GHA- Is there anything else I can do???

[dmh41532]

Are you using a filter sock? i had a major outbreak and used a filter sock to catch all the dirt that was settling on the algae. About a week later, it was gone.

 

[LesPoissons]

Yes, I use filter socks. Helps to catch the stray GHA I scrub off and the detritus from blowing off rocks. Plus since my nitrates are low, I don't have to stress about changing them every 3 days.

 

[road_runner]

The system is about 3 years old
Started with Live Rock an Dry rock, Live sand and dry sand, and a chunk of shrimp
Current parameters: Ph: 8.3, Nitrate 2.5, phos 0-0.05 (looks like 0 to me but slight tinge that may put it inbetween), mag 1500 (right now, usually 1350-1400), cal around 400, kh/alk 8.3/3, ammonia 0. (RODI Water, filters 2 months old).
I have used api, sea chem, and salifert test kits. Over the last 3 months I have replaced them all just incase and scrapped API (although it was always acurate for me)- so currently just sea chem and salifert.
Filtration: 55g sump, Eshoppes Axium X350 skimmer, 150-200# of live rock, 2 inch sand bed, new fuge with chaeto, culerpa, gracilaria + red fuge light. Filter socks for micro bubbles and gha removal post scrubbing. Just added carbon reactor today.
Lights are Viparspectra 165w Leds x 3
Dose Kent tech M (magnesium) and reef buffer added at water changes
Lights are on 8am to 7pm right now, blues only to try to keep alage in check @ 75%. Today I added my whites again @ 1% 9-5 bc the alage is still growing and Im sick of the blue tank. My fuge is lit 18hrs begining at 8pm.
Never had gha before, maybe a tuft here ad then gone. The algae outbreak started janurary after a month- 6 weeks of massively overfeeding corals with reef roids and phyto. I was culturing my own phyto and pods and just had way too much and didnt want to waste it so the tank got a ton, plus totally misread reef roid dose and over the holidays w family visiting I didnt keep up w testing and ignored the beginning of algae bc I assumed Id get rid of quickly now that I corrected the overfeeding and Id never had an issue before as the tank was low nutrient since the beginning. Wrong.

Its baffling to me that GHA can grow in zero po4 environment, I really think your testing is inaccurate.
Just think about it:
You overdosed phytos, phytos are full of phosphorus and add po4 to tour system. Yet you have zero po4?
You overdosed roids which add lots of nutrients yet you have zero po4?
Your chateos are growing well yet you have zero po4? Chatos are also algae they will die in true low nutrient system.
My po4 is 0.08 and I cannot keep chateos (rightfully so)
I really think your po4 is wrong and you actually have po4 that is fueling the alage.

Sea hare and urchins, they will help but we need to stop whatever is fueling the algae.
If we realized indeed you have po4 we can simply use something like rowphose it will end it, but we have to make sure we know without a doubt what's your po4 because if ita zero we cannot use the rowphos.

Here is what I recommend

1- google bryopsis and make sure you look at the pictures and compare to what you have in the water...make aufe we are not dealing with bryopsis
2- can you get a hannah ULR test kit and run po4? If you have a freind you can borrow from do so..
3- can you check if you have any silicon inside the water or any metal that is touching the water especially in the sump area?
4- might worth doing an icp if you can, it's worth it.

 

[LesPoissons]

I appreciate the advice but lets just imagine that my readings are correct and move on from trying to blame it on excess nutrients. With decades of lab experience and fish keeping, I promise you I can run a phos and nitrate test correctly, and that a multitude of api, sea chem and salifert test kits over a 3 year period would not all give incorrect results.) Even after a month of over feeding, 6 months of 0 reefroids and 20% water changes and gfo, manual gha removal, and good filtration can deplete food related phos with no problem. As far as all R2R reefers who read my posts and weighed in on the ID page, John @ reef cleaners, and my lfs- its gha and not bryopsis, even if it were, between the fluconazole treatments and increased mag- I should have seen a some noticeable decline in bryopsis at some point in 6 months. Aside from that, the chaeto is not doing well, it's smaller than when I introduced it and has white patches.... as my tank seems to be very low in phos. I only tried it bc people were suggesting that I needed a "different alage" to take up the excess nutrients that must be fueling the GHA. It couldnt hurt anything so I added it in. I'm not kidding when I say I'm trying everything and nothing is working. At this point, when I remove 85% of the visible gha leaving a handful or 2 in a 220g tank that I can't reach... if I test the tank the following day or the day after, there is not suddenly an abundance of phos "not being used" by GHA.
The only silicon is what holds the tank together and I imagine they use a reef safe version. Theres no metal other than whatever is part of the pumps and the heater- everything is PVC or tubing or glass or acrylic.
I don't know anyone with a hanna but I'll look into that and icpc testing as another step on this infuriating journey. Im increasing cuc some more on Monday (Fuzzy chitons- those are new to me). Thank you for your input!

