purple_drazi
Fishaholic
While I was venting the other day about black algae re-establishing itself in my tank The_Wolf suggested that I look into hydogen peroxide as a treatment. There are a number of treatments for black beard algae but I hadn't heard of this one so I stopped ranting long enough to look it up.
One of the fish keepers who tried it said that he lost 1/3 of his fish from the treatment, a point which I wasn't keen on. My otos and neons said they weren't keen on that part either. otoh, it seemed to be an effective treatment so we all agreed to give it a go with a few modifications.
I put a heater in one of my spare treated water buckets and left it for a few hours to get the water comfy, then caught (using the clever food-in-a-jar method that I learned on TFF) all the fishies and transferred them over to the bucket. I had read that the author of the article had used 180ml per 63.5 gal (he didn't say whether it was U.S. or Imperial gals), which works out to 2.8ml per gal. ish. Since I didn't have any fish in my tank I just dumped the whole dose in at once, covered the tank w/ a blanket because h.p. degrades faster in light and left it for about 6 hours. When I looked at it again I wasn't impressed with the result, the algae looked healthy as ever, so I dumped in another dose, covered the tank and left it.
This morning when I checked the tank, the threads of algae on the Anubias were dead and pink like the picture in the article (yay!) but the threads on the rocks looked black and healthy. I'm not sure why there would be a difference but that's what it looked like. I didn't want to treble the dose because I haven't a clue what I'm doing so I removed the rocks and put them in the oven at 450* F for an hour.
(That should kill the b*****ds.)
I moved the fish to a fresh (heated) bucket this a.m. but I want to get them back into the tank as soon as possible so I did a 40% water change in the tank, added some gravel & a filter from another tank to help re-establish the bacteria and I'm going to put the fish in when everything is put back and settled.
no fatalities yet, wish us luck.
One of the fish keepers who tried it said that he lost 1/3 of his fish from the treatment, a point which I wasn't keen on. My otos and neons said they weren't keen on that part either. otoh, it seemed to be an effective treatment so we all agreed to give it a go with a few modifications.
I put a heater in one of my spare treated water buckets and left it for a few hours to get the water comfy, then caught (using the clever food-in-a-jar method that I learned on TFF) all the fishies and transferred them over to the bucket. I had read that the author of the article had used 180ml per 63.5 gal (he didn't say whether it was U.S. or Imperial gals), which works out to 2.8ml per gal. ish. Since I didn't have any fish in my tank I just dumped the whole dose in at once, covered the tank w/ a blanket because h.p. degrades faster in light and left it for about 6 hours. When I looked at it again I wasn't impressed with the result, the algae looked healthy as ever, so I dumped in another dose, covered the tank and left it.
This morning when I checked the tank, the threads of algae on the Anubias were dead and pink like the picture in the article (yay!) but the threads on the rocks looked black and healthy. I'm not sure why there would be a difference but that's what it looked like. I didn't want to treble the dose because I haven't a clue what I'm doing so I removed the rocks and put them in the oven at 450* F for an hour.
(That should kill the b*****ds.)
I moved the fish to a fresh (heated) bucket this a.m. but I want to get them back into the tank as soon as possible so I did a 40% water change in the tank, added some gravel & a filter from another tank to help re-establish the bacteria and I'm going to put the fish in when everything is put back and settled.
no fatalities yet, wish us luck.
/www.skepticalaquarist.com/docs/health/potper.shtml
Good luck to your fish as well.
