Please advise what will consume this Algae

[mike89t]

Just an update on the success I'm having with my Naso Tang. When I added the Naso to my Display I had about a dozen softball sized clumps of Dictyota spread all throughout my display tank. In about a month the Naso has almost completely removed all of the Dictyota algae! Lets just say that he is one fat and happy Naso.

I'm considering growing some of the remaining Dictyota in my refugium to have a renewable natural food source for my Naso. It would also help with removing nutrients from the water.

 

[Dag]

I just got a scribbled rabbitfish which I hope will eat the bryopsis taking over my tank.

 

[mike89t]

My Naso has completely removed all of the Dictyota algae from my tank. It took about a month.

 

[Tomoko Schum]

I had a tank full of dictyota at one time. No tang or rabbitfish ate mine. I took small batches of them and fed every herbivores I can find in LFS's around here. Variagated sea urchin ate them, but he was slow. Then one day I found Dolabella sea hare at one of the LFS. This sea hare ate all of them up (29 gallon tank full) within a few days.

http://www.seaslugforum.net/factsheet.cfm?base=dolaauri

Tomoko

 

[Dag]

I thought it might encourage some of you to see an update 4 mos later. I was ready to give up the tank. See this now:

I don't really know what caused the recovery. I manually removed the bryopsis week after week, and then suddenly the growth slowed.

I had a refugium before this outbreak of bryopsis. But for some reason the macroalgae (caulerpa) stopped growing in it.

I added another refugium. For this one, I filtered the water through a Magnum 350 with charcoal. That refugium is filled with macroalgae now. So maybe it was an alleopathy thing.

Or perhaps, it just went though its cycle. At various times I have had halimeda flourishing, then it was xenia (green), then it was xenia (pink), then it was cyano, etc.

By the way, nothing ate it: I tried lettuce nudibranch, sea hares, two barred rabbitfish, urchin, etc.