What are the root causes of Cyano?

[Dan_P]

As always, nice experiments. I need to try the sludge addition, but first...

A funny thing happened to my Spirulina culture when I added rinsed aragonite sand from the aquarium. It barely grew compared to the no sand control and only at the water line. @taricha reminded me about the adsorption of PO4 by aragonite. Sure enough, an experiment proved that 0.15 mL of sand in 5 mL of medium was sufficient to seriously deplete the medium of PO4. After adding fresh medium, the Spirulina growth increased but barely at all on the sand, just at the water line. I am in the process of repeating the sand experiment results with additional observations to help understand why there might be this effect. I am now wondering whether Spirulina adapts to being cultured differently then the Oscillatoria @taricha is culturing. I also wonder if Oscillatoria has different PO4 requirements. That means @taricha needs to measure the PO4 level in his cultures for me

Here are the results for PO4 adsorption and desorption of rinsed aragonite for 0.15 mL well rinsed sand. The last point (green dot) is where I treated the sand with fresh Instant Ocean acidified to pH 5 to see if more PO4 would desorb. Take away messages for me:

Aragonite sand is a PO4 sponge and could have depleted my culture medium of PO4
Only a portion of the adsorbed PO4 was desorbed

I cannot say how much PO4 was consumed by the organisms growing on the sand grain versus the formation of insoluble calcium phosphate.

 

[taricha]

Here are the results for PO4 adsorption and desorption of rinsed aragonite for 0.15 mL well rinsed sand. The last point (green dot) is where I treated the sand with fresh Instant Ocean acidified to pH 5 to see if more PO4 would desorb. Take away messages for me:

Aragonite sand is a PO4 sponge and could have depleted my culture medium of PO4
Only a portion of the adsorbed PO4 was desorbed

I cannot say how much PO4 was consumed by the organisms growing on the sand grain versus the formation of insoluble calcium phosphate.

So if I assume 5mL solution and calc'd right the last blue point represents that the entire 9+ppm PO4 was depleted out of the water in about 3 days?

biotic and abiotic factors sure conspired to make that uptake look linear.

and I would have expected more to be released. but that means there's still a lot there (available?) either in the form of biofilm or still bonded somehow.

 

[jim_fitz]

First thing back at Chernobyl

Good luck

I accept it as part of the hobby
It comes and goes

 

[Dan_P]

So if I assume 5mL solution and calc'd right the last blue point represents that the entire 9+ppm PO4 was depleted out of the water in about 3 days?

biotic and abiotic factors sure conspired to make that uptake look linear.

and I would have expected more to be released. but that means there's still a lot there (available?) either in the form of biofilm or still bonded somehow.

I had designed the experiment thinking that the sand would quickly adsorb the PO4 and stop. I started with three vials, each containing 10 mL of PO4 spiked tank water and 0.15 mL of sand and three control vials without sand. I removed 2 mL for every test. Unfortunately, I ran out of water before the sand was saturated. The curve looks like it was just beginning to flatten. If I remember correctly, half the PO4 was consumed. If I had taken samples every other day, the adsorption curve might have flattened.

With the small amount of water left just before starting the desorption test, I measured the nitrate level of the control and test samples. The test sample showed a 1 ppm higher level of nitrate. The emission spectra with 405 nm excitation were different (the exact meaning of the difference is another unfolding investigation as you know already). So, maybe there was some biotic PO4 removal. Unfortunately, my experimental design did not anticipate all the questions that arose when the data came in.

I was also surprised by the the amount of released PO4 and how little was released in pH 5 salt water. Oh the questions I have If studying aquarium substrate was not on my to-do list already, it would be now.

 

[Jimmy Elder]

Flow and nutrients are always the leading factors to champ but also making sure your flow gets every inch of you aqaurium moving. You can have awesome powerful power heads but if there is a dead zone where no power wheats and no return can reach then that gives a place for champ to grow and thrive. So increase flow, decrease nutrients in the system, and focus no just on the power of the flow but the direction and area of the tank covered.

 

[vetteguy53081]

overfeeding, organic waste, lack of flow and algae are contributors to cyano.
Lights siphoning every other day along with use of Chemi-clean is my cure for such. Don't know why chemi-clean comes in such a tiny vial ??

 

[Jeferson Stutz]

My first post here at REEF2REEF, my personal experience about Cyano.

Cyano is caused by a series of factors but the mainly ones are:

1- Unbalance of CARBON:NITROGENHOSPHORUS 106:16:1 not Nutrients only itself, nutrients is just part of the problem. All nitrogen is related.

2- Already mentioned low water flow.

3-Molybdenum

At the bottom line if you phosphate is low, your nitrate is high, you have low flow circulation and molybdenum is in excess you have a very good chance to have cyano.

