View Full Version : Green Water
2ManyHobbies
12-17-2002, 10:01 PM
I know that I have seen this question before but cannot find anyting in the search function...
How do you get rid of green water? I have been changed about 50% of the water twice now in a period of about 2 weeks to reduce my nitrates. Other than water changes and no addition of fertilizer is there anything else I can do? I have a 29 gallon, pressurized CO2, pH=7, KH=8, 55 W, & Nitrates=15. Lights are on for about 12 hours a day.
Suggestions?
Fishiebusiness
12-17-2002, 10:48 PM
Green water is a tricky thing. You'll be hard pressed to get rid of it with water changes. I had green water for weeks, and my 50% water changes put a temporary dent in the GW which comes back just as strong the next day. I havent seen nitrates promote GW growth. I've noticed that GW is often correlated with ammonia presence in water. The standard approaches to getting rid of GW are blackout, diatom filtration, or UV sterilization. Totally black out your tank for 3-4 days and make sure no traces of ammonia are present. This should get rid of your GW and keep it from coming back. This will cause your plants to get leggy tho.
You can also use it as an excuse to get a diatom filter or uv sterilizer. Both will get rid of your GW problems in very little time.
darren
12-17-2002, 10:48 PM
this one can last awhile. i remember being so distraught with it i started researching how to build a Daphnia cage (water fleas which eat 'green water') to set in the tank and then learning how to culture them too! thank god i never had to use all that knowledge, but it was interesting reading.
its been a long time, but i recall using a UV filter. i think it was the corlalife 8w one that hangs of the back.
good luck.
darren
AMiR UNC
12-17-2002, 10:58 PM
After 5 weeks of green water when I started my tank I solved the problem by throwing in a big bunch of water sprite. Didn't know it would solve anything but from what I understand it sucks out all excess nutrients from the water leaving little for the algae to grow. Blackout and water changes did nothing for me. Also, UV works very well. After good plant growth is established with sufficient lighting, Co2, nutrients then you won't have any problem with green water.
Richer
12-17-2002, 11:13 PM
Fishiebusiness is correct, GW is generally caused by a spike in ammonia. After the inital bloom its difficult to rid your tank of GW. You can do water changes till your blue in the face and it will come right back as strong as ever. Instead, a blackout should work fine. Do a 50% water change, then add KNO3 till your nitrates are around 10ppm (if they are at this level or beyond it already after the water change, don't bother). Cover your tank with a heavy blanket or black trash bags and raise spray bars in your tank (or add an air pump+air stone) to create some surface aggitation. Shut off CO2 supply and shut off lights for 2-4 days. Don't feed during this time. After the 2-4 period do another 50% water change, add KNO3 to get 10ppm (again, dont' bother if its there or higher after the water change), add your traces, pottassium, etc.
Diatom filters will work in filtering out GW, as will UV. However, blackouts are free, so try that first.
HTH
-Richer
Depending of how severe the GW is it may take the blackout in combination with diatom and/or UV sterilizer.
Check with friends if they have either of those so you can borrow them.
wetmanNY
12-18-2002, 7:21 PM
Whatever the Ultimate Cause/Causes, green water is a dense bloom of euglena and its kin ("euglenoids") and of single-celled and small colonies of planktonic algae.
If the grass is too tall in the pasture, get a cow.
The zooplankton in a balanced system are all the rotifers, copepods, even daphnia (except the fish gobble them up) and other microscopic creatures that graze on algae and green protists.
The water that came with the Amir's Water Sprite may have had a founder population of zooplankton. So would duckweed. So would a quart or two of clear clean water from a healthy, planted, mature tank not recently medicated.
Fight a bloom of phytoplankton with a stable population of zooplankton. This advice is not dramatic enough, however...
... a flame-thrower would take unwanted ivy off the old college campus walls...now, would the dean want you to do it that way?
Wetman , with all due respect - that sounds good but what does it mean (Basil)?
tyler
12-18-2002, 10:31 PM
wouldn't any fast growing plant take the nutrients from the water column and away from the algae?
Richer
12-18-2002, 10:40 PM
tyler - GW is extremely presistant, you can add all the fast growing plants you want, do as many water changes as you want, but it will come right back as strong as ever. Preventing it, or completely killing every algae cell is the only way to stop it.
