The ugly pico

[Matteo]

A single turbo snail will eat it all

[Archon]

30 minutes ago, Matteo said:

A single turbo snail will eat it all

I heard that the algae should be short in order for the snails to be able to eat it. What do you think?

Also, I have the snail for some months but it usually goes out during the night across the glasses of the tank.

[Matteo]

16 minutes ago, Archon said:

I heard that the algae should be short in order for the snails to be able to eat it. What do you think?

Also, I have the snail for some months but it usually goes out during the night across the glasses of the tank.

Just in my experience honestly. Turbos eat it all from what I've seen haha. I have two in my 40 nuvo plus a handful of astreas and such. Hermits should eat it too... 

[Penguin Reef]

3 hours ago, Archon said:

I have read about fluconazole in other threads and I am currently doing a  research on it. Have you used it? I’m sure I will come up with questions if I decide to go this route.

I used Fluconazole last month due too bryopsis growing in both my nano's and i saw results within the first week. I'm planning on dosing again tomorrow after a water change due to some gha growing on some frags and snail shells. Do some research on it and you'll see the success many have had with it.

[Tired]

If you think you have detritus problems, improving the circulation can be good, or you can manually squirt it out of places with a turkey baster now and then.

[Matteo]

22 hours ago, Tired said:

If you think you have detritus problems, improving the circulation can be good, or you can manually squirt it out of places with a turkey baster now and then.

I turkey baster like 3+ times a week 😂 not much detritus unless after a heavy feeding but I got nothing else to do these days 🙈🤷‍♂️

 

[Archon]

I do this before water changes with not much coming out of the rock. My concern is whether detritus gets trapped between the rocks. I will try to pull some pieces away from each other to get better flow around them.

[Archon]

I decided that I am going to try Fluconazole and see if it is going to work. I pulled what I could and dosed the tank yesterday. No ill effects so far other than a seriatopora frag that looks very irritated. Hopefully it will survive.

This is how the tank looks on day 1:

 

[Penguin Reef]

Try to not do a water change for as long as you can after dosing fluconazole. If you do need to change the water due to parameters not being in check, just add extra fluconazole to your fresh batch of water. If after two weeks you don’t see the tips of the GHA dying off... increase your dose. Make sure to take plenty of pics and watch your corals closely. Was your rock Dry rock, live rock or dead rock when starting this system?

[Penguin Reef]

Also lowering your light intensity maybe to 50% blues and 3% whites will help battle the GHA without doing any damage to your corals. 

[Archon]

I will keep an eye to the water parameters. I observed that the tips of the algae have turned to a light gray color. The rock was previously live which dried for a few years without any other cure and got into the tank after a FW rinse. I hope that makes sense, excuse me for my English. 

Also, I have already reduced the blues to 80% and whites to 30%. I am going to watch the corals and reduce accordingly.

[Penguin Reef]

9 hours ago, Archon said:

I will keep an eye to the water parameters. I observed that the tips of the algae have turned to a light gray color. The rock was previously live which dried for a few years without any other cure and got into the tank after a FW rinse. I hope that makes sense, excuse me for my English. 

Also, I have already reduced the blues to 80% and whites to 30%. I am going to watch the corals and reduce accordingly.

Yeah that explains it perfect.

 

You have phosphates leaching from your dead rock since the rock was never cured. No worries it'll burn itself out. just really keep an eye on your phosphate levels. Killing all of the GHA will release all of the phosphates into the water column.

 

I'd suggest buying a phosphate test kit if you don't already have one. You can also try some GFO or Nano Blue to absorb some of those phosphate until the GHA completely dies off, but remember you do not want to hit zero phosphates or Nitrates because that will encourage a Dino bloom. Trust me you don't want to deal with that

 

Do you have any sort of filtration or skimmer? This will help with collecting the dying off GHA during the fluconazole treatment.

[Archon]

I have heard a theory for phosphates leaching from the rock when the water phosphate levels drop to zero which makes sense to me since I did not have so much algae when my phosphates level was higher. 

I do have a phosphate test kit and I am closely monitoring all parameters just to be sure. I also have a small internal filter with filer floss that is replaced every two days and catches a lot of algae strands. In case the phosphates increase I have seagel on hand but hopefully it will not be needed. I did a manual removal yesterday to reduce the load in the system.

[debbeach13]

BRS has a nice video on GHA. If you have time you should watch it. It definitely starts with manually remove as much as possible. Last time I had an out break I absolutely took the rock out of the tank and pulled off as much as I could. Then I scrubbed every where I could in between corals with a new tooth brush that I dipped in hydrogen peroxide 3%. After I just put the rock back in the tank. I did not rinse it. A couple days later I did it again. Then I got some snails. My tank is a 20L so I did get one turbo snail. They can be large but I found a medium one which I still have. They are clumsy, knock stuff over, and can not right them selves if the land on their back. Most LFS will take them back. So when it has done it’s job if it is too large just return it. You may not get any $ but like I said they usually let you return them. I also very gently move them to where there is algae until it’s gone. TheY can hold on pretty good but take your time and you can get them to retract after some gentle pulling. Good luck

[Archon]

A couple of weeks later here is what the tank looks like. There is a clear progress. The algae stopped growing during the first 5-6 days. Now it’s almost gone with a few patches remaining. My parameters look ok, with calcium and alkalinity a bit lower than usual, 430 and 7.7 kh respectively. I am going to wait another week and then do a water change.