GHA Has Destroyed My Passion for the Hobby

[HumuhumuFan]

Title says it all. I've been in the fish game on and off for about 30 years now. I don't think my morale has ever been this low. I feel like my tanks are just becoming a source of stress in my life. My 20g reef (below) has been up since 2019, my FOWLR has been up since 2015, and I also setup a 20g long frag tank because for a while my montipora and war coral were growing so well I was actually propagating both of them. The Monti still is, but the war coral is not. It's just a continuous cycle of whack-a-mole with which tank has the most runaway GHA problem and then I spend 3 hours+ scurbbing it while I use my old Eheim as a shop-vac. Then it looks nice for a week, rinse, repeat.

I've tried:
PhosphateRX - next morning my previously healthy Yellow Tang was dead.
Vibrant - seemed to make no difference at all
I bought internal refugiums and chaeto - GHA smothered and killed it.

At this point, I think I'm just going to let it run wild, keep the fish healthy, but when they pass away, not replace them and work toward taking the tanks down.

 

[w8lifts]

My sea hare made quick work of hair algae along with switching to all blues. with the sea hare I had to mow down sections for him to get a foot hold on it and he went to work

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

I would suggest as a kindness to the fish, to give them away. I let it grow wild once, it will eventually suffocate the fish.

 

[brandon429]

Please let me run that easy tank to fix through this thread:

Algae Identification

Any opinions on what type of algae this is growing on my rocks and sand bed?

www.reef2reef.com

don’t blend methods, this way above is the best method in nano reefing. The method was earned by the oldest living pico reef on the planet, simply doing what the oldest pico reef does makes its cousin the nano reef behave just the same.

you don’t need to buy additives or use test kits to fix that GHA nano, we roadmapped the fix as plainly as possible already.

we do about 500 rip cleans a year now on reef tanks to fix them in one day, that above is the top seven runs. primos, creams of the crop


on a scale of one to ten hard to fix, I rate your issue a 2 or 3 because you have such an accessible, open rock scape.


the key to beating gha is shown above in a gha challenge tank. any other invasion a nano reef will see is also handled by the same action, it’s not possible to own an invaded nano reef if you rip clean it


-but what if that sounds destabilizing-

above is one of 5000 jobs searchable/rip clean. we can click on anyone’s name badge there above and see posts theyve made about the tanks after rip cleaning them. I provided an eighteen month update to a nano reef your size, just yesterday there.

No guessing is required for outcome stability we can click on post rip clean nanos to assess them.

before

after

one day turnaround.

 

[brandon429]

See how the algae abuts the brain coral war coral

its preventing mass expansion the coral would be doing, to take ground on the sides with new growth.

I have that species of red brain, it’s been in my bowl for nearly two decades. Familiar with it and it will expand fast if you use reef dentistry to clear its path, surgical means. Guiding exacting means of removing the algae.

algae doesn’t ever grow on the flesh, lps flesh is exclusive to algae, that coral gets algae on septal edges receded to just skeleton

dont alter your entire tanks water chemistry around that issue

treat it like a garden, can be worked in one day to look like you want. Needs about 6 mini trips to the dentist this coming year as guiding runs, due to delay. Such a savable reef in one day…I downgrade its challenge to .5

if ten was the hardest dinos invasion I’ve seen in a nano, hard to beat, your tank above is a .5

hope that helps, enjoyment=soon to be reinstated.



you have nice coral growth, that’s why nobody can say you have bad parameters. Keep those parameters, don’t alter them to starve an algae


a dentist doesn’t give us pills to clear a plaqued out mouth, the dentist gets out steel tools and goes to town, same day we leave feeling fresh, no delay. Your guiding runs will be casually lifting a rock out of the tank occasionally, to precision score off any algae that regrows. Do the spot peroxide treatment shown in the thread and there’s a small chance of a one pass long term fix, no repeat work needed. Depends on your luck in establishing grazer animals too…if they don’t work, you still must graze the system by hand


a rip clean tank allows you to feed more food vs withhold it, therefore your corals grow faster for a while.

a rip clean is a total tank cleaning, like a trip to the dentist then we feed it like it’s a weight lifter for two months while keeping up higher than normal % water changes, exactly like a reef tank exercise program. Logged above.

