- Hi guys and girls.
I'm ReefMan and today I wanted
to talk to you about Cyanobacteria.
You might have some Cyanobacteria in your tank,
it usually is a reddish kind of slime
that grows on sand or possibly on rocks or
maybe your pumps, things like that.
In areas where there is maybe not so much flow,
although it can grow in high flow places as well.
And you might have wondered how to get rid of it
because you siphon it out of your tank
and over the next couple days it just grows right back.
So, cyanobacteria is actually a really interesting organism.
A lot of people consider it an algae,
but it's actually bacteria, hence the name cyanobacteria.
It is one of the original forms of life on Earth,
and, actually, has some really interesting properties
that distinguish it from other things
that are around us every day.
Cyanobacteria is the only cellular organism,
the only organism that does not have a cell nucleus
but can still make oxygen on its own.
It doesn't have chloroplasts the way a plant does,
but it can photosynthesize like a plant.
And, in fact, we believe that way back
at the beginning of time,
plant cells actually engulfed some cyanobacteria
and over time that cyanobacteria
that now lives inside what would
become the plant cell, became a chloroplast.
So the cyanobacteria that you have in your tank
is actually a really interesting thing
just to read about on its own.
It can photosynthesize like a plant, but it's not a plant,
it acts a lot like a chloroplast,
but it doesn't have chloroplasts itself.
So it's really an interesting organism.
But, in your tank,
cyanobacteria is a sign of unbalanced nutrients.
More so than any other thing, if you add extra nutrients,
you start feeding a lot more suddenly,
you start dosing nitrate like I did,
anything that unbalances your system
is probably going to lead to at least
a little bit of a cyanobacteria outbreak.
In and of itself cyanobacteria doesn't really
seem to bother most things.
It can cover some kinds of coral,
like zoanthids, things like that.
But it doesn't seem to bother my acropora,
doesn't seem to bother my blastomussa,
or anything like that.
So, coral does seem to be able to defend itself
against getting smothered by cyanobacteria, up to an extent.
What you can do is blow it off of rocks,
blow it off of coral with a turkey baster or a power head.
Just get it into the water column,
suck out as much as you can, clean it up.
And then try to reduce available nutrients in your system.
For example, for mine, I was starting to dose nitrates
to raise my nitrates in my tank.
My coral looks great, it's beautiful
and nice and colorful right now,
but because of that sudden extra nitrates in my tank,
I have this outbreak of cyanobacteria.
So, I'm not gonna really worry about it,
I just going to maybe reduce my nitrates
that I add ever so slightly.
I'm trying to go for about .03 parts per million nitrates,
and that has done wonders for the color of my coral.
But it's also done wonders for my cyanobacteria.
So I think as my tank stabilizes at that level,
the cyanobacteria will just automatically
be out-competed by the coral,
out-competed by algae and things like that
that are growing that are using the nitrates
and it'll just kinda go away on its own.
That said, you can increase flow,
but I have some cyanobacteria that's
actually growing on a vortex,
so, you know, that doesn't get any higher flow than that.
So that's not gonna be a cure-all for you.
Lots of water changes are definitely
going to be a great thing for cyanobacteria
because you're exporting those extra nutrients.
There are also chemicals that you can add.
I don't recommend them, but I guess
if you really wanted to you could use them,
I think it's called ChemiPure or ChemiClean.
And what it is, is really just an antibacterial drug
that you can put in your tank,
and as a antibacterial is, you know,
expected to do, it'll kill bacteria.
Cyanobacteria is a bacteria,
and then your cyano will go away.
I've heard if you do use that,
be careful, your skimmer will go crazy,
and it will also drop the available oxygen in your water
because of all that extra gunk in the water.
So, though your skimmer will be going crazy,
don't turn if off, keep your skimmer going
if you're using those kinds of things
because it's important to keep oxygen in your tank water
so your fish and things don't suffocate.
So yeah.
Cyanobacteria, it's a really interesting creature.
It's, you can know, can make oxygen just like a plant,
but it's not a plant.
It used to be growing on its own,
then got engulfed into other cells
and became what we know as chloroplasts today.
Really interesting creature, so, yeah.
I'm looking forward to getting rid of it in my tank,
but hopefully you don't have that problem in yours.
See you next week, bye.