candymancan
Member
- Joined
- 8 Nov 2014
- Messages
- 99
I have never seen this algae before in my 20 years fishkeeping.. I've delt with green spot, red algae, BBA, and green hair or string algae but not this brown stuff.. Its in my 44g Pentagon discus tank.. Its different looking then BBA or other hair algae I have seen. You cant see the strands its like really fluffy and like cloudy almost.
It grows on every single plant in my aquarium but doesn't touch the rocks or filters or anything like that.. In fact its nearly killed off my once big watersprite and same with my telethara cardinalis. It grows on their roots and smothers the leaves.
Since its my discus tank I feed the fish 3 times a day at least.. 2 times with freeze dried blood worm and once with tetra flakes (plus shrimp). I change the water in this tank every 2 days sometimes 3 and I change about 50-70% of it when I do. I have an Eheim 2217 canister filtering it, and I use a single slot tetra 30 Whisper HOB which has a sponge on the intake and I use 2 bags of 100ml purigen.. I do this to try to keep nitrates are there lowest if possible since purigen sucks organics before they turn into ammonia and ect.
Water temp is 82-84f, PH is around 6.8-7.2, Phosphates which I thought was odd was 0.. My tap water has at least 1.0-1.5ppm of phosphates in it.. and all of my planted tanks usually are around that.. But this tank it was 0 and I don't have many plants in it, which leads me to believe this algae is eating all the phosphates. My lighting is Orbit 2x 65w Power compact light. It has a 6700/6700 light and a Actinic 420/460.. I never used the actinic though when this algae started, I always just used the 6700/6700 light. So I figured maybe the lighting is too low so I started to keep my actinic on ( I like actinic because it makes my discus and electric blue rams really pop out) The light is also on stands so its like 6 inches above the water line and the tank itself its what 24 inches tall.. So it isn't like my lighting is super high.. its deff in the medium range but not really high..
I don't dose ferts either, mainly because my discus I noticed act extremely weird when I use flourish.. And I don't want to kill $400 worth of fish in my tank..
It grows on every single plant in my aquarium but doesn't touch the rocks or filters or anything like that.. In fact its nearly killed off my once big watersprite and same with my telethara cardinalis. It grows on their roots and smothers the leaves.
Since its my discus tank I feed the fish 3 times a day at least.. 2 times with freeze dried blood worm and once with tetra flakes (plus shrimp). I change the water in this tank every 2 days sometimes 3 and I change about 50-70% of it when I do. I have an Eheim 2217 canister filtering it, and I use a single slot tetra 30 Whisper HOB which has a sponge on the intake and I use 2 bags of 100ml purigen.. I do this to try to keep nitrates are there lowest if possible since purigen sucks organics before they turn into ammonia and ect.
Water temp is 82-84f, PH is around 6.8-7.2, Phosphates which I thought was odd was 0.. My tap water has at least 1.0-1.5ppm of phosphates in it.. and all of my planted tanks usually are around that.. But this tank it was 0 and I don't have many plants in it, which leads me to believe this algae is eating all the phosphates. My lighting is Orbit 2x 65w Power compact light. It has a 6700/6700 light and a Actinic 420/460.. I never used the actinic though when this algae started, I always just used the 6700/6700 light. So I figured maybe the lighting is too low so I started to keep my actinic on ( I like actinic because it makes my discus and electric blue rams really pop out) The light is also on stands so its like 6 inches above the water line and the tank itself its what 24 inches tall.. So it isn't like my lighting is super high.. its deff in the medium range but not really high..
I don't dose ferts either, mainly because my discus I noticed act extremely weird when I use flourish.. And I don't want to kill $400 worth of fish in my tank..
I added floating plants so I could reduce the light getting through to the tank but still have the lighting period I wanted to see the fish.
