Reef2Reef Pest algae challenge thread hydrogen peroxide

Gweeds1980

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oh wow I cant thank you enough for that really. so nice. im always jealz of large reefers they get the great fish!

your rocks are guided into self-regulating masses of corals and coralline, that's biorejection. the algae focuses on the glass where there is no bio rejection this is exactly like my tank.

when I leave it for weeks unserviced ill come home to opaque glass next time ill take a pic.

looks wrecked but its illusion

razor scrape + 35% wet the glass from the inside, it all comes off, and the rocks and coral are pristine. sign of an old/mature/ideal tank, biorejection right up to the glass.
Just to push the point home... off topic somewhat, but here's my answer to the algae being kept at bay... that's all 5 tangs in one shot...
4c87da776b35042121e1c8f14cbb6291.jpg
 
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brandon429

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that lines up with all my soapboxing. nature uses them, nature doesn't starve out algae via phosphate stripping like we do or those fish and the raspers wouldn't live. algae potentiates, and gets through, in the ideal healthy reef and reef tank

our demands and expectations are the unnatural part, but with a few orders of operations adjusted, that above is what results.

we're willing to cheat burn anything that gets past the finned/spurred blockade

biological defensive ends we are. mean big ones
solid solid reef I am getting a little tired of a reef with a footprint the size of a coffee cup heh
 

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I have some green turf algae in my 180gallon that happened when I had high nutrients, now I have my nutrients lowered as I added a better skimmer, carbon dosing. However the turf algae is still on my rocks, the urchins I have do an okay job at keeping it in bay, but I want to completely get rid of it.

My rocks are all cemented together and I cannot take it out of the water to do it that way. So I am looking at scraping as much as possible and then spot treating it, however this is all going to be underwater most likely as I have a lot of SPS too that are right on the rock.

What would you say the max amount of peroxide I could put into my tank every couple of days? I plan to only spot treat a couple spots every 2-3 days to make sure I do not affect anything dramatically. I was thinking like 20ml a day or could I safely do more then that?
 

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@brandon429 Is peroxide treatment effective against Caulerpa Brachypus? If so, want to help out with how to beat this? Or do you know what species this really is?
20171113_183816-jpg.613264
20171113_183901-jpg.613263
20171113_183850-jpg.613268

20171113_183803-jpg.613261
 
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brandon429

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DirtR howdy

I didn’t get an alert for your post, little software glitch I guess so glad you posted. I’ve never had that species in a thread before but historically caulerpas are massively affected by dosing

Look how our friend is battling lyngbya with spot testing first this is what I recommend for you

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/is-this-lyngbya.338909/page-2


I really hope you are working with a nano for ease of tank access


If not, we need to try some paint bucket water dosing modeling before we begin in tank. I do think that plant will succumb fast, we’ve got every other common strain of caulerpa tested at reefcentral/pest algae challenge thread.

To begin water dose modeling, if it was my tank I’d pull a test rock and put in a circulated bucket of saltwater, add peroxide to that bucket at the one mil per ten gallon rate a few times over the course of a week or so and let’s see what the plant does. That’s a known safe dosage for corals and bacteria etc. bristleworms will die but nbd
 
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We are always including a manual work element in our updated peroxide work, it’s not about water dosing only per the old ways. If your plants respond well to 1:10 model testing, we’d actually hand remove the whole plant from your system with massive take apart and cleaning, old school. We would then hit the -clean- manually worked system with the known working dose. Growback prevention in the face of no visible invader biomass = clinch the win and even that method should be pre modeled first before you upscale to the whole tank
 
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brandon429

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Let the record reflect: 17 pages here, 66 pages at the nano-reef.com peroxide thread, sixty pages from the reefcentral peroxide thread, zero times of me asking to see someone’s nutrient levels.


Nutrients have nothing to do with making a tank uninvaded.
 
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I’ll bet a dollar than given enough time we will see fluconazole resistant plants develop. They’ll never adapt to peroxide and rasping.
 

