Green Hair Algae Problem? HELP me and others alike Fix this

[kien]

Originally Posted by SpikeJones

Lots of skimmate is coming out, Parameters are perfect besides the high phosphate ha ha. My lights are on 12 hours a day but have cut them back to 6 hours. My lights are brand new Ecoxotic Panorama Marine LED's. So I hope through patience and these changes i have made will help

If you are getting a high phosphate reading then I would start by getting this down, as you are attempting to do with the rowaphos. I wouldn't necessarily go bombarding your tank with too much stuff all at once as that might actually be more harmful. So ya, just keep running your rowaphos and wait for your phosphates go down to near zero or zero. After you've achieved zero(ish) phosphates see how the algae is doing and assess then if you should take further action.

In my experience bioPellets do not do a great job of removing phosphates. They are great at nitrate removal however. I run GFO (phosphate remover) in a TLF reactor while at the same time running BioPellets to attack the nitrates. Also, I would not recommend putting bioPellets in a mesh bag. That's is unless you don't mind shaking that bag every hour of the day. BioPellets really should be fluidized and tumbling in a reactor.

[The Grizz]

^^^ ya that to......thanks Kien you took the words right out of my brain that I was thinking of but could not put it into text

[SpikeJones]

Thanks for the input guys now the waiting game

[kien]

Originally Posted by SpikeJones

Thanks for the input guys now the waiting game

This is essentially what the hobby is all about. :-)

Everyone will tell you that the only thing that really happens quickly in this hobby are bad things! Patience is the key.

[gregzz4]

I haven't read through this thread, so take what I say as is ...

I have had very good luck with Strawberry Tophat snails, Black longspine urchins and Mexi Turbo snails ( the latter tend to die )

I also raised my Mg level and have kept my system kinda ULNS ...

Low amounts of feedings etc

[Reefer Rob]

To kill it you can manually remove as much as you can, trying not to loose any little pieces back into the tank. Then baste the remaining stubble with boiling hot RO/DI water.

You say tanks. Meaning more than one? Can you transfer the livestock from one tank at a time and give each a month of total darkness? That would be best.

As others have said, definitely keep working on lowering your phosphate. In a new tank this can be a slow process.

[asylumdown]

I've been doing a tremendous amount of research on both ecological resilience theory, and problem algae in aquariums recently, and the more I read and learn, the less I'm convinced that the answer to every algae problem is always to reduce nutrients. Having high nutrients will definitely help speed a developing problem up, but once you've got that problem, stripping your water and making your tank anorexic rarely (if any of the thousands of threads on the topic are to be believed at face value) seems to 'fix' the problem.

First, hair algae is a broad term for a pretty huge range of species of algae, and just like Australia could never have had a rabbit problem without rabbits having been introduced, a 'problem' hair algae outbreak couldn't have started without an initial exposure. Some species are more resilient and can grow in a wider range of conditions than others. Two tanks could have identical parameters and maintenance techniques, but be very different looking tanks due only to the fact that one was exposed to an aggressive and invasive species of algae. It helps to know your enemy when you're talking about "hair algae", if not to the species, at least to the genus. Some respond better to certain management techniques than others.

