I have had a problem with green hair algae for over two months now. It has infested my rock and now parts of the sand and tank. Any Ideas on how to remove it. My perimeters are fine. No drastic changes have been made. I just cant get rid of it. I was thinking about using algaefix from the brand API Marine. It says its suppose to get rid of the algae without damaging coral or fish.
Green Hair algae
- Thread starter Bigshow
- Start date
100%hydrophylic
New member
i dont like algaecides or any chemicals that supposedly kill algae. for me all they did was create a resistant strain. some people say use GFO to get rid of phosphates in the water which helps get rid of algae....... blah blah blah. what i did was first manually remove and scrub the algae off, then i killed the lights for a week and did daily 10% water changes. added several turbo snails and emerald crabs next. i changed out my old bulbs then put chaeto in for nutrient export.
Flipper62
Premium Member
Hermits IMO dont help that much.
Get some Asteria snails. They will do a good job on the rocks. For the sand, get some Nassarius snails. The Nassarius snails will move under the sand to keep it clean
andrewatch
New member
I had that same problem, you need to focus on getting as much algea physically removed from the tank as you can, then cut back light times a few hours, water changes often, get large turbograzers or mexican turbograzer snails, and red legged hermit crabs. This helped my aquarium immensly.
tcwoodrn
Member
Your parameters are fine because the algae is using the nutrients before you can measure them (ie phosphates). You need to drastically (or totally if you don't have coral) light starve the rock while you still can. Cut back feeding to a bare minimum. Manually remove everything you can. Do frequent 10% water changes (at very minimum 1/week). And lastly consider running a GFO reactor.
Hope that helps good luck. If I beat it so can you.
Hope that helps good luck. If I beat it so can you.
bekindtoyurbuds
New member
emerald crabs helped for me, I had a few small patches and they ate it up in no time
kzickovich
Member
I'm just getting over the same problem. I removed what rock I could and scrubbed them in tank water, then before I put them back in the tank I dipped them in clean tank water to remove the small pores that were just hanging on after scrubbing. Then I bought some turbo snails on reef2go.com (you can find them on the sponsor page) when the snails came I was surprised they were huge, they cleaned up what I couldn't get.
Sea Hare! I had so much hair algae in my 25 gallon and have tried to get rid of it for a year. I used Marc Weiss algae magic, API algae fix for saltwater, emerald crabs, all kinds of snails, and manually removing the rocks and hours of plucking.
Within 1 month my Sea Hair has 80% of the rocks completely hair algae free. The one I got was rather large 5 inches or so long and 2 inches around on his rear end. He gets everything off the rock it is amazing and nothing has grown back like when I would spend the night plucking algae to find it all back the next day.
Within 1 month my Sea Hair has 80% of the rocks completely hair algae free. The one I got was rather large 5 inches or so long and 2 inches around on his rear end. He gets everything off the rock it is amazing and nothing has grown back like when I would spend the night plucking algae to find it all back the next day.
