Update time....
I've been battling an unknown algae for about two weeks now and I fear I am losing the battle. I'm not sure how to proceed from this point.
It is a sort of brown slime algae almost. It flakes off in chunks when I blast it off the rocks. It tried to cover up my orange dot zoas and was keeping them shut but I blasted them hard and they recovered (thankfully). It also was starting to crowd the base of my yellow polyps but I did the same and they've been good for now.
It is mostly a rock issue, though, it is growing voraciously on some of the rocks and not others which immediately made me think it was a low problem. However, I have reached a point where I actually like the flow in the tank and feel like every area is getting adequate flow. I have used the string test to test this hypothesis.
The next step was to let the stuff grow. For four days I let it grow out and see how it behaved. It got long and, agreeing with my guess, was waving quickly in the flow of the tank. I know it's not from lack of flow to these areas, then.
So today I did an 8-gallon water change today and blew the shit out of the algae and sucked it through the siphon. I pulled out a ton of the stuff (but obviously still missed some...I would have liked to have done a better job getting the crap that settled to the sand but I couldn't take more water out of the tank).
Now the tank looks great because I spent 2 hours cleaning it but there's still enough algae in the tank that I would assume that it will come back just as strong if not stronger.
My alk test is expired and I need to order a new one. That's the only thing that I need to test for.
1.025 SG, 0ppm ammonia, 0ppm nitrites, <10ppm nitrates (didn't test today but last night before the 8 gallon water change they were about 10), 0ppm phos,
In other news, everything in the tank is doing quite well. All the corals are showing signs of growth.The acan is starting to sprout two new heads.
As for livestock, things are still great. The wrasse is on a better schedule now but still spends a lot of time in the sand. He seems happy, though, eats voraciously, swims actively, etc.
I might take a couple videos soon to show off some things in the tank. Depends on if/when I can get the algae under control.
A couple pics:
This is a trumpet coral I bought. It looked like this at Petco and I thought it was closed up but after a 2.5-hour slow acclimation and a few days on the bottom of my tank, it has not had any noticeable change. It does not glow under the blue actinics and it doesn't seem to open up to light. In a few days if it is still like this I am going to try moving it up in the tank.
This is a new zoa colony I got. It is difficult to tell in the pic because its a camera phone and I don't know how to edit pictures...but the outer rim is a vivid blue and the centers are yellow. They are very cool looking. Got this 30-head colony for $25. You can see the brown slimey flakey algae on the right side of this pictures with the bubbles indicating algae growth. :(
Here's a FTS from yesterday (before the water change). If you look closely you can see the algae clearest on the bottom right. Everything is closed up in this picture because I had just fed everything nutramar OVA.
