BBA slowly appearing

[qoob]

I think I accidentally introduced BBA in my tank with a bucephalandra I added recently, and now it is slowly spreading around.

Tank volume is 120 liters (probably less considering high substrate etc), 70 days old. Medium lights, on 8 hours a day. I inject CO2 at 2bps, which turns the drop checker green (had some issues with shrimp when co2 concentrations were higher). Co2 goes on and off 1.5 hours before the lights.

I dose EI daily with a dosing pump (small doses throughout the day). 10ml per day of this https://www.aquasabi.com/Aqua-Rebell-Makro-Basic-Estimative-Index as macro and first 3ml per day of this https://www.aquasabi.com/Aqua-Rebell-Mikro-Basic-Eisen as micro. I reduced the amount to 2ml per day, and now to 1ml per day. I don't know if this will help or not not, but excess iron apparently can cause BBA.

I do partial water changes weekly. Any help is appreciated!

 

[libertybelle]

Bba is the worst. Burn the tank with a flamethrower and start fresh.

Ok maybe not but I have been tempted. All the standard algae advice of ensure your tank is balanced applies to this as well. Just like any other algae it will take advantage of any imbalance.

In addition to that spot treatments of excel or h202 can get rid of patches or rescue any infested dipable plants ( if you have any anubius for example.)

If your tank is not fully stocked Siamese algae eaters can help. (Do your research though as there are lots of look alikes that won’t touch it) The best bba eater I’ve ever accidentally discovered was when my lfs sold me these little yellow nosed shrimp which we both thought were amanos (in retrospect I think they were caridina longirostris) they demolished every spec of bba in my tank. So if you ever see them at your lfs your problem is solved. Look for the slightly elongated nose and bit of yellow on the body.

Nerites and young amanos (the older ones learn about fish food and don’t bother ) in my experience will not help with existing tufts but can prevent new tufts from spreading as an aid to other methods. (I think they get it when it’s small and less tough.)

 

[qoob]

Bba is the worst. Burn the tank with a flamethrower and start fresh.

Ok maybe not but I have been tempted. All the standard algae advice of ensure your tank is balanced applies to this as well. Just like any other algae it will take advantage of any imbalance.

In addition to that spot treatments of excel or h202 can get rid of patches or rescue any infested dipable plants ( if you have any anubius for example.)

If your tank is not fully stocked Siamese algae eaters can help. (Do your research though as there are lots of look alikes that won’t touch it) The best bba eater I’ve ever accidentally discovered was when my lfs sold me these little yellow nosed shrimp which we both thought were amanos (in retrospect I think they were caridina longirostris) they demolished every spec of bba in my tank. So if you ever see them at your lfs your problem is solved. Look for the slightly elongated nose and bit of yellow on the body.

Nerites and young amanos (the older ones learn about fish food and don’t bother ) in my experience will not help with existing tufts but can prevent new tufts from spreading as an aid to other methods. (I think they get it when it’s small and less tough.)

Thanks! I've tried spot dosing with both Excel and H2O2 on separate occasions, with limited success. As expected, it appears on slow growing epiphytes the most (Anubias/Buces), but I've seen a bunch on amazon swords. I've tried scraping it off and cutting affected leaves, but again to no real benefit.

Can't add any more fish to the tank and I think Siamese algae eaters are a bit too big for my tank anyway, but I've got 4 otos (and ~30 scared shrimp in their hidey-holes) that don't seem very interested when there is easier algae to munch on. I've been contemplating adding Amanos, but I'm not sure I want to.

I can't (or don't want to, because of my shrimpies) treat the whole tank with excel so I think treating in locally is my only chance, but that apparently does not solve the issue as I don't know the underlying cause yet. It looks better for a while but a few days later there is more BBA than what there was before I started.

