Battle of the Algae Eaters!

[fly-fisher]

Hi all. After deciding to switch to real plants (instead of fake), I upgraded my lights, added flourite substrate, then added a variety of plants to my 54-gal corner tank. Shortly afterwards, I started seeing various forms of algae growing throughout the tank.

I did some research and bought a bristlenose pleco and five oto's to deal with the algae. The algae covering the sides and bottom of the tank quickly disappeared, however most of my plants where still covered with some kind of hair/filament algae.

After several weeks, the hair algae was only getting worse, so I brought in the "big guns" -- two SAE's and two Florida Flag Fish. After less than 24 hours, my plants are nearly algae-free!! I'm not sure who to give the credit to, but my FFF definitely look well-fed ...

Now that I've got an effective "cleanup crew", I feel I can work on growing my plants (instead of algae). I'd be interested to hear other's experiences dealing with this problem.

 

[kenneth_kpe]

nice! algae cleaning crew scores one!

*ps i hope you have alternative food sources for your cleaning crew since they did such a good job they might have nothing left to eat after a while

 

[George Farmer]

Welcome to the Forums!

Glad to hear your algae crew have done the trick.

I find that my Otos and Amano shrimp are great little maintainers - although there's little in the way of nuisance algae in my tank so I have to feed them dry foods. The shrimp are very amusing to watch free swimming in an attempt to grab flakes and granules. I recently witnessed one take a lump of Diskusin from my Discus' mouth (ironic when people warn about Discus eating shrimp!)

BTW do you have CO2 injection? With 2.4 WPG you will need it IMO or the algae will outgrow your crew's ability to eat it. Check out the pinned topics at the top of this forum if you haven't already.

 

[fly-fisher]

Not to worry about these guys getting enough food - there's a steady supply coming out of the vegetable garden this time of year.

No co2 yet, but I've been considering it. I'm looking for something low maintenance. I'm thinking about a fully automatic pressurized system -- for example,

http/www.drsfostersmith.com/product/prod...U&N=2004+113779