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Dealing with algae in a 'small' tank.

I recently managed to cultivate a nice cyno garden in a sterile tank - new sand, peroxide for the rocks, no livestock, no cycling additives. Cyno was restricted to the area occupied by my "vintage" always- wet rocks. So I am again a believer in old rock leaching nutrients, and am sorry I didn't old-school cook them beforehand.
 
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Top 10 Benefits of Keeping Mollies in a Saltwater Tank | Reef Builders | The Reef and Saltwater Aquarium Blog

Saltwater mollies are one of the least celebrated fish that aquarists can keep in a saltwater tank and this is very unfortunate. Of course all the new salt hobbyists are drawn to the hyper bright…
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Algae Eating – Let’s face it, there’s always a need for more ways to eradicate and manage algae growth in a saltwater aquarium, especially in newly setup tanks that are still working on becoming established. It’s astounding how much work mollies do in a saltwater aquarium, eating a variety of undesirable algaes – especially biofilms that lead to algae growth – before they grow out of control.

Cleanup Crew – If you think hermit crabs and snails help keep a tank clean, you haven’t seen anything until you’ve watched mollies go around an aquarium eating every little bit of uneaten food. They won’t pick at corals unless there’s something to graze on from the coral tissue, but their lips are gentle and will only cause the polyp to withdraw if they do.
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Ok, so update. other than "frag rocks" there were no big rocks in the 40, I did however keep some in the sump as I was afraid at the pain to deal with a big rock that gets covered in algae. However in the 10g tank I pulled out a large "branch" rock because it just got too algae covered, scrubbed it off and tossed it into the 40g sump... again assuming some level of "cycle". It didn't take too long for ALL the wavy hair(?) algae to just disappear completely without me doing anything else. Tried to get on top of the 40g, but it seemed like I would siphon as much algae out, and within a couple days it looks like I did nothing... then I decided to do the same thing, pulled the big rocks out of the sump, and a couple days later there's significantly less algae, and I'm willing to bet (hope) that by the end of the week it'll be largely algae free.

So this whole "phosphate in the rock" bit may have some merit, I did test for phosphates but only got 0.04, which is barely anything ... but maybe it's a lot consider there's zero fish and zero fish food going into it. Either way going to have to look into fixing the rock, I seem to recall muriatic acid will take off the outer layers and give you a phosphate free(r) rock.
 
sfsuphysics said:
So this whole "phosphate in the rock" bit may have some merit, I did test for phosphates but only got 0.04, which is barely anything ... but maybe it's a lot consider there's zero fish and zero fish food going into it. Either way going to have to look into fixing the rock, I seem to recall muriatic acid will take off the outer layers and give you a phosphate free(r) rock.
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Rock leeching nutrients isn't really a theory - it's a fact I'm the same realm as the world being round and water being wet :).

It's called live rock. When it dries out, all that "live" doesn't just magically disappear; it dies. And then just like a pile of decaying anything, it turns into excess nutrients when put in your tank.

It's why real live rock is expensive, but also is gold.

A tank full of algae will also always test falsely low on phosphates/nitrate because the algae is actively consuming it. Having a tank full of hair algae is functionally exactly the same as having an algae turf scrubber or algae rector in your sump.

It's a phase, it passes with patience and time. Clean up crews will eat algae, turn it into poop, which you can then export via siphoning out during a water change. Or you can pull the rock and scrub it. Or run GFO, etc, to actively soak phosphate up. Plenty of chemical solutions also.. vibrant is a popular one that works well as it has some sort of bacterial culture that out competes algae for nutrients, then dies and is exported via skimming/water changes/etc.
 
The quickest method for me was to pull the rocks out soaked, and scrubbed them in a bucket in a mixture of water and peroxide for about 30 minutes.. For the rocks I couldn't remove due to the landscaping, I removed 70% of the tank water sprayed with a peroxide mixture and then added back in a 50% mix of new salt water and the original tank water. Algae with gone the next day.
 
xCry0x said:
Rock leeching nutrients isn't really a theory - it's a fact I'm the same realm as the world being round and water being wet :).

It's called live rock. When it dries out, all that "live" doesn't just magically disappear; it dies. And then just like a pile of decaying anything, it turns into excess nutrients when put in your tank.

It's why real live rock is expensive, but also is gold.

A tank full of algae will also always test falsely low on phosphates/nitrate because the algae is actively consuming it. Having a tank full of hair algae is functionally exactly the same as having an algae turf scrubber or algae rector in your sump.

It's a phase, it passes with patience and time. Clean up crews will eat algae, turn it into poop, which you can then export via siphoning out during a water change. Or you can pull the rock and scrub it. Or run GFO, etc, to actively soak phosphate up. Plenty of chemical solutions also.. vibrant is a popular one that works well as it has some sort of bacterial culture that out competes algae for nutrients, then dies and is exported via skimming/water changes/etc.
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When people talk about phosphates specifically leaching from rock, they are not talking about rock that had living stuff on it that is now dead and balanced organic nutrients coming out like when anything dead decomposes, which is obviously true and what you are talking about I think.

They are talking about specifically phosphates (and not nitrates, organic carbon, etc) leaching out that were bound by the rock somehow, and as far as I know it is not proven and always seemed questionable to me. But since I’ve never had that happen I never looked into it too deeply.
 
Correct on what John said. This rock that went in was basically bleached white, not due to oxidizers like bleach but due to the sun, if there was dead algae on it was very minor and not noticeable (in the case of the 10g tank's "rock"). So I'm unsure if the porous nature of the rock that may have been in a phosphate "rich" tank, may have some how absorbed that into the rock or not. But I do gotta say that the algae just disappearing without any sort of effort other than removing the rock is making me lean towards that there may have been something leeching from the rock into the tank.

I did think about running GFO to see if I could simply keep up with the problem, but the night and day difference of removing the rock from the smaller tank made me wonder why bother if there already is a solution, maybe I can figure out a method of removing the phosphate externally (e.g. muriatic acid baths), as I would like to put rocks in the display portion so I corals are growing on more than just plugs.
 
Less taking visible dried algae on rocks and more the bacteria that would have built up when the rock was "live" and subsequently died off when the rock was dried.

Stuff like Marco rock is coming in from a dry quarry and still leeching - although I think I remember saying it leeched less than wet harvested dry rock.

I just know I expect dry to have algae issues for about 6 months ish.
 
Whelp, I really need to get my tanks back on track.
On big tank, hope to get my sump fuge section up and running again. It is currently holding rocks in the dark, which just makes my DT the fuge. (wow - DT boasts healthy algae growth and diversity). :rolleyes:
Definitely need to clean my sandbed somehow and also add more sand, which will be a different task and post.
Need to get the upper hand on all types of algae everywhere, so in addition to recently adding cleanup crew I will try H2O2 dip this week (not dosing) on a few corals that just are not getting free of it from me trying to pull it off. May try applying straight peroxide on a few frag plugs with Q-tip, as I also read about - on the plug, not the coral tissue.
 
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