Getting rid of turf algae/GHA...ugh

Zeal · Jun 9, 2019

amazongb said:
Algae Turf Scrubber

Don’t think one world work for me since I have a AIO tank

Zeal · Jun 9, 2019

mspad said:
How often do you do water changes?

Used to do it weekly now biweekly but I think I’m going to go back to weekly water changes. Doing one tomorrow

niQo · Jun 9, 2019

Have you tried a tuxedo urchin?

Scorpius · Jun 9, 2019

If you have turf algae then be ready for quite the battle. Nothing eats it. My only method of control is starvation. Realize that starving algae puts you in the danger zone of starving your corals.

Zeal · Jun 9, 2019

niQo said:
Have you tried a tuxedo urchin?

Nope but I think those will pick up my frag plugs and take them for a ride

Rich Klein · Jun 10, 2019

Hand removal and brush the rock with a toothbrush. Something about getting at the roots slows down he re-growth and then the CUC can keep it clean.

Hermie · Jun 10, 2019

Just today I was compelled to remove a struggling favia frag from my tank and do some spot treatment with H202. Not sure yet how it will respond... but the coral tissue seems fine.

EmptyWallet · Jun 11, 2019

FYI, you don't want to let GHA get a foothold in your tank. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure couldn't be more true for GHA.

I have been battling it for over a year and in the end I lost and it conquered my 8x2x2 tank. All water parameters and setup (flow, skimming, chaeto in fuge etc) were 'perfect', tried all 'cures' which work for a while but don't solve the underlying issue.

Then I moved house and tore down the tank, scrubbed every spec of rock and 'blackout' for a week in the new tank before turning on the lights. Left the sandbed behind. 2 months later not a spec returned (fingers crossed it stays that way) despite now having higher nitrate/phosphate. Putting it down to detritus in the sand bed and generally aged\dirty water + overfeeding.

But I cannot emphasise enough the importance of getting rid of it as soon as you see it, otherwise it spreads like wildfire and once established is difficult (in my case impossible) to control.

User1 · Jun 11, 2019

Dennco2000 said:
Scopas tang saved my frag tank... only fish in there, it even cleans out the algae scrubber as best as it can get to.

Scopus and Lavender tang here. Both are work horses and I've never seen a tang go after it as much as the Lavender does. In either case sounds like too small for the OP's tank. So in this case you are going to have to be aggressive on a clean up crew and manually remove what you can. Pair of shoulder length gloves if you have them, cup of water, turn down flow, reach in, grab hold, gently left, move out of tank and place in the cup with your hand a little bit in the water so it pull the GHA away as you lift. Manual process will help and let clean up crew do the rest. Snails astrea some say turbo - whatever works or you have had luck with. I went with 50 astrea in my 210 along with the tangs I noted above.

With regards to Vibrant. It works. It works well. However, there are always things that happen if we use a product, or a chemical, for a short term gain. Meaning I had a pretty bad case of GHA and I went to Vibrant. I did the dose based on total water volume not tank size. So gallon minus rock, sand plus sump, etc. Worked out to about 170 gallons. I then read Vibrants instructions and started to dose twice a week since I was in bad shape. I saw change on two of my tanks walls within 12 hours. It worked fast. I continued on but the mistake I made was by not removing the nutrients that the Vibrant was adding by killing off the algae. So as the tank started to get clear and nutrients build up I didn't export them via a water change and guess what. BAM! GHA came back 10 times worse than what I originally had. Rocks, all tank walls, sand bed, etc. Horrible. So now I had to take a step back, do a water change, dose once a week until I got the water changes under control then went back to twice a week. Skimmer, water changes, clean up crew, tangs, vibrant and I'm clear.

All in all it took about two months and now I only dose it once a week for maintenance. I have to say I'm pretty happy with results. Whatever you do just remember to stay ahead of the nutrient export and do a water change once a week if using vibrant. It will help and just dose around it so you don't waste it.

Skynyrd Fish · Jun 11, 2019

I vote for clean the tank. All rock scrubbed in a bucket of tank water. All gravel vacuumed. Use a stiff bristle brush to scrub the rock. Clean the sump. This has worked wonders for me. I then added a couple urchins and they really have kept the rock pristine. I had to scrub a few rocks every other week a couple times. Good luck.

