There looks to be a lot of dead plant matter in there and not alot of green algae, have you tested your water parameters recently?
odin wrote:There looks to be a lot of dead plant matter in there and not alot of green algae, have you tested your water parameters recently?I have tested my ammonia, nitrites and nitrates. First two are zero, nitrates <5.
I think at least some of the brown stuff is live algae because it keeps growing on the glass (you can see some, the blurry brown blotch, in the 3rd photo) as well as well as below the water meniscus, and often there are bubbles on the rocks where it is. However some of it is definitely dead algae and dead chaeto. Some of the chaeto you can see by the edge of the tank at the back of the last photo is still alive but covered in the brown algae.
I am still not sure what happened to the green algae. I assumed that it might be linked to the tank still being in the cycling process or maybe temperature, because it seems to have disappeared around the same time I added the new heater. One major difference between the green and the brown algae is that the brown doesn't seem to grow very well on the vertical faces of the rocks, only the tops of the rocks. It isn't just the shadow, the vertical face of the rock in front has mostly gone to its original black due to lack of algae. However, it is not dislodged when I do water changes (some of the detritus on the bottom is definitely stirred up though).