Help Please! Terrible Alge Bloom

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Bobindy1

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Jun 9, 2005
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The good news, my chemistry is stable 0-0-0. The bad news? I ignorantly used tap water to make my sea water (thinking the store-bought treatment would take care of any tap water issues) and now I have really happy LR, copiopods(Sp?) and other LR critters, but I also have a very happy and RAPID growing bloom of this brown-ish, rust colored alge. When I wipe it from the glass it comes away like "powder".. on my substrate it looks like a heavy layer of brown dust. and it's covering up the lovely corraline on my LR :sad: I bought 3 little blue leg hermit crabs, but they can't even begin to keep up with the growth of this stuff.
Is there anything I can do to stop the growth of this invasive alge?

I saw that Blinky mentioned the use of Caulerpa in trying to lower phosphates or control alge, but I don't know what that is.

Does anyone have any suggestions or ideas or experience to share?
 
Caulerpa is a macro algae, as opposed to the micro algaes that we usually consider to be problems in our tanks.
But, brown algae is usually diatom algae, caused by silicates in the water, rather than phosphates (at least that's my understanding of it). Either way, if you can, test for both phosphate & silicates (there are kits available). Whichever it is, you can also get chemical removers like phosphate sponge & silica sponge to remove it, and the bloom will die off.
HTH!
 
It seems like almost every new tank goes through a diatom bloom, which subsides on its own fairly quickly. I would wait for a bit and see what happens. It's very rare that a diatom bloom is a persistent problem.
 
I am in the process of cycling my tank and have the same problem with the algae. The advice from the LFS was to leave it for now but I feel your pain cos its hacking me off as well!!!
 
my tank has been setup for 5 years now and if i add like 4 fish in one go you can get a brown algae outbrake untill the bio filter pics up the load for the extra fish usaly gone in a few days to a few weeks depending on the size of the outbrake if you have a new fish tank it just takes a bit longer to build up the backteria to fight it off it will disapere ..

try some turbo snales and algae snales i have large tnak i have about 10 turbo sanils and about 15 algae snailes to keep things clean

i also have a large tank with large sump to clean
 
Well, you were right about the brown outbreak going away... But, NOW that I've added the most beautiful life enriched LR I have EVER seen, I have a GREEN alge bloom (outbreak?).. you know, the slimy stuff on the tank walls... Will this go away too? Snails are having a tough time keeping up...
 
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