 

[Davileet]

You could try flipping the rocks over to starve the algae, get more algae grazing fish, or take the rock out and put them in bleach and just get you some new live/dry rock. I like using PhosGuard as it seems to act slower and has been effective for me starving off algaes.

 

[HumuhumuFan]

Alright, @brandon429 I guess I know what I'm doing next weekend.

 

[brandon429]

I truly want to work this system more than any recent one I’ve seen because it will be such a healthy stark change to the current setup once done

the water quality is not the issue at all / your corals are happy is how we know, we become the missing grazers in the system clearing room for them easily


if we guess and add ten snails we are guaranteed to get piles of extra pellet waste, and low guarantee they work on target but we will be able to undo the holdfasts of the algae with scrape runs easily

cleaning that sand better than the average rinser is what we do there, it robs feed for cyano and algae to lessen growback

we will need to lift the rocks out a time or three in follow up guiding, working out any growbacks like a quick trip to the dentist but your successive runs won’t have to be full sand rips, just the first one

in five mins time the rocks can be lifted out, set on the kitchen counter with corals in the air (your corals can go easily 30 mins in the air and we won’t need more than five minutes) and we can knife tip scrape any new whisker growth, apply precision spot peroxide to the area after we scrape it, let sit in the air a couple minutes to burn invisible cells leftover, then set back in like one clean tooth.


and all along you are feeding better than you have before vs withholding feed

you aren’t adding reef flux or various chemicals to the water


you removed pent up waste so it doesn’t morph into a monthslong cyano battle

its all positive outcome, just this first rip clean takes about four hours or so to do the initial catch up and waste export. It de-ages your tank in every way to evacuate waste from it.


remember to verify the rinsed sand by dropping a handful in a test cup of water in a clear glass, make the rinsed sand so clean it falls like snowglobe grains, totally cloudless, in the test cup.

final rinse of that prepped sand is in saltwater, to evacuate the tap water, then it’s all ready for pristine reassembly as a skip cycle rip clean tank. No bottle bac is used.

 

[Spare time]

To me this sounds like the perfect opportunity for fluconazole. It takes about 2 weeks but its quite effective. It is an anti fungal that has been found to be very effective against green hair algae without visibly harming anything desirable except some macroalgaes.

 

[TokenReefer]

I've heard it suggested (and I think I agree at face value for some reason) that once a tank converts to algae system its hard to get it back and so I think @brandon429 rip clean method is probably a good idea at this point....imho

 

[Tamberav]

Everyone will think I am crazy but I would just remove the corals and clowns to the frag tank, scrub the rocks, clean the sand then do a peroxide + tank water dip (enough to bubble) for 8 min on the affected rocks.

Be sure to have an appropriate CUC to eat the dying algae from the peroxide after.

The peroxide dip WILL kill starfish, pods, and bristleworms.... though surprisingly, my hitchhiker sponges were fine. Coralline algae took a hit but recovered. I had no problems with a cycle or bacteria. Stuff returns to normal fairly quickly.

I am sure everyone will think I am crazy but this acro is on a rock that had bryopsis on it... I left the acro just on the top above my bubble bath of peroxide. The acro was totally fine afterwards.

Bryopsis never returned. Reeflux was hit or miss... seemed like it would return 6-9 months later.

I do not play around. I don't have time to play around and want the problem fixed in one go.

 

[Tamberav]

Same concept in my 7g cold water. I ignored the tank mostly for a year after my kid was born but recently got it fixed up.

The white on the after photo (took just now, lights are off) is the dead algae and it is patchy as the snails consume its remains. I think of it as easy to eat blanched lettuce for them.

Tank completely turned around in an hour time. Done and done.

I didn’t dip the rocks on this one because of the nems. I instead spot treated/poured the peroxide on (not mixed with tank water this time) out of the tank then replaced the rocks and let it bubble away in the tank.

