Bubble Algae, how to get rid of it

Ok I have emerald crabs and they don't eat the bubble algae I have. Mine is not spreading and is slowly dissapearing. Keep your water quality up. I never starve my fish; I feed them once every evening. The thing is you can feed daily just reduce the amount. Do you think fish in the wild only eat everyother day? I personally feel if you do not feed daily you stress them out. I tried it for a few weeks on another tank and my tangs got lateral line disease. As soon as I went back to daily feeding and adding vitiamins to the dried algae strips it went away.

Back to the crabs, emerald crabs are tiny! They would have to pop the bubbles to eat them, they do that they release more spores!

Do you test for phosphates?

 

One piece of LR that I bought had bubble algae growing on it. I bought an emerald crab to go after it but it never touched it. The crab eventually disappeared. I eventually pulled the rock out and nuked it.

 

I've been dealing with BA for around six months. I'm slowly but surely winning with it.. but it takes persistence.

Every weekend when I do my water change, I take the 5 gallons that I've pulled out and split it in half in two separate buckets. I'll pull the rock out that has the bubbles, place it into one and scrub it with a wire brush. After scrubbing, I'll swish it around and then transfer it to the other bucket. I swish it in there for about 45 seconds before placing it back into the DT. This is complicated by the rock being populated with Xenias that I don't want to kill.

My thinking on this is that it rinses off the free/released spores. So far it's worked well enough, I've managed to keep it contained to the single piece of LR that it originally hitched a ride on. I've found a few bubbles trapped on the screen for my Koralia, but that's about it.

I'd likely have had it beaten months ago, but there have been a few lapses where I let the rock go two or three weeks between scrubs and the bubbles seemed to suddenly have an explosion of growth once they hit some critical size/number. Avoid that if you can.

 

That's good advice wildblue. I had some growing deep between the branches of a trumpet. I pulled toe coral out and used a screwdriver to pry out all the bubble algae pieces and let them full into a bucket. Lots of pieces popped. I then poured tank water over the a coral to rinse away all the spores. I haven't seen it since.

I'm not sure if this approach will work for pufferchick since it is popping up everywhere for her.

 

Yeah, that definitely complicates things.

Another suggestion that may have already been given(sorry if I'm repeating here) is to get a 1/4" stainless tube (Ace,Home Depot) used for water lines & some poly hose that will fit over it. Sharpen one tip with a grinder or a dremel, and use the sharp edge while siphoning to pry off/scrape off the algae wherever it pops up.

No idea on how well it works in practice with porous rock as it was my Plan B. This stuff is harder to get rid of than Byropsis, without a doubt. In a desperate moment, I even tried Joe's Juice on the bubbles.. That didn't get me anywhere. :-[

 

thank you all for your helpful replies. I just got an emarld crab and have him floating in the bag right now. If he doesn't work he will become puffer food and i will try your suggested methods i'm crossing my fingers that he will work

 

What if you used a UV sterilizer in the DT, and then tried removing as many bubbles as you can. Wouldn't the UV sterilizer destroy the spores?

 

i could look into getting one if people think that would work, i don't know anything about UV sterilizers but i'll do some research

 

I am not dure if the UV would destroy the spores inside. The membrane is pretty thick. I am sure if that worked you would have seen it posted. It would have to be inside a confined area to to get enough UV so why not just kill everything in the nuker.
Which I would never do!