 

[road_runner]

I appreciate the advice but lets just imagine that my readings are correct and move on from trying to blame it on excess nutrients. With decades of lab experience and fish keeping, I promise you I can run a phos and nitrate test correctly, and that a multitude of api, sea chem and salifert test kits over a 3 year period would not all give incorrect results.) Even after a month of over feeding, 6 months of 0 reefroids and 20% water changes and gfo, manual gha removal, and good filtration can deplete food related phos with no problem. As far as all R2R reefers who read my posts and weighed in on the ID page, John @ reef cleaners, and my lfs- its gha and not bryopsis, even if it were, between the fluconazole treatments and increased mag- I should have seen a some noticeable decline in bryopsis at some point in 6 months. Aside from that, the chaeto is not doing well, it's smaller than when I introduced it and has white patches.... as my tank seems to be very low in phos. I only tried it bc people were suggesting that I needed a "different alage" to take up the excess nutrients that must be fueling the GHA. It couldnt hurt anything so I added it in. I'm not kidding when I say I'm trying everything and nothing is working. At this point, when I remove 85% of the visible gha leaving a handful or 2 in a 220g tank that I can't reach... if I test the tank the following day or the day after, there is not suddenly an abundance of phos "not being used" by GHA.
The only silicon is what holds the tank together and I imagine they use a reef safe version. Theres no metal other than whatever is part of the pumps and the heater- everything is PVC or tubing or glass or acrylic.
I don't know anyone with a hanna but I'll look into that and icpc testing as another step on this infuriating journey. Im increasing cuc some more on Monday (Fuzzy chitons- those are new to me). Thank you for your input!

Ok got. Sorry am not enough help.

Good luck.

 

[JoshH]

Any chance you could try some Turbo snails? I've read through everything and haven't seen them mentioned, they worked wonders for my GHA issue...

I would stop overfeeding everything. TBH you're just adding fuel to the fire. As mentioned above, your tests could be perfectly accurate and be 0. But that doesn't really mean much of anything as to proving you don't have a nutrient issue. All it proves is your Algae issue is big enough to consume the nutrients as they come up.

 

[Big Daddy Reefer]

Hi all,
been batting gha for 100 years now. Possibly 200. lol. I see all these reef tanks with white sand and 0 algae and I do not know what I am doing wrong and I want those beautiful tanks. I will summarize briefly this ongoing crusade and hopefully I can get a few more ideas on how to win the darn war.

220 gal tank, 3 years old ish, 2 inch sand bed, 200# live rock ish, 55g sump, protein skimmer, fuge w chaeto, rodi water

parameters: ph 8.3, nitrates 1.5-2, ammonia 0, cal 420, alk 8.3 to 8.7, mag 1400, phos 0.05

It is gha according to R2R reefers who identified a pic I submitted.

What i have tried:
-running 0 nitrate/0 phos for over a year
-manual removal of course
-peroxide soak and scrub
-fluconazole
- increase cuc (i now have 150 dwarf ceriths, 20 florida ceriths, 25 nerite, 20 nassarius, 20 trocus, 50 or so hermits)
-get fish that eat algae: 3 tangs, 2 alage blennies, 1 foxface
-blackout tank for a week (horrible idea, I dont reccomend that to anyone)
-switch to only blue light (going on 3 months now, algae still growing fine)
-decrease light cycle/intensity, increase fuge light
-add in a new piece of live rock as GHA may be out competing good bacteria for nutrient removal (put in 10 more #s of LR after manually removing maybe 90% of gha I could get)
-try sea hares (3 poor creatures lasted only about a week each so I wont be trying again)
-blow off rocks (I do this every few days).

The fluconazole did not work for me and I lost several fish because of it. I followed instructions to the letter but it has been recommended that I must have done something quite wrong and to try it again as it really does achieve results but Im very hesitant. Thoughts? Positive/negative experiences?

Is there anything else I can do here? My tank is a reef and the only thing I cant do is replace all the rock because of all the corals. If it comes to that, then it will just be the end of the tank for me.

At this point I manually remove it with a scrub brush and siphon every week or 2 depending on growth and my time.I usally get a small handful each time. (If you have experience with GHA then you know this is a good bit!) It grows on rocks, the overflow walls, on the shells of some of my snails and hermits, on the cords to the powerheads, and it loves to grow around the bases of my corals (I think the bonding agent must release phos or something but most of the corals have been in there for years, so who knows) but it starts to encroach on them very quickly.

