Algae identification and advice

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Everything just keeps getting worse so I'm going to just cut my losses and give up the hobby, appreciate the help but I'm done fighting with this pos, plants melting again, staghorn out of control, hair out of control and I honestly just can't do it anymore, thanks again folks.

If you want to cut your losses, scrape the plants, give everything a giant clean.

Dirt + cap the tank. Plant heavy + perform some large water changes for a month, and then let the tank be. Go look up Dustinsfishtanks on YouTube. Its an easy way to grow plants. No dosing needed for 1-2 years. Easy, simple setup.

Run your lights on an estimated 30-40 PAR @ substrate level for 8-12 hours a day, and perform some weekly water changes. Simple and easy.

I think you are expecting a lot from your plants in a low tech environment. They will be slow growing, and that is okay. It's hasn't been a month yet. These things take patience to get right.

Don't give up over some algae. Lets see some pics of the tank and plants as of now??
 
If you want to cut your losses, scrape the plants, give everything a giant clean.

Dirt + cap the tank. Plant heavy + perform some large water changes for a month, and then let the tank be. Go look up Dustinsfishtanks on YouTube. Its an easy way to grow plants. No dosing needed for 1-2 years. Easy, simple setup.

Run your lights on an estimated 30-40 PAR @ substrate level for 8-12 hours a day, and perform some weekly water changes. Simple and easy.

I think you are expecting a lot from your plants in a low tech environment. They will be slow growing, and that is okay. It's hasn't been a month yet. These things take patience to get right.

Don't give up over some algae. Lets see some pics of the tank and plants as of now??
Don't have the money to do this, don't have the patience to keep on tweaking things, everything's getting worse not better, I'mbGonna have to go in and trim literally every single crypt that's melted..
I don't have a par meter and I don't have a calculator to guess what my par @the substrate is so I'm sol about that, also if I wanted to start over it would be with a new tank and stand, my tanks 20 years old and the silicone is in bad shape and I dont have another tank to put the fish in while the dirt is releasing its ammonia in the n rw not to mention the 2 week empty waiting period so it can settle and I dint have blow out.

It looks good from afar, but there's literally staghorn on every plant, thread on my buch, Wisteria looking like junk even it should grow like a weed, all crypts melting [emoji107][emoji107]
 
Seems like I remember you standing on the ledge before Rick. Change it up man.
Z×C (scientist) - Calban (naturalist) both have successful but different approaches to the planted aquarium. What they both have in common is a green thumb. Not everybody has that. "Change it up".
If you need a new tank, (Craigslist). People in my area can't even give away 55 gal tanks. You can buy big tanks that have been drilled, dirt cheap. That's an easy fix too. Need new substrate, Lowe's / Home Depot- pea gravel, pool filter gravel, ten bucks.
I just came in from working out. I'm watching the OU / Texas game. Across the room is my African reef tank. Not a plant in it ! just big white holey rocks and very cool looking African Cichlids. No need to calculate ferts, duration & intensity of lights. No worries about substrate composition. All I have to do is a weekly WC, change up the hardscape when I get bored with it and manage cichlid aggession. What you are attempting sounds more like work than a hobby. I snapped a pic of my plantless, low maintenence tank from the comfort of my easy chair. It's just like a coral reef. Try something new.
 

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Patience is the key but we just don’t seem to have that anymore.

Aquariums are predictable in the early stages. You can’t avoid certain things. Fungus, Diatoms, Cyanobacteria, GSA. These are stages that seem to crop up as the tank matures. You have to get through those with patience. Its nothing more than that...
 
Patience is the key but we just don’t seem to have that anymore.

Aquariums are predictable in the early stages. You can’t avoid certain things. Fungus, Diatoms, Cyanobacteria, GSA. These are stages that seem to crop up as the tank matures. You have to get through those with patience. Its nothing more than that...
What's the most frustrating is I know my tap water doesn't have anything in it as far as magnesium, calcium etc etc my tap tds is 30 kh 6 gh 6 so I added the equilibrium to add those to the tanj, but it's ultra weird as high nutrients do not nessessarily catse algae where as too little will because you're not feeding the plants and algae needs way less nutrients than plants, and unhealthy plants cause algae, I'm trying tonight to go fully dark but my boesesman is a jerk and likes to torment the others if I go full dark, reason I'm doing this is because people say lunars cause algae.

