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Tonight is a boring night shift so now is as good a time as any for a bit of an update.
First how about a FTS and then I will get into my algae issue (looks nowhere near as bad in the FTS haha).
Pretty much after the first month post tank transfer I have consistently had 0-5ppm NO3 (almost always closer to 0) and undetectable PO4 (salifert kits). However mid-December I started to get some green algae spreading on the higher up rocks. Nothing too bad but noticeable. I attributed this to the ATS screen losing water flow a couple of times (never saw a spike in nutrients though).
But like I was in a horror movie, towards the end of December the algae really started to explode (tests still showed next to no nutrients). Thinking my lights may have been contributing to this I turned the whites off and ran with only blue light for a month. This did absolutely nothing to halt the algae. Even with manual removal where I could it spread. Fast.
Tangs seem to pick at it but not really eat it. The urchin crawls all over it but doesn’t seem to eat it. Snails all stay on the glass and even when I place them on the rocks don’t seem to eat it and just motor back to the glass (I never get anything other than coralline on my glass though).
By now most rocks have a decent amount of algae if not fully covered. Pulling it out doesn’t help as it just grows straight back. I am having horror thoughts that this whole tank move did nothing and I have gone from 1 algae filled tank to another.
But like hell I am going to give up as I am really quite happy with how I set up this tank. So I pulled some out to try and get a good photo to confirm it is actually GHA and not something else. Not the best photo but this seems to be as clear and zoomed in as I can get. It doesn’t look quite like other pics I have seen of GHA, but it certainly doesn’t look like bryopsis.
I have been doing a lot of reading about treating GHA with peroxide and seen a lot of good results. So to test it out I placed a bit of the algae in a small container filled with 6% HP (3% is recommended so 6% should certainly kill it). Well after 2 days of soaking in HP it hasn’t even started to go white in the slightest.
Disheartening to see that HP likely won’t help me. However I have come across the thread about treating bryopsis with Fluconazole (R2R is awesome isn’t it - https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/bryopsis-cure-my-battle-with-bryopsis-using-fluconazole.285096/) and in this thread I have found a possible ID for the algae I have – derbesia! Image searches of derbesia look pretty much identical to what I have. It is apparently a type of turf algae that is more similar to bryopsis than GHA and it can thrive in low nutrients and is very hard to remove (my exact situation).
It seems that if I do in fact have derbesia it may have come in on a coral (I think I remember the one too which was put in a couple of weeks before my original algae outbreak) and spread fast in my old tank. 6+ long months of fighting it with a mix of water changes, manual removal and adding a kick butt ATS helped start to slowly bring the algae down in the old tank. But bringing across 3 rocks and a fully mature ATS with derbesia into a tank full of nice new rock would have caused it to then spread fast in the new tank.
Good news is that apparently a treatment of fluconazole also seems to kill it! I don’t want to get my hopes up but I am also very excited to try it. Attempting to acquire the 4000mg of fluconazole that I will need may prove difficult as it appears you need a prescription to purchase it in Aus, however I will be giving it my best shot this week.
First how about a FTS and then I will get into my algae issue (looks nowhere near as bad in the FTS haha).
Pretty much after the first month post tank transfer I have consistently had 0-5ppm NO3 (almost always closer to 0) and undetectable PO4 (salifert kits). However mid-December I started to get some green algae spreading on the higher up rocks. Nothing too bad but noticeable. I attributed this to the ATS screen losing water flow a couple of times (never saw a spike in nutrients though).
But like I was in a horror movie, towards the end of December the algae really started to explode (tests still showed next to no nutrients). Thinking my lights may have been contributing to this I turned the whites off and ran with only blue light for a month. This did absolutely nothing to halt the algae. Even with manual removal where I could it spread. Fast.
Tangs seem to pick at it but not really eat it. The urchin crawls all over it but doesn’t seem to eat it. Snails all stay on the glass and even when I place them on the rocks don’t seem to eat it and just motor back to the glass (I never get anything other than coralline on my glass though).
By now most rocks have a decent amount of algae if not fully covered. Pulling it out doesn’t help as it just grows straight back. I am having horror thoughts that this whole tank move did nothing and I have gone from 1 algae filled tank to another.
But like hell I am going to give up as I am really quite happy with how I set up this tank. So I pulled some out to try and get a good photo to confirm it is actually GHA and not something else. Not the best photo but this seems to be as clear and zoomed in as I can get. It doesn’t look quite like other pics I have seen of GHA, but it certainly doesn’t look like bryopsis.
I have been doing a lot of reading about treating GHA with peroxide and seen a lot of good results. So to test it out I placed a bit of the algae in a small container filled with 6% HP (3% is recommended so 6% should certainly kill it). Well after 2 days of soaking in HP it hasn’t even started to go white in the slightest.
Disheartening to see that HP likely won’t help me. However I have come across the thread about treating bryopsis with Fluconazole (R2R is awesome isn’t it - https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/bryopsis-cure-my-battle-with-bryopsis-using-fluconazole.285096/) and in this thread I have found a possible ID for the algae I have – derbesia! Image searches of derbesia look pretty much identical to what I have. It is apparently a type of turf algae that is more similar to bryopsis than GHA and it can thrive in low nutrients and is very hard to remove (my exact situation).
It seems that if I do in fact have derbesia it may have come in on a coral (I think I remember the one too which was put in a couple of weeks before my original algae outbreak) and spread fast in my old tank. 6+ long months of fighting it with a mix of water changes, manual removal and adding a kick butt ATS helped start to slowly bring the algae down in the old tank. But bringing across 3 rocks and a fully mature ATS with derbesia into a tank full of nice new rock would have caused it to then spread fast in the new tank.
Good news is that apparently a treatment of fluconazole also seems to kill it! I don’t want to get my hopes up but I am also very excited to try it. Attempting to acquire the 4000mg of fluconazole that I will need may prove difficult as it appears you need a prescription to purchase it in Aus, however I will be giving it my best shot this week.