strange brown cauliflower like algae

[reefinmike]

A few months back I made the decision to nuke all of my rock with bleach to once and for all get rid of vermetid snails and aiptasia. Now I'm learning that bleach isnt the best option and wont always sterilize the rock. I ran it in bleach water for a week, constantly refreshed fresh water for a week and sun dried for a week. somehow either the rock or minute amount of frag plugs/coral skeleton I brought over also brought along pests I have never seen on my rock the prior 5 years. Bryopsis, flatworms, hydroids and this peculiar brown algae. it seems to thrive directly under my kessil and seems to gravitate to high flow areas. It is soft, almost sponge like. It peels off the rock fairly easily. I have been in the hobby/trade for 12 years and never seen anything like this. a general search here and google for "brown fuzzy algae" just brings up a bunch of filamentous short brown hair algae.

my army of hermit crabs do not seem to like it, margarita snails wont touch it, my two mexican turbos seem to mow over it periodically but never seem to eat any. since I moved my giant zebra turbo to the tank it seems to be declining but I have not seen him eat it myself. Any ideas of what it could be? I need to go in there with a tooth brush and siphon when I do a water change this weekend.

 

[Michael Hoaster]

I feel ya, reefinmike. I'm in a kind of similar situation.

That stuff looks like it could be bacterial. So if you are carbon dosing, you may want to suspend it for a while.

The problem with nuking your rock is that it takes you back to square one. Suddenly, you have all this clean rock that is ripe for re-colonization. All that clean rock has to get encrusted again. But you have no control over WHAT decides to move in. It's pretty similar to starting a new tank. So, you get to go through all the new tank uglies again.

If you didn't have corals, I'd say just sit back and let nature do its thing, while adjusting your clean up crew. Since you do have corals, you don't want them to get overrun, so, toothbrush and siphon…

I'd still look at improving the CUC. You should expect a lot more algae to show up in the coming months. In my experience, the best way to get your CUC to perform, is to make sure they have no other source of food. If they have access to fish food, they're useless. If they have nothing but algae, they'll eat it.

You could provide some nutrient competition, by adding some macros. At least you get to choose those! One conclusion I reached regarding aiptasias, is that if they come back, I'll resign myself to keeping a filefish. They're actually pretty cool fish!

Sorry about rambling on. I hope there is something useful to you in there.

 

[Smokey Stover]

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I have the same stuff, Hoping for a definitive ID and cure.

 

[reefinmike]

Thank you for the reply Michael, i agree, starting anew with bleached rock opens up the surface to anything willing to settle there. I know that coralline really prevents anything else from growing on it, sadly several pieces of rock were coated head to toe in coralline before bleaching. Coralline started showing up in the tank and coincidentally most of it is appearing in the dark nooks and crevasses where it was before. I feel that a week long soak in bleach water, a week in fresh and a week sun drying in the sun didnt completely nuke the rock.

I do believe i have very low nutrients, several people have commented the tank looks low on nutes due to coral coloration. I haven't done a water change in a month and have been feeding 2 grams of PE mysis each day. I cant detect nitrates with my nyos kit and dont have/ want a reliable phosphate kit. I'm hoping to get enough in there to get cheato growing to help combat low ph/ very high house CO2. Mine all slowly withered away but i picked up a little today.

I actually feel i have too much CUC for the system as it sits. all my 40-50 zebra hermits are starting to get too big, i feed extra to keep my 20 nassarious snails going, 15-20 margarita snails and three big turbos. I picked up a longspine urchin today knowing that they aren't too picky and tend to strip the rock bare! Also got about a hundred baby trochus snails for free!

 

[BonesCJ]

I have that stuff as well in my Macro system, only saving grace is its easy to siphon off when doing water changes or general cleanup.