Any other ideas of what I can do or what I am doing wrong? Thank you all!

Try this...

New Filtration System for Reef Tanks!!!

I would like to introduce a new filtration system to the hobby. It's very inexpensive, easy to make and is very effective at reducing ammonia from the aquarium. Let us start this thread with typical information and methods in our hobby, a conventional biological filter: Fish continuously...

www.reef2reef.com

 

[Rilo]

How fast does your algae grow in your fuge?

 

[brandon429]

How many times does gha beat us here vs number of times we beat and photographed dying gha

Reef2Reef Pest algae challenge thread hydrogen peroxide

we have a way for that, drain access. still the pumps and drain off some water to re pour back in nbd while in the air, do this operation: one section is rasped with a pocket knife blade such that the algae is removed by force in that section alone, representing the worst case scenario handling...

www.reef2reef.com

Run a test rock for proof, ten mins and you get your first absolute knowledge about your tank and it’s adapted invaders. Up till a test rock is done, pure guessing, partial work, and unhappy outcome

Post full tank shot pics so we can identify where the detritus feed is

On a real reef, if you simply box off a portion of the reef with a metal cage preventing grazers, gha grows. Number of problem parameters that indicates: none, gha has adapted to all reef presentations.


The reason gha cannot beat us there is bc creative humans with cheat/best grazer. We open with the claim in that thread that all reef tank invasions are psychology and not biology

its not whether or not we can rid your tank of gha, fast. It’s whether or not you want to be free of it directly after being shown the fix

How I came up with the theory of psych vs biology: literally watching ten thousand invaded tankers choose to continue to be invaded, name your reason. =Psych
I’ve watched em hold onto the invasion until takedown, literally refusing to become uninvaded it’s purely fascinating man behavior

The biological portion is already photographed, effects don’t range tank to tank, they have the same outcome. Gha cannot live when it is killed directly and by cheat.

Pics prediction: rocks not covered in coralline and bio-rejecting coral flesh. Rocks will have open space, ripe for primary production. Pics w likely show collection places for detritus waste, a direct feed for algae localized, and not registering on test kits since the nutrient is locked and only partially emitting from half rotten protein waste. Bare bottom tanks can get gha, but sandbed ones get and retain gha best when they’re tan hands off, the typical non cleaned sandbed approach the masses use

 

[IslandLifeReef]

There are definitely nutrients in your system. They are just being consumed before they reach a level that can be detected in the test kits. If either NO3 or PO4 were truly 0.0000000 ppm, the limiting nutrient would prevent the growth of algae.

@brandon429 has some great threads about detritus free sand beds and algae removal. Can you pick up a handful of sand in your tank and drop it and not see any sort of cloud? If not, then you have decomposing food providing nutrients to the GHA.

Another problem with getting rid of GHA in the tank without some sort of external removal is that as the GHA dies, it releases nutrients back into the water column for the remaining GHA to consume. It's kind of like mulching your mower clippings to fertilize your grass.

I would recommend checking out @brandon429's methods. Saying you don't have any nutrients is comparable to saying that a person can survive without eating any food. It just can't happen. The GHA is getting food from somewhere.

 

[KevinsReef]

I would try reducing your lighting period to something more like 7 hours. That probably won't stop the algae on its own but Marc Levenson (melevs reef) has said in some of his videos that coral doesn't need more than 7 hours per day. Any extra is just more fuel for the algae.

 

[serwobow]

Your current cleanup crew: 150 dwarf ceriths, 20 florida ceriths, 25 nerite, 20 nassarius, 20 trocus, 50 or so hermits.

In your cleanup crew, only the trocus snails might touch the GHA (unlikely). And they are not hardy (in my experience). Your other snails eat film algae only (ceriths, nerite) or are detrivores (nassarius). Hermits don't ever eat algae in my experience. So, basically, your cleanup crew has zero chance of eliminating GHA.

My advice is to get emerald crabs - 1 per 10 gallons (you need a lot of them to make a dent). Then you will finally have something in your cleanup crew that eats GHA. They will slowly start to clear it.

Also you can get turbo snails. They are really the only snails that might get big enough and are active enough to go after GHA, and they are super tough. They probably wont touch the big tufts, but they will at least keep it from spreading. Add a bunch of them, like 1 per 5/10 gallons. They will bulldoze a bit, but if your frags are well-glued, it will be no problem.

