I've read a lot of conflicting information on this. To pop or not to pop. I'm assuming emerald crabs pop it when they eat them? Is the best way to get rid of them to manually remove them? I have an ATS and the algae is still growing well, so i'm a little confused as to why it's still growing.
Emeralds probably do pop them, but also if in correct amounts constantly eat them up, allowing other things to outcompete the bubble in the tank. I kept an emerald once when I had a small outbreak of bubble, but then saw him go after a coral (not sure if thats the case, but better safe than sorry). Then I removed them manually in one of two ways:
1. If the bubble was on something that I can remove from the tank, I would, and then remove the bubble. I would then use a bit of tank water or RO and rinse the rock/frag/snail over my sink to get potential spores off.
2. If I could not remove whatever it was on, I constructed a little siphon using hard tubing (from an old dosing container) and attached airline tube to it. When I would do water changes, I would turn off flow, and using that siphon I would pop off the bubbles and have then get sucked out through the contraption. If they were bigger than the opening, I would carefully pry them off while holding the tube with siphon going next to them.
After about a month (2-3 water changes) I couldnt see any bubbles anymore. Once in a while I'll get one show up here and there, so I use the little syphon to get it out, most of the time they are small enough that it fits the opening.
Edit: as to why you still have algae with an ATS, there could be two things causing it. The algae in the tank gets better flow and light so it out-competes the ATS algae, or you just have enough nutrients in the tank to support both. If you know that you dont have too high of nutrients (which can be masked by algae uptake and not show up on tests), I wold manually remove, or add more CUC to get rid of algae in the DT. That will allow the ATS to be more effective as it'll absorb the extra stuff and keep new ones from taking hold.
I would probably as a precaution also reduce feeding frequency or amount by a little, if possible, to account for potentially less algae up-taking nutrients which may slightly spike your nitrates or phosphates otherwise.
