I fought it for at least 2 years and couldn't get it all out of my system. I recently set up a new system with the hope of no bubble algae. It can grow with nearly any light. It gets under anything you have glued together and will slowly pry it apart. Constantly waking up to a nice sized frag that has fallen into another colony and both are half dead from burns.
I believe it puts out a defensive chemical that harms the coral next to it as well as stresses everything in the tank. My Lobo and Acan frags will start dying off when a bubble parks on their plug. When I had an out of control outbreak, I lost almost all of my Pocilipora for no apparent reason. Now that it is under control, the mystery deaths have stopped. I think it was the bubbles.
If you like it and think it is pretty, you could keep it in a fish bowl near your tank. It won't need a filter.
I was not able to control any of it with any natural predator. All of them eventually started nipping at, or just eating my corals. I had two small rabbit fish that fed almost exclusively on my Jedi mind trick. I tried everything. After a year in my tank I have one Scopas tang that will go after small pieces on the rocks. He also nips at my LPS but not enough to kill them. I had a sea urchin that would also eat at it slowly but it would also frag my Digi's for me and pull my frags out of the rack.
I feel like I have brought it under control. I have used a combination of a larger refugium growing Chaeto lit 16 hours on reverse daylight. I shortened my reef light time by an hour. I manually removed all I could. I put a fish net where the filter sock goes and manually scraped the bubbles off the rocks with a dental tool. In the morning the next day I would empty all the bubbles from the net.
The rocks I could get out of the tank, I took to the sink and scraped them there to avoid more spores in the tank. When I finished scraping those rocks, I sprayed them with hydrogen peroxide and let it sit for a minute before I rinsed them off a second time and put them back in the tank.
I did this over a 2 week period in three separate sections and sessions that took a couple hours. It would always end up taking closer to 4 hours because I would accidentally knock over a rock or move one and not be able to get it back in place. Many times I found myself holding a rock that I couldn't get out of the tank. I had no place to set it down without crushing some other well established colony and I couldn't get it to fit back where I picked it up from.
Most of my favorite large colonies have been accidental fragged up from the efforts. I treated the tank with Fluconazole at the same time and that seemed to help. There is or was a good chance that It was Derbesia as much as Valonia.
It has been about a month since all that, and my corals are looking healthy and growing fast like they did before the bubble algae take over. There are still some bubbles in the display tank as well as the Chaeto tank. I will do another sweep to clear them out and possibly dose fluconazole once more.
The new tank I set up to be bubble algae free sits a few feet from the main display. I found a bubble colony in it last week. Bummer! Could have been spores from the skimmer? Who knows, I did all I could think of to not cross contaminate the two systems. I still haven't decided how to deal with it. The tank has been cycling since Feb and I don't want to restart it. I pulled the effected piece and cleaned it off. I will take the system to 0 nutrient and dose peroxide for a while and see if I can starve it out.
If I were to offer you advice, I wold recommend that you pull anything you see with bubbles on it out of your tank and scrape it off. Try to get all you can from whatever it is on. From there use a Q-tip or a spray bottle and hit the area with peroxide and let it sit for at least a minute before you rinse it off and put it back in your system. Then watch it and make sure it does not come back.
I hope that story helps you make a more informed decision about what to do with the small colony you have spotted.
Good luck with whatever you decide.
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