Cleaners for algae?

[flanque]

Heya,

I've been fighting a brown algae problem for a while now. I've reduced feeding to every other day, moved lighting to 7hrs and do fortnightly water changes. I still get this algae on the rocks.

I'm now thinking of some cleaner crew guys or something else that will eat the algae. Are starfish a good choice or are they just likely to die due to difficulty in keeping them?

I was thinking of a sea urchant too.


Thoughts?

[Devilishturtles]

Is it just on the rocks or also on the sand? What is your clean up crew like now?

Astrea snails are the ones that seem to really like picking at the rocks. Urchins are good algae grazers, but they also like to eat your coraline algae and knock things around, so make sure your rockwork is steady.

[roka64]

My pincushion urchin is an algae eating machine, hair and coraline included. They like to pick up objects, including snails, rock, small coral and even my old hydrometer and lugging them arouns the tank. I have never seen him topple rock, but I have mine stacked pretty well. My pencil urchin does not carry stuff around but has wedged between rocks and knocked one off. My next urchin will be a ling spined urchin, they don't carry much around and will not wedge between rocks.

[melosu58]

When you are doing PWC`s are you drawing as much of the algea out with your siphon hose?This will help to get rid of it also.

[flanque]

I basically have a single hermit crab, which incidentally I haven't seen for about a fortnight now. This is common though and I'm sure like in the past he'll pop up somewhere.

The algae is basically on the rocks, but there is some on the sand. I typically just clean the sand by sifting it around every few days and it's back to milky white again.

When I do water changes, the algae isn't coming off with the siphon so I cannot remove much that way. It's not long hair algae, its just that short brown stuff, it's just all over the place.

As for the names.. I think I'd need some pictures or common names as the LFS doesn't use anything but common names, or even simpler with just "snails". I have found this...

http://www.reefcorner.com/SpecimenSh...trea_snail.htm

I'm sure I've used these before and they were so stupid they kept falling over to be eaten by the hermit or the fish themselves. They were quite large ones though, so perhaps some much smaller ones would do the trick..? Are there any hermits that are decent at algae eating?

I also found this.. I'm having difficulty seeing any large difference between the Astraea and Trochus snails. Can anyone help with some pointers so I can choose correctly at the LFS?

http://www.reefland.com/rho/0305/medprod3.php



Any tips?

[flanque]

I ended up buying 8 small "algae snails"... I'll take a picture tonight and post it but these ones seem far better at keeping themselves upright than the larger ones I've had.