BBA vs SAE vs Rosy Barb
- Thread starter Flavius
- Start date
I have 9 odessa barbs in a grow out 45....Plan is for them to go into my 150 soon...anyway point is I already had the fish. I had a large sword that aLOT of BBA on it. I trimmed it up a good deal, but still had a lot!! I put it in the 45 hoping I could evantually salvage it. 2 weeks later the BBA is gone.
I think that cutting back on feeding a bit results in them nibbling on algae like hair and BBA more often. I have rosy barbs and some gold barbs that also nibble. I think barbs in general tend to nibble on algae and at the bottom. I used to have a few odessas in an unheated tank, and they loved it in there. Odessas are nice fish.
I just did this with both of these fish. I have a planted Anubis tank which I was keeping pike cichlids and large mouth bass. It was going great for a year+ until the bass one day realized he was big enough to eat my SAE (which were pretty good size) then the pike started too. It was amazing that in about a week my pristine planted tank was being overrun with BBA and other junk. I guess the loss of the SAE combined with a goldfish feeding frenzy I did threw the whole thing out of balance. Anyway I was bored with those fish, so I sold the Bass and the Cichlids and decided to try something new. But, this took a couple more weeks to get around to, so I REALLY had a BBA problem by this time.
I bought 6 new SAE and they went to work right away, but it still wasn’t fast enough. After a week I bought 4 Rosy Barbs. Wow! great team the SAE concentrated on the BBA on the middle of the leaves while the Rosy Barbs would tear off the stuff on the edges. Still there was a lot of the bigger older BBA neither were touching. So I treated this with H2O2, worked great (use carefully I got a little zealous and killed a frog and gourami) anyway after treating that BBA the SAE and RB team went to work on it full bore. I think the H2O2 may have softened it up.
After three weeks the tank looks great! Water chemistry is back in balance and the BBA is on the run and almost completely gone. A little here and there but I can pick in out now.
A little more to tell. I want to make discus tank now. So I put a Betta in there the other day just to see if I had any fin nippers, before dropping any big buck for Discus. HOLY COW! those Rosy Barbs were like some kind of piranha on that thing. Really, I had to pull them off with my hands. Got rid of them and the Betta looks great now.
Hope that helps
I bought 6 new SAE and they went to work right away, but it still wasn’t fast enough. After a week I bought 4 Rosy Barbs. Wow! great team the SAE concentrated on the BBA on the middle of the leaves while the Rosy Barbs would tear off the stuff on the edges. Still there was a lot of the bigger older BBA neither were touching. So I treated this with H2O2, worked great (use carefully I got a little zealous and killed a frog and gourami) anyway after treating that BBA the SAE and RB team went to work on it full bore. I think the H2O2 may have softened it up.
After three weeks the tank looks great! Water chemistry is back in balance and the BBA is on the run and almost completely gone. A little here and there but I can pick in out now.
A little more to tell. I want to make discus tank now. So I put a Betta in there the other day just to see if I had any fin nippers, before dropping any big buck for Discus. HOLY COW! those Rosy Barbs were like some kind of piranha on that thing. Really, I had to pull them off with my hands. Got rid of them and the Betta looks great now.
Hope that helps
