I went to my LFS and purchased some caulerpa about 4 months ago. Now I have a 28 gallon KUDZU tank. While on vacation I had someone come and take care of my tank ( no maintance). I came back to my tank completly covered in caulerpa! How do I either get rid of or slow down it's growth?

I dont want to be the bearer of bad news, but I had to shut down a tank when this happened....no way to get rid of it///grape calupera especially. scrubbing wont help, nothing 28g worthy will eat it....

this is why IMO grape calupera should not be in tanks...its an invasive, tank destroying nightmare.

I had to totally kill my live rock in order to start over...

I was thinking of scrubbing the rocks but I didn't want to kill anything good. Why is there not some warning lable when you buy this stuff?

First I will say that this is a result of not doing any research before buying organisms. Most people avoid adding Caulerpa species to their tank for this very reason.

Second: Now that it has completely infested your rock, your only hope (and a dim one at that) is to manually pull out as much as you can and "cook" the rock when you are done. "Cooking" means keeping it in a completely dark bucket for up to several months, during which the water in the bucket is circulated with a powerhead between bi-weekly changes.

What species are we talking about here? Do you have a pic?

I have corals and mushrooms all over the rocks.....can't take them out to "cook". Plus I also have a breeding pair of perc clowns.

all the research I did (TONS) pointed me to Fosi's conclusion, btw...

way worse than bryopsis or anything....grape calupera.

I ended up tossing the rock in a bucket with bleach, letting it sit for months....I now have a bucket of totally dead rock that will have to be cleaned up before it can ever be used in the future, as base rock or something....really sucks.

This really sucks bro, but you just should have not ever introduced this thing into the tank....its a tank-killer...youre right, the LFS did you a huge disservice selling it to you.

sorry bro....for real. Unless you do what Fosi says, you are gonna have to live with it until you eventually shut the tank down.

Fosi, will manual pruning at least help this guy keep it in check? Is there a downside to that approach?

The only downsides are that it takes a lot of effort to affect only a small change in how it looks and that you have to keep doing it. That, and the danger of tearing your soft corals to bits if the Caulerpa rhizoids have entwined themselves about them.

In a way, you could view it has an effective method of nutrient export... The bummer is that it is one that requires the aquarist to do a lot of leg(arm)work.

Of course, one could always change their goals for the tank. Instead of it being a reef tank in which corals feature prominently, it could be a macro tank with fish.

2 small emerald crabs and manual labor?
is it's root structure in the rocks?
I have mine growing from the side so it won't spread and when it does I yank it by the root- recently yanked one root off a zoa plug and it took a clump of zoa's with it - pissed me off but it left me with a beautiful frag
Only grape is red....

dictyota > grape caulerpa.

back in the day before caulerpa was banned in CA, i had a tank full of it after having some in my refugium go sexual. it's hard to get rid of yes, but you can do it if you pull it out religiously as it comes in, skim heavily to reduce nutrients, and shorten the light cycle a little bit. and if you pull it all at once, you'll start a new cycle, so pull it out slowly. its not impossible, but it'll take a long time.

That's actually what I'd recommend....some manual pruning....plus toss some xenia and GSP in there, and have an easy-to-maintain jungle tank.


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I had green grape calupera...removal was near impossible because any part you grabbed with break off...and the root structure was incredibly resilient...

Good advice, but it seems as though this would only be the case if you move your rocks/sand around while doing it...?



Yeah, a really long time and it'll be hard to do when he's got fish and fry to feed.

Not intending to start an argument, but this statement is very generalizing.

The species the OP has sounds as if it is invasive and not easily controlled. But, then again, there are many species of macroalgae that can become a nuisance if not properly maintained. Many people have various species of caulerpa in their tanks and refugiums and do very well with it with the proper husbandry.

Mark

I'd still really like a species ID or better yet, a pic.

C. taxifolia =/= C. prolifera

I tend to generalize....no arguement there my problem was with grape calupera....and it is what I described....others, I have not enough experience to comment on....I'll edit the first post to clarify. thanks.

if you have a lot of caulerpa, it might be the predominant source of nutrient exportation, so if you take all your caulerpa out at once, in theory you might get a spike in nitrates and what not. could be wrong.

I like your reasoning vis a vis an increase in NO3, but that shouldn't cause a "cycle" in the way the term is generally understood. Shouldn't be any increase in NH3 and/or NO2 unless he rearranges the rock or substrate.

Agree/disagree?

I don't know how long he was on vaca...but, if it grew that aggressively, it would seem that there were a good amount of excess nutrients that it was consuming. Upon removal of the macroalgae, those nutrients would seemingly not be consumed as quickly. I would be concerned about that.

As Fosi suggested, I am curious what the species is as well. Look at this which may help you to identify what you have.

i once got a little grape caulerpa from a frag trade and it was a little bit of a nuisance, but i just had to remove it manually once or twice a week and that kept it under control.
also i believe my strombus snails kept it in check, not sure...
either way it never got out of hand...

HTH

Had a problem with caulerpa prolifera. Thought it looked kind of cool, came in on a small frag. Didn't bother to remove it. Within 2 months entire tank was taken over. It's now impossible to remove so now its a FOWLR tank with caulerpa.