 

[brandon429]

the trick to winning is to apply all the common preventative measures after you've killed it, not before. change the order of ops makes your work not against a huge mass of target, that has to be killed and rot in the tank, it makes all the work align against a few leftover cells you missed in the hand gardening portion, amplified, against the target truly as preventative.

separating the removers from the preventers is how we get so many pages of tamed tanks.

 

[LesPoissons]

Thank you all for more input!

The algae in my refugium doesnt grow. I added chaeto and red gracilaria (lit with a mostly red refugium light),when I cleaned out as much of the GHA as humanly possible to see if the new macros would out consume whatever nutrients that the gha is getting. The macros are getting smaller by the day. There is gha in the fuge now. It was suggested that I add phosphates so the macro algae can grow, but I'm worried that the GHA will blow up.

The original cuc is what was suggested to me by reeflcleaners for gha so I didnt really question it. As of today, added to my cuc are 15 emerald crabs, 5 huge turbo snails, 3 fuzzy chitons, a paved mithtax crab, and 5 pithos crabs. Some of the creatures in my original cuc do eat hair algae, but they also consume detritus, which breaks down and leads to more algae, so I assumed a necessary part of the program. I also have algae blennies, fox face, bristle tooth/yellow/hippo tangs as grazers to help.

The clay/basket method has been tested in fresh water, I'm hesitant to dump kitty litter into a reef tank at this point.

I dont feed heavily.

I know there are some nutrients in the tank as the corals are alive and growing and there is algae. My point is the algae is not a result of an overwhelming phos and nitrate issue so its not easily correctable by standard methods of lowering nitrates and phos. Gha can live in low nutrient environments.

I read up on the threads about the peroxide, thank you for posting. I have tried already removing a ton of the rock, scrubbed, sprayed with 35% peroxide, let sit, rinsed and returned to tank. It took hours. That was a couple months ago. It all came back. I didnt try the knife method because it didnt seem possible for me to remove each rock and knife scrape them all down, esp the ones full of holes and gullys. It's like 200#s of rock. Perhaps if this new updated cuc cant help, that will be next. <shudder>. You step correct in that a lot of the algae is in crevices, but a lot is just right out on the surface rocks, right in the flow etc. I blow off the rocks every week with a jaebo R20 and at this point I get very little detritus- just angry corals- and so far no reductions in algae.

These pictures were taken today. 1 week ago I removed about 80% of the algae (IMO) by manually scrubbing and siphoning (I syphon to the sump w a sock on the end onto catch gha) then remove. It's all back and then some bc I turned white light back on to 1%.

 

[IslandLifeReef]

Even with the best CUC, you will need to manually remove the larger, longer clumps of GHA. If the GHA is to long, the CUC won't touch it.

BTW, that doesn't look to bad. The turbo's and emeralds will be able to handle it once you remove the larger clumps.

 

[Matt1508]

I’ve had a similar issue to this the water column has 0 nutrients but the rock is bound up, GHA grows here as it’s the first thing to feed on it as it’s purges. To test this I removed a piece of rock when I did a water change, tested water column for nutrients and then left the rock overnight in water (with heater) and tested water again in the rock bucket .. be sure to remove all GHA when you place rock in bucket then you’ll see if your rock is indeed leaching bound up nutrients

 

[Matt1508]

I’ve had a similar issue to this the water column has 0 nutrients but the rock is bound up, GHA grows here as it’s the first thing to feed on it as it’s purges. To test this I removed a piece of rock when I did a water change, tested water column for nutrients and then left the rock overnight in water (with heater) and tested water again in the rock bucket .. be sure to remove all GHA when you place rock in bucket then you’ll see if your rock is indeed leaching bound up nutrients

It doesn’t look all that bad though tbh I have patches that look the same

 

[brandon429]

peroxide isn't a one time cure, it's to accomplish the above... Tank no longer invaded that's not bad at all! Great coralline. It would be much worse if you hadn't treated/nice job nice tank

We use peroxide just to cut mass and get caught up. Regrowth is perpetual w any system

 

[LesPoissons]

It doesn’t look all that bad though tbh I have patches that look the same

Thanks, keep in mind this is only aprox 1 weeks growth after 2 hours of manual removal. I will do the same this week and I am praying the updated cuc can keep up. (Btw- emerald crabs are $7 each here. For my tank at the suggested 1 per 10gal- thats $150 for crabs- And they only live 2-4 years? Argh!!!)

 

[LesPoissons]

peroxide isn't a one time cure, it's to accomplish the above... Tank no longer invaded that's not bad at all! Great coralline. It would be much worse if you hadn't treated/nice job nice tank

We use peroxide just to cut mass and get caught up. Regrowth is perpetual w any system

True, I was just hoping the cuc would catch up before it came back in such force.