Need Help with invasive macro-algae

[jkobel]

Any help at all will be appreciated!!

I am not sure what happened here but it all started with a small colony of Green Star Polyps. After a few weeks in my tank they started to develop these large (0.5" dia.) round and slightly flattened, purple/red bubbles that have a white pattern that faintly resembles a star on the top. At first I let this develop since I thought it was only a stage of growth for the GSP since it was new to me at the time. These (red bubbles) have since spread to neighboring rocks and have grown into quite large groups. About 3 weeks ago I decided to see what would happen if I manually removed them. Unfortunately I didn’t have the foresight to do it in a separate bucket or tank and many of them broke open releasing their "juicy filling" into the tank. Now it is everywhere and I mean everywhere. I have come to believe that they are some form of Red Sea Grape even though I can find very little info on this type of Macro. In fact, everything that I can find says it is very rare to have this in your tank. At this point I am looking for either a fish or an invert to manage it. The guy at the LSF hinted that emerald crabs might help and I have added a couple and the first day one seemed to be chowing it down but it hasn’t actually made a difference that I can see and since then I haven’t seen them touching it at all.

Any insight would be great and I can hopefully post some pics this evening.

Thanks.

 

[stereomandan]

A foxface rabbitfish will work on practically any algae, but you will need a small one, like 2", for a 20g. You might want to consider getting one until the problem is solved and then return it to the LFS because they aren't well suited for a small tank.

Dan

 

[coralnut99]

Pics would definitely help, but sounds like red bubble algae you're describing. IF they don't develop into chain of any sort, I wouldn't put them into the macro-algae category. From my experience with it, it was a lot easier to remove manually than green valonia only because the bubbles were tethered at the base of a large bubble and were really easy to pluck with tweezers. I wish I could say that I did something great to get rid of it, but I didn't, and I didn't intoduce anything to eat it. From what I've read, both are very poor at competing for nutrients with higher macro-algaes. So you should be able to get them under control with some patient and careful plucking, some attention to the macros in the refugium, and attention to size and frequency of water changes.