Too much algae, 0 nutrients..

[BTimms]

How big is the tank? Could you house a lawn mower or starry blenny? I find them to do great with different types of algae, like hair. I'm pretty sure you're dealing with the start of GHA, green hair algae, on that back wall and rock. The sea lettuce you'll probably need to manually remove and then maybe a cuc or blenny will take care of it for you.

For me GHA was all about the right cuc and fish in the tank after manual remove on my part. Yours is still pretty short, so I think a good cuc and herbivore will take care of it for the most part.

What cuc do you find works for GHA?

 

[BTimms]

Are lawn mower blennies really THAT useful in terms of algae control?

Mine barely touches any gha

 

[jt8791]

Emerald crabs might pick at it, turbo snails tend mow it down then die off, pincushion urchins do a pretty good job at it. According to la spiny star astrea snails will eat it. Although I think the most effective has been outcompeting it with macroalgae, scraping it off the glass and scrubbing the rocks with a toothbrush.

 

[Smite]

What cuc do you find works for GHA?

That partially depends on tank size but for me the front line of attack is the keeper. I tried a lot of things, seahares, nutrient levels and additives. Not a lot of it worked, even the sea hare won't touch long strands of green hair algae in my experience. Once I really got in there and got my hand wet on a regular basis to get the algae scrubbed or pulled out down real short on the rock then all the members of the cuc that i read would do the job started to actually do their job.

Once short or manually removed:
Tangs, can't beat them if your system allows. But don't expect them to eat spaghetti
Lawn mower/starry blenny do a heck of a job and constantly work
Sea hare - gotta be short still and you need to keep a watchful eye for starvation
the snails I mentioned earlier, though I can't say what did what specifically.
Trochus
Turbos
Nerite

If you have a nutrient imbalance or something in your top off or water change water, like silicates or phosphates then you're going to constantly have an up hill battle. I had silicates in my RODI that an ATI ICP test showed me. I now run Spectra Pure silicate buster and that seems to help some overall.

My display is really clean of algae now. My corals are filling in like crazy, so I've started a frag section in my sump. After 3 days of being lit by a kessil...you guessed it, algae! It's lit offset from my display but lines up with my chaeto reactor and I'm still getting algae. To me, if there is nutrients present without a proper cuc a refugium does very little to combat it. You need a proper cuc to maintain algae in the display and allow macros in the refugium to uptake excess nutrients as my frag section made very apparent to me. I've been adding nerite and trochus snails from the display to the section along with a starry blenny and the algae is starting to get back under control in the frag section. I bet it's clean in a week as long as I don't let it get long.

 

[attiland]

Hi everyone. I am currently experiencing a phase in which my PO4 come back undetectable and my NO3 is below 15, however, the tank has all sorts of algae. I got brown (diatoms i think) algae on the sand, sea lettuce all over my rocks (pics 2 & 3), and a weird greenish-brown stringy type of algae on the back glass (pic 1). I want the algae gone, please help..

DT light is on for 9 hours with half an hour of sunrise and sunset.
I have a fuge with chaeto, the light is on for 11 hours. It turns on one hour before the DT and shuts off one hour after.
I have a HOB skimmer that's doing ok.

I will admit I'm running low on CUC right now but im not sure if CUC will eat all this sea lettuce.

Feed more or doze po4.
i don’t know about diatoms unless you have new silicates source. Get a microscope to ID it otherwise you are just guessing.
the pics don’t look terrible at all. Check your other parameters. I would expect coralline everywhere from a tank more than a year old.

 

[maleks.reef]

Regarding CUC I will definitely be getting more snails and trying to manually remove them. As much I want the lawnmower blenny, i think i prefer having the canary blenny tbh. I might change my opinion but we'll see. Also, urchins are cool but they coraline so that's a nono for me, plus my tank isn't all that big so they'll knock the hell out of everything which will be annoying.
So to conclude all the amazing feed back ive gotten from you guys:
1) Get more CUC: 3 turbos, 1 mexican, 2-3 nassarius, MAYBE a lawnmower blenny and ill try to find some mini brittle stars too
2) Try to manually remove as much as possible before a WC and use thick filter floss to catch all the broken off algae

Also, should I be feeding so lightly rn until I see improvement? Im worried my corals will be staved, plus I'm afraid ill get dinos with my 0 P04 but at the same time whenever i feed heavily it instantly goes into the algae.

 

[maleks.reef]

Btw, on another thread here people agreed that lawnmower blennies don't do well in smaller tanks and that their survival rate is very low. If that's the case then I should avoid one, wouldn't you say?

 

[Smite]

I think that's more to do with accepting prepared foods, they tend to just stick to the algae sometimes. Between that and already having a canary you may be better off trying to combat the algae with invert first.

 

[attiland]

Regarding CUC I will definitely be getting more snails and trying to manually remove them. As much I want the lawnmower blenny, i think i prefer having the canary blenny tbh. I might change my opinion but we'll see. Also, urchins are cool but they coraline so that's a nono for me, plus my tank isn't all that big so they'll knock the hell out of everything which will be annoying.
So to conclude all the amazing feed back ive gotten from you guys:
1) Get more CUC: 3 turbos, 1 mexican, 2-3 nassarius, MAYBE a lawnmower blenny and ill try to find some mini brittle stars too
2) Try to manually remove as much as possible before a WC and use thick filter floss to catch all the broken off algae

Also, should I be feeding so lightly rn until I see improvement? Im worried my corals will be staved, plus I'm afraid ill get dinos with my 0 P04 but at the same time whenever i feed heavily it instantly goes into the algae.

Both 1 and 2 is a good plan but you need to address po4. There are ready products to dose feed heavy may not be enough not to mention that increasing no3 too and you need po4
Think about the microscope too

 

[maleks.reef]

Both 1 and 2 is a good plan but you need to address po4. There are ready products to dose feed heavy may not be enough not to mention that increasing no3 too and you need po4
Think about the microscope too

I really appreciate the input but I reallly don't want to get into dosing PO4. My po4 has always been perfect at 0.03 it's just that once the algae issue came up, especially the lettuce, plus of course the 11-hour fuge, that's when the po4 plummetted. I'll try to get a more snails asap and hopefully the issue can be solved eventually.

 

[Midrats]

My ORA pincushion urchin I bought recently doesn't touch any algae at all. It has many choices but seems only to want to eat coralline exclusively. It's tripled in size. I'll be rehoming him soon. No luck with blennies either. The last lawnmower I tried enjoyed biting mouthfuls of colorful Battlecoral polyps and spitting them out like confetti. Didn't touch algae.

 

[maleks.reef]

My ORA pincushion urchin I bought recently doesn't touch any algae at all. It has many choices but seems only to want to eat coralline exclusively. It's tripled in size. I'll be rehoming him soon. No luck with blennies either. The last lawnmower I tried enjoyed biting mouthfuls of colorful Battlecoral polyps and spitting them out like confetti. Didn't touch algae.

Blennies can eat coral? thats odd.

 

[Midrats]

Blennies can eat coral? thats odd.

It would sample then spit out. I've had many over the past thirty something years, because I think they are interesting fish, but most were coral nippers and ended up getting removed. Just my experience.

 

[maleks.reef]

Update: So I have added quite a bit of snails since this post, mainly turbos. I've also been manually removing the lettuce, I think it is no more in the tank. However, no matter how much GHA i remove it keeps growing back so I started using Flux Rx yesterday. Hopefully by the end of the 3 week treatment, it will be gone too.