White fuzzy fungi or chrysophytes? Help me get rid of this stuff!

[fishmonkey]

So it’s been well over a year of dealing with this white hair type of algae that gets stuck on everything in my tank. This is what it was when it started.

It was so stuck on to the rock that when I pulled on it, some of it tore off but most of it was still stuck to the rock.

It’s photosynthetic because I turned off the lights and it died out and eventually turned into this brown goopy stuff which was not nearly as stuck to the rock as the white. Also stopped dosing alk.

I left the tank on auto pilot a while ago because I had a lot going on but now I’m trying to get this tank going. I took one rock out and cleaned it completely and in a week or two the white stuff slowly started growing back.

Oddly enough my tank uses of alkalinity and been having to dose to keep it at 9. No corals and very little coralline.

I just want to figure out what’s going on and if there are any proactive measures I can take other than waiting it out and constantly cleaning this stuff. (It’s very hard to clean without a blackout period) I also don’t know if this is fungi or chrysophytes.

 

[Dan_P]

So it’s been well over a year of dealing with this white hair type of algae that gets stuck on everything in my tank. This is what it was when it started.

It was so stuck on to the rock that when I pulled on it, some of it tore off but most of it was still stuck to the rock.

It’s photosynthetic because I turned off the lights and it died out and eventually turned into this brown goopy stuff which was not nearly as stuck to the rock as the white. Also stopped dosing alk.

I left the tank on auto pilot a while ago because I had a lot going on but now I’m trying to get this tank going. I took one rock out and cleaned it completely and in a week or two the white stuff slowly started growing back.

Oddly enough my tank uses of alkalinity and been having to dose to keep it at 9. No corals and very little coralline.

I just want to figure out what’s going on and if there are any proactive measures I can take other than waiting it out and constantly cleaning this stuff. (It’s very hard to clean without a blackout period) I also don’t know if this is fungi or chrysophytes.

A mystery.

@taricha this stuff does not seem to pull off easily which I take to mean this is the typical nuisance growth.. I have this growing in an overfed experimental aquarium. It is a mixture of filaments, some obviously cyanobacteria and some nearly devoid of organelles like that odd organism with the golden rhizomes that sends out these colorless filaments.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

My guess would be a brown macroalgae like one of the following (though I could very well be wrong):
-Acinetospora crinita
-Chrysocystis fragilis
-Chrysophaeum taylorii
-Ectocarpus sp.
-Sphacelaria sp.

 

[fishmonkey]

My guess would be a brown macroalgae like one of the following (though I could very well be wrong):
-Acinetospora crinita
-Chrysocystis fragilis
-Chrysophaeum taylorii
-Ectocarpus sp.
-Sphacelaria sp.

Anything eat this stuff?

 

[Dan_P]

My guess would be a brown macroalgae like one of the following (though I could very well be wrong):
-Acinetospora crinita
-Chrysocystis fragilis
-Chrysophaeum taylorii
-Ectocarpus sp.
-Sphacelaria sp.

Thanks for this.

Acinetospora is an almost dead ringer for a weirdo algae that I often cultivate experimentally, though never a bloom in the aquarium.

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

Anything eat this stuff?

I know some fish do (the Striped Sea Bream, Sarpa salpa, for example, is known to eat Acinetospora), but figuring out which may be a challenge.

Thanks for this.

Acinetospora is an almost dead ringer for a weirdo algae that I often cultivate experimentally, though never a bloom in the aquarium.

Glad to help - there are a number of other filamentous brown algae that I haven't looked into yet, but these are the ones I know at the moment that can be found around the U.S. East Coast.

 

[fishmonkey]

I know some fish do (the Striped Sea Bream, Sarpa salpa, for example, is known to eat Acinetospora), but figuring out which may be a challenge.

Glad to help - there are a number of other filamentous brown algae that I haven't looked into yet, but these are the ones I know at the moment that can be found around the U.S. East Coast.

Think a fox face or a tang would eat this stuff?

 

[ISpeakForTheSeas]

Think a fox face or a tang would eat this stuff?

Possibly, but I don't know for certain.