So I had some brownish-red algae in my tank that started about 4-5 weeks ago. I continued weekly water changes and cleaned the inside walls of the tank to get rid of any algae on there and didnt use any kind of "algae-fix". After a couple of weeks i noticed it was getting less and less. It was looking pretty good last week, but now i got a whole bunch of green algae as soon as that brownish-red algae had disappeared. Anyone know anything about this and how to get rid of it?
Continous Algae problems
- Thread starter gstate
- Start date
15 hours of lights seems a bit much IMO I would try just turning the lights on when you get home, thou ill be honest your plants would obviously be effected....hope this helps!
What kind of plants do you keep?
What kind of plants do you keep?
The green algae is going to be there regardless if you keep plants. The amount will be affected by how well the plants take up the nutrients. 15 hours of light is far too much. Limit it to 8-12 hours.
I've read that the brownish-red algae is actually diatoms that grow after sudden changes in the tank (like massive water changes or aquarium cleaning). I've had the same problem, but after a while when the tank restabilized the diatoms slowly diminished. The other algae is probably a type of blue-green algae that very few fish will eat. Lighting seems to be the solution to this problem, or the addition of some fast growing plants.
OK, i will limit the light. Im just trying to figure out how it showed up all of a sudden after a couple of months of being perfectly fine. Although I do need to change my filters...could that have anything to do with it? I need to get rid of my fiddler crabs also, fools keep chopping my plants from the bottom. They think there frickin lumberjacks...
Brown algae that grows on the side of aquariums and on surfaces is an actual algae. Diatom, or blue green algae is a completely different organism. The green algae that grows on the side is also an algae, and is commonly eaten by many fish, including several plecos, otos, algae eaters, snails...
Diatoms are synonymous with "gravel algae" and can be caused by low oxygen and/or low light which causes plants to stop photosynthesis and therefore stop taking up nutrients that are also used by algae/diatoms. This is paraphrased info from The Natural Aquarium Handbook by Ines Scheurmann, Barron's publishers, page 66.