Well, here it is, the surrender update. Well, kind of...
After 5 months of fighting this green hair algae with every method I could find on this and other forums (more cleanup crew, reduced feeding, increased feeding, more water changes, no water changes, less light, blue light, no light for 3 days, GFO, fluconazole, a double dose of fluconazole) I have decided to resort to extreme measures. Blackout.
First, I acknowledge that I am the victim of my own mistakes. I caused this algae outbreak by intentionally overfeeding for a period. Then, I couldn't stick to one treatment method for long enough to see if it would really work. The problem is there's just too much conflicting information out there. And since nothing I tried ever made a noticeable improvement in the ~3 week time period that my patience seems to last, I just kept moving on to the next. The sad part here is that I can't come back and say I know which one thing worked. But at least in the end I'll win anyway.
You can see that on August 18th (previous post) things were looking ok. The corals were all thriving and the algae seemed to be returning more slowly each week. Then I changed two major things:
1) I bought more cleanup crew (half a dozen trochus snails and a tuxedo urchin) that were either dying on arrival or I didn't acclimate them well enough, because within two weeks basically all of them had died, plus my tailspot blenny who had been doing great for like two months. The urchin decomposed into a hollow shell in the period of 6 hours while I was at work, I didn't have a chance to remove anything but the empty husk. A nutrient bomb. Snails were a similar story. I managed to get half of the blenny out before it decomposed.
2) This all happened at the same time that I was trying to do no water changes so the algae would "starve" itself of some essential nutrient.
Well, the combination of these two events lead to the biggest explosion of algae growth I've seen to date (photos below), and the cause for my apocalypse solution.
About 6 weeks ago I set up and cycled a QT tank, and have been using it as a refuge for my smaller clown who was getting beat up by the bigger one. This past weekend, I moved every piece of livestock (all corals, cleaner shrimp, bigger clown) to the QT tank along with my radion XR15. I left my snails and emerald crab in the display tank and taped up construction paper over all the sides. There it will sit fallow for 3 weeks, 4 weeks, 6 weeks, I'm not sure yet. I'll keep testing Nitrate and Phosphate and use the skimmer, carbon dosing, and GFO to manage them as the algae dies off and releases nutrients. I'll keep changing filter socks to remove the dead algae. I'm really hoping in 6 weeks I open up a pristine, blank slate. Then I'll start the process of bringing it back up very slowly. Probably starting with several months of letting coralline algae grow on the rocks before I add any fish or corals. Maybe 3-6 months from now I'll begin repopulating it.
For now, everything seems happy in the QT tank, even the two clowns are getting along well (I think the blenny was getting between them). So, as long as that lasts they will stay in their refuge until I can properly "mature" the display tank, like I should have done in the first place a year ago.
I'm curious for anyone's thoughts on this idea. If you have experience, any idea how long the blackout should be?
Thanks for following along!
