View Full Version : So what will eat brown alga?
Ordovician
05-19-2003, 2:53 PM
Is there an oto of the marine world. I know the stuff goes away, but it has to be the ugliest stuff a tank can get infected with.
ChilDawg
05-19-2003, 2:58 PM
Found this page, replete with a little info on brown algae control in SW tanks: http://members.tripod.com/mark26/algae1.html.
OrionGirl
05-19-2003, 3:09 PM
Patience is much better for dealing with this. If you know that you are not overfeeding, know that your water source is not high in phosphates, know that your water is not high in silicates, then you really should just wait it out. The silicates that support the high reproduction will wear out, and the micro predators that will compete with the diatoms for nutrients soon establish themselves, and the diatom bloom will fade away.
Purchasing a fish to deal with a short term problem results in you having to provide long term care for something you only wanted to 'rent', so to speak. Not the best method for managing a tank, in the long run.
As for the link...Ehhh. Advising someone to get a tang just to deal with algae is irresponsible, since it does nothing to identify the life needs of the tang, nor to break out the fact that most tangs are not going to eat brown algae and are not appropriate for most systems.
Getting an algae crew of hermits, crabs, stars and such will help, and should be done in reef setups and some FO tanks, but it not appropriate for all tanks. Why buy a bunch of crabs, if the eel is just going to eat them all?
As for fiddling with the photo period...Very, very bad call for any reef system. Will this kill algae? Probably--if you have photo synthesizing algaes. The problem? Not all 'algae' photosynthesizes, and of those that do, most are benign, if not beneficial. Corals have algae slaving away in their cells, making energy and keeping the coral alive. Killing off those algae will result in the death of many corals--the process is called bleaching, and is very, very real.
kreblak
05-19-2003, 4:13 PM
Turbo snails! I added three to a 46 gallon tank, and within a week there was no longer an algae/diatom problem to speak of. Scarlett hermits are good too, they churn up your substrate nicely. Snails get up on the glass, though, which is handy.
kreblak
05-19-2003, 4:14 PM
PS - the ugliest stuff you tank can come down with is red slime aglae....which is actually a bacteria, but trust me, it's gross.
Assuming that this is a new tank, it should go away on it's own with time. But I did find that Nerite snails did a very good job in removing it.