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Innovative Marine Aquariums

A lot Sea Lettice from Refugium got into tank!


Sector001

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Well I guess I didn't stick to the old adage, “keep your hands out of the tank!”

Recently cycled Waterbox 20 cube. Only have one clownfish and a few inverts. I was messing around with my refugium as the sea lettuce was dying? I'm not sure why, plenty of light (nano glow for 9 hours at night) so I'm assuming not enough nutrients in a newly establish tank to keep it alive.

Well, almost all of the sea lettuce leaked into the main display tank and is floating everywhere!

I can’t scoop it out with a net so should I let my filter sock catch most of it a do water change tonight? I will clean out the filter sock with a power wash as best I can before putting it back in, waiting for extras to arrive.

I didn’t even want sea lettuce, but AlgaeBarn was out of chaeto so that’s what the gave me. Maybe I should clean the whole thing out and wait until the tank has more nutrients before adding chaeto (not sea lettuce)?

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Um. Sea lettuce is a type of seaweed. Phytoplankton is to be fed to animals, like corals, which have mouths and can eat it. Sea lettuce needs nutrients from the water (nitrates and phosphates), it won't at all benefit from phytoplankton. In fact, the plankton, being algae, would suck up nutrients and compete with it. 

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Live phytoplankton feeding is great for a lot of corals, mostly things with small polyps, and for filter-feeders like tubeworms. What macroalgae needs, though, is straight-up nutrients. Nitrates and phosphates come from feeding your critters, and, if needed, you can directly dose them.

 

Why do you want chaeto? If it's to try and get nutrients super low, that's not very good in most tanks. Corals need nitrates and phosphates to grow, so you don't want them really low. Also, having them low encourages pest algae, which thrives in "bad" conditions (no nutrients) and on no competition. To keep pest algae from going wild, you want non-pest algae, a variety of species that don't grow fast enough to engulf your corals, and those need nutrients. The best way to get a stable tank without pest algae is to have a reasonable number of snails, and to keep your nutrients up enough that the helpful algae can establish itself. You want your rock to be all sorts of colors, as far from white as possible. Corals grow right over algae, but pest algae has a hard time competing with a nice, mature layer of other healthy algae. 

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