The ways to solve are many. I prefer balance nitrate and phosphorus, but already cleaned Cyano with high ORP and light shut off for 3 days.

Hope this helps.

Jeff Stutz - Brazil

 

[Dan_P]

My first post here at REEF2REEF, my personal experience about Cyano.

Cyano is caused by a series of factors but the mainly ones are:

1- Unbalance of CARBON:NITROGENHOSPHORUS 106:16:1 not Nutrients only itself, nutrients is just part of the problem. All nitrogen is related.

2- Already mentioned low water flow.

3-Molybdenum

At the bottom line if you phosphate is low, your nitrate is high, you have low flow circulation and molybdenum is in excess you have a very good chance to have cyano.

The ways to solve are many. I prefer balance nitrate and phosphorus, but already cleaned Cyano with high ORP and light shut off for 3 days.

Hope this helps.

Jeff Stutz - Brazil

Welcome to R2R! Great first post.

Why is molybdenum important?

 

[taricha]

I am now wondering whether Spirulina adapts to being cultured differently then the Oscillatoria @taricha is culturing. I also wonder if Oscillatoria has different PO4 requirements. That means @taricha needs to measure the PO4 level in his cultures for me

Ok. Here's some data for the beaker culture I posted about here...

start with very little, innoculated with oscillatoria cells and gradually fed particulate matter.

It seems that this has sufficient conditions to grow as much cyano as one could possibly want.
BUT
Which subset of these conditions was actually necessary?

I compared 48hr old culture water to the water 30 min after I did an 80% water change with media and adding particulates.

New -> 48hr old
PO4: 0.26 -> 0.14 ppm
NO3: 15 -> zero ppm (undetectable so below 0.5)
Fluor405: barely detectable -> 4 or 5 times as much

Boy Dan, considering all the theory in support of not needing nitrates, our cyano sure drinks the stuff. Hmm....

 

[Ben Pedersen]

Cyno really confuses me.. It comes and goes sometime without any action on my part. I always have high flow... I always feed a lot.. I used to never do water changes (once every 8 months). I am doing monthly water changes now and still have the same severity and number of outbreaks as when I didn't do water changes.

I have always wondered where cyno comes from. Is it introduced on our live rock? Is it air born? Does it come from the coral we keep? Probably all of these are true. I have heard of people chemically treating a tank and killing it off and it never coming back. I don't use chemicals to get rid of it so I have not experienced this.

Cyno has been a major player on reefs for more than 3 million years... I don't think it will be going away any time soon.

 

[Hermie]

I have always wondered where cyno comes from. Is it introduced on our live rock? Is it air born? Does it come from the coral we keep? Probably all of these are true. I have heard of people chemically treating a tank and killing it off and it never coming back. I don't use chemicals to get rid of it so I have not experienced this.

theoretically......
maybe the chemical treatment kills the cyano and since the cyano already used the trace elements (molybendium for example) in the tank, once it's dead it doesn't have access to those "used up" elements (in the same form they were originally in)

sorry to throw some pseudo science out there...

 

[Streetcred]

Flow and nutrients are always the leading factors to champ but also making sure your flow gets every inch of you aqaurium moving. You can have awesome powerful power heads but if there is a dead zone where no power wheats and no return can reach then that gives a place for champ to grow and thrive. So increase flow, decrease nutrients in the system, and focus no just on the power of the flow but the direction and area of the tank covered.

I have a high flow 500g display ... reef head strong flow ... 0.03ppm PO4 ... dose vinegar, not much ... cyano waxes and wanes ... go figure. ;-)

 

[MabuyaQ]

I have a high flow 500g display ... reef head strong flow ... 0.03ppm PO4 ... dose vinegar, not much ... cyano waxes and wanes ... go figure. ;-)

Whatever you measure in your water is the average endresult of all local consumption and production processes. So there are often local values that are different enough from this average so an organism can take advantage of these local values.
I also keep my NO3 and PO4 under control and balanced yet from time to time I get a small patch of cyano on my sandbed because the lack of flow alows detritus to settle at that location. I have 3 Holothuria atra that normally solve that problem but if they stay away to long from that area I get cyano, manually stir the sand for a couple of days and bye bye cyano.

 

[ZaneTer]

This is a heavily neglected tank of mine. It still serves a point. Notice the placement of the cyano growth? It’s right in front of a 24000l/h powerhead. (Left hand side)

Try to explain again how cyano only grows in an are of low flow.

