NUKE it or let it eventually kill everything?

[revhtree]

NUKE may be a strong term but it's what I'm calling it.

Have you ever battled algae so much and so long that nothing and I mean nothing has worked besides an all out onslaught that may hurt or even kill coral? Let me refer to this as "nuking" your tank. By that I mean using whatever means necessary to eliminate the algae.

In my case I think I have recently done that and have lost most of my acropora. The relentless hair algae had already smothered several acros and it was either pull out all the stops or let the algae KILL EVERYTHING! For me I'm finally beating the hair algae and it's white and almost gone from most places. The frag tank is almost 90% clear now and the main display about 75% clear.

What did I do? I made a cocktail of Reef Flux, Vibrant and GFO and hit it hard. I still have a few acro colonies that look to be doing fine and my other corals show no signs of distress so nuking may be a strong term but let's think about it. If you try every natural means necessary to remove algae, to no avail, do you continue to just let your tank turn into a swamp and kill everything or do you take extreme measures to save what you can? Let's talk about that today!

1. Would you take drastic measures to kill algae even if it means killing coral?

2. Have you ever had to "NUKE" your tank to save it?

 

[homer1475]

While I have never "nuked" my tank. I did remove all dry rock, and sand. Replaced with real live rock, and dry sand.

Algae was so bad at one point I couldn't tell the difference between rocks and algae clumps.

 

[Johniejumbo]

I voted no. Although I have accidentally “nuked” my tank cleaning hair algae out before. Got a little overzealous pulling it out and siphoning. I’m still not entirely sure what killed, but kill it did. Almost everything in the 40b. I had a pj cardinal live. And of course the star polyps survived. Though they didn’t come back out for about a month. Bout quit the hobby over it.

 

[revhtree]

So some of you are telling me that you would rather let algae consume and kill everything other than you targeting the algae knowing that some coral will die?

 

[brandon429]

steps to avoid arriving at the crossroads:
1. abandon hands off reefing which is only using water actions/param changes/indirect means to control algae. its what we've all been taught. it works terribly.
2. when building a reef, design the rocks for direct access, on your counter one day. That may be inconvenient or nonstandard, you might not get a Saxby wall, you might have to be creative with coral bommies if your tank is huge, but external is external and that's opposite than water-only methods that kill thousands of tanks which started well. scan work threads in the nuisance algae forum here, imagine you have ten years of sps in place and you get algae and you refuse to lose it, whats your next step option? plan ahead. super huge tanks can employ a crank and pulley system where rocks can be lifted up somehow, outside of tank and at least worked in the air, they don't have to just sit there on the bottom of the tank for forty years.

if someone paid you $750,000 to design a reef tank where the rocks could be lifted to the surface and beyond just a bit, could you do that? then make it happen in your own reef which will be worth five grand before you know it.

3. the uglies phase in reefing is the worst advice we circulate. purposefully self-invading any reef is counterproductive; a shocking turn of events. be hand guiding your reef,

when we moved into a new home did we purposefully entertain the uglies in the lawn? did we let dandelions go rampant so they'd eventually starve out? we do that in our reefs though> we circulate info in reefing, from our teachers, that makes us get invaded. plan oppositely is best course. the teachers are getting to also sell bottled cures for profit not by intent but by beneficial coincidence.

4. animals and grazers wont take responsibility for access and can't replace it. access to your rocks on the counter is the best approach we have until a for-cost doser dose a better job. counter surgery allows you to not contact corals with algae attacks, it separates the jobs and forces you to plan for access.

5. in no way are params responsible for GHA problems, like the masses would say. I don't see lots of work in the nuisance algae forum to impress me with param control.

6. Go cure some gha tanks that are not your own in the nuisance algae forum as live time jobs where they post feedback pics on your suggestions. This is the prime way to prevent your own reef from becoming infected by will. you don't have to take on whole reefs at once, that's what water dosers do. You can test model sections of total control...lift out a five pound rock + target and learn to directly control it, on the counter, and put back. when that holds, then upscale to the large tank. Quit farming algae via the uglies and you'll never have an algae problem. any gha tank here can be made gha free overnite, if they choose to.

