Heh heh. Mojo reef is an awesome guy (and a good guy to have sushi with too
). And Mr. Calfo has been advocating the use of Magnesium in the form of Grey coast sand for a long time.
Careful though--the original post says "use mag chloride, NOT mag sulfate", so Epsom salts will not work. The chemistry explanation was a little dodgy but the gist of it is that the chloride ion you're adding may be just as important as the magnesium. May.
Now, while boosting magnesium may in fact help the hair algae, and those pictures do show the algae going away, note too that the post is FULL of scientific inaccuracies and outright falsehoods:
"Only the lettuce sea slugs ate it, but they only suck the chloroplast out and the plant still grows fine despite this."
If lettuce slugs sucked all the chloroplasts out of a photosynthetic algae, it could no longer make energy or grow. And algae is not a plant, but who's counting
"Everyone kept saying there must be a nutrient problem or bryopsis wouldn't grow. This sounds good at first, but makes no sense when tests consistently show 0 nitratres/phosphates and you have a refugium with chaetomorpha growing."
Test kits measure some forms of ions and not others. Phosphate is a great example of this--it measure the inorganic phosphates, but any organically bound phosphate will not show up on the test kit. So, forget the kit for the moment: if your desireable macroalgaes are growing well, then there must be nutrients in the water, no matter what the kit says. Kits are not all-knowing, and more importantly, nuisance algae don't read your test kit results.
"Cheato should eat up the nitrates/phosphates and keep your tank clean, right? My chaeto was getting choked out by bryopsis. Bryopsis needs extremely little light and nutrients to get by, even less than chaetomorpha needs. If a healthy tank (low nutrients) allegedly can not sustain bryopsis, then how is it logical to believe the same system can sustain chaetomorpha?"
He answered his own question here. Bryopsis needs less light and nutrients to grow. So, when there is not enough nutrients to share, which will grow better? Briopsis. And when both are growing? Then you have too much phosphate in your system.
I have an experiment I'll try. I have some Bryopsis-like algae in my tank, and I had been waiting on a foxface which had been ordered for me, but I think I will try adding Magnesium Gluconate (not chloride, not sulfate) for a while and see what happens. That way, we can tell if it is the mag or the chloride that is making the difference.
Thanks for the post Justin!
Don't mind my edit tag, Christine. All I did was fix your color tag Larry
