Maintaining Algae In Brackish Tank

[phistar]

hi everyone!

i hope this thread makes sense . . .

my pleco died the other day and i was trying to research on what other fish would be perfect to take on this task

i was curious on what you guys can recommend me on what fish to get to take over the job of the pleco?

thanks alot

 

[CFC]

There is no fish that will clean algae from the glass in a brackish tank, none that are readily available in the hobby anyway. The best thing to clean algae is a long handled bladed scraper to cut the algae away from the glass and then a coarse algae pad to polish off any last little stubborn bits.

 

[nmonks]

I'd actually go further than CFC and actually make the point that no fish actually keeps a tank-algae free. At best, a fish crops the algae so it's less noticeable, but the flip side is that more fish = more nitrate, and that means algae grows faster and you have a greater risk of causing a major algae problem, such as blue-green algae.

There are, however, a large variety of algae-eating fish for the brackish water tank. Mollies are well known and effective. Florida flagfish are also very good algae eaters, and when sufficiently hungry have been reported to deal with hair algae. Ameca splendens eats a lot of algae too, including blue-green algae supposedly. In fact virtually all livebearers and most of the brackish water killifish eat algae to a greater or lesser extent.

Gobioides spp. are algae-scrapers and will clean rocks and such, though perhaps not as effectively as plecs, and mostly green algae rather than the other types. Scats happily eat thread algae.

A variety of nerites and shrimps are suitable for brackish water aquaria.

Cheers, Neale

 

[Kevin_D]

I keep one tiger Nerite, and plenty of Malaysian Trumpet Snails in my brackish aquarium, they do a good job of keeping the algae down. Before I added them the algae often got out of control.

 

[Marine/Freshwater?]

I have never really had much algae. I used to have a blenny that kept everything spotless. Blennies seem to do a ggod job eating algae.