How else to do battle with hair algae

ponokareefer · #1 07-10-2007, 05:45 PM

I initially tested for phosphates as well, and they were 0, and the algae was growing. I switched my water source to RO, along with all the other suggestions and just stopped checking. I know everyone says you need to find the problem, but mine wasn't going away, and until I got the urchin, it was only shrinking barely.

christyf5 · #2 07-10-2007, 05:53 PM

I had a tuxedo urchin that cleared up some hair algae I had growing on the underside of my centerbrace (eventually I took some teeth out of the overflow to reduce the water level). He was a great addition to the tank, ate various types of algae, constantly plastered various rocks, caulerpa and stray zoos all over himself and (most importantly IMO) stayed small.

Currently I have a diadema urchin which arrived as a hitchhiker on a rock. He was about the size of a pencil eraser when I moved at the beginning of April. "So cute, I think I'll keep him" His test is now the size of a small mandarin orange and his spines are easily 12-15 cm long. So suffice it to say they are speedy growers. He also eats rock. He makes lovely little piles of granular sand all over the place. I often wonder how long it would take him to whittle all the rock in the tank down to just sand (not to mention how long it will be before I stick myself with one of his spines)

IMO, hair algae is one of those things that come on fairly quickly, and like everything else in this hobby takes forever to get rid of (ie. browning out of corals in like 2 days then months to color up again :confused). Between RODI usage and a phosban reactor (or even phosban in a filter bag in a high flow area) it should clear up on its own albeit slowly. It may help to pull some of the longer bits out by hand and then siphon any stray bits.

Pescador · #3 07-10-2007, 05:55 PM

My old 125 looked just like your tank and I was just about ready to throw in the towel.
I don't know what the solution was for sure but I put in three diadema urchins, a new skimmer, and changed to Tropic Marin salt. It cleaned up pretty fast after that.
I still think it was switching salt but that's pretty hard to prove. It's never come back anyway.
Good luck and hang in there.

michika · #4 07-10-2007, 06:08 PM

I'm thinking that I will look for an urchin, but only after I've found a way to secure all my SPS frags down.

Until then I guess I'll just conitnue with the points I outlined above, and with what I've already been doing. I hope this nasty outbreak takes care of itself soon, because its making my tank look like quite the eyesore.

Delphinus · #5 07-10-2007, 07:43 PM

Honestly, I think it's an unadvertised rite of passage for most reef tanks to go through a cycle like this in their first few months or so... This tank is about that, isn't it? If so ... continue on, as you are doing, and it should clear itself eventually. It's when the tank does have measureable nasties like nitrates and phosphates that you can't account for when you start to have REAL headaches. For example, my ritteri tank, just can't keep nitrates under 30.

I can't keep any corals in that kind of sewage. Where do they come from? I have no idea, it's not like I overfeed, it's not like I don't have a good skimmer. I guess it's just having a 24" anemone turns out to be a bioload beyond my wildest imagination. But weirdly I dont' really have any filamentous algaes in the main tank except for in the overflow strainers. I guess the urchins, rabbit and abalone are basically keeping things clean that way. But I do get the occasional bad bout of cyano, man I wish I could figure out a way to deal with this nitrate problem (tank is about 1.5 years old now).