Gha?

[Staggs]

Hi Guys,

I've been fighting what u think is GHA for several months. Vitamin seems to be spreading when I'm not manually removing it.

Hopefully you can see it in these pictures....it shows up in spots like this...typically after the rock has some green/brown sludge looking stuff on it.

My po4 had been running a bit higher for a few months (.33) so I started running brs hc gfo.

Here is basically the parameters for the last two month:

Dkh - 8.3
CA - 470
Mg - 440
No3 - 8 to 16
No4 - .04 to.08
1.025 to 1.026 salinity

 

[Staggs]

Here are the pics.....doing this all from my cellphone but I will get better pictures tomorrow

 

[Staggs]

Here is the film/sludge stuff that I'm getting on the rocks as well.

Right under the corals

 

[Tuffyyyyy]

Don't know how true this is but saw someone say earlier today that GHA on rocks comes from the rock itself and that there's not much you can do besides scrape it off. That made a ton of sense to me, especially considering the number of times I've seen people say "I just brushed it off with a toothbrush any time I saw it and it went away."

 

[Staggs]

I seem to keep getting it to come back after I take the good ole toothbrush to its. If possible I always remove the rock and give it a scrub while dipping the toothbrush in hydrogen peroxide.

One thing to note is that the tank is a bit over 1.5yrs old and this just started around 4ish months ago.

 

[Staggs]

Finally remembered to take some pictures before the lights came on, it's still growing and getting thicker in places. I haven't manually removed in a couple weeks now.

 

[Koaleigh]

Been having the same problem and the cause is high phosphate. We had gha for 10 months, but since we were using a useless api test kit we could only assume the phosphates were high due to the gha issue. We tried getting rid of it with a tooth brush multiple times but it always grew straight back as it was impossible to get rid of it all and the phosphate issue hadn't been addressed. After reading about sea hares I decided to get one since our lfs had a couple in stock, it did tho take me a long time to be convinced that it was safe enough to get one, but after reading in the forums of someone having one ink in their 125 gallon tank with no side effects and our task is also a 125, my complete frustration with the gha and their experience with the hare made me choose to take the gamble. It took about 3 weeks for it to devour all the gha, my wife even gently picked it up from time to time to move it to some gha it had missed but it never inked once. Since removing the hare from the tank a few small tufts of gha has returned, but I now have a hanna ulr phosphorus checker which proved my phosphate was too high. I have now been using brs hc gfo for 2 months and the gha is finally starting to turn a brown color as our phosphate level is dropping. I realistically expect it to take a while to completely eradicate the gha as it was an ongoing issue for a long time and the live rock most likely absorbed the phosphate, but that should fix itself in time with keeping my phosphate level low. I am replacing the gfo every 4 weeks and seeing the phosphate drop slowly, so now that I am treating the cause of the gha I am happy to see it slowly dying.