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DirtR howdy

I didn’t get an alert for your post, little software glitch I guess so glad you posted. I’ve never had that species in a thread before but historically caulerpas are massively affected by dosing

Look how our friend is battling lyngbya with spot testing first this is what I recommend for you

https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/is-this-lyngbya.338909/page-2


I really hope you are working with a nano for ease of tank access


If not, we need to try some paint bucket water dosing modeling before we begin in tank. I do think that plant will succumb fast, we’ve got every other common strain of caulerpa tested at reefcentral/pest algae challenge thread.

To begin water dose modeling, if it was my tank I’d pull a test rock and put in a circulated bucket of saltwater, add peroxide to that bucket at the one mil per ten gallon rate a few times over the course of a week or so and let’s see what the plant does. That’s a known safe dosage for corals and bacteria etc. bristleworms will die but nbd

No problem! Glad to hear that most species of caulerpa are affected.

Yes, currently in a 34 gallon red sea max 130

I will try to find a rock without coral/anemones on it to test with.

I am not in need of eliminating it from the tank per se, but I have a new tank coming that I want to transfer my coral to. So I want to know how to kill it off of the coral skeletons for when I do the transfer.

As for whole tank dosing, rule of thumb is 1ml/10 gal still correct? Dose daily after lights out and set spectrum to heavy blue/no white or red?
 
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hey this is going to turn out -great-

that full pic showed me such a neat perspective btw wow, nice tank wish I had one!!

I would hand clean all of it out topically first, its worth the effort. the exact same type of cleaning you know would just otherwise growback

but for the rocks you can get outside the tank (I like how this is accessible scaping, not stacked) if you will manually debride that lightly anchored plant off the rocks, then spray mist peroxide back over the surfaces I bet it doesn't grow back much.

if it does and you can document a mutant strain then we'll know next time. this certainly wont cycle or cause any other harm, your growback indicates fail or win. all our steps are skip cycle steps. from what I can see, the tank will also tolerate direct dosing of peroxide 3% equivalent to 1 mil per ten gallons of system volume once or twice a day. not as the major mass killer, but solely as growback preventer in a manually-debrided and detailed tank.

I bet strongly peroxide w beat it bigtime.
 
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hey I just noticed the anems. tread easy, not twice a day those tend to get mad. we've never had a single loss, but they act mad with some delay on prior posts. all of that is remedied by simple external work anyway, the whole tank water dosing is usually reserved for big tankers who cant do a rip clean as easy as a nano reefer can. we just needed a way to stop growback here, the manual clean part is easy avail since you've scaped so accessibly.
 

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hey I just noticed the anems. tread easy, not twice a day those tend to get mad. we've never had a single loss, but they act mad with some delay on prior posts. all of that is remedied by simple external work anyway, the whole tank water dosing is usually reserved for big tankers who cant do a rip clean as easy as a nano reefer can. we just needed a way to stop growback here, the manual clean part is easy avail since you've scaped so accessibly.
I should be able to remove all the rock in this tank other than 2 smaller ones. I have a couple of mini carpet nems that are attached both to the rock and glass. Ended up killing one trying to remove it when i tore down my other tank, so that will be a no go for me

Ill be able to work on the tank this weekend hopefully. Ill probably treat 1/3 of the rockwork friday, 1/3rd saturday and 1/3rd sunday.
 
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So I haven’t been fighting it per say because I’ve done a lot of research on this treatment process(no testing yet) but I don’t want to loose my shrimp in my 14G system. So as of lately I started scraping the GHA off of my back panel in my display(I think it’s a black acrylic).

That is where a majority of the algae grows so I’m not sure what to do as far as a external fix for this issue. Will post pictures later.
 
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thanks for posting for sure.

if this is a nano, we could easily part out the tank, hold the delicates elsewhere, and dispatch the algae as a direct access spot treatment. at least you are on things until final decision, action is best for sure.
 

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Also I appoloigize if I
Missed something similar to this but I read through everything in this thread from yesterday to today. Phew a lot of reading.
 
