How to clean red turf algae from chalice frags?

[Alpha Aquaculture]

Whatup Reef2Reef!

I've got some red turf algae growing on some of my smaller chalice frags. In the last few days I have noticed a correlation between this red algae and my chalice frags not growing fast. I decided to do something about it but it seems to be a more difficult opponent than I thought. After mangling a few sweet chalices I've decided to ask for advice before I mess with the Dragon Fruit chalice. Check it out in the pic growing right below the chalice. Its obvious to say just remount it but with small frags like this they don't remount well especially when the algae is growing into the skeleton and on the bottom of the chalice. Just superglueing the heck out of the algae area has been more stressful to the chalices than leaving it alone. Manual removal and scraping with a knife has been tough and never finishes the job. Plus its very difficult to scrape such tiny frags.

Please and thank you for ideas :)

 

[CalmSeasQuest]

I had a large outbreak and found red turf algae to be a tough opponent. Aside from mechanical removal, running near UNLS has worked for me (MB-7 and Vinegar in Kalk/ATO) but it takes a few weeks to begin to see it die away as the red turf seems to survive at lower nutrient levels than other nuisance algae. Mexican Turbos were the only thing that I found will eat it, but at least in my case - they weren't an entire solution.

 

[SteezySPS]

is it the slow growing kind, impossible to pull out with fingers or brush, fairly short turf algae? If it is, very large turbo snails worked for me. I bought the largest turbo snails I could find and in a week they were all gone and I returned the turbos back to the lfs. i did this twice

 

[Jeepguy242]

turbos, and astreas, they will eat it, if they can get to it, i try to re-task my snails by putting them right where i want them to graze, sometimes they do, sometimes they dont. but enough of them will quickly make short work of the algae

 

[m and m]

I wwOuld remount it like you said, take a saw right under the chalice and remount it flush to s disk.

 

[Alpha Aquaculture]

Thank you everyone! I can't start a ULNS my acans would be very mad at me lol. The Turbo snails are the ticket I think (I actually got in 10 yesterday for some of my other tanks). The think I don't like is that they will bulldoze my entire collection around and I know something will get flipped over or stung. Its just too much going on in my tank now for all that. But what about this. What if I take the few frags that have it and put them in a QT by themselves, maybe one at a time. Only a 5 gallon tank with one frag and a few turbos. I like the idea of redirecting them to the algae. Let the frag sit in the QT for a day or two with the turbos. Then return algae free frag to the tank.

m and m: so far the remounting has not worked well. The algae is too close to the base of the chalice. Remounting is a great idea normally but this algae has been neglected for so long that now its very much into the base of the chalice. When we have remounted the frag has to be cut so close to its base that the cut and glueing are too much for these small pieces. I think it would be sweet to not have to stress it so much by remounting it. The ones we remounted got stressed big time and the algae is still now on their base.

 

[SteezySPS]

Qt tank idea sounds great. You would only need one for a 5 gallon. Those snails are pigs. Their whole mission in life is to eat as much algae as they can. Once they're done with the other algae they will get to the red turf so there's no need in redirecting. The bigger the snail the bigger the appetite