Further developments
AS my reef has developed and changed I have noticed what appear to be a series of algal mini blooms. After several months I had a small outbreak of green hair algae and some bubble algae. This must have been due too an increase in nitrates, possible as a result of overfeeding, introduction of nitrates in new water or from something within the LR or sand. I was pleased however that coralline algae had begun to grow and establish itself on the rocks and back of the glass. At this stage I was still measuring high phosphates and so decided on adding a phos reactor to try and bring them down.
I don't know if what happened was as a consequence of this change or just coincidental but I had a growth of cynobacteria in various places in the reef and an increase in brown diatoms. This again lasted two or maybe three weeks and then died back.
I have continued to occasionally get small cyno blooms in different places in my tank and think this may partly be as a result of different changes in the water flow. When corals are placed in the tank or grow larger there must be small changes in the water flow patterns. This may account for very small and localised growths of cyno. After about 18 months I began to notice the growth of a red algae. I don't know what it was but it grew like leaves or plates from the rock. It actually looked quite attractive (see right------>) and grew for quite a few weeks and then slowly disappeared. This algae tended to grow lower down in the reef and not near the top of the rocks. During the life of the reef I have a couple of fish losses and not found their bodies, an efficient clean up crew I guess, but have had odd blooms of cyno. This might be as a result of fish decay, I don't know. I continue to have some brown diatom growth on parts of the sand and a light dusting on the glass about 1 week after a clean. I have read in a couple of places that this diatom growth is part of the phytoplankton in the reef and may well be providing a food source for much of the microfauna in the tank. It would be nice to have lovely white sand but I would rather have a healthy population of planktonic life in my tank and refugium to help feed the rest of the tank. It would seem that the natural filtration systems are continually adjusting to changes of nutrient levels in the tank and that these adjustments take time. If changes are too rapid or to big then the system will go out of balance inducing greater algal growth. |