How else to do battle with hair algae

[Delphinus]

Hey Catherine,

Originally Posted by michika

Delphinius,

What does the urchin eat after its devoured all the GHA in my tank? Did you ever have problems with them picking up or moving too much around? I'm worried that it will devistate my SPS field, and hurt my clams.

It seems to me that urchins are more adaptive (or adaptable) than, say, seahares.

Each species has their own preferences though, making them better or worse than others for particular algae types.

For example, I have a diadema urchin, and... to be honest I'm not sure what his preference is. But this thing eats like a pig. I can feed it pellets, flake, chaeto, .. you name it, as long as it's a herbivore feed he seems to eat it like nuts. I really need to film a video of it catching flake and eating it because it is like nothing I have seen before. He does actually pick out flake from the water column.

The tuxedo type urchins seem to rasp the rockwork and glass. They're after coraline algae usually, but something you get this fuzzy hard algae that grows on coraline, they'll totally remove that in the effort to get at the coraline.

I bought a "math" urchin in an effort to get at some problematic caulerpa on my rocks. While he took care of it, he's also a "boring" (I don't mean "uninteresting") type urchin meaning he actually burrows into rock (by eating the live rock to make a hole large enough to fit into).

This green urchin of mine, that I have not been able to ID, has been a hair algae eating machine. I see him on my nori feeding stick at night so I think that's what he eats now that the tank has been cleaned of hair algae (for the most part). I'll try to snap a picture of him. Think "blue tuxedo urchin" but completely green. I've not seen an ID of this species anywhere online. Colby at Elite seemed to know it though, he said "this one is good for algae" and he called that one right. I wish I could find you an ID because this is the one you want. The others, .... probably not so much.

I have a blue tuxedo and the math urchin in the tank with my clams, there are no issues of interaction with them whatsoever.

Anyhow, I hope some of this info helps. At some point, I'll try to get a picture of the green urchin to show you so that you know what to look for.