7. your filthy sandbed: reverse that.




doing opposite of steps 1-7 leads right to the crossroads of loss.

internal locus of control vs external locus of control, the classic conflict. all GHA invasions are psychology well before biology. you either want dandelions or you don't.

the truth is ive been that neighbor. possibly more often than not. but Id never do it in my reef tank I do have standards.

 

[jeffrey750750]

I voted yes due to my horrible outbreak of gha. I did the manual method, h202 method, chemiclean, and reef flux. Yes it killed the gha after about two months. Lost quite a few corals and my inverts, clams and fish were good through this with fingers crossed. My problem was I cleaned it too good that opened the door to dinos. Omg, at this point I was missing my gha! The dinos were starting to wipe out the remaining corals so i was starting to freak.
Its nuclear war time, clorox time... yes I did alot of research on this site before hand. Clorox worked but not 100%, for a couple months-at least that is what it seemed like. I blew off rocks and sucked up what I could in the sandbed till it was almost bare bottom.
Did my next water change and dosed h202 in Hope's to eradicate the bleach. I added sand back in. For the next couple months I added microbacter7 and its counter part, used dr Tim's, marine s.a.t. and then optimizer to get my good bacteria back after I'm sure killing it. It's been a super long road. Snails have kept it at bay so far and using tlc marine optimizer once a week.
I'm sure there's alot I left out but had to do it or I would have lost everything

 

[dadnjesse]

You had lots of people suggest to use Reef Flux in your other thread. That's what worked for my tank, you just have to dose high and keep dosing until it's dead.

 

[fish farmer]

I voted no.

I had bad GHA and some reds that were difficult to remove in a long running tank. Basic husbandry skills like WC, better skimming, better CUC, better management of feeding and adding a chaeto refugium to my sump have all worked to rid my tank of algae and significantly dropped my nitrates and phosphates.

My disconnect from keeping up with nutrient control is what led to many LPS to perish many years ago. My tank is small (29 gallons) so I can get my "hand snail" in there to manually pull out algae, every time I do a WC change I suck out a little detritus and algae if it is taking a foothold.

I still have some algae in my tank, but it is well trimmed and not headbanging hair algae.

Maybe I got lucky, well see in a few months, I have a few easy SPS now and more LPS that seem to doing well and the algae is behaving.

 

[ReefGeezer]

1. Would you take drastic measures to kill algae even if it means killing coral?

If algae was just out of hand & threatening to kill corals anyway I definitely take steps to reduce it. If those steps would potentially kill some of the corals also, I think there would be a risk vs. reward decision to make. I think the size of the tank and maturity of the corals greatly increase the risk.

2. Have you ever had to "NUKE" your tank to save it?

No. The closest I've come is all-out chemical/biological warfare... Vibrant, ReefFlux, GFO, GAC, & Chemiclean used in conjunction with carbon dosing. I've also sent in the Special Forces... Sgt. Seahare and Lt. Urchin. There is still a mop up crew in tank to discourage dissidents and chemical/biological agents (Vibrant) are added to maintain the perimeter. I didn't lose any corals, but their growth & colors were definitely effected.

 

[revhtree]

You had lots of people suggest to use Reef Flux in your other thread. That's what worked for my tank, you just have to dose high and keep dosing until it's dead.

My first post in this thread says that's what I did as well and it's working.

 

[Billldg]

I think that in some cases it is better to nuke it. Reason being that I have seen a lot of reefers try to take a natural or slow approach and eventually give up reefing because they felt defeated by the algae. Had they just nuked the tank they would still be in it. You may loose a few corals, but it is far easier for most people to bounce back from that than several months of battling algae and never feel like their is an end.

 

[revhtree]

I think that in some cases it is better to nuke it. Reason being that I have seen a lot of reefers try to take a natural or slow approach and eventually give up reefing because they felt defeated by the algae. Had they just nuked the tank they would still be in it. You may loose a few corals, but it is far easier for most people to bounce back from that than several months of battling algae and never feel like their is an end.

