Get rid of hair algae

[spidercrab]

How do you know its truly zero if the hair algae is consuming it? Yes I agree hair algae is far more resilient but the real reefs have almost zero phos and Nitrate. Yes they circulate a lot of water that only has tiny amounts but at the same time they have no hair algae.

Anyway I am pretty much out on this one. I have seen 17 years of these kinds of posts and the actions taken are almost always to add some kind of chemical to the water.

Well i did go for several months without adding any sort of nutrient to the tank and the test registered zero for both phosphate and nitrate for several months. No fish in the tank. Hair algae stopped growing during this time but didn't die. Coral all began to bleach and stopped growing completely. Lesson learned here is that you cant starve hair algae to death and expect to keep coral living. During this period the tank got hit with dinos and still has hair algae... I believe it all points to the tank being truly nutrient limited: dying corals, no growing algae, no fish, no addition of any nutrient source for months, Dinos popping up...

 

[spidercrab]

To update... So far I have nutrients at 20 nitrates and phos .07. Dinos and hair algae both loving it so far also the corals look good.

 

[spidercrab]

I am starting to wonder if salt mix can have anything to do with dinos. I had this tank set up for 7 years and never once dinos. Same routine no new frags for years. I started using a new salt mix and dinos came on within a week. This also happened in one of my other smaller pico tanks that I have done weekly water changes on for 4 years and never had dinos. Then, as soon as I switched salts it also has dinos within a week of using the new salt. Im guessing it could be an impurity, excess of some sort of trace element that favors dinos or even possibly live dino cysts in the salt itself.

 

[spidercrab]

Hmm that is a bit alarming https://www.bostonmagazine.com/restaurants/2013/12/23/chefology-bacteria-sea-salt/. Actual live bacteria? How about Dinocyst that can live 100s of years.

 

[King Turkey]

What salt? You test it? Mixing container could have been contaminated some how maybee??

 

[spidercrab]

What salt? You test it? Mixing container could have been contaminated some how maybee??

I havent tested the salt. Its reefcrystals I bought 8 buckets when they had the super special at petco! I use a 5 gallon bucket to make new water every week.

 

[spidercrab]

So far total no-go... adding nutrients is just fueling the Dinos to extreme growth rates. Its been a week of .7ppm phos and 20 nitrates nothing but giant Dino blooms.

 

[VR28man]

So, partially driven by this thread, I decided to finally sit down and fight my decent sized GHA problem. (good amount of accumulatd detritus, NO3 around 25, no idea what the PO4 is. However, the algae seems fairly static for the past few weeks; little growth and even in the ATS is not growing terribly well. Acros might not have been growing for a few weeks, hard to tell)

On Saturday (2 days ago) I took out every rock I had (30x11x18" tank) and brushed off a huge amount of GHA, and then stirred up a lot of detritus to be taken in by my marineland micron polishing filter, and then added flucanzole.

I think the brushing did most of the work, with the flucanzole doing the finishing touches; either way now much of it has disappeared. So far only one acro is doing poorly, though I don't think it's flucanzole related, it's been doing bad for a few weeks. We'll see how it does long term.

Pics to follow.

eta video:

Just an update: I've done my three weeks and did an approximately 50% water change. This has done a number of the algae; all that's left is one kind of red algae, which exists in sparse, slow growing numbers and can easily be removed if I wanted.

Most corals are doing OK (Copps Efflo), some (Walt Disney, orange monti cap which is actually m. aequituberculata, green slimer, unknown purple branching acro, Acro microclados and Monti Digi) have continued growing slowly but noticably. Only one that's not doing well is the same one mentioned above, an A. plana which I'll start a separate thread on.

Either way, this has definitely destroyed my algae. We'll see now if it comes back, hopefully in my ATS and less in my DT.

Video:

 

[VR28man]

three days post water change and stuff is growing well again in the algae turf scrubber.

This was almost empty three days ago. Nothing in the DT yet.

 

[spidercrab]

Still no evidence of increased nutrients doing anything to help. Dinos seem to flourish under high nutrients once they are established. So far all 3 algaes including dinos, cyano and hair algae are doing quite well with elevated nutrients. did notice tht cyano seems to kill dinos but the problem is that cyano will not grow everywhere just in lower flow areas. So the bottom of my tank is mostly dominated by cyano while the upper higher flow areas are Dinos.

 

[Saltywaterbox]

Still no evidence of increased nutrients doing anything to help. Dinos seem to flourish under high nutrients once they are established. So far all 3 algaes including dinos, cyano and hair algae are doing quite well with elevated nutrients. did notice tht cyano seems to kill dinos but the problem is that cyano will not grow everywhere just in lower flow areas. So the bottom of my tank is mostly dominated by cyano while the upper higher flow areas are Dinos.

Fighting the same fight. Did you ever have any success?