General Tank Maintenance Questions

M

MarkInNC

AC Members
Jun 16, 2009
107
0
0
74
Hampstead NC
My 45 gallon tank has been running for about three and a half months now. First a fishless cycle for a bit more than two months. Now some fish and live plants for about five weeks.

I did a bit of general cleaning yesterday as I was doing a water change. I trimmed my plants a bit, removed a bunch of unwanted snails, and did a little general cleaning. I have a few questions.
-Is there some way I can reduce or eliminate my snail population. These must have been added as hitch hikers with the plants and now I have likely hundreds.
-I have the brown alge which I understand is from silicone and is normal in new tanks. I have several fist sized rocks which were covered with this and removed them for cleaning. I could not scrub them clean so I attempted to boil them in a pot. The brown turned green but the green remained. How do I get them clean?
-I removed my last artificial decor piece which was a cool looking ceramic drift wood piece. I found two fish dead inside this and not knowing if they went in and got lost or just used it as a hide when they were sick I decided to remove it. I am off to the beach today to search for a piece of drift wood to replace it. I will soak the new piece in a pail. Are there any other get ready things I should do for new drift wood?

thanks,

Mark
 
ok for starters if silicone puts off something that promotes alge growth its news to me! lol. alge need only food n light ta grow as ar as i know whitch means leftover food, and fishpoop, a tanklight n very little time will get ya a huge amount o alge. personaly i use bleach for cleaning anything aquatic cause its indescriminate....it kills everything! lol. also ill caution you on that boiling rock thing...if the rock has even 1 small bubble of air inside it you run a good risk of exploding it or something equaly volotile (my spellins terrible lol) as for the snails.....good luck because the only way ive personaly found to controll their population was to make my planted tank a ciclid tank cause they eat em lol. ok..my planted tank wasnt doin too good n e ways but it was LOTS less planted in REAL short time..seems ciclids like to eat greenery too lol. so if any o this helps your welcome, if not then sorry i couldnt be of more help! good luck!
Beaux
 
OH! afterthought on the bleach thing. make sure to rinse thouroughl(spellin!) and if u use it on wood dont leave it n the bleach solution long and then completely submurse it n clean water n let it sit a day or two to leech all the chems out. jus sum added precaution. good luck!
B
 
New tanks often get diatoms (brown algae) and with time it will go away on it's own. If you are also getting green algae then you may need to adjust your lighting schedule. How long are the lights on each day? You only need about 8-10 hours if you have plants. The snails are generally harmless and are most likely one of the three common "pest" species (Pouch snails, ramshorn or malaysian trumpet snails). To control their numbers limit your feeding. If you cut back on feeding the numbers will stay reasonable. Over feeding will cause the numbers to get out of hand. Snails can be benificial by eating dead plant materiel or digging in the substrate(MTS). As far as the driftwood goes I would scrub it and boil it to kill anything that may be living in it. Bleaching would work for rocks but I wouldn't use bleach on driftwood because it would be more likely to soak up the chemicals and leech them out.
 
I had an outbreak of those little snails once in my oscar tank and the only way I could completly get rid of them was to tear the tank completly apart and clean all the decorations and replace the gravel. That was before I was "cycle educated". Thankfully, my oscar survived the expereince and went on to live several more years.
 
diatoms (brown alga) is caused by silica not silicone. pretty much every new tank will get it usually it just goes away as the tank matures.. that said bushy nose plecos love the stuff. i had a fairly good outbreak in my planted 55 put a few bn in there one afternoon next morning i had no algae left
 
MarkInNC said:
My 45 gallon tank has been running for about three and a half months now. First a fishless cycle for a bit more than two months. Now some fish and live plants for about five weeks.

I did a bit of general cleaning yesterday as I was doing a water change. I trimmed my plants a bit, removed a bunch of unwanted snails, and did a little general cleaning. I have a few questions.
-Is there some way I can reduce or eliminate my snail population. These must have been added as hitch hikers with the plants and now I have likely hundreds.
-I have the brown alge which I understand is from silicone and is normal in new tanks. I have several fist sized rocks which were covered with this and removed them for cleaning. I could not scrub them clean so I attempted to boil them in a pot. The brown turned green but the green remained. How do I get them clean?
-I removed my last artificial decor piece which was a cool looking ceramic drift wood piece. I found two fish dead inside this and not knowing if they went in and got lost or just used it as a hide when they were sick I decided to remove it. I am off to the beach today to search for a piece of drift wood to replace it. I will soak the new piece in a pail. Are there any other get ready things I should do for new drift wood?

thanks,

Mark
Click to expand...
your snail population can be controled a couple of ways picking them out, lettuce or cucumber place them in your tank when your snails are on them pick them outwhen they cover them, my tiger barbs eat them they find them or when i drop the in they go after them like a pack of wolves, or try assassin snails, just order some of them going to try them out. when you get new plants rinse them off in a bleach water solution and rinse again a couple of more times that does the trick for prevent them from getting in the tank at the start
 
Don't confuse silicone with silicate. Brown algae are diatoms and need silicates to build their shells, but silicone is quite a different thing.
 
Erythromycin at 1/4 dose ( found in Maracyn ) will rid the tank of diatoms. From there you just have to stay on top of water changes. As far as cleaning rocks... soaking in a hydrogen peroxide solution ( or you can use Prime, just more expensive ), will kill most algaes/ diatoms. I don't normally use chemicals in my tanks, but I do use the erythromycin treatment for new setups.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
AquariaCentral.com
Top Bottom