Wanted to post about this in the event others start looking for ways to battle this crap -- I found it hard to find a lot of meaningful content anywhere.
What my rock work looks like:
My tank is more or less completely overrun with red turf algae. I have always operated under the assumption that algae = nutrients and that you can beat back algae by aggressive nutrient export.
As such, I have run GFO forever and was always diligent to not feed in excess.
That didn't solve anything.
My water was nutrient stripped; ~0.03 po4 and salifert nitrate test would always return without any coloration.
I used a full bottle of Vibrant in an effort to knock out the red turf as well as eliminate bubble algae. The Vibrant knocked out the bubble algae but didn't do anything at all to the red turf.
Now I know people always like to say, "Oh your nutrients test low because the algae consumes it." Say what you want - but I could easily go over a month without cleaning my glass. SPS coloration was muted; my zoas completely stopped growing, my gonipora died and my acan was receding/dying. My tank was nutrient starved and the algae didn't care.
I have an army of trochus snails, hermit crabs and 2 huge turbos in my 65g tank. They kept the algae trimmed as you can see in the picture, but never fully removed it.
I read a few times that the best way to fight it back was with urchins, however, I also read people insist turbos would strip it from the rocks as well and that has not been the case with me. I had nothing to lose though, so this past weekend I bought two tuxedo urchins.
It looks like what people said was true - one of them got right to down and is making progress ripping out patches of the algae.
That is another angle of the same rock from the first picture - all the bald spots are where the urchin has been eating away over the past few days.
I understand that the urchins don't get into all the nooks in the rock work - but if the two of them can make progress like that, I am hoping it cuts back the algae enough that the snails become more aggressive at stripping the algae instead of just trimming.
Hopefully they continue and things start to look better over the next few weeks!
What my rock work looks like:
My tank is more or less completely overrun with red turf algae. I have always operated under the assumption that algae = nutrients and that you can beat back algae by aggressive nutrient export.
As such, I have run GFO forever and was always diligent to not feed in excess.
That didn't solve anything.
My water was nutrient stripped; ~0.03 po4 and salifert nitrate test would always return without any coloration.
I used a full bottle of Vibrant in an effort to knock out the red turf as well as eliminate bubble algae. The Vibrant knocked out the bubble algae but didn't do anything at all to the red turf.
Now I know people always like to say, "Oh your nutrients test low because the algae consumes it." Say what you want - but I could easily go over a month without cleaning my glass. SPS coloration was muted; my zoas completely stopped growing, my gonipora died and my acan was receding/dying. My tank was nutrient starved and the algae didn't care.
I have an army of trochus snails, hermit crabs and 2 huge turbos in my 65g tank. They kept the algae trimmed as you can see in the picture, but never fully removed it.
I read a few times that the best way to fight it back was with urchins, however, I also read people insist turbos would strip it from the rocks as well and that has not been the case with me. I had nothing to lose though, so this past weekend I bought two tuxedo urchins.
It looks like what people said was true - one of them got right to down and is making progress ripping out patches of the algae.
That is another angle of the same rock from the first picture - all the bald spots are where the urchin has been eating away over the past few days.
I understand that the urchins don't get into all the nooks in the rock work - but if the two of them can make progress like that, I am hoping it cuts back the algae enough that the snails become more aggressive at stripping the algae instead of just trimming.
Hopefully they continue and things start to look better over the next few weeks!
