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I want to start by saying my goal right now has been to grow moss. Simply moss. *deep breath, exhale slow* I had a tank which crashed due to my inexperience and losing CO2/fertilizer regularity. That was the underlying reason for the plants struggling. Following a few months of that, I trimmed the plant that was doing "too good" (PSO) and seemingly destroyed any progress I had on the tank. Everything dwindled down slowly over time except for my anubias. Following that, we moved houses, which led to everything in tubs with a light and almost no day to day care. I also lost the ability to setup the tank for an extended period of time which led to massive BBA outbreaks and extremely bad conditions for the plants. This post is my attempt to try to explain everything that has happened since those initial struggles and offer any bits of advice I can to help others who may have struggles with algae. I'll start here, with this video, and my morning of thoughts when the robots on youtube finally got one right and recommended a video I actually wanted to click and watch intently. I would encourage you to click it on and listen to George as you read and then go back and re-watch with the added visuals. When I first setup any sort of a "display tank" I had some pretty high expectations for myself. I had a tank, with good substrate, easy plants, and I wanted to let the plants grow before I did anything else. The idea being it was a planted tank, not an aquarium. I want to have plants in my aesthetic and I wanted to be able to have consistency in my dosing schedule and just enjoy the greenery. I planted the tank, it looks amazing and like 100's of videos I'd seen of aquascapes that led to success. Immediately I had issues with the plants uprooting themselves, not taking hold, melting, and withering away. All of that $ spent on plants was basically a waste. Attempt 2, I did a lot more research on planting depth, tried to ensure they didn't pop out of the substrate and things stayed in place, withered away, melted, and was basically a waste. Attempt 3, I tried to add the anubias from the tubs, convert it to new growth and then add another batch of plants and *hope* they actually take hold. Things were on edge of sustainability.... I can't keep buying plants to fill in this tank and have failures. This is the point when everything started to crash continuously for me. The anubias had BBA, the dwarf hairgrass had brush algae, melt, KH issues, lighting issues, lack of nutrients, and ultimately was not setup for success. Between power failures, my own struggles with consistency, overdosing because I thought it was a lack of nutrients causing the plants to fail and noticing too many shadows on the tank I had to take a step back and really just adjust how I was viewing the entire situation. One of Cory's videos had encouraged consistency, longer time between water changes, a month or several weeks at minimum. I was focusing on consistent weekly water changes and trying to keep that schedule, adjusting my lighting and dosing as a focus for my changes. There was some success to playing with those variables (separately), but ultimately the tank did crash and has struggled. I currently have the lights turned way down and I currently have the dosing set for 2/3 of a dose 2x a week of easy green. I think every sentence above speaks to how frustrated I have been with my inability to grow anything. I know if I add a stem plant in the back, it will help. If I add moss it will help. My struggle is getting enough new growth so that the entirely of the new growth can push out the algae for good. More on this concept later. I have had the tank to a place of stability where the algae is not increasing several times. Weeks of stability, but eventually something happens and it always takes hold again. I have even gone to doubling, tripling the amount of amano shrimp in my tank as a means to passively increase the ability of the tank to clean itself. Through all of these struggles there has been a few nuggets of advice I want to pass along and hope that if anyone is as discouraged as I am, to hold your chin up and try to keep pushing through the algae issues. First, I really want to commend, ecstatically so, the ability of amano shrimp to be great and cleaning algae in a tank. It doesn't matter what it is, they will *eventually* get to it. My best example I can give you is 2 bushes of anubias that have pretty long roots. It's almost like clockwork how they let it fill with BBA, clean it, go elsewhere, and then cycle back to clean those roots. Waking up and seeing those pale bright green roots is one of my favorite things. They can clean any variety of algae and they will do so without needing much of anything besides oxygenation and time. Second, manual removal and manual effort is the only real way to get through a severe algae issue. When it first started I was at a loss because every bit of my anubias was caked in BBA covered leaves. If I remove those leaves, the plant will be encouraged to grow, but have nothing but a rhizome and a few roots to do so. Giving the plant time to do it's work, manually removing the leaves as new ones appear, scraping it off leaves when I can, using a brush on hardscape, scrubbing the hard algae off of the glass and hardscape, and manually taking out every bit of frustration on algae growing on the equipment is the only real way to make progress. It's going to float around the tank and massive water changes will help to siphon out a lot of the floating debris, but it takes constant weekly effort to keep brushing it off and keep pushing it back to get ahead. Especially if the algae is stubborn and persistent. On wood, use a knife or razor blade and scrape it off. Use a sponge or stiff brush on rocks to remove it. Use a soft toothbrush on your leaves and then siphon everything out. Remove the filter, clean it thoroughly, and get ready to do the same thing next week if you need to. Keep doing this, until you get things going the right direction. That is how you give your plants a fighting chance when you're dealing with severe BBA. Third, and I want to say this is my opinion only, I think everything that is green or brown brush algae and green hair algae can simply be stopped by adjusting lighting, dosing, and giving the tank time. There are members here who have algae balls for their tanks as a main feature plant. It's