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Purposely Growing Algae

shangman

Member
Joined
13 Jul 2020
Messages
1,153
Location
London
Hi All,

I'm making a new scape with a friend of mine, and we are interested by the idea of a tank scaped with algae, where it's grown it on purpose and try to make it look good.

Sometimes I think a BBA covered bit of hardscape looks great, or that short green fuzzy algae that's like beautiful green fur. And of course in nature there's shedloads of algaes everywhere and to me it looks great.

But these two algaes (pics below) never really grew in my tanks much at all except for tiny dots, so I wondered if you have grown them and what the parameters are, and if anybody has some cultures I could try?


01-002_89094aca-7d67-4ebe-bbbe-75a1fe240085_grande.jpg
WwmAfAB.jpg
 
Unusual idea @shangman, I can see the attraction to BBA tufts on hardscape, but I maybe struggle to see the attraction to have it covering plants. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that though!

I guess you just try and reverse engineer what you would normally do to avoid algae. So for BBA you'd want a high dissolved organic loading, a decent amount of light, randomly fluctuating CO2 levels, a very high level of flow, perhaps an ammonia source and probably no plants (as they'd likely die anyway).

You've probably already seen this, but Rachel O'Leary grew a serious BBA carpet in her tank:

 
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