New development

Dinos typically look a lot better first thing in the morning and then grow and get bubbles as the day progresses with the lights on. If I were in your shoes, I would be hesitant to try any drastic measures to get rid of them. Some folks don't believe a tank has to go through the uglies and fight tooth and nail to get rid of them as soon as they pop up. In my opinion and experience, it's better to keep up with tank maintenance and let the system seek it's own balance. Pretty soon you'll start seeing green hair algae since it's usually starts right as the dinos start to diminish. I've always started to get things squared away once I start seeing GHA but adding a few snails and hermit crabs.

If this happened in 2 years, I'd say there was something out of whack and try to figure out what it was and correct that. With a new system all kinds of things are "out of whack"; it's just the nature of a new system. It make it hard to combat when so many things are changing on their own and there's no inherent balance in a system. I would probably start by getting the light program squared away and maybe shortening it by a little bit.
 
Stir the sand bed and see how quickly it comes back
 
So - I'm dealin with the same in my frag tank - and it's most likely lighting. It's bare bottom, but tied into my existing display, so there's already live rock to offset the growth of uglies. I can't imagine what it would be without that live rock. I'm actually moving a lot of the Matrix in my sump to a higher flow area to see if that helps, and I cut my T5 timer down to 25% of what it was. LEDs (blues) will stay the same - for now. It's not just you Nancy, but you're in the early stages of a tank with no live rock starter - it's gonna happen if you've got lights on.

If I were you - not only would I shorten the light cycle, but I would get rid of all green/red/white/yellow color spectrums and just run blue/violet/UV if possible for a week or so. A lot of people don't like the color of Windex, but it greatly slows algae growth.
 
If I were you - not only would I shorten the light cycle, but I would get rid of all green/red/white/yellow color spectrums and just run blue/violet/UV if possible for a week or so. A lot of people don't like the color of Windex, but it greatly slows algae growth.

Agree!
 
Thanks everyone. I’ve only been running the blue channels for about a week now and have stopped with the T5’s already. Probably should’ve just gone with the live rock, maybe next time. The only thing I don’t understand is the thing about it being a new, unstable tank. The instability must be in things I cannot or am not measuring because all of the basic parameters stay in a pretty tight range (temp, salinity, pH, NO3, PO4, dKH). Haven’t tested Ca or Mag for at least 2 weeks, maybe more. I feel like I’m in a time warp with all the stay at home. The grandkids just left for 10 days to be with their dad so my CO2 levels in the house should go down a little lol. In happier news the Hippo tang I have in QT is doing GREAT! She’s not scared of us any more - she’s figured out where the food comes from. I’m just doing observational QT right now. She is active and beautiful and eats everything we feed plus the seaweed in a clip. I am picking up a pre QT’d diamond goby tomorrow. Other than that I don’t think I’m going to add anything else to my clean up crew. Can’t seem to get the brittle stars anywhere unless @dball711 wants to hang some on his fence for me! Anyway we will see. And @aestheticlibra sorry you are dealing with it in your new frag tank already!
 
I’d be happy to grab you some maybe when I do my next maintenance in the next couple days I’ll keep you posted.
 
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