Lights out to kill algae?

[starionesir]

I did a stretch of 3 days with no lights in my basement so it was total darkness with no moon lights as suggested to help with my algae issue. It seemed to help eliminate alot of the algae and I manually removed the remaining but the corals don't seem too happy. My zoas, polyps and mushrooms seem fine. My sps corals seem fine but my frogspawn and duncan don't seem happy at all. Any ideas as to why? I had been aggressively skimming which was suggested during the black out and had upped my gfo amount in my reactor.

Possible that the corals spit which I heard they can do if there stressed and its bothering them? I'm not currently running any kind of carbon.

 

[Sk8r]

Total dark is not a good thing. Allow ambient light. Run carbon. The lights-out treatment is not for algae, but for cyanobacteria. For algae, run GFO, but if you have sps be VERY careful to wash the GFO well, so that no dust remains.

 

[starionesir]

Right now I'm back to full lights and have been for a couple days. Everything looks fine with the exception of those couple corals. I'm going to pickup some carbon tonight. Any preference for carbon. I have a local petco and petsmart. I know people like brs but to get something going quickly I'd have to use a local store.

 

[tmz]

Light deprivation affects all photosynthetic organisms including corals, cyanobacteria and algae .
Tolerance levels for a lack of light for various species varies but in general it stresses them all.
Some photoautotrophic organisms rely more on photosynthesis to produce organic carbon ( sugars ) for energy and life functions than others. For example sps may rely on photosyntesis from their zooxanthellae for 95% or more of their needs for organic carbon while kenya tree/capnella might be more around 80% or less. Some corals take up organics from the water ; some rely more on food than others too.

I'd target feed the frogspawn and the duncan to help them out.

While a lack of PO4 starves out some nuisance algae;not all types, dropping it too much too by amping up gfo can also effect corals which need some PO4 for life functions. What is your PO4 now?

 

[starionesir]

Last reading was 0 but there is still some algae and a I have refugium so that can also give me a false reading.

 

[Sk8r]

You can also have trouble with nassarius snails and crabs attacking bottom-sleeping fish if the dark is total and prolonged.