-Richer
wetmanNY
12-19-2002, 12:27 AM
inxs, you're so right! that's pretty incoherent.
My message simply: fight green water, not by eliminating all nutrients 9impossible) or using a flamethrower (too violent) but by encouraging all the lil critters that eat the green stuff...
Wetman - thanks - have you used the method in practice?
If so , how long did it take? What did you introduce ? And in how big a tank?
Thanks
plantbrain
12-19-2002, 9:32 AM
I've used Daphnia, worked well, took awhile for the number to get high enough.
Problem:
Fish like to eat them. Rotifers are not even close to being as effective, you might get a predatory Rotifer that eats the other rotifiers that are herbivores.
Daphia interfere with Rotifiers when both are present but Daphnia do not "prey" on them just mangle them as the Daphnia feed.
Daphia are much more efficient.
But the rotifiers generally are too small to be eaten by many fish.
It takes longer than Diatom or UV methods but is the natural method.
Works well on mild cases or lower lighting.
PC lighting has awful times with GW.
You'll never starve the GW.
Once induced, it's there to stay unless you remove it all.
GW is not Volvox nor Egulena. GW is much smaller, roughly 2-3 microns across and very fast. I've enevr found Egulena in any aquarium samples ever. The group is completely asexual.
When I get back I'm going to run some over a EMS to get a good look. Light microscpoes are insufficent.
Regards,
Tom Barr
wetmanNY
12-19-2002, 12:24 PM
Anyone who can culture infusoria is culturing all kinds of critters that eat green water. ("Well I'm not going to culture infusoria in my tanks, wetman!") My own experience is only with planted tanks and soft water-- fo forty years.
How small? Well, I have a cylindrical salad bowl, maybe a gallon and a half, packed with plantlets and cuttings, with a single male Paradisefish, and enough gravel scarcely to cover the bottom. The water's always crystal clear, but a test tube held up in the window and inspected with a 10x loupe is swarming.
Any predatory rotifers are kept in check by the availability of their prey. Populations naturally settle into ratios of predator to prey that are astonishingly similar whether it's lions/antelope or rotifers/ciliates. The predatory rotifers don't just gobble up all the prey and then... what? Only humans do that.
After medicating for an Ich outbreak, I've sometimes decimated the plankton, and I get vaguely cloudy water sometimes. Then it dissipates (but not by magic!).
You can control the green in the meadow with herbicide, with a blowtorch-- or with a cow.
I'm not advocating ideologically "natural" aquaria, BTW: I use carbon and polyfilter and water changes etc etc like everyone else.
When I had GW bad , I did 50% waterchange +blackout+50% waterchange + diatom filtering for a week off/on +UV sterilizing for a week = clear tank (125G)
I am intrigued with the use of daphnia.
If I had the same tank what would I do?
Net daphnia in a pond and introduce them after getting all the fish out? If I did ; how long would it take a couple of dozen daphnia to multply and knock out the GW? and would I just be able to introduce fish afterwards to consume the daphnia? Is there a better micro organizm?
wetmanNY
12-19-2002, 6:31 PM
It's a whole community, not just one organism, inxs. Don't you know anyone who has a clear clean planted tank and would let you siphon off a gallon or two, with plenty of detritus from the substrate? That would cure green water in ten days.
What's in it? bacteria, cyanobacteria, diatoms, algae, euglenoids --being eaten by ciliates, some flagellates, amoebas, hydra, rotifers, microturbellaria, nematodes, aelosomatids, naidids, rotifers, gastrotrichs, plus all the water mites, a few springtails and the microcrustaceans, especially copepods.
The problem with Daphnia is that they're so big and noticeable the fish decimate them.
Well, my experience with green water in a 45g start-up tank stocked with zooplankton was a 6 week affair. The daphnia population blossomed all right, but so did the cyclopoid and hydra population, which kept the daphnia population in check. Some of the first ciliate grazers to bloom were the larger scoop-shaped ciliates, like Lembadion. Man, I sure miss that bloom, it was a lot of fun. :D
Inxs, if you want to play around with daphnia, make sure it’s a pure culture. Collecting wild daphnia without screening the catch is a good way to introduce copepod raptors into the tank, and they’ll decimate your daphnia population.
