Flat Brown Algae

Hi All,

I have been having issues with a flat, brown/green algae. It looks a lot like sea weed. I have had to "harvest" it pretty much weekly. Has anyone had any experience with this type of algae before, and if so any idea on how to control it? Is there a reef safe critter that eats this stuff?

I have a 45 gallon tank. It has been established for well over a year. I do 10-20% water changes using RO/DI water every week. My PH is 8.4, Nitrite is 0, Nitrate is 0, everything looks good. I have predominantly softies in my tank and they have never looked better. I also 2 tank raised clowns. I have a clean up crew consisting of red leg hermits, astrea snails, and mexican turbos. I also have 80 pounds of live rock (Florida Aquacultured).

Any advice on what I can put in there to help keep this stuff in check?

 

question: how long do you run your lights, and you can also try chemi clean its a white powder that is reef safe it should get rid of it i had a red cyno algae outbreak and it took care of it in a few days

 

I run my Metal Halide for 6 hours, my actinics for 9 hours (over-laped with the halide), and moon lights the rest of the time.

Any idea what the Chemi-pure does to help the situation?

 

That chemical treatment is for cynobacteria. It is not for regular algae. What is your fish load, how often do you feed and have you checked your phosphates? It is good that you are using ro/di water, but have you checked your output to see if your filters are ready to be changed?

Jim

 

My RO/DI filters are all new (within about 30 days). I have 2 small false perculas. 2 toadstool mushrooms, 1 devils hand leather, a green star polyps colony, a cabbage leaf leather, 4 seprate zoanthid colonies (Green, pink, and brown), and about 8-10 red mushroom corals. My tank is 100% aquacultured fish, corals and rock. I have started with small coral cuttings. They are all decent sized now, but not huge. I feed the fish a small amount (2-3 flakes per fish) of dry food 1x per day, but not everyday.

 

Can you post a picture of the algae?

 

if it looks like seaweed it might be sargassam http://coexploration.org/bbsr/coral/html/body_sargassum.html

its a brown macro alge its not a bad thing but it grows like crazy. I had it at first and had to keep pruning it but after a while it will grow it self out and slowly dissapear

 

Hi All,

Been a while since I posted. It's summer and it seems like all my free time is spent outside these days. I am of course keeping my reef up though

I finally figured out how to get rid of this pesky brown algae. It was not easy. Basically I took my live rock out of the tank, piece by piece, and scrubbed the brown algae off with a NEW toothbrush. I then rinsed the rock in salt water making sure to get all of the residual algae that I scraped off before putting the rock back into the tank. It appears to have worked great. An additional bonus is it forced me to redo the layout of my tank. I have better positioned the corals, and honestly, most if not all of the corals look much better in their new and improved locations (different light, flow, etc.). All in all a big pain in the shorts, but net result is very positive.

***If you decide to do this, make sure you use a NEW toothbrush. You do not want to get any residual toothpaste on your rock.

Take Care

 

Do you have a phosphate reactor? You may want to try one to help control micro(if that is in fact what it is) If it is macro, I wouldn't worry about it-as prunning is better than removing it all together. Macro is very beneficial for your tank, so as long as it isn't taking over the tank and aestetically it looks nice, that may be your only option-prune it.

 

It is macro. Its not bad looking per say, but it was getting too close to my corals...and I was getting tired of pruning it all of the time, so I went all out on it. Took me a couple of hours, but I am very happy with the results.