 

[Belgian Anthias]

Just like in a normal biofilm, a microbial mat, the mat itself will ensure the production and supply of organic material and building materials for the recycling of dead organisms part of the mat. Due to the presence of cyano's, a shortage of nitrogen can easily be compensated, the fixation of nitrogen and carbon combined with the production of oxygen helps to maintain the mat and makes the community less dependent on the environment. Once a mat is formed it may sustain itself regardless off the environment but to grow the mat must retrieve nutrients from the environment . Battling microbial mats is done by removing them manually and limiting growth by providing enough competition for the available nutrients. Microbial mats with cyano's, grown in a refuge, can be used to remove nutrients as phosphorus in nitrogen limited conditions. This may prevent increased growth when nitrogen becomes unlimited available due to the competition for phosphorus and other nutrients.

 

[Belgian Anthias]

Due to R2R policy I may not link any more to the website Makazi Baharini where the information is available with readable references due to the fact it is considered to be a commercial website because the presence for a free contribution bottom to support the website. Whit this contribution we provide reading and publishing rights for published references.

Does this include links to pages of publishers of scientific approved papers as these pages provide links and bottons to buy reading and publishing rights from the publisher?

Just like in a normal biofilm, a microbial mat, the mat itself will ensure the production and supply of organic material and building materials for the recycling of dead organisms part of the mat. Due to the presence of cyano's, a shortage of nitrogen can easily be compensated, the fixation of nitrogen and carbon combined with the production of oxygen helps to maintain the mat and makes the community less dependent on the environment. Once a mat is formed it may sustain itself regardless off the environment but to grow the mat must retrieve nutrients from the environment . Battling microbial mats is done by removing them manually and limiting growth by providing enough competition for the available nutrients. Microbial mats with cyano's, grown in a refuge, can be used to remove nutrients as phosphorus in nitrogen limited conditions. This may prevent increased growth when nitrogen becomes unlimited available due to the competition for phosphorus and other nutrients. ( ref: CMF De Haes : Makazi Baharini : baharini.eu/baharini/doku.php?id=en:makazi:bio-chemie:cyano)

 

[Dan_P]

Ok. Here's some data for the beaker culture I posted about here...


I compared 48hr old culture water to the water 30 min after I did an 80% water change with media and adding particulates.

New -> 48hr old
PO4: 0.26 -> 0.14 ppm
NO3: 15 -> zero ppm (undetectable so below 0.5)
Fluor405: barely detectable -> 4 or 5 times as much

Boy Dan, considering all the theory in support of not needing nitrates, our cyano sure drinks the stuff. Hmm....

Thanks very much for this! I know it’s a pain to test.

Boy Dan, considering all the theory in support of not needing nitrates, our cyano sure drinks the stuff. Hmm....

They certainly need a lot of nitrogen because they make a lot of protein. So, if you have or want a lot of cyanobacteria growth, there must be a good supply of it.

Maybe the paradox is resolved if you do not assume that the cyanobacteria depend on the nitrate in the bulk water for nitrogen. Said another way, nitrate level is a poor predictor of cyanobacteria mat formation. Is it because of fixing nitrogen, a very high energy process, or just because the cyanobacteria live in the vicinity of heterotrophic bacteria that supply it with ammonia and phosphate.

Data sure complicates things!

 

[Belgian Anthias]

As most photo-autotrophs, cyano prefer ammonia as a nitrogen source. The growth rate using nitrate-nitrogen will be a lot slower. Fixing N2 requires very much energy but they are able to provide nitrogen for the other members of the community in nitrogen limited conditions, with the proper light source, enough to grow. Are they able to compete with heterotrophic r-strategists for ammonium-nitrogen if enough organic carbon is available? I do not think so. They only have to wait to take over.
A lot of cyano present in microbial mats do not form heterocysts which makes them able to compete for nitrate-nitrogen against heterotrophs.
Before battling cyano with chemicals or other unnatural products on must take in consideration a lot of endolitic cyano can form mats but they are also very important for the balance within a closed environment, within corals, providing a balanced nitrogen supply for the symbionts in nitrogen limiting conditions. Cyano are an important member of the coral holobiont.

 

[taricha]

Maybe the paradox is resolved if you do not assume that the cyanobacteria depend on the nitrate in the bulk water for nitrogen. Said another way, nitrate level is a poor predictor of cyanobacteria mat formation.
....
Data sure complicates things!

Right. The measurements are only an accounting of the nutrients in/out for the water not for the cyano.
And when you consider that the cyano/bacteria/sludge mat structure looks like this, so fundamentally connected, then we can expect the water action is only a tiny slice of the full flow of nutrients.

 

[Belgian Anthias]

Welcome to R2R! Great first post.

Why is molybdenum important?

it is part of most enzymes used by organisms, in this case nitrogenase, the enzym to fix nitrogen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molybdenum