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agreed its lots of words

quick summary:

1. we test rock most attempts. all other forms of anti algae work affect your entire system, and usually require one to change out nutrient levels where corals were doing just fine. We are an action thread, I don't need to Identify your invader nor know you nutrient level details to make your aquarium free of an invasion. The sand rinse thread handles all non anchored invasions, below, and this thread here handles all anchored invaders because we use test rocking and rasping along with peroxide to truly affect a win

sand rinse thread, not possible to have cyano issues after going through this.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/t...a-one-against-many.230281/page-7#post-4107442

2. Test rocks and rasping.
For most presented invaded tanks, we need to learn about your invasion specifics and how they interact with variables in your home; lighting, c02, nutrient levels though I don't care what they are, we need to see how well the invader responds to some detail work. we use a steak knife or a hard metal tool/brush, to score off areas of the algae outside the tank (a test rock is lifted out) and the knife action makes the spot free, some substrate is scraped and damaged like a rasping organism would do on a real reef (parrotfish, urchin etc) we put peroxide on that spot after its cleaned, not before, as a final burn cleaner of plant cells.

rinse all that work off with clean saltwater, put the test rock back in the tank and lets chart what it does a few days or a week before massive work. That is a test model which gives any invaded tank a personalized approach. If we need to dose the whole tank with peroxide, rare, then you can use a paint bucket and the known dilutions on a test rock before you proceed.

3. Doing any form of algae work while you have a sandbed that cannot pass a drop / clouding test from my sand rinse thread is the greatest waste of time in history. Attack your algae from the bottom of your tank, up, as work will save you and non work got you here.

4. 35% peroxide is dangerous, but needed in some invasions depending on test model performance and level of catchup work done. It is a blinding agent, totally dangerous, and shouldn't be kept around small kids. 35% is all I used when I needed to fix up an invasion, carefully, bc its so fast. 3% works well enough that we are safe with it, and 90% of tanks respond just fine to 3% normal solution.

5. Peroxide is not a never ending wheel. Actually attacking an invader can stop them from growing, though you've been told that wont work. You are doing work on top of a clean sandbed, with no nutrients for them, of course a direct kill is part of the actual solution along with that greater action. Cyano and some limited species of green algae are permanently associated with reefing, so when they show up we don't see bad, we see a keeper who allowed natural events to take place and they either want it killed, or not.

6. Sensitive organisms to peroxide: lysmata cleaners, fireworms are super sensitive and w die within the rock work at times, xenia, decorative macros and coralline might stress. Posts here show we can work around those, and we being with test rocking for that very reason, it doesn't contact such targets.


7. all known reefing fish are not sensitive and many have endured massive overdoses (accidents) and survived, I know of no commonly kept fish that are sensitive.
post us a bunch of pics! we are pic heavy here
B
 
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brandon429

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Nice nice pics breakdown, this is my take:

You have no alarms going on, that's what a reef looks like to a scuba diver. Some algae must get through our defenses, they're adapted to that, and it feeds grazers in the wild. The very low scope of invasion you have, my own tank will do it if I don't keep my sandbed nice and clean, so your tank looks healthy to me, and not in distress. The patches are localized on the rock, not all over the substrate and glass but limited rather, and if a parrotfish happened by he'd bite the whole chunk off, digest the algae, and excrete beach sand on the way out.

That being said, your rocks will respond to light 3% testing for sure. if this is a nano, we could easily change out your sandbed or rinse it, but even your sandbed growth is normal and nothing some lucky snails couldn't get a hold of, or a diamond goby

I like that you are feeling the urge to act or test early, this is the perfect time to act, before anything big happens.

Can you either drain the tank to allow for access, or remove a rock, and spray some peroxide on the target areas after scraping things off a bit with a knife?

If so, I think they wont grow back for a while at least in that area, it lets us know how your invader responds to an easy test just localized.
 

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Ok I just bought a new bottle of peroxide(wife’s like we have it, I’m like uuhhh it’s aquarium science I’ll be happy to explain, needless to say I didn’t have to). Tonight the test shall go down and will take pictures before, during(I hope), and after. Can I post videos on here?
 

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