caulerpa verticillata please help?

[exotic3412]

ive had a huge problem with this algae for the past 9-11 months, ive tried a kole tang, foxface, yellow tang, turbo snails, and a baby sea hare (but was never seen agian after 1 week). Ive tried big water changes and after maybe a few hundred gallons i gave up on that! i have a 100 gal. acrylic tank with good water flow and a 15 gal sump with some rubble with a 15w light on at all times. i run 2 400w MH with a pfo ballast. Right now i have a foxface and a sand sifting goby in there for fish. For critters i have maybe 20 turbos, 5 nassarius, 3 queen conchs, 30 electric blue hermits, and variuos micro stars and snails! The Name of the algae is CAULERPA VERTICILLATA Please help????? o and the phosphates read 0 calcium usually around 400 and ammonia and nitrate usually near 0

 

[AIMFish]

From previous tanks I've had it in manual removal and nutrient competition from other macros was the only way I could control and eliminate it. I got lazy and didn't keep it under control in the trigger tank and now it's everywhere in there. It's definately not an algae you can ignore for a week or so. Good luck, so far it's one of the hardest algae's I've seen to eliminate.

 

[kaptken]

been doing the same battle myself in a tank or two the past couple years. I have beaten it before with a really good Fuge with fine sand DSB and a little rubble rock and lots of macro like green grape, and razor and mostly prolifera. I set up a fuge tank half the foot print of the main tank with the verticulatta problem and ran it as a side filter. a maxijet in the sump up to the fuge and back to the sump. after a while with good husbandry, the verticulatta died out. it was clean. until i moved a frag from another tank with it on it. then my fuge return line broke and i disconected it to dry the rug an never put it back. But Im about to install the fuge again. its the only way. nothing really eats it.

one other way i have been playing with is take the infested rock out, pull as much off as possible, then dunk it in a bucket of kalwasser for a few minutes. . the high PH seems to wipe it out. Im trying dunking some frags with yellow polyps and GSP on them with the verticulatta now too. seems to be ok. havent tried any hard corals. the softies have more slime to protect them in a short dunk. it might take a couple dunks over a week or two.

 

[Keith Thomson]

I,ve been battling this stuff for about 10 months as well. I've tried a lot of different things as well. I find when you get it to die off in one area, it just feeds it somewhere else. I bought a Hanna low range phosphate tester and have my phosphates down to 0.03.I find that I can barely keep any other macro alive in the fuge so it won't compete with the caulerpa. I started to dose a low amount of vodka daily to see if that has any effect on it, but it's too soon to tell at this point in time.

Keith.

 

[AIMFish]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=12103936#post12103936 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Keith Thomson
..... I started to dose a low amount of vodka daily to see if that has any effect on it, but it's too soon to tell at this point in time.

Please post back here or PM me with the results on how that goes.

 

[Keith Thomson]

I'll keep you posted. I'm moving slow with .3 ml/day at this point. I have about 170 gal total volume.

Keith

 

[exotic3412]

have any of u guys tried a sea hare?

 

[Keith Thomson]

I did and it didn't touch the stuff. I havn't found anything that will eat the stuff.

Keith