Hi from ‘algae’geddon

[GagaGuppy]

I’ve had tanks before, all amateur..

But, I’ve never made such a big mistake.

First I cycled my new 10 gallon tank for two months with nothing but daylight and a Java Fern. I took it out and kept just the babies and got it ready for fish. I spent hours planning the hard scape (in vain), but I didn’t mind the fern in the filter for some reason..After I got my water testing consistently, I stole some inbred guppies from my grandpa. One of them looks like a seahorse and there is absolutely nothing wrong with him! He comes from a long, prosperous line of seahorse guppies! Photo’s don’t do his grace justice.
My mistake was thinking I’d like the look of algae on my rocks instead of flushing dollars on moss again. the algae consumed the ferns almost everytime I washed it off. My tank was pretty low tech for a few months, only thing special was RO water and a good 12 hours of light for absolutely no reason. 
This is the aftermath with 50% water changes every other week and very deliberate feeding, after another 2 months of the Fluval Plant light… with no plants… I was pretty much just farming whatever algae this is. I changed my mind and got some feeder shrimp and just hoped the stones had leeched enough minerals back into my water to keep them alive and clean everything up. I turned my light down some.

I didn’t take any pictures the next few months of the evolution, the shrimp are invisible anyways. I kept fighting the algae and eventually got it corralled to the glass where it made nice mowed pastures for the shrimps and I could watch em close too. Lots of molts and only 3 shrimp casualties in 3 months is pretty dang good for me. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure it’s only females left. They eat some mini sinkers but mostly everybody is on freeze dried blood worms.

Q?
If I keep buying RO water do I need to continually supplement to balance minerals and hardness for shrimp? Should I stop getting RO? Waiting on a gh/kh test kit to deliver this week.

Does anyone have bad experience with freeze dried food for fancy shrimpcesses?

In the last few months I got a second 3 gallon tank for the coolest beta I’ve ever seen, but his home is still too ugly to take any pictures of. I’ll get a rimless 6.5 gallon cube next month. He has some Monte Carlo that only grows on one side but hopefully it will make a carpet I can feed into the other tank.
I bought him a small Oase internal skimmer hoping to clear some of the oily biofilm. I also added an air stone to both tanks. First the beta exploded a bubble nest with more o2 and the skimmer pushing up some tannins from the soil, but when he and I both realized it was actually just dirt in the water column we both changed our minds.

I decided to get a bunch of plants again, and get a co2 injector soon after. Maybe I should have got the co2 first.. and some liquid fert..

And now I’m stuck with a self made catastrophe. A dark algae took over that the shrimp don’t seem to love to eat. I didn’t realize this was quite a problem… it’s only been 24 hours since I took all of the plants from their beta tank quarantine and got them in the soil. They’re covered in spores. I think a lot of the muck on the rocks is actual soil or stuff moss might like to be stuck on, but the spores are going to eat everything! I don’t know what to do now besides wait and see.

Q?

How do I preserve my glossostigma for the next 2 weeks before I get a co2 system delivered?

 

And, should I labor over washing the spores off of leaves until I get whatever water parameter is out of whack in check, or the plants start soaking enough stuff up?
 

Should I risk the plants dying, that are waiting for co2, with the added stress of a blackout? Or just get the fancy and slow growing ones out until the algae is in check?

 

I’ll add this in Streetwise’s page too, but at first glance,

Should I change the strength on this light down for a 10 gallon with no riser and floaters barely coming in? I don’t want to accidentally deprive the plants of enough light trying to get rid of the algae.

 

and!

how do I upload videos?

does anyone know how to remove meta data inside iOS for forum posts? 
 

Excited to learn from the collective conscioussness! Thanks for any responses!

[Guppysnail]

On 8/26/2024 at 6:08 PM, GagaGuppy said:

how do I upload videos?

Upload the videos to YouTube and post the link. 

[SantaMonica]

This might help with the overall fight against algae:

What do all algae (and cyano too) need to survive? Nutrients. What are nutrients? Ammonia/ammonium, nitrite, nitrate, phosphate and urea are the major ones. Which ones cause most of the algae in your tank? These same ones. Why can't you just remove these nutrients and eliminate all the algae in your tank? Because these nutrients are the result of the animals you keep.

So how do your animals "make" these nutrients? Well a large part the nutrients comes from pee (urea). Pee is very high in urea and ammonia, and these are a favorite food of algae and some bacteria. This is why your glass will always need cleaning; because the pee hits the glass before anything else, and algae on the glass consume the ammonia and urea immediately (using photosynthesis) and grow more. In the ocean and lakes, phytoplankton consume the ammonia and urea in open water, and seaweed consume it in shallow areas, but in a tank you don't have enough space or water volume for this, and, your other filters or animals often remove or kill the phytoplankton or seaweed anyway. So, the nutrients stay in your tank.

Then, the ammonia/ammonium hits your rocks, and the periphyton on the rocks consumes more ammonia and urea. Periphyton is both algae and animals, and is the reason your rocks change color after a few weeks from when they were new. Then the ammonia goes inside the rock, or hits your sand, and bacteria there convert it into nitrite and nitrate. However, the nutrients are still in your tank.

Also let's not forget phosphate, which comes from solid organic food particles. When these particles are eaten by microbes and clean up crews, the organic phosphorus in them is converted into phosphate. However, the nutrients are still in your tank.

So whenever you have algae or cyano "problems", you simply have not exported enough nutrients out of your tank compared to how much you have been feeding (note: live rock can absorb phosphate for up to a year, making it seem like there was never a problem. Then after a year, there is a problem).

So just increase your nutrient exports. You could also reduce feeding, and this has the same effect, but it's certainly not fun when you want to feed your animals :)

[MWilk]

It looks like your substrate is being disturbed excessively, dirt has settled everywhere, and nutrients from that soil is dispersing into the water. Have you tested for nitrate? I would recommend turning the lights down a bit on the length of time and adding more plants, rapid growth, water column feeding plants. Maybe even just some pothos on the outside of the tank to suck up nutrients.