BBA and excess nutrients

[CaptainBarnicles]

I'm not convinced Black Beard is linked to excess nutrients in the water column. I think it's light that is the major contributer here....or at least, it was in my case.

My fluval plant was running somewhere between 50-60% and I was dosing 200l TNC lite once a week. The black beard just exploded and I was advised to cut the ferts and lower the lights...so I did both. I put lights down to 50% and the ferts I took down to 100l a week....

The algae did nothing but my plants, I noticed began to suffer. So I lowered my lights another 10% down to 40 but increased my ferts to 240ml....and this happened

Sorry for the reflections, but you'll see the white patches on this stone...this is dead BBA. So even though I'm dosing more ferts than I was before, it's slowly going away. For me at least, it was a light issue

 

[xxBarneyxx]

It's always a balancing act between light, nutrients and CO2 (technically still a nutrient). One thing out of whack and you end up with algae. That's why I tend to go for EI style, CO2 high light set ups. Supply everything in abundance and the plants will outcompete the algae every time.

100% agree excess nutrients does not always equal algae. If it did EI tanks would not work as well as they do.

I have seen more than one case were removing nutrients causes algae growth. Plants need something like 13 macro/trace nutrients to grow. Removing nutrients can causes a shortage of something that the plants need so they stop growing as well. Then the algae gets chance to get a foothold because they can make do with whatever nutrients are left in the tank.

You can have two tanks set up the same with the same stocking but still need vastly different amounts of nutrients added due to whats in the tap water.

The reason "remove excess nutrients" is the go to solution for most algae issue is that it's generally the easiest option. Get it down to a bare minimum so the plants still grow, but the nutrient level is still low enough to be completely removed by the plants. If there is no nutrients left then the algae will struggle, in theory.

It's one of them, "80% of the time it works everytime".