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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.พ. 2025
- Hey all, today I am happy to share with you all how I beat my hair algae problem. It was a massive struggle but check out where we ended up.
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#picoreeftank #fishtank #aquarium #saltwatertank #pico #reef #salt #water #fish #hairalgae #algae #snails #nitrates #phosphates
Got to love a man with a four point plan. I have that same Tupperware and brine shrimp hatchery btw. Thanks for bringing so much humor to this frustrating subject.
Glad to see the tank doing better! I’m dealing with the same thing and almost out of it. Word of advice, toss the vibrant in the trash..
haven't had to buy it yet and hopefully wont ever have to. Plus the turbo is still going really strong
Yeah man turbo snails are awesome and they can turn themselves over most of the time so don't die as often as trochus. Tank is looking good.
yeah I always felt they would be a bit big for a pico, but now I feel like it's a necessity. Just going to need to trade it in for a smaller one eventually
On top of water changes, limit your light exposure, or use blue light as much as you can. Also, try swapping your filter media to chemiclean blue. I feed mine with that same frozen food every three days.
yeah I actually tried the heavy blue while dialing down everything else down before the video and it didnt really change anything (but coupled with other methods maybe it would have made a difference) like the feeding schedule comment though. Probably would have helped even more than my once a day
Looking much better! That stuff almost evolved into bryopsis!
I know right. I unintentionally had a macro algae tank there for a minute
Higher the nitrates buy nopox and watch your po4 goes fast down.
Why go through the aggravation just add better filtration and a UV sterilizer and call it a day
in my tank i have urchins' lettuce nudibranchs' hundreds of snails' hermit crabs and tiger conchs the snails that i have are astrea and cerith with some nerite the reason why i have hundreds is because of them reproducing
wow how big is your tank that sounds like a ton of livestock
Just a suggestion, in your filter, reverse your biomedia and chemical filtration, by having your chemical first, your removing nutrients that your bacteria need to reproduce.
Tank you appreciate the advice. I'll try it out!
Pistol shrimp eat hair algae
No they don’t
oh wow just seeing this comment. I haven't heard of any pistol shrimp that eat hair algae. Was there a specific species you were thinking of?
@@ioaquatics no but I had the same problem and everyone suggested pistols shrimp
I agree with Alex. Shrimp do not eat algae. Crabs maybe but not shrimp.
The only benefit a pistol shrimp has to the tank besides something cool to look at is that they will constantly turn the sand over. But only in the little front spot of his cave.
Your phosphates are WAY too high. GFO will correct that quickly. Just dont go to zero as dinos will come. The goal is .03-.1
Yup, agreed. Im not the biggest fan of GFO in small pico tanks, but a number of water changes and stopping the use of reef roids also helped get it down to a lower stable range pretty quickly. These days I sit at about .05 - .1 pretty consistently
@@ioaquatics I have a 12 gallon long and had to resort to it to get things in check. Then I had dinos. Then I covered the dinos on the sand with plexiglass for a week and started doing water changes every 2 weeks to raise my nutrients. I'm finally stable. Every tank is crazy different
@@cbarber5366 my god that sounds like quite the journey. Open top as well? I always get nervous with small long tanks cause of salinity swings (hence why I went small and tall). But glad you have it stable finally!
@@ioaquatics I have a glass top on it. I've never heard of salinity swings due to size of the tank. Never any issues as I have a gravity fed auto top off
@@cbarber5366, its more so the geometry than size. I have a lot more water evaporate from my shrimp bowl than I do from my saltwater tank just cause there is so much more surface area between the water and the air. But to your point, once you have a good auto top off, the issue becomes a lot more minimal
I think you need more biological media
I had the same problem as you but the Mexican turbo snail didn’t work and I used vibrant and it killed all my lps but half of my xoanthids were already gone by the time that I was able to take out the algae 🥲
dang I'm sorry to hear that. Ive have been told (haven't verified it myself) that there are two types of Mexican turbo snails that come from two different parts of Mexico. One loves hair algae and the others don't eat it :/