very cool to see. I would prefer moss instead, but I totally understand there can be an aesthetic where something like green hair algae looks nice on the back wall of a tank as it grows in. Manually removing it once, fixing the tank lighting, adjusting dosing, I think will generally fix the vast majority of issues for most tanks. The plants can generally out-compete those two types of algae pretty easily. A lot of people struggle when the brown/green brush algae becomes the BBA variety over time as things worsen. Finally, what do I mean by the chicken and egg thing? Well, this is where I am at now. I have to fix algae so I can have plants, but I can't fix algae because I don't have enough plants. Sometimes plants literally just won't work well in your water. Be it the type of plant and parameters in your water or a situation where those plants came from water that is very different than what you can provide. I think a lot of my own struggles come from water chemistry differences as well as not having the bioload to actually out-compete the algae in question. This is where I go back to my first statement, I simply want to grow some moss.... I am on the verge of getting rid of this stinkin' BBA, it's been a journey and I'm hopeful. Make sure you have enough plants in the tank. That's the final tip. If you're really, severely struggling with plants, add something like PSO that will just out-compete everything in the tank and grow literally.... like a weed. (ref. Goliad Farms and their love of hornwort). The main thing is to keep pushing through the struggle, adapt when you need to, and pay attention to what the tank is telling you. Even daily, try to figure out what is going on. It might mean spending 20-30 minutes sitting there and pondering. It might mean testing 3-5x a week to track how your plants are using fertilizers. Understanding what is going on is critically important and above all be patient and try to give your plants the best chance to grow in. If you need to, consider adding more.

Hello All! I have been seeing a few things on videos online and I've seen things over the years from pretty much every youtuber that covers the hobby on this topic. I was reflecting on Zenzo's video in my head while watching a random video this week and it let me to a conclusion. Snails might not be a beginner friendly option for new hobbyists. Let me explain. If we think about this logically there should be some snails that you'd want to avoid just to make your life easier. Some snails might be better suited for a beginner hobbyist, while others should be avoided. Beginner Friendly Snail Traits: 1. This snail would help eat algae and leftover food 2. This snail would breed slowly or not be able to reproduce in freshwater as a means to limit bioload impact 3. This snail would not damage equipment easily 4. This snail would not harm anything in the tank, such as other fish 5. This snail would not cause exceed "need" (more on this later) In the wild, there are a lot of different methods of survival. One of the main methods for creatures lower on the food chain is to simply propel the population forward using a sheer number of offspring. One amano shrimp female can have hundreds or thousands of zoes per spawn. some fish can do the same thing. Certain snails also use this tactic in some fashion. If you put that methodology into an enclosed ecosystem and you don't have a way to control that population boom, then logically it is going to be a perpetual issue over time. For clarity, I do not know enough to say "avoid these snail species", but I have ran into this issue in the past. Maybe this becomes an issue in a few weeks or even months, but it is often an issue and something that beginner hobbyists very well could struggle to overcome. The most often beginner advice is to recognize the tank as an ecosystem and understand that snails can play a key role in that ecosystem, but as Dean mentions in the video above, there are some issues when it comes to how much of a bioload the snails can impart. Along the same line of thinking, how snails reproduce can compound this issue. Someone sees this "beehive" looking structure in their tank and it instantly freaks them out. Honestly, it would freak me out too if I just happened upon the tank and I saw a big snail clutch. Nerites pepper hardscape and plants with egg casings which can be very difficult to remove for some hobbyist. Some snails use cloning and don't require a male and female to reproduce. There is a lot of methods of reproduction and if I was a beginner hobbyist trying to understand what is going on in my tank easily, I would really struggle at times to fully grasp all of the things to look out for in terms of keeping snails. Worst case scenario, someone goes to the pet store to buy a single mystery snail. Once they get home the snail lays a clutch that is fertile and they don't notice the clutch under the hood on their tank. After a bit of time one snail is now hundreds, in a 10G tank that isn't meant to have that load. I can see how an experience like this would push someone to avoid the hobby if that was their first experience. This also extends pretty heavily into pest snails (pond or bladder snails) hitchhiking onto a plant. FInally, the last point on the list above and trying to avoid a snail that would put too much "need" on a tank. We do know snails can use up the minerals in the water. Whether this is done via food or done via mineral absorption, there are going to be some circumstances where someone might run into GH/KH issues in their water and that could lead to a PH crash, shrimp deaths, fish not having the correct water parameters, and a lot of what I am getting at here is some pretty complex issues that aren't immediately intuitive for someone who is just trying to get their hands wet in this hobby. Especially a younger hobbyist, a true beginner, I can only imagine how slippery the slope can be when it comes to something like this. (and this is something we have seen on the forums!) Ultimately, I don't really know what my beginner recommendation would be for a snail. I think using amano shrimp might be easier for most beginner tanks, but that is just my own perspective. I have ran into issues keeping snails and I was that beginner hobbyist at the time. I have learned a lot more about them since and I do plan to have snails eventually. What do you think? What would your best "beginner friendly" snail be and why?