Let's hope this works

Jedi1199 · Oct 30, 2021

My 55g is infested with either Bryopsis or GHA. Most of the natural predators ignore the stuff.. The only one that seems to be interested in the pencil urchin. I am usually not a fan of chemical treatments, but I have been doing some reading on the subject and decided to give it a try. I ordered a vial of Flux Rx. Put it into the tank on Oct 29. This product is basically Fluconazole. As you can see in the attached pictures, I manually cleaned most of the rocks with some pretty good success. Unfortunately, the remaining affected areas are not something that can be easily removed for cleaning. I will be posting updates here throught the process to document the treatment.

Tim McLellan · Oct 30, 2021

Algae, the universal battle. Just curious how old your tank is? I too have a 55g, 6 months old, and while I haven't had any severe algae outbreak (yet) I do have some pretty good film algae on the glass and rocks. My diamaond watchman goby seems to keep the sand so clean that algae doesn't even get a chance to start there. I have a tuxedo urchin and fair number of snails who do work on the glass and rocks, but don't seem to get the upper hand. While I clean the front and side glass with a flipper I have let the back glass go a bit, but I think I'm going to try to work that a bit more to clear some of it out. What I discovered today is that once it gets well established on the glass it's quite a bit harder to clean off as opposed to keeping on top of it.

Just John · Oct 30, 2021

I used flux rx for bryopsis and it worked, but was not great for some areas in shade. I recently read on a post here that photosynthesis is part of the mechanism of action, so that would explain my shaded algae. Just something to keep in mind. Scrubbing the shaded areas with a steel tooth brush like tool/brush took care of it.

CanuckReefer · Oct 30, 2021

Jedi1199 said:
My 55g is infested with either Bryopsis or GHA. Most of the natural predators ignore the stuff.. The only one that seems to be interested in the pencil urchin. I am usually not a fan of chemical treatments, but I have been doing some reading on the subject and decided to give it a try. I ordered a vial of Flux Rx. Put it into the tank on Oct 29. This product is basically Fluconazole. As you can see in the attached pictures, I manually cleaned most of the rocks with some pretty good success. Unfortunately, the remaining affected areas are not something that can be easily removed for cleaning. I will be posting updates here throught the process to document the treatment.

Pencil Urchin was a workhorse for me for 5 years....until he got a taste for my Kenya Trees lol....back to LFS it went . Still have a pincushion and short spine black. Curious to see how this goes . You like I with chemicals. I did the Chemiclean once and it worked, thankfully but it was also a headache for a few months afterwards.... 6 of one half dozen another as they say lol. Best of luck with the treatment

Jedi1199 · Nov 6, 2021

Update: Well it has been 8 days since I added the Flux Rx to my tank and the results are looking good. The algae is not gone completely yet, but it appears that it is on it's way out. I can clearly see that there is less of it, and it is not growing larger or in any new places.

I will post a few pics later when I can get a glare free shot of the tank.

Uncle99 · Nov 6, 2021

Was phosphate in the normal range when the pest algae occurred?
Treatments are fine provided the original cause was corrected, otherwise, it just returns over time.