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Green Hair algae (1 Viewer)

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David812

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Tanks about 6 months old. 29 gal. 2 small fish, emerald crab, a few snails. Lights on on 8.5 hr cycle. Kessil light that I run mostly blue. I feed once daily very sparingly. Use long pipets to spot feed fish so very little waste. Nitrate say between 5-10. I have a Hannah phosphorus ulr and always read zero since adding gfo in reactor. Was running a fuge with cheato but gfo killed that off. I manually pull out as much of the algae as I can during my weekly 4.5 gallon water changes. Algae has not completely taken over but it is slowly getting worse along with red slime cyano which I blow off with blaster weekly. I have increased flow. Looking for advice on how to get rid of it. Urchin or sea hare? Black out tank? What have you done? Thanks!
 

Rispa

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I let it be and just have some cuc to manage it. Eventually when everything is glued down I'd like to get another lawnmover blenny or try a sea urchin. In the meantime the amphipods love it.
 
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There is a relatively new method for killing off GHA as well as bryopsis that uses Fluconazole (Reef Flux). It's a fairly straight forward treatment and takes two weeks. Basically you remove all chemical filtration from the system, ie: carbon, purigen etc. You can leave the skimmer on, but you want to set it to produce a rather dry skimmate. Dose the tank with 20mg/gal of Fluconazole and sit back and wait. Reef Flux or Fluconazole is an anti-fungal treatment and is completely reef safe, inverts, beneficial bacteria, macro algae (cheato etc), and corals including SPS are not effected at all. After a few days to a week you will start seeing the GHA start to take on a greyish tint and begin to disappear. By the end of the two weeks the GHA should be completely gone. Finish with a large water change 30-40% and add carbon or any other preferred chemical filtration.

How it works. "Fluconazole blocks the enzymatic pathway for the production of ergosterol. Ergosterol is essential for maintaining the cell wall integrity of plants. Ergosterol (ergosta-5,7,22-trien-3β-ol) is a sterol found in cell membranes of fungi and protozoa, serving many of the same functions that cholesterol serves in animal cells"

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/bryopsis-cure-my-battle-with-bryopsis-using-fluconazole.285096/

I have used this treatment on GHA in my tank and it in combination with a sailfin tang, absolutely eradicated the GHA within the two week treatment period.

Now it's important to remember that while this kills the GHA present in your tank there is always the real possibility it can return. Either on a new coral frag or even from dormant algae spores. Keeping your nutrient levels in check as well as running all new corals, fish and inverts through a QT regimen will go a long way to preventing future outbreaks. A coral/invert QT tank can be easily treated with Fluconazole to remove any GHA and/or Bryopsis before you transfer to the display tank.
 
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Old school way of pulling it by hand works best plus a sea Hare to assist you.

I have used fluconazole for the hub tank . Which didn't do anything, the problem in the tank wasbad. I'll look through my pictures tomorrow see if I can get a good picture of it.

But try that first method first before you start adding fluconazole into your tank.

If you have cyano also black out your tank. If you want the quick way buy red slime away which works well but makes your skimmer go crazy.


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Tstew32

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Assuming you do, but are you using a 0 TDS water source?


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David812

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Yes using rodi and have tds meter. Water is not the problem. Thank you all for replying.
 
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I was thinking about this, and where my first tank was at the 6.mo mark. Basically your tank still hasn't fully matured. GHA, Cyano, and many other types of nuisances will pop up from time to time for the first year give or take. You have to look at all the potential sources for this stuff as well as available nitrients in the water. Nitrates and Phosphates for example. Yes they can show to be very low to undetectable and you can still get a GHA outbreak. GHA usually comes in as a tag along with a new frag and will readily use any available nutrients in the water thus giving you a false low reading so to speak. The use of some types of chemical filtration like Purigen, or Chemipure Blue do absorb these as well and can give an incorrect test result. You have removed GHA from your system before or it never had it and suddenly now its all over the place, where did it come from? Most likely the introduction of new corals. Even if you scrape the plug, there can still be algae spores or traces of cyano on it. Once the tank as fully matured and you have deep bio filtration built up and coraline development issues with cyano tend to fall away. GHA can pop up after that at any time, keeping good water parameters as well as multiple types of nutrient export also help reduce or eliminate it all together. Another good thing to do is QT all new corals in their own tank for a month or so. This can help identify potential issues with nuisance algae, as well as parasites like ICH and Velvet making their way into the tank on a new piece of coral.
 
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