Yellow / brown colouration

[yoba]

Hi. There has been some yellowish brown colouration with small yellowish dots in them on all the corners of my aquarium. Iniially my lfs guy said it was brown algae and we covered by one side of the tank which was close to a window and he said it would subside(the tank is now close to one month old and it was built by the same lfs).he tried scraping it off once something did come off, but the colour has remained and eventually its as good as before. Now he says there is some problem with the silicone he used and so will have to empty out the whole tank and re surface the sides with some fresh silicone. I'm not very conviced .the tank has a scat in it and a sailfin tang(the tang was added about 2 days back).now the scats been chasing the tang all over the place, so we decide to remove the scat and keep the tang alone. Please advise is it ok to drain out the whole water and store it and the refill it after the silicone has dried(its about 75 gals). I also have a 15 gal quarantine. Please help

[leebca]

I'm assuming your tank is made of glass. It is real easy to make a glass aquarium. That the person you are dealing with is having trouble indicates they are not very experienced or not competent or the person might be trying to give you a piece of rubbish. You may not have a lot of options, however I would not deal with that person and, if you have to empty out your tank, acquire another tank from another source (don't use the one he's recommending). That's about all I can say on that.

Brown 'algae' is really diatoms which are common at the start. They like bad water quality and they need dissolved silica to live. They will never go away, but your LFS is correct that when the tank matures it should reduce in quantity and become less noticeable. It will, however, never go completely away. You can get snails to eat it and keep it out of sight.

It seems to me in general that you are adding fish too soon to the aquarium. You are going too fast. Might be worthwhile to start over, anyway. You have put a relatively sensitive fish (the Tang) in a young aquarium. Not too good. In addition, the Scat does not make for a very good community fish. I'd recommend reading this on how to start a marine aquarium: Setting Up a FOWLR Aquarium