ZoWhat · Jun 11, 2019

* urchins

* scrub GHA with small stiff wire brush....meanwhile have filter socks capturing the algae particulates

* use live bacteria like Dr Tim's

* Carbon vodka dose

It takes a VILLAGE

.

vetteguy53081 · Jun 12, 2019

Vibrant all the way and small doses of Red Sea No3P4X

Purpletang92 · Jun 13, 2019

Don’t scrub the rocks , your just releasing nutrients back in the water, even if you do it in a separate container, it’s a waste of time. If you want to go natural just let it grow out and it will starve when everything in the tank is used up just stop adding coral foods to the water and cut back on feeding fish. If you want to go chemical way , dose lanthinum chloride, when dosing you have to keep up on testing and go very slowly. Dosing lanthinum dose lower alkalinity so test water daily.

Hermie · Jun 13, 2019

NotASpammerDude said:
Just today I was compelled to remove a struggling favia frag from my tank and do some spot treatment with H202. Not sure yet how it will respond... but the coral tissue seems fine.

so as a follow up, I removed significant amount of turf algae+something from two frags using a brush and H2O2, and both frags appear to be doing fine. In fact, the favia even ingested some food tonight. I think that corals have a really hard time "encrusting" over exposed skeleton that already has turf algae on it. I don't know why... The coral must not be able to dissolve the algae strands... there is some microbiology question here

Snookin · Jun 13, 2019

Use reef flux fluconazole. It beat hair algae, turf algae and caulerpa verticillata in my 20g IM with SPS and LPS and it never affected my corals from what I could see. My tanks Ca and Alk consumption did drop slightly and my cheato stopped growing and reduced in size but didn’t die off. I ran it for 1 month. Here’s a pick of my monti and stylo corals. They have been growing better than ever since the aren't engulfed in algae.

Scott (Mack) McIntosh · Jun 13, 2019

I like all the ideas. But doing 5% water changes every week will help each and every problems in your tank. But that instant weekly water change will help during and after the problem goes away and help keep the trouble at bay. Weekly water changes is the best thing you can do for your tank.

Ashley Kekua · Jun 13, 2019

maybe you should not dump your skimmate back into your tank???

Zeal said:
SO I have a couple localized areas of GHA or Turf Algae on random rocks/frag plugs not sure why they're on these random things.

Ive tried CUC and nothing really seems to eat it.

I did a peroxide dip, kinda worked but it came back after about a month.(I scrubbed it)

Not sure what else I can do.

I have Chemipure, Seachem Matrix and Cheato.

I will admit I dose Red Sea A/B Twice a week and Aquavitro Fuel as well(Alternate)

I feed my coral Benepets Reef Food twice a week and my fish daily.

I believe the excess amount of nutrients is causing this spike in random algae.

If I stop all feeding of corals and just my daily feeding of fish could that possibly help as well as going back to doing weekly water changes instead of bi-weekly water change? My phosphate is a 0.3 and last time I tested it was 0.16-ish

KenO · Jun 14, 2019

Snookin said:
Use reef flux fluconazole. It beat hair algae, turf algae and caulerpa verticillata in my 20g IM with SPS and LPS and it never affected my corals from what I could see. My tanks Ca and Alk consumption did drop slightly and my cheato stopped growing and reduced in size but didn’t die off. I ran it for 1 month. Here’s a pick of my monti and stylo corals. They have been growing better than ever since the aren't engulfed in algae.

+1 on the fluconazole. I've used it in numerous tanks with no side effects. For GHA, I needed to do 2 rounds to eliminate it. There are various threads on R2R on it's use. Some folks are now running their tanks with a low dose as a maintenance routine. People use Vibrant in that manner. I tried Vibrant several times and had bad Cyano outbreaks. I use fluconazole in my coral QT setup, who knows what is riding on those new corals. One spore of something is all you need. Before I started my coral QT setup, I picked up an algae called Caulerpa verticillata which was ID'd by Jose Mayo on the main Fluconazole thread with Bryopsis. I tried a 10% daily AWC, low nutrients, ATS, sea hare, tangs, etc. The sea hare and tangs would eat it and it looked like it was gone. I moved the tangs to a larger setup and took the sea hare back to the LFS. Within a month the C. verticillata was back with a vengence and I still had the ATS running. I'm now on my 2nd round of fluconazole. The top growth is mostly gone, but I need to eliminate the root like structure. I'm planning 3 rounds plus a maintenance dose for 6 months just to be sure the algae is gone. It has a root like structure that you can't brush off, even if you use H2O2, I tried. My belief is that the sea hare and tangs kept eating whatever top growth appeared, but the root like structure remained. This is one tough algae. So once the sea hare and tangs were moved, the algae regrew. The fluconazole is a fungicide intended to treat fish with fungus infections. The dose used for killing the algae is much lower than the amount you would use to treat infected fish. Just my .02.