After posting the OP I've done the following:
Diminished light and CO2 period from 8 hours to 6½ hours
Took out the contaminated epiphytes that were not glued in, put them in a glass jar with a double dose of Seachem Excel. Leaving them on that treatment for 2 days.
Spot treated the epiphytes I couldn't remove with H2O2

What I'm wondering is, how can I fix the underlying cause? What could it be? I would think nutrient deficiencies cannot be possible since I'm dosing EI, but maybe there is too much of something? How do I start finding the balance? BBA is a bit of a *****, since if the process takes close to a month my tank will be a goner without weekly maintenance, and frankly I'm a bit worried about doing big maintenance jobs so often since the fish can get stressed.

 

[libertybelle]

You’ll need to chat with someone more knowledgeable about EI and CO2 balance as I’ve only ever done low tech tanks. I know I’ve read a lot that inconsistent or insufficient co2 is often a culprit but take anything I say about a high tech set up with a grain of salt; I just don’t know them well.

I don’t suppose it’s particularly reassuring but once I got bba I never got rid of it. Even with the bba eating shrimp. They controlled it spectacularly but once they were gone it came back. On the more reassuring side once I got my tank balanced it was very controllable and never bothered me to see a spec here or there. Every once in a while i’d pull out the slow growing plants and dip in h202 and spot treat any hardscape it had grabbed onto. When things are in balance the plants really do outcompete it well. If I looked I’d find some tufts but it just couldn’t get a foothold on the plants.

For me in my low tech / low light setup the solution (aside from the amazing shrimp who made my life so easy for a while and I couldn’t find again!) was more consistent lighting (wasn’t even using a timer at the time) and small but more consistent fert /excel dosing. Combined with the algae eating crew that served as preventative. ( As I said few things will eat the tough grown clumps but I’m convinced that my nerites would get the young softer stuff. )

I never had problems with excel with any of my shrimp/inverts. I had nerites, ghost shrimp, amanos and those caridina (I think) short nose shrimp in the tank at the time. I also had a few RCS in there for a while; but it was their fishy tank mates that did them in, not the excel! I did half doses since the light intensity was fairly low.

 

[BBradbury]

Hello q...

Algae gets a bad name, but it's really one of the best natural water filters and gives the tank a natural look. Algae thrives in water with a lot of unused nutrients. Either your fish or your plants aren't using all the food you're giving them. Light has little to do with the problem, it's the food source that you need to limit. Increase the amount of the water you change and change it a bit more often. Gradually reduce the food too. Do these things until you see the algae begin to die back. If you take away the food, the algae will be controlled.

B

 

[qoob]

Hello q...

Algae gets a bad name, but it's really one of the best natural water filters and gives the tank a natural look. Algae thrives in water with a lot of unused nutrients. Either your fish or your plants aren't using all the food you're giving them. Light has little to do with the problem, it's the food source that you need to limit. Increase the amount of the water you change and change it a bit more often. Gradually reduce the food too. Do these things until you see the algae begin to die back. If you take away the food, the algae will be controlled.

B

I agree when it comes to most algae, but BBA just looks unnatural to me. Black fur balls everywhere in an otherwise lush green tank seems wrong. And it's not even working as natural food to my algae eaters, since even they despise the stuff

I feed my fish twice a day so I can cut that down, but I do remove everything that was not eaten (floating food, removed with a surface skimmer). I'm already changing around 50% per week, as recommended when dosing EI. How I understood EI is that overloading ferts actually gives the plants a chance to grow instead of algae, so I'm having a hard time understanding what might cause algae in my tank. Am I adding too little ferts? According to the instructions I could be adding up to 12.5 ml of my macro fert daily (vs. 8ml being the current dose) and up to 1.5ml micro fert daily (vs. 1ml that I dose currently). However when I measured PO4, K and Fe, they were very high. PO4 and K were off the scale (PO4 test caps at 1.8 mg/l and K at 15mg/l) and Fe was at 0.2-0.4 mg/l. Nitrates are however are always under 20 mg/l. So all the nitrates I add in ferts and fish poop seem to be consumed well enough, but the other ferts accumulate a lot. Could this be it? How to fix it?

I have a lot of plant mass, and it is also growing at quite a good pace. Here you can see a gif of 10 day progress https://imgur.com/DwAjZss
Bacopas produce a new "stem" in 4 days, I get new buce and anubias leaves at 1-2 per week and my Amazon sword runner just spreads and spreads.