Agree here.

Now I will go against all that is known to be good here.
I had (had) a C. prolifera /i] problem in my 29 gallon biocube. It was taking over. Every Saturday during water changes I would take out a good cereal size bowl of the stuff and the next week it would be right back. I embarked on a plan to take care of it.

the first thing I did was get a 2 -2.5 inch Foxface [i]Siganus unimaculatus. This creature decimated the weed within weeks. I mean I could not find any. I left it in the tank until it got to about 3 - 3.5 inches. This occurred I would say over about 3 months. Took it out and returned to the LFS for store credit. A few months later I could see the stuff coming back. I let it go for a while then bought the second one. Same story as the first. I went through 5 of these fish over time each time getting the smallest I could find and returning when they got to the 3 - 3.5 in mark. On the fifth one I was getting tired of it and started to investigate Ultra Low Nutrient processes. I instituted a vodka - amino acid - Prodibio dosing regimen. I now have no algae in the tank. And I mean no algae in the tank. I was running a fuge in the second chamber of my 29 gallon biocube with a ball of Chaetomorph to try to control the nutrients but it did nothing to keep the caulerpa down. However when I started the vodka dosing over time the chaeto in the fuge started to die. Previously I was harvesting a pool ball sized clump about once a month, but it just disintegrated. On the wall where water flows over from chamber 1 to chamber 2 I constantly had hail algae growing on the top of the wall. Kind of like you see at the ocean on the rocks along the waters edge where the algae is growing on the rocks and you can see it a low tide and it is covered during high tide. This hair algae died off and has not come back.

That is my experience with Caulerpa and my fight against if and my WIN of the war..


For what it is worth.

Really people think its that bad? Whenever I had caulerpa start to get out of control I would toss the rock it was on into my 125...which has a yellow tang and blue line rabbitfish...within min it was gone. Now granted it was never more than about a softball size clump but hey it worked for me. The rocks I had the caulerpa on never grew any back either. If I were close to you I would do the same thing for you, maybe someone you know has some tangs/rabbitfish that love caulerpa? just an idea.

I had to work to get rid of mine in my 75 gallon tank. Skimming, manual removal, scrubbing of isolated rocks etc.. all kept it in check but still present. Finally I broke down and went to the LFS and looked at 3 fox face. Had them give some to each one and picked the most aggressive eater. From what I could tell it was all gone in about 1 month. Just getting rid of one other macro now. I had the space, find it to be an intresting fish, and plan on getting a larger tank at some point so the foxface made sense.

yay rabbitfish success story!

This happened to me (caulerpa came as a hitchhiker) and I had to remove all the rock and start with new rock. :/

I haven't read this whole thread, so sorry if someone already suggested this- but my tank became overgrown with feather caulerpa and I was able to rip it all out with no regrowth. I think if you're thorough, there's a chance this will work.

I have two plans...maybe ya'll can help me decide which is a better idea.
1.) Remove corals, fish, inverts, anything alive and removable into another tank temporarely.
Hook up UV sterlizer to 29 gallon for 2 weeks
Bake live rock with caulerpa on it at 200 degrees for 15-20 minutes and return to tank (after cooling)
2.) Scrap all the rock and start over.
I know the first plan sounds drastic but I really need to get rid of it. Is it true that the UV sterilizer will kill the spore in the water?

+1
Exactly what I did because I'm too lazy to manually remove. The tangs love the stuff though!

what species?

That's what I'm sayin'.

(this post has nothing to do with you Jaxx, just talking to Fosi)

i think caulerpa ids need to go to the "show us a pic" level in general. People with brachypus think they have prolifera, people with "taxifolia" almost always have fern or mexicana....etc...To this day I have never seen taxifolia in a picture...it just googles well. /rant on caulerpa.

Agree?

I think it is easy for people to assume that "caulerpa" is all the same even though that label encompasses lots of species. The simple fact is that not all caulerpa species are the same with regard to virulence or removal difficulty.

Either way, trying to tell people this is like swimming against the tide.

I ended up here right after a "caulerpa taxifolia is in my tank thread", so I just felt it would be good to share, I knew you could appreciate that.

here is apage that might help with identification jaxx:
http://www.sccat.net/#nine-banned-species-...alifornia-f45a4

Man and here im intentionally stocking several species of calerpa.

Hey, some people like caulerpas and don't mind a tank full of them. formerly icyuodd/icyoud2 was one of those.

I think I'd like a macro tank eventually but the only caulerpa species I would consider would be C. prolifera. There are plenty of other macros I'd like to have but most of them are hard to find or too expensive... Not to mention, I barely have time for the tank I currently have.

I guess I sort-of already have a macro tank at the lab but it is like a maltreated child.

Im doing C. Prolifera, C. Numelaris (sp) and a couple others.

Caulerpa is a hard one to get. It is everywhere in nature, but only a handful of divers are allowed to collect it in FL, and many can't tell the species apart. Their monopoly makes non-hobbyist supplied caulerpa expensive. Sandwich bags go for a fixed price of about $15. (Small sandwich bags too) Imports always have a built in transportation cost, so it is one of those items that despite its abundance stays artificially high.