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Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Tips On Battling Nuisance Algae In The Marine Aquarium

So you have spent countless hours researching, planning and developing your tank. All looks great for a few weeks, then "It" hits, "It" starts out as a small green or red patch on one of your rocks then a few days later more of your live rock is showing green and before you know it your beautiful aquarium looks like the field at Yankee stadium. You then ask yourself why? how? what do i do now? You may even have thoughts of adding a chemical treatment or even worse, quitting. But don't fret "It" is only nuisance algae, and like anything else it CAN be dealt with. Most if not all can be dealt with the same way, by eliminating the organisms food source. "Easier said than done" you say, "what about my other tanks inhabitants"? Here is a list of things you can do to cut down and eventually eliminate nuisance algae without harming your tank.

1. Use only Ro/Di water. Water from a reverse osmosis unit is striped of nitrate, phosphates, silicates and other possible algae food. This water should be used for top offs and water changes. It should also be your first step in battling algae, and it will remedy a whole host of nitrate problems.

2. Increase water movement. This is a two-fold solution, first it keeps detritus suspended in the water column and allows it to either be filtered or eaten. It also makes it harder for algae to attach itself onto your substrate or rocks. This is generally a good solution for diatoms.

3. Run a phosphate remover such as Phosban in a phosphate reactor. Simply enough phosphates are generally the leading cause of nuisance algae and chances are if your testing for phosphates you probably are not getting a reading for them. This is mainly do to the algae using up phosphates at such a quick rate that they are almost not detectable in the marine aquaria.

4. Run a phosphate remover in your top off water and/or your water change if your test kits test for phosphate. This will eliminate the phosphate before you feed it to your algae.

5. Change your light bulbs if they are more than 6-9months old. My suggestion is 6months for pc's and 9months to a year for your metal halides. Your lighting looses its spectrum and intensity as the bulbs grow older...i will not go into further detail as to how or why because its a 20 page blog in itself.

6. Reduce your photo-period. Cut your lights back if you don't have light loving inverts.

7. Cut back on your feeding. We all love our fish and corals but lets face it this isn't a Big Bertha's all you can eat buffet. I feed my tank's inhabitant a maximum of four times a week, however i make sure everyone in the tank gets fed properly. The more you feed your tank the more pollutants become available to feed your algae.

8. Raise your magnesium levels to 1600ppm. This will help control the hair algae bryopsis.

9. Clean up crew. Make sure you keep a good efficient clean up crew. Astrea turbo snails, emerald mithrax crabs, diadema urchins and blue legged hermit crabs are what i would suggest for hair algae and general detritus clean up. There are plenty more but that's for another blog in the near future.

10. Water changes. Your aquarium is a closed unit, there is not a constant supply of fresh saltwater to wash out all the pollutants. The only way to get new water is ofc water changes. The general thought on this is 10% of your tanks total water volume (include the water in the sump, skimmer and refugium if applicable). While you are changing your water take a turkey baster and blast off the detritus on your live rocks and suck it out!

11. Get a efficient skimmer. Foam fractioners as they are sometimes referred as, remove organic waste from our systems so make sure yours is producing a nice dark colored stinky mess.

12. Add a refugium. Add controlled algae such as cheatomorpha to compete with your nuisance algae. This is also a great place for copepods and amphipods to breed and live.

13. Check your carbon. Believe it or not some carbon will leach out phosphate! Check the brand your using to see if it will leach it or not, it will usually say "will not leach phosphate" on the container.

14. Pull it out. Get a jump start on hair algae by manually pulling it out. Make sure that when you are pulling it out you don't loose any strands.

There are probably more useful techniques in controlling algae, however these are the ones that have worked for me while I was battling green hair, and red hair algae.

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