How To Treat Cyanobacteria or Blue Green Algae in Planted Aquariums

This article is all about treating cyanobacteria. Cyanoacteria, as we all know primarily it comes in planted tanks because we have lot of you know dead spots, especially around soil where we have lot of sludge getting accumulated and you forget to clean the substrate properly that’s when normally cyano bacteria triggers. Also the contributing factors like you know, less amount of nitrates in water column or got infected from somewhere else. But the primary reason where bluegreen algae comes in a planeted  aquarium as we see is because of not cleaning substrate.

How did we recover a Cyano Infected Tank?

Now we have encountered a cyano situation because the foreground is full of carpet plants. We basically messed the  tank as well. At the substrate level, we have a cyana outbreak, so in this article, I am talking about how we go about treating this tank. You know, that’s it. So for treating cyanobacteria, we actually use a product called Aqua Vascular cyano rid. This is a specific product to treat cyano. Actually, there are other products as well, but this is the one that we use. So as you can see what we do is we actually start dosing strainght in the infected areas around substrate now.  For a 90 P tank the maximum dosage that we have used and tried out and worked out is around 4 ml per day and we dilute it with tank water and spot dose it. After spot dosing within 48 hours is that the color of the Cyanobacteria should actually turn pale. It should become white later  and it will subside.

Now there are couple of points one should remember while treating cyanobacteria with product like Cyanorid or anything else

• (1) is that it will suddenly drastically reduce the dissolved oxygen in your aquarium, so you should remember to immediately start aeration in the tank. You can use a normal air pump and stone, or if you have a powerful canister filter you can lift the outlet up so that there are a lot of other surface agitation, but I would prefer using an airstone or an air diffuser .
• (2) is if you’re spot dosing like what we have done here it’s always recommended to do a 50% water change within next 48 hours or 24 hours.

Another question around cyanobacteria is, what is its infected all over the plants, especially those stem plant?

in that case before starting to treat with chemicals, we would recommend you to do a 3 to 4 days complete blackout. When I say complete blackout no Co 2. No light. All the sides of the tank should be covered with some, you know, opaque material. We normally use the garbage black bags, the black ones that comes. So we cover all the aquarium sides and also the top . Once you open after the blackout, you should see that cyanobacteria has withdrawn considerably. That’s the time. Then you can start using products like Cyanorid.

Now what if It is not subsiding. You will have to use some  antibacterial products and all I am not going to talk about them. So this is how we recover cyanobacteria. One need not worry if you have cyanobacteria outbreak, can use chemical treatments, You can add nitrogen. You can go for blackout, give aeration and generally in planted aquariums its recommended to have aeration during dark period.