What to do with Green Hair Algae?

Patrick Cox

Patrick Cox

Active member
My aquarium is now about 2 years old and I am having my first outbreak of Green Hair Algae. I started my tank with dry rock and ran GFO and Rox Carbon for the first 6 months or so and my tank was very sterile and I was not able to sustain corals very well. After realizing this I spent lots of time trying to increase nutrients and over the past 9 months or so, I have gradually seen more algae in my tank and more color in my corals. Although I still have problems keeping some SPS corals.

Now after a 10 day vacation, I came home to a green hair algae outbreak. Over the past say 3 months, I have really noticed a lot of green film algae but my lawnmower blenny has really taken care of that. However he obviously does not like this latest algae. So, question is - what should I do now to reduce this algae?

Tank info:
75G - 36x24x20
Large Skimmer
No Carbon or GFO currently
Not mechanical currently but I have filter socks if needed
T5/LED lighting - 6 hours per day plus 1.5 hours dawn/dusk.
2 MP40 running 50-75%

SPS and LPS Corals

2 Clowns
1 Cardinal
3 Flasher Wrasse
1 Yellow Assessor
1 Possum Wrasse
1 Lawnmower Blenny


Parameters are as follows:

Salinity - 35 ppt
Temp - 77.6
PH - 88.05
Alk - 7.7 (This has been creeping lower. I think my corals are consuming more.)
Ca - 400
Mg - 1230 (I know this is low. I am dosing today.)
Phosphate - .03 (I wonder if the algae is consuming this and reading lower than actual?)
Nitrate - 0.1 (Same comment as PO4)

FTS from Today:
i-SfZRGmk-L.jpg



Thanks for your suggestions!
 
First off, beautiful tank!
My first question is, who fed your tank while you were gone? Is it possible it got way overfed? Yes, your PO4 readings won't really be accurate at this point. I went through months of this, and my problem, and cure, won't relate to you (I replaced all the rock since the old stuff was leeching, I think).
At this point it's a competition, and GHA is very good at winning. I would do a 3-day blackout, wrapping the tank in garbage bag, and run GFO and carbon during.
Watch your skimmer and sock during that time too since they may fill faster with the die off.
Dramatic things, like using peroxide on each rock, or adding a turf scrubber may end up being a cure, but if the balance of food, light and maintenance is right, along with your herbivores you should be able to keep it in check.
Add some macro algae to the sump to compete is a solid idea too.
I tried a sea hare twice, and both times they died pretty quickly, making the problem worse. My abalone doesn't seem to do much either. Now I grow my GHA in the overflow. By accident, but at least it's not on the rocks and I can keep it until control.
 
mpderksen said:
First off, beautiful tank!
My first question is, who fed your tank while you were gone? Is it possible it got way overfed? Yes, your PO4 readings won't really be accurate at this point. I went through months of this, and my problem, and cure, won't relate to you (I replaced all the rock since the old stuff was leeching, I think).
At this point it's a competition, and GHA is very good at winning. I would do a 3-day blackout, wrapping the tank in garbage bag, and run GFO and carbon during.
Watch your skimmer and sock during that time too since they may fill faster with the die off.
Dramatic things, like using peroxide on each rock, or adding a turf scrubber may end up being a cure, but if the balance of food, light and maintenance is right, along with your herbivores you should be able to keep it in check.
Add some macro algae to the sump to compete is a solid idea too.
I tried a sea hare twice, and both times they died pretty quickly, making the problem worse. My abalone doesn't seem to do much either. Now I grow my GHA in the overflow. By accident, but at least it's not on the rocks and I can keep it until control.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply. I used an auto feeder twice daily, generally enough for the fish to consume in less than a minute, and then I had a LFS owner stop in twice to feed frozen so my Cardinal would eat. All fish survived and in fact, my fish and corals have more intense color, but the GHA has taken over as well so it is a mixed result.

On the blackout, should I be worried about my corals surviving? I guess for starters I will start running a small amount of GFO.

Thanks again.
 
Black out won't work.
The best bet is on every water change have someone hold the hose next to the toothbrush your using as you scrub the rock.

If your system is in check, it won't establish itself again.

I had one rock so bad that it was simple to remove it, toss it in a preheated grill at 500 degrees. Then rinse, rinse and rinse again. Pop it back in the grill again for slightly longer and the rinse again. Done. I then added the rock back into its place and presto! No GHA and the rock is white. Anything live is dead. Why no P04 rise? It's simple cook something long enough and it turns to char/dust.
 
Run GFO again and the hair algae will disappear. At one point I had a huge outbreak of it. I must've spent hours manually pruning it out. I got a phosban reactor+phosban and every trace of it was gone after a few weeks.
 
I would put money on it since you stopped using gfo, the majority of po4 being removed that's leaching from the rock has finally caught up, and algae has started.
The change was probably slow at first, but it's building speed? The .03 may very well be the excess coming out of the rocks, the algae slowly using it.

Imo, over gfo, look into carbon dosing. Biopellets are my preference as to keep a mass die-off out of the main tank. But you can do very well with vinegar/vodka/sugar dosing. VSV is what it was referred to, but I've seen some recent arguments that would probably if not remove, severly limit the amount of sugar in that formula.

