Making the road bumpy for algae?
- Thread starter apache73
- Start date
IMM, pest type algae’s and bacteria’s (aka Dino and Cyano) favor unstable water chemistry and metabolically multiply very fast.
That being said, it’s not as much an issue of level, provided your in the traditional ranges, it’s the amount of flux the system experiences day to day.
Salinity, Alk, and temp are certainly those things which must be rock solid at any time and nitrate and phosphate should be both in trace amounts and should not be rising or falling, week over week.
While CA and MG are important contributors to both calcification, they are usually easily managed.
I did experience a few times that a higher ALK (11dkh) did seem to lessen the green stuff.
If you keep everything pinned, the more advanced algae’s populate faster, leaving less real estate for the other crap. At one point in the process, the pest stuff just disappears seemly overnight.
Provided I keep parameters pinned, sand stays white, rocks clean going on 4 years without intervention from me.
That being said, it’s not as much an issue of level, provided your in the traditional ranges, it’s the amount of flux the system experiences day to day.
Salinity, Alk, and temp are certainly those things which must be rock solid at any time and nitrate and phosphate should be both in trace amounts and should not be rising or falling, week over week.
While CA and MG are important contributors to both calcification, they are usually easily managed.
I did experience a few times that a higher ALK (11dkh) did seem to lessen the green stuff.
If you keep everything pinned, the more advanced algae’s populate faster, leaving less real estate for the other crap. At one point in the process, the pest stuff just disappears seemly overnight.
Provided I keep parameters pinned, sand stays white, rocks clean going on 4 years without intervention from me.
brandon429
Well-known member
The number one cause of algae in my opinion of others tanks is the light settings too powerful plus no matched grazers for the species of invasion
We're all trained to go as bright as possible, there's a price for that. Corals do well, even sps, in far bluer less white and blasting light levels.
Matched grazers doesn't mean experimenting with several types of crabs and snails hoping for a match; that's a disease import risk for systems. It means if we get lucky and grazers present match, the lighting is less of an issue.
Way down the causative line are nitrogen and phosphate. <-- claimed because we have about 300 combined pages of algae work with before and after pictures in my threads on r2r and not once did I ask for their nitrate and po4 levels or to ID the invasion type. The number one reason our tanks never turned into dinos challenges was because we did not alter nitrate and po4, we handled algae directly+ the waste stores in the sandbeds that fed the algae.
We're all trained to go as bright as possible, there's a price for that. Corals do well, even sps, in far bluer less white and blasting light levels.
Matched grazers doesn't mean experimenting with several types of crabs and snails hoping for a match; that's a disease import risk for systems. It means if we get lucky and grazers present match, the lighting is less of an issue.
Way down the causative line are nitrogen and phosphate. <-- claimed because we have about 300 combined pages of algae work with before and after pictures in my threads on r2r and not once did I ask for their nitrate and po4 levels or to ID the invasion type. The number one reason our tanks never turned into dinos challenges was because we did not alter nitrate and po4, we handled algae directly+ the waste stores in the sandbeds that fed the algae.
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