As for the other herbivores in a tank, IME the collective zooplankton only shorten a water bloom, but won’t prevent one. There’s always a lag period between between the bloom trigger and grazer population growth. I have this 29g that I use to sort out my collecting forays and it blooms religously every 2 months when I add aged tap water to it.
IMHO, daphnia aren’t worth the extra effort with diatom, UV filters, and tank blackouts as the other options. Unless you like to experiment. :D
Tom
That's my point Tom, i'd love to go the way of Wetman and Plantbrain if I could but practicality seems to point me in the way of UV and Diatom hence the question about what is to me unknown : biocontrol.
I'd love to be able to do it if there is a way to do it practically.
Tom.E
12-19-2002, 10:59 PM
*
Will the Zebra mussels become impossible to completely get rid of?
125gJoe
12-20-2002, 6:25 AM
Originally posted by Tom.E
IMHO, daphnia aren’t worth the extra effort with diatom, UV filters, and tank blackouts as the other options. Unless you like to experiment. :DTom The Vortex XL or D-1, and a UV sterilizer will 'fix' that green water problem promptly. Just the diatom filter should do it. It's a good investment for getting super clear water... :)
wetmanNY
12-20-2002, 6:38 AM
Look at Shiftaltumlock's planted tank in his current thread "Final pics...." A gallon of his water would cure green water!
What would you expect to find in water that clear, figuring it hasn't been medicated in the last months? Well very little algae or detritus at the base of the pyramid, to judge from the photos, so you'd expect to find a correspondingly light population of plankton, but a great diversity of kinds. That's what makes the water both clear and stable: low density/high diversity.
That's mature, balanced water. Get a founder population of that from Shiftaltumlock on moving day, and your green water is over! "Saint Altumlock! let us draw a pitcher from your magic well!"
I get cultures of Euglena once a year or so. I just can't keep them pure. And I can't give the photosynthesizers enough brilliant daylight to stay ahead of their grazers. The culture eventually clears. If I put some green water/euglena culture into each of my tanks, the tanks don't go green. They clear.
How can you avoid this state of affairs? Keep everything in turmoil: vacuum gravel, dose with fertilizers, overload with fishes, zap with UV and medications. It's a lot of work...
Yes Matek, that was a tongue-in-cheek comment by me, and probably not a good one. There are transportation regulations with zebra mussels and for good reason. I’m not sure if they’re even legal to keep in an aquarium. I better go back and edit it out.
Tom
Yes Matek, that was a tongue-in-cheek comment by me, and probably not a good one. There are transportation regulations with zebra mussels and for good reason. I’m not sure if they’re even legal to keep in an aquarium. I better go back and edit it out.
Oh just great Tom! I just got back from scraping the hull of a freighter at the docks in Toronto at Lake Ontario and put the little blighters in my tank. Now what am I going to do???
*Steve places tongue in cheek and wistles innocently*
Will GW harm the fish after an extended period of time? Also, Mrs. Claus is bringing me a diatom filter for Christmas. If I rid the tank of Green Water and add a couple of litres of water from a healthy planted tank after the cleaning, will the beneficial little guys from the planted tank live in the diatom filtered tank?
GW will not harm anything , diatom filtering will strain some beneficial stuff out and I have no experience with seeding from an established tank.
125gJoe
12-23-2002, 6:25 AM
Originally posted by inxs
GW will not harm anything , diatom filtering will strain some beneficial stuff out ..Sounds like you mean using a diatom filter is not a good thing (?). Never heard of that...
I was actiually thinking more of UV sterilizing but also diatom filtering will remove some beneficial algae which takes time to colonize the watercolumn.
IMO UV sterilizing and diatom filtering are both very useful tools to clean up messy water, GW outbreaks and disease but it isn't good to use them on a regular basis as prevention just like antibiotics for humans. If you do that your tank will be more succeptable to outbreaks and swings in waterchemistry.
The best thing to do is to set up the largest tank possible and get is established and balanced (fish and plants) , once you get that you should try to minimize interfearance into the environment .