I would probably engage one of those nutrient management "tools" or go back to gfo, but decrease the gfo by half maybe, from the amount the corals didn't like? Or use the suggested amount, but add the timed feeding of plankton via a feeder to just add a little pinch to keep the water from becoming too clean.

In my experiences as well, hydrogen peroxide works wonders. I prefer to not use it in the tank as my urchin gets mad. But you can add (I've seen) 10-20ml a day of the 3% to spots in the tank where algae is, with powerheads off for a few minutes.
I prefer to remove the rock, manually remove what I can, and then use a dripper to drip peroxide directly on the algae. If it's directly next to a coral, depending on the coral, sps being the most sensitive, you can use a weak dip solution of tank water and peroxide. GHA/cyano/corraline/bryopsis will all die from peroxide quite easily, bryopsis being the hardest. I've not had to deal with debrasia(?) so I can't comment.

Hope ya get the situation cleared up though, always sucks when the tank gets out of wack!
 
Thanks all. I started a small amount of GFO. I will also look into some of the other suggested methods like carbon dosing. I will report back in a couple of weeks.
 
Fairly standard case of rocks filling up with phosphate. This might help:

Nutrient Export

What do all algae (and cyano too) need to survive? Nutrients. What are nutrients? Ammonia/ammonium, nitrite, nitrate, phosphate and urea are the major ones. Which ones cause most of the algae in your tank? These same ones. Why can't you just remove these nutrients and eliminate all the algae in your tank? Because these nutrients are the result of the animals you keep.

So how do your animals "make" these nutrients? Well a large part the nutrients comes from pee (urea). Pee is very high in urea and ammonia, and these are a favorite food of algae and some bacteria. This is why your glass will always need cleaning; because the pee hits the glass before anything else, and algae on the glass consume the ammonia and urea immediately (using photosynthesis) and grow more. In the ocean and lakes, phytoplankton consume the ammonia and urea in open water, and seaweed consume it in shallow areas, but in a tank you don't have enough space or water volume for this, and, your other filters or animals often remove or kill the phytoplankton or seaweed anyway. So, the nutrients stay in your tank.

Then, the ammonia/ammonium hits your rocks, and the periphyton on the rocks consumes more ammonia and urea. Periphyton is both algae and animals, and is the reason your rocks change color after a few weeks from when they were new. Then the ammonia goes inside the rock, or hits your sand, and bacteria there convert it into nitrite and nitrate. However, the nutrients are still in your tank.

Also let's not forget phosphate, which comes from solid organic food particles. When these particles are eaten by microbes and clean up crews, the organic phosphorus in them is converted into phosphate. However, the nutrients are still in your tank.

So whenever you have algae or cyano "problems", you simply have not exported enough nutrients out of your tank compared to how much you have been feeding (note: live rock can absorb phosphate for up to a year, making it seem like there was never a problem. Then after a year, there is a problem).

So just increase your nutrient exports. You could also reduce feeding, and this has the same effect, but it's certainly not fun when you want to feed your animals :)
 
Short term, use API's AlgaeFix Marine. It will wipe out any hair algae in short order. HERE is a good thread here on RC about it's success.

Long term, an Algae Turf Scrubber, grow the algae where YOU want it to. It is a more natural, and less expensive way of removing excess nutrients.
 
OK, I wanted to follow up on this. I started running a small amount of GFO and then I also started dosing Prodibio products to start lowering nutrients. Now I notice that the green hair algae is starting to lose color. Does this mean it is dying off? Thanks.

i-tzc5TwH-L.jpg
 
Nice tank! I live in Lexington as well, are you a member on big blue reef? I don't recall seeing your tank. :)
 
First off, beautiful tank.

Yes it looks like its running out of nutrients but if you continue to have this problem and aren't against added some Emerald crabs they've been the best solution I've seen so far and I'd definitely recommend a few.
 
I would like to share my experience with you guys about GHA. I had few months ago a outbreak, despite I have RO/DI to top-off the water, and seems to have around 0 of phosphate. Amazing solution was to buy two urchin(one blue and another red, very beautiful BTW) and one big Sea Hare. In fact the Sea Hare attacked the GHA with one voracity amazing. With helps of the two urchin, now I have almost zero GHA, and better, the Sea Hare is eating all Algae, not only GHA. The red slime algae and green slime algae as well were attacked for the Sea Hare. When I took the picture I have the opportunity to measure, it has 5 inches. It is fairly nocturnal and sleeps buried in the sand. I dont know if I'm a luck guy, but I'm totally satisfied with my Sea Hare.

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Bulabr
 

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You should probably start feeding your sea hare Caulerpa or kelp or it will starve...

8 hours on lights seem short.. I usually do 12 hours. But, if everything is fat and happy and growing well then I guess carry on.
 
Pick it out and put it in a salad, lol no just kidding. But GHA sucks I'm dealing with it too and probably couldn't give you any better advice then that
 
My Sea Hare died after a few months. Worse, it buried itself in the sand before shuffling off this mortal coil and I couldn't locate the carcass. GHA came back, worse than ever.

So yes, they're great for reducing GHA.. if you can keep them alive. :)
 
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