Moving stock problems

[asylumdown]

There are a bunch of different species of bubble algae, and it's the one thing I have yet to find a silver bullet solution to. It seems that these days there's either a guaranteed predator (if your tank is large enough) or a chemical treatment for every single kind of aquarium pest except bubble algae (and hydroids).

I've got it in my tank. It's grown when my tank's nutrients have been on the high side, it's grown when it's nutrients have been so low my corals go in to suspended animation, it grows where there's lots of light, and it grows where there's almost no light at all. I've got bubbles that reach the size of mandarine oranges underneath my rocks in the caves my fish sleep in at night, and popping corals off of rocks from underneath the epoxy.

This is one of those things that you can only get if you introduce it to your tank. It doesn't matter what your nutrient profile is, if you don't import it, you will never have it. I introduced mine as two tiny little balls on the exposed skeleton of a frag of frogspawn, and I don't think my tank will ever be free of it.

If you really don't want it in the new tank, I think you only have one option - don't put anything with bubble algae on it in the new tank. Otherwise you will almost certainly get it, and whether or not it becomes a persistent problem in the new setup will depend more on luck than anything else.

If it were me, and I was very attached to the clams that it's growing on, I would take the clams out of the water, annoy them until they sealed themselves up tight, take a fine pick/point tool (the kind you get in a frag kit) and scrape the h*ll out of the shell ridges, then VERY carefully, with a fine paintbrush clean the outside of the shell with a dilute bleach solution, being extra, super duper careful to not get any bleach on the foot. Then I'd put them in a QT tank for a couple of months to make sure I got it all. Anything else, (rock or easily replaceable LPS) I'd either toss, sell, bleach or frag to the point where no exposed skeleton was left.

If you hate bubble algae enough for it to make your break down a tank and leave the hobby, I don't think any piece of livestock you currently own is worth risking bringing it in to the new tank. It's almost better to start over completely than risk it IMO. I know I've said it a million times, but you can't have a problem with problem algae, unless you have a problem algae.

I wouldn't take anything but my SPS fragged off their bases from this tank to my next one because of this very same problem.