 

[Seymo44]

Everyone will think I am crazy but I would just remove the corals and clowns to the frag tank, scrub the rocks, clean the sand then do a peroxide + tank water dip (enough to bubble) for 8 min on the affected rocks.

Be sure to have an appropriate CUC to eat the dying algae from the peroxide after.

The peroxide dip WILL kill starfish, pods, and bristleworms.... though surprisingly, my hitchhiker sponges were fine. Coralline algae took a hit but recovered. I had no problems with a cycle or bacteria. Stuff returns to normal fairly quickly.

I am sure everyone will think I am crazy but this acro is on a rock that had bryopsis on it... I left the acro just on the top above my bubble bath of peroxide. The acro was totally fine afterwards.

Bryopsis never returned. Reeflux was hit or miss... seemed like it would return 6-9 months later.

I do not play around. I don't have time to play around and want the problem fixed in one go.

I use this same method and it works very well

 

[brandon429]

Spare time

When recommending fluconazole, a retail product for sale, don't withhold a link to the 500 page fluconazole thread so that readers can see 75% cyano invasions for years after using it

The fluconazole thread is a massive incidence of GHA killing, then getting dinos, then cyano in the majority cyclically

It's great at killing gha, then it's great at causing a new invasion. We need the waste mass cleared out first in nano reefs


We may elect to use it as growback prevention in worst case scenarios - After the rip clean, not before

 

[brandon429]

If we want the results from the work thread attached we wouldn't do opposite of what it shows

The work thread didn't use my tank as an example it uses solely other people's reefs. I feel this matters greatly when advising outbound tank jobs, other people's reefs have variables we don't usually encounter in our tanks

 

[Pntbll687]

Spare time

When recommending fluconazole, a retail product for sale, don't withhold a link to the 500 page fluconazole thread so that readers can see 75% cyano invasions for years after using it

The fluconazole thread is a massive incidence of GHA killing, then getting dinos, then cyano in the majority cyclically

It's great at killing gha, then it's great at causing a new invasion. We need the waste mass cleared out first in nano reefs


We may elect to use it as growback prevention in worst case scenarios - After the rip clean, not before

I bolded the part that most people seem to forget about.

People use fluconazole, it kills the agae, and they forget about the mass of nutrients that the algae was holding. The nutrients are put back into the water column and a "new" algae or bacteria has a chance to use them up.

 

[Garf]

Title says it all. I've been in the fish game on and off for about 30 years now. I don't think my morale has ever been this low. I feel like my tanks are just becoming a source of stress in my life. My 20g reef (below) has been up since 2019, my FOWLR has been up since 2015, and I also setup a 20g long frag tank because for a while my montipora and war coral were growing so well I was actually propagating both of them. The Monti still is, but the war coral is not. It's just a continuous cycle of whack-a-mole with which tank has the most runaway GHA problem and then I spend 3 hours+ scurbbing it while I use my old Eheim as a shop-vac. Then it looks nice for a week, rinse, repeat.

I've tried:
PhosphateRX - next morning my previously healthy Yellow Tang was dead.
Vibrant - seemed to make no difference at all
I bought internal refugiums and chaeto - GHA smothered and killed it.

At this point, I think I'm just going to let it run wild, keep the fish healthy, but when they pass away, not replace them and work toward taking the tanks down.

You sure your heater is working? Never seen algae on a heater before.

 

[ilikefish69]

e sure to have an appropriate CUC to eat the dying algae from the peroxide after

What kind of CUC? I am struggling with dead algae after a fluconazole treatment

 

[ilikefish69]

I bolded the part that most people seem to forget about.

People use fluconazole, it kills the agae, and they forget about the mass of nutrients that the algae was holding. The nutrients are put back into the water column and a "new" algae or bacteria has a chance to use them up.

That is me, 100%

 

[Tamberav]

What kind of CUC? I am struggling with dead algae after a fluconazole treatment

I generally like trochus, tuxedo urchins, and female emerald crabs depending.

I use peroxide though, not fluconazole. I didn't find fluconazole effective enough.