pink slime cyanobacteria

[Sarahbell430]

about a month ago I posted a thread about a pinkish spot on my rock thinking it might be the start of coraline. It wasn't - it is, what I believe, pink cyanobacteria . It started as a spot about the size of a thumbnail - i scrubbed it off in the tank and now there are 4 or so smaller spots that are much smaller but surrounding the initial spot. Should I keep scrubbing them off or am I encouraging it to spread? I saw some treatments online but Id rather not introduce a chemical if I can get rid of it another way.
In my tank I have a RBTA, shrimp, snails, two clowns, a firefish, an urchin and a bengal cardinal

 

[Gladmaker]

I know you said you didn't want to use a chemical but I don't know of anything else that will get rid of it. I don't think scrubbing it will help. I used Chemiclean and mine was gone in a couple of days. Mine was all over the tank. Follow instructions and do a water change after a couple of days. Nothing in my tank was hurt. I have a lot of inverts and several fish and coral.

 

[Ron Reefman]

Use a siphon to suck it out of the tank. You can run to exit of the siphon to a filter sock and put the water back into the tank, or better, throw the old water away and top off with some new saltwater.

You may have to do this a number of times. But the cyano should/could/may run out of food and stop developing in the tank.

 

[Haunt]

How old is your tank? If it's fairly new then what your seeing is actually quite common. Just manually remove what you can during a water change, maybe increase the amount of flow you have and try to keep things like Nitrates and Phosphates as low as possible. (don't overstock, don't overfeed etc)

https://www.reefcleaners.org/nuisance-algae-id-guide

 

[highlite2nice]

You should find the cause of the cyano you have excess nutrients, do you run gfo at all? Do you use rodi water?(make sure its 0 tds) make sure you don't overfeed and have plenty of flow. I wouldn't really worry about it spreading around from your blowing it off if you find the source it will die off.

 

[Sarahbell430]

I know the source - I stupidly used tap water to top off the tank when I ran out of distilled.

I will NEVER do that again ...I used chemiclean and its gone - doing a water change tomorrow and am hoping it doesn't come back