but some does end up on the bottom, where the CUC seems to take care of it. I don't feel like I'm overfeeding, but I was feeding daily, and a couple of times I've fed twice per day.
I've dropped daylights from 11 hours/day to 9 hours/day, and I'm only going to feed the clowns every other day. Water parameter tests for this morning showed 0 nitrate, 0 nitrite, 0 ammonia, the water is crystal clear.
Does this sound like the right course of action to control the green?
I'm looking for opinions -
Do you think this green is the final stage of cycling, even though I didn't get brown or red stages?
Or from introducing livestock, and thus beginning feeding cycles?
Is there anything I could add to the CUC to combat the green?
