Sorry to hear that Mark, if you decide to place an order with fragalot please let me know.

:biggrin:

My two cents
 

Hello,

Love the tanks you have, they are looking great! In reading I saw you were having some problems with an unknown algae. Well I have a small nano tank at work and it had the same kind of algae in there and I had no clue what to do about it. I took a shot at adding one single hermit crab to the tank to see if he would get rid of the algae and to my surprise two days later he had litterally cleaned over half a medium sized rock bare to the rock surface. I'd say if you are able to add a hermit crab to your tank, it's worth the shot. I think it's a blue legged crab we added, but don't quote me on that. I hope this helps.
I've also heard from a friend that tang fish will eat this algae up like nothing also, though I think the nano tank is a little small for a tang, if you have a bigger tank that can handle the tang after he is in the nano for cleaning reasons, that could be an option too.
Just trying to help. Hope some of my advise helps.

Thanks for the compliments on my tanks. I really do love this hobby, I just haven't had the luck I wished for in my nano tank.

On the note of what to hit that algae with, I've got blue-legged, red-scarlet, and left handed crabs in the tank and they have no interest in the Algae. I've got a tuxedo urchin and even that won't touch it other than to decorate itself.

I've been sorely tempted to do the Tang thing but as it grows up, I really don't have room for it in my main tank and that just isn't acceptable. Maybe as time goes by, I'll figure out some way to do it.

wow, you weren't kidding, you have a lot of mushrooms in there! Are they all the same species? What colour are they ?

Haha...and that's with me culling every week. Painful I know.

They are the blue mushrooms that seem to be incredibly hardy.:(

hey man how's it going
I have got a 3" yellow tang you could try for a while to see if he will eat it

I think that moving your tank to the new 280 might be a good opportunity for an intervention. Before you aquascape the 280 just get in there, tear it down and scrub those rocks clean.

Thanks for the offer...but the tank is only 16" x 16" and that would be torture to a tang. I see that the LFS has some 1" Blue tangs in so maybe I might look at that.

Oh ya i forgot it was that small. oh well keep trying

Yeah you are right but man, I don't relish the thought. When you do this...how do you deal with the other corals attached to that rock?

Can you tell I'm just dreading this.

Hello is this slime algae?

Missing the picture on this post.

I remove all corals from the rock. It ends up being a complete reaquascaping nightmare-um.. I mean chore. Everything is removed save for the mushrooms. I even had to pull out the chisel to remove my favourite corals from infested rocks :lol: I feel your pain. Oddly, even after all that effort I went and threw a rock of blue mushrooms into my new 150g tank :drinking: Surprisingly they are keeping to themselves but I have had to give away a few prunings.. that reminds me, I should prune this weekend.

The other thing you can do is just sell the darn mushroom rock. There are lots of people out there who'd be more than happy to take it off your hands I'm sure.

I just can't imagine doing this. What about my encrusted SPS? Yikes. I will be buying a lot of Eco-rox for the big tank and I was hoping that my 90lbs of Liverock from the current tank would be sufficient to seed the system. I also don't have and have never had aptasia...so my hopes included not adding any other LR as it might have this pest.

Mark I was asking you if this was slime algae you have.

I re-read your post though, unless you want another tang one thing I can recommend that will make this stuff curl up and die is erythromiacin. When I first started in the hobby Sharla told me about using this in a very very small amount. That stuff just died immediatley. I never had an issue again.

The only draw back is it can bug your beneficial bacteria a touch but wow does it work. I have some human stuff that I keep to give you an idea when I moved stuff to my 3 gal and disturbed everything, I had this starting so I opened a capsule and took out 3 bead of this and zapped it all, never had an issue since then. So I have used it twice in a new setup and never had a problem with it coming back again.

Just a suggestion as appose to the fish unless you would like a new tang. AJ's has a tiny blue hippo in the front tank across from the till. Watch out for their rock though, lots of aptasia in there.

for my new 104.72G tank I have a rubbermaid tub full of live rock that I got from a canreef that I'll be using. One of the rocks has way too many mushrooms on it and they started to spread so I decided to cook those rocks. They've been sitting in my basement with just a thermometer and powerhead for about a month now. The mushrooms are all dead. Had to do lots of water changes but the rocks are nice and clean now, although I am still cooking. I know you have encrusted corals on some of your rocks so you don't want to do that to all of them. You might just have to bite the bullet and chisel them off the rock so that you can clean it. They will grow back :-) Also, you don't need 90lbs of rocks to seed your new rocks. Maybe half of that?

So bringing this thread back from the archives...this tank started with a plague algae of some type that no-one could ever identify...but since then, valonia got in on a frag and has completely taken over. It's overcome all but the hardiest of corals and has covered about 50% of the rock. I prune out a baseball sized amount each week and you can't tell I even touched it. I run a fuge on this plus GFO and Carbon (via reactors). I do have some phosphates...but still less than my main tank (which has no algae problems)

Any suggestions to deal with this? I have thought about taking the rock out to scrub it down but I have a pistol/goby pair and if the rock comes out I won't be able to get it back in through the sand...thus the pistol will probably dig out a hole and get crushed.