Second, the common wisdom online seems to be that nutrients equal algae, and that if you reduce nutrients you'll reduce algae. In the broadest sense, this is of course true (it's true about life in general), but when you think about a coral reef, or a rainforest, or any other highly diverse and productive environment, they're not low nutrient places. In fact, they're incredibly high nutrient places. What coral reefs don't have, however, is much by ways of available nutrients, as anything that can be taken up by a biological process gets consumed almost as soon as it's produced. Reefs have low dissolved nutrients in the water because they are the most efficient ecosystems on the planet, just like rain forests have the some of the poorest soils in the world because all the nutrients are locked up within the biomass in the forest. Again, maintaining low dissolved nutrients in the water column from the beginning will help prevent an algae problem from getting out of hand, but that requires that there is some sort of nutrient export system from the start that was always more efficient at removing biologically available nutrients than the problem algae species you happen to be dealing with. It's like a balancing act, where you're trying to pile all the nutrient export systems on one side of the scale, so that the small amount of algae that's in your tank sitting on the other side never gets a change to grow. However, once an algae problem gets out of hand and the scale has tipped in its favour, you can kill yourself adding more and more phosphate removers, doing more and more water changes, and adding all the fancy gadgets and systems that are out there, but that's not going to 'fix' the problem. It's why you see so many people posting on forums saying "I've got GFO, carbon, biopellets, etc, and yet my tank is covered in hair algae that keeps growing back, but all my test kits show undetectable nitrate and phosphate". Well, biopellets and GFO can't remove what isn't there, and it's not there because the algae sucks it up before it ever gets to those reactors. I would bet my house on the premise that an established 'green hair algae' problem will always be a superior competitor for available nitrogen and phosphate than a GFO or biopellet reactor. GFO wears out the more phosphate it consumes, while algae only gets better at consuming the more it consumes, and anything that runs in a reactor only has the capacity to process the volume that is within that reactor at any given moment. That volume is only ever a small fraction of the water in your sump, which is only ever a portion of the water in your system. Hair algae has the entire surface area of your display that it covers, multiplied by the surface area of each individual strand within which to absorb, instantaneously exposed to a much larger percentage of your total water volume. I think it's why you see people struggle so desperately with the various 'pest' species, who seem to be doing everything right, with all the right media and equipment, but still don't seem to make any headway. Once an ecosystem finds a set point around a particular attractor (hair algae dominance, for example), it can become self sustaining and can be extremely resilient and resistant to change.

On real reefs, there's almost always enough nutrients available for algae to grow if it's given the chance. The rate of growth, however, is kept in check by the fact that there is so much competition for those nutrients, that day over day, the rate that algae can grow isn't fast enough to overtake their many and varied natural predators, which is the other side to the equation. On 'healthy' reef, there's a predator for just about everything, and that includes all the algae. All things being equal, importing an invasive species of algae to a reef where it has no natural predators is often enough to switch the dominance regime from hard corals, to that invasive algae (though in the real world, invasives are usually combined with increased nutrient load from human caused runoff, which just exacerbates the problem).

Basically, what I'm saying is that there's every chance that adding a phosphate remover isn't going to solve your problem. It's certainly a good idea if you're testing high phosphate levels (which to me indicates that you're system is nitrogen limited), and it might slow it down, or prevent it from getting worse, but what you need to do is deal with the accumulated nutrient load that's sitting in the living, phosphate and nitrate sucking biomass of your current problem. That will likely include physically removing the algae that you already have so that it's not there to outcompete your nutrient management system, while providing enough of an export system to suck up what becomes available as a result of the reduced capacity of the algae. You effectively need to fight to tip the scale away from the algae's favour. The most labour intensive way to do this is to physically remove as much as you can, as often as you can, but the most sustainable way is to find something that naturally predates your specific species of problem algae, and let it go to town while you dial in your nutrient management system. If you can't get a natural predator for whatever reason (space, compatibility, availability, etc.), I highly recommend Algaefix Marine by API. It's an algaecide that works on many kinds of algaes and fills the role of predator by directly killing the algae if you can't otherwise get one. However, the major key is to make sure that you re-jig your system so that going forward, your nutrient sink and removal systems are both desirable (such as corals) and the most efficient ones on your tank, otherwise something like algaefix marine is really just a short term band-aid.

Also, AlgaeFix doesn't really work that well against siphonous algae (Derbesia, Bryopsis, etc.), so that whole 'know your enemy' thing comes in to play here too. You'll also need to find someone on ebay who will ship it to Canada, as it's not presently approved for sale here. I got mine from a vendor in Hong Kong. I've stopped dosing and between my army of mexican turbos, religiously refreshed GFO, and mature biopellet reactor, GHA doesn't seem to be making a comeback of any kind.