If it makes me want to give up I can only imagine someone who is not as seasoned or grounded in the hobby. Good pint.

 

[Crustaceon]

You’re never going to quickly eradicate algae using vibrant and gfo without killing your corals in the process. These products work by starving algae of nitrates and phosphates. You know what also needs nitrates and phosphates? Coral. It may be tedious, but your best bet is manual removal, even if you have to do it over and over again for months on end. Eventually and with enough diligence, you’ll beat algae. It CANNOT thrive of you’re constantly physically removing it.

 

[saltyhog]

I certainly wouldn't hesitate to do what you did rev if all else had failed. Like you said it wasn't really a nuke as you had survivors...even acros.

I have definitely had it cross my mind while fighting dinos.

 

[mitch91175]

So some of you are telling me that you would rather let algae consume and kill everything other than you targeting the algae knowing that some coral will die?

Just do not understand the logic. If a tank gets that bad, then you just need to put in that much more work to recover it. Scrubbing rock, maintaining nutrients over time should solve 99.9% of algae issues without killing the coral. Now something may potentially die, but doing so on purpose is crazy.

 

[brandon429]

Ive found over time that keeping an aquarium clean is like oral surgery.

you take an extracted tooth/live rock chunk and debride and scrape and dislodge, you polish at the end. first part bleeds. set it back clean, reverse-aged.


some mouths self balance better than others; diets range/care ranges but in the end what do we all do: go to the dentist. its the only way to realign/clean up, metal to tooth contact.



dental detailing avoids nontarget gums/coral flesh but we score up under them barely for a reason

mouths and plaques don't run well untended, neither do reefs.


Hair algae begets hair algae. it catches and holds detritus on site for degredation, independent of water params. test shake any gha rock in the middle tank water at nice, no main lights, flashlight only it will look like a ddt cloud coming off. to kill algae is to stop a source or cause.

we try to dislodge reef plaques and foodstuffs wedged in live rock crevices

we can use peroxide as a target polish

many similarities. this is the feed for gha

when you can shake off a cloud of literal feed in the night, you have some redesigning to do. but we kill that plaque algae before it starts to cause gingivitis of your corals.

to clean up a cloudy reef tank isn't breaking the biological mechanism, its addressing a design approach that keeps GHA feed in place always. this is why people go high flow/bare bottom

to work less bc targeting the detritus for removal is easier than whole-tanking it. simply refusing to acknowledge the effects of compounding wont remove it, and water dosers like vibrant add to it due to target dieoff in tank...an accumulation mode vs a flush mode.

*some people have it lucky, no gha forever.

if that's not your case, pure access and will has the same outcome.

 

[mitch91175]

I think that in some cases it is better to nuke it. Reason being that I have seen a lot of reefers try to take a natural or slow approach and eventually give up reefing because they felt defeated by the algae. Had they just nuked the tank they would still be in it. You may loose a few corals, but it is far easier for most people to bounce back from that than several months of battling algae and never feel like their is an end.

It really is a balance of over-using chemicals and allowing time by proper husbandry. People that get in/out because of this aren't your actual hobbyists. I think most of them are in it to try to make money and run into a challenge and bail because it'll cost them more time and money. Not always the case, but all it does take is to really care about your tank like they are living animals (which they are). Research about them and provide them with the best living environment you can create.

If you get algae problems for the sake of being lazy, then you just deal with it. But starting completely over not on purpose lol. Algae just a minor road block.

 

[GeoSquid]

I shut down my tank for two months due to Aiptasia ;Sour

 

[Zuma]

Usually one results to the nuclear option because patience and planning was not part of the equation from the get go.

 

[Reefing Concepts]

If I had that serious of a problem, I would just address it naturally, or I would frag my tank, break down, and start over.
Fish disease on the other hand, I might frag and nuke my tank to get rid of fish disease