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Red Slime!! grr

1272 Views 1 Reply 2 Participants Last post by  Robin, 
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okay so im hoping someone can offer me some advice here... i have a 100 gallon mix malawi aquarium with about 15 total fish with anoth 15 in quarantine awaiting placement into my main tank.... been set up now for 6months and i have recently ran into a few frustrating problems...

a few weeks ago i had a columnaris issue in my tank and i treated accordingly and all the fish are fine now with the exception of the 3 otopharnx lithobates i lost during treatment. my LFS retailer advised me to treat with copper and not touch or clean the tank during treatment. (basically treat and let go at least 10days with no signs of the disease) which lasted a total 13 days and i backed my feeding down to one time a day to keep pollutants down and then did a 50% water change the first day and then 25% every other day since (8 days now) to get my nitrates back down... what i didnt take into consideration was the phosphate levels (since spirulina is a lot of what im feeding) and when i realized what was going on it was off the charts...

so now this is where i am at.... ammonia, and nitrite is 0ppm... nitrate is still a lil high between 10-20ppm and i purchased some phoszorb to get my phospate under control and threw it in my filter which has brought the levels down to 2ppm to far.... i have a phoshate reactor coming in the mail fri so that will me a permanant part of my system now.... but now i have this red slime im dealing with...

every other day *** been scubbing all the problem slime areas and doing a 25% water change and it seems to be helping because the slime is coming back less and less, but my concern is my rocks.... i have lava rocks stacked for caves and are completely covered in the stuff and as porous as they are i know there is no way ill be able to get it all... so basically im wondering if i should just keep doing what im doing or just forget it all and treat with erythromycin? id prefer not to medicate again especially so soon after copper but i dont think ill ever totally get rid of this stuff otherwise....

any input is greatly appreciated....
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Robin
I believe you only need to do a half dose of Maracyn, (erythromycin), to get hopefully get rid of the red slime--otherwise known as Red Slime Algae (Cyanobacteria), so it shouldn't have a huge impact on your fish. But I understand your concern so perhaps wait a few weeks before you do the erythromycin. In the mean time keep up with the manual removal and plenty of partial water changes. A fine mesh filter placed in your regular filter may help to filter some of it out although you'll need to rinse this filter out often to actually get rid of the algae.
Running a diatom filter for a few hours will also help to catch any free-floating algae.

Good luck with it.

Robin
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