Need advice

[madreefer14]

Just added my first piece of live rock with 9 mushroom corals and a few tiny feather dusters on it. The coraline alge is starting to grow but so is the brown alge. My question is, is it safe to remove the rock with the mushrooms on it from the water for a brief time. say 5 minutes, to scrub off the brown alge or should I leave is submerged and scrub it with the water I pull off durring the water change. Any chance of scrubbing off the coraline alge? Not sure what my phosphates are but amonia is 0.19, Nitrite is 0.19, Nitrate is 3.0, Ph is 8.2, SG is 1.022, Alk is 2.5. Temp is 79F. Will do a 7 gal H20 change tonight to get things alitle more tward goal. Goals are sg of 1.024, Ammonia, nitrites and nitrates down by at least half, Alk of 3.5-4 and Ph of 8.4. Will also be adding some calcium supplement and increasing the actinic light ( will leave it on all night tonite.) to help coraline growth. Thanks for your input. Mad Reefer:smokin:

 

[sir_dudeguy]

well, to start off, you shouldnt have added any corals till all the amonia and nitrites are down to 0 and done cycling. Im not saying the corals are gonna die, but its more of a risk when you add them so early...mushrooms however are pretty much imposible to kill if you have any light whatsoever from what i hear so i wouldnt worry.

and why are you leaving actinic on all night? I wouldnt do that...the corals wont get their normal light patterns that way. You could add a "moonlight" thats sposed to give of light spectrums that the moon does which is sposed to help the light patterns even more. And do you have a daylight bulb? i'm assuming you do, but you just leave the actinics on all the tme? if so, the actinics running all night wouldnt help coraline i dont think...

but to your question...no the coraline wont come off..if it really is coraline. Coraline is kinda hard and once its on, its on. The brown algae will come off easy. when you do a water change, just get a big bucket and fill it w/the tank water...as quick as you can get the rock from the tank to the bucket of water. Nothin will die if you dont hold it out of water for more than a moment. I had some polyps out of water for about 5 minutes and a week later they are now making more polyps and spreading on the rock. But just get a toothbrush or something and brush it off. IME that way is fine and nothin will die.

 

[madreefer14]

Tank was completly cycled before adding rock and corals. I think with the addition of the first piece of rock I got an ammonia spike due to byproducts of the corals. I would expect to see a small amonia spike each time I add a coral or a new fish as the nitrifying bacteria arent able to handle the extra load with each new addition. I should probably add that this is the only piece of rock in the aquarium (45g hex) and barely a quarter pound in weight. I'll probably add some biozyme to combat this too.

 

[bertoni]

The SG is very low. The canonical average sea waters is about 1.026-1.027. Raising over a period of a couple of weeks might help.

I wouldn't remove the rock in order to scrub off the algae. I don't think it'll really do much good, and it could stress animals, etc, on the rock. This type of bloom is very common, and they often resolve themselves given some time.