Help! This algae is taking over my tank.

[pdavidson]

Hi all,
I'm at my wits end. Don't know where it originally came from but it seems to be here to stay and it loves my tank.

This algae has long tendrils that grow very fast covering rocks, glass, corals and equipement. It has small oval shaped dark green leaves with a slight serated edge. Almost like a kind of ivy.

Question is, how can I get rid of this stuff, it is literally taking over my tank. The intake to my stream keeps getting blocked, its up the glass, its everywhere.

I've had the rocks out, cut at it, ripped it off, scrubbed the rocks and it comes back quicker and stronger than before. I've spent so many hours on this, I'm not doing it any more because its not getting me anywhere.

So, I'm looking for practical advice on getting rid of this once and for all.

Is there anything that eats this stuff?
Should I run lights off for a couple of weeks till it all dies off? The corals would suffer though - I can't take the chance of rehoming the corals since the algae has got to most of them and would just infect some one elses tank. and reinfect mine when I got them back.

if it dies off, the crash will be pretty devestating to the water paramters. which will then affect the fish and inverts

techy bits
48"x24"x18" reef tank
40kgs LR
miracle mud sump - brimming with caulerpa - no problems there.
2xT5 daylights
2xT5 actinics
1 Stream
temp, s.g., ph etc all within reasonable paramters
I use spring water that has been RO'd, my water is professionally tested every year and has a phosphate reading of 0

Livestock

1 clarke clown (just realised today that its mate is missing :-( must be dead in the rock work somewhere)
6 yellow tailed blue damsels
1 chalk goby
flame angel
coral beauty
red legs
turbos
super turbos
1 large brittle star
2 small brittle stars
a few cerith & nassirius snails
2 cleaner shrimps
1 blood shrimp
1 coral banded shrimp

corals
nothing too large
lots of frags
staghorn
birdsnest
trumpet
pineapple
sun coral
zoanthids
metalic green xenia
clove - once I get rid of the algae I need to get rid of the clove - its almost as bad for taking over a tank!

fish look fine.
corals are growing, slowly but growing. nothing is suffering - other than being chocked by this algae.

After a bad water problem in Dec and losing all my inverts, having another big problem like this is driving me nuts. almost on the edge of packing it in.



Phil

 

[kmk2307]

Hey Phil,

From that description i'm really unsure as to what kind of algae you have but it is most likely an ulvophycean. Maybe try looking up "ulvophyceae" and "ulvophycean" on google picture search and see if anything that comes up looks like what you have. You might want to get your own phosphate and nitrate test kits (Salifert is a very good brand of test kit) and keep a close eye on them. Also, do you test the TDS of your RO water? It's possible your prefilters or membrane needs replacing. What could be happening is the nutrients are comming into the tank w/ the water and the algae suck them up so they do not show up on water tests. Do you think you could be overfeeding? What kind of Caulerpa are you growing? You might want to try to get some chaetomorpha which is a green filamentous algae that grows rapidly.

There are a few different types of animals that might eat that algae. Just a couple individuals of several different species of snails might be useful. Is the stream device you were talking about a tunze stream? Do you have a lot of water flow? Sea hares (Aplysia sp.) are hungry eaters of algae but they can't take a lot of flow. I had one in my tank until it got sucked into the intake of a MJ 1200 powerhead through the strainer... quite horrible. A couple small emerald crabs and a couple scarlet hermit crabs might also be useful.

If all else fails you might want to consider adding a protein skimmer.

HTH,
Kevin