Overrun with Grape Caulerpa.

[Pez]

My 29 gal nano has been over run with Grape Caulerpa. I can't manually remove it fast enough now. Any ideas and techniques or suggestions? Short of removing all my LR and bleaching it which will be my last resort I was hoping that there was a new product or invert that would eliminate it or at least give it a heavy haircut. Thanks

 

[Eckolancer]

You could add a very small bristle tooth tang. Let him scrape the rocks clean then sell him. Might try some crabs and snails. Wish you were close to me I would trade you some rocks for those ones.

 

[Angler and Eels]

+1 tang. I would go with a yellow tang. 2 tangs will be better so the you know it will be eaten faster then it is growing.

 

[cu455]

Starve it out biopellets and gfo.

 

[brandon429]

Enter your tank in the pest algae challenge thread below this one, all caulerpa can be beaten with that technique

 

[Humblefish]

Following. I've never found a fish or critter which will completely eliminate Caulerpa. I've even tried various urchins.

 

[TheEngineer]

I had no luck beating that stuff back on a previous tank with any technique that didn't involve removing the rock and treating it. I do not recommend you put a tang in your 29g tank to address this.

 

[human]

You could try a sea hare, but the problem with caulerpa is its roots entwine in the rock pores making it nearly impossible for any critter to get to. As long as there is still a root piece, the caulerpa has a chance to regrow.

 

[ChristiD]

I had a 180 gallon system at work that we had to dismantle because it was so over run with this stuff. Initially it was in a Refugium tank as a bio filter. Fish and wildlife found out about it and it's an invasive in this area. We tried drying the rocks, we tried freezing them, we had tangs in there. Unfortunately we ended up bleaching all of our live rock and hand picking all of the caulerpa off of any corals or things we didn't want bleached. I'd love to hear about a successful way to clear this out of a system

 

[brandon429]

I have beaten it out of about nine systems on the reefcentral peroxide thread

its highly susceptible to peroxide, massively. we do test areas first, and in tank work can be done. the references for this work are in our peroxide thread here, if you enter this tank you have a huge chance of beating it without disassembly. disassembly is much faster though, with external treatments. the first caulerpa fix was on roughly page 6 or 9 of the reefcentral peroxide thread its in clear bright pics. locating this stuff takes link work for sure, threads are massive.