A huge mess!

[Hookman]

I had an insane green hair algae problem in a 55. I changed more than half the water and took each rock out and srcubbed it in a bucket. Some of the rocks look good, and about after a week some of the green hair was coming back on certain rocks. My tank was like a swamp, It took me a long time to get around to cleaning it. Do you think the rocks could be bad and need to be replaced. My black ocelaris and spotted mandarin along with some peppermint shrimp survived everything though. My frogspawn is the only coral I have left. I also pulled out my DSB and put new sand in, about 1 inch. Any ideas about the rocks, plus I need snails and the like.

 

[melosu58]

Water changes and scrubbing are OK but they are band aid solutions. They only cover up the problem and not solve it. Read these articles and lets try to starve the algea out.

http://www.fantasyreef.com/database/index.php?p=getitem&db_id=11&item_id=5

http://www.aquariumadvice.com/article_view.php?faq=2&fldAuto=14

 

[lando]

What are doing will go a long way to helping. However, as Mike mentioned, you need to identify the source of the problem or it will return. Look into feeding, source water, PO4 and NO3 as causes.

 

[Hara]

ok, your post mentions several things that need to be addressed. You said you "cleaned" the rocks. How did you do this? Depending on the answer to that, you may have killed off the biologicals on it and it will need to reseed. YOu mention survivors, which means you have had losses..what kind of losses? You also said that you removed the DSB. This needs to be done carefully, with close watch of the water chemistry aftward. The DSB was part of the filtration. When you removed it, you removed a big part of your tank filtration and this could have caused an ammonia spike and definitely excess nutrients in the water.

The algae problem could actually be doing you a service while all these other changes are going on in your tank. Algae feeds off the excess.

 

[macman7010]

Hook,

My guess is that you have excessive phosphates in your water. Of course without having you do a phosphate test I cannot be sure, though I know when I started out on the marine field years back I had bad hair algae and phosphates were the culprit.

I would first look at your water chemistry and post test results so we can guide you in ways to better water quality. Once that is taken care of I would get a good clean-up crew to take care of eating the any algae that might exist on the rocks and perhaps even get some herbivorous fish. Also installing a refugium would be a good step in controlling algae with algae, kind of like fighting fire with fire!