Valonia/Bubble problems
 

For a brief history
aboout two months ago i was asked to help reclaim a marine aquarium,from bubble algae the tank was infested with the stuff from top to bottom after a few hours with a hose i managed to remove 75% of it last week i was called back to find 50% of it had returned "not surprising",
apart from emerald crabs is there much else that can tackle this problem long spine sea urchins perhaps ? any ideas would ber great thanks john..

Manual removal or Emerald Crabs are probably your two best bets...there's probably a fish out there that eats the stuff as well, but which fish that is, I don't know.

i wanted to pickup some Emerald Crabs but i cant seem to find any :(

IME, manual removal only made the problem twice as bad as it had been previously :evil: Keep looking around for an emerald crab, though not all emeralds will actually eat the valonia and may prefer other algae in your tank.

there wasnt much of a option than sucking them out with the hose while doing a water change the guy said that in the past that to remove them he poped them,i guess that would account for the 1000's that were in there.

I scraped mine of with an Xacto knife, then rinsed each rock in outgoing changewater. The valonia just got worse. As a last resort, I boiled each rock (about 40 lbs), then cured it. Once cured, all the rock went into a different tank as base rock. After 4 months, the boiled rock is beginning to get coralline on it.

As for the heaters and powerheads, I soaked them in vinegar. The tank was scrubbed down with tapwater. I felt awful killing all that rock, but I felt I had no alternative as I had battled valonia for going on a year and it only got worse each time I carefully scraped it off. Plus, the emerald crab I bought ate all the OTHER algae and some of one of my lps corals and didn't touch the valonia :evil:

Which LPS did he eat? :eek:

classic!

The little beggar started in on my galaxy, so I took it back to the lfs.