What I dont get is I have green spot that's caused by low phosphates.... My phosphate is 3.5 [emoji848] it's just Hella frustrating
 
Seems like I remember you standing on the ledge before Rick. Change it up man.
Z×C (scientist) - Calban (naturalist) both have successful but different approaches to the planted aquarium. What they both have in common is a green thumb. Not everybody has that. "Change it up".
If you need a new tank, (Craigslist). People in my area can't even give away 55 gal tanks. You can buy big tanks that have been drilled, dirt cheap. That's an easy fix too. Need new substrate, Lowe's / Home Depot- pea gravel, pool filter gravel, ten bucks.
I just came in from working out. I'm watching the OU / Texas game. Across the room is my African reef tank. Not a plant in it ! just big white holey rocks and very cool looking African Cichlids. No need to calculate ferts, duration & intensity of lights. No worries about substrate composition. All I have to do is a weekly WC, change up the hardscape when I get bored with it and manage cichlid aggession. What you are attempting sounds more like work than a hobby. I snapped a pic of my plantless, low maintenence tank from the comfort of my easy chair. It's just like a coral reef. Try something new.
Nice tank I don't like cichlids, I like planted tanks which if I cannot achieve I will be done with the hobby, I don't want a used tank if I get another one it will be new so I don't have to re silicone it.
 
What's the most frustrating is I know my tap water doesn't have anything in it as far as magnesium, calcium etc etc my tap tds is 30 kh 6 gh 6 so I added the equilibrium to add those to the tanj, but it's ultra weird as high nutrients do not nessessarily catse algae where as too little will because you're not feeding the plants and algae needs way less nutrients than plants, and unhealthy plants cause algae, I'm trying tonight to go fully dark but my boesesman is a jerk and likes to torment the others if I go full dark, reason I'm doing this is because people say lunars cause algae.

What I dont get is I have green spot that's caused by low phosphates.... My phosphate is 3.5 [emoji848] it's just Hella frustrating



Are you dosing any liquid carbon at all?
 
What's the most frustrating is I know my tap water doesn't have anything in it as far as magnesium, calcium etc etc my tap tds is 30 kh 6 gh 6 so I added the equilibrium to add those to the tanj, but it's ultra weird as high nutrients do not nessessarily catse algae where as too little will because you're not feeding the plants and algae needs way less nutrients than plants, and unhealthy plants cause algae, I'm trying tonight to go fully dark but my boesesman is a jerk and likes to torment the others if I go full dark, reason I'm doing this is because people say lunars cause algae.

What I dont get is I have green spot that's caused by low phosphates.... My phosphate is 3.5 [emoji848] it's just Hella frustrating


Potluck. You don’t get it because you’re not supposed to get it. I used to believe all those myths. The only plausible reason adding more phosphate takes care of GSA is that it directly kills it. I personally just don’t see that as a desirable thing. Just like I don’t see adding chemiclean, algaefix, glutaradehyde or hydrogen peroxide as a desirable thing. Hell I don’t even see adding nitrates as a desirable thing. I’ve done it all though mate. Remember me telling you nitrates were harmless to fish? That MAY be true in some context but the reality is they don’t belong in water bodies that our fish and plants originate.

The hobby has gone backwards. We’ve gone from air driven sponge and and under gravel filters, heavy fish loads, minimal water changes, gravel only substrates, stock T8 lighting fixtures to light loads, large frequent water changes, big electrical motor filters with massive turnover rates, powerful lighting and expensive plant substrates all in the space of about 80 years. It’s honestly changed for the worse in my opinion. Its all marketing. People had perfectly healthy systems back then and most I’ve spoke to would argue they had never even seen BGA or GSA or even knew what it was.

How can low phosphates possibly cause GSA when I do absolutely nothing to my tank, have 0ppm phosphates and have none? It’s falsified. BBA? I just don’t have to worry about it anymore. Hated the stuff more than anything.

I used to worry about calcium and magnesium. Potassium too. Adding them did nothing. Time after time. In fact, adding nutrients just made The plants go white. I don’t necessarily believe it was toxicity. I got way caught up in the hype surrounding that. Its more about nutrient availability. You can add all the nutrients you want but you have no idea what is happening to them in solution. No idea. They oxidise or precipitate, form other bonds and the more you add the worse it gets. TDS goes through the roof and we lose track of whats in our water, then we do huge water changes adding chemicals to stop the tap water killing our fish. There’s another thing that has probably changed in the last 80 years, tap water and what its made up of. I’ll never add it to my aquariums ever again the problems adding it has caused over the years, even with dechlorinator. Ill never forget the water engineers words when he came out to test my tap water for Zinc because I was obsessed my plants weren’t getting enough or getting too much. ‘We don’t make water for fish mate’. That should have told me everything right there and then.

The only way you can manage to effectively control or even get rid of algae is by starving it. And by that I don’t mean depriving organisms of light for 3 days because thats another myth. I mean stop doing water changes. Export your nutrients back to tap water levels. Then stop. Feed the fish twice daily and just let the tank stabilise. Give the plants and organisms a completely stable routine they can adapt to. 80 years ago or even longer that’s all they did. Some of them didn’t even use lights. Those that had fluorescents used to SUBMERGE them. Imagine the health and safety implications surrounding that now? **Im not suggesting anyone does that by the way**

There was never a problem with the functionality of the under gravel filter but they had two drawbacks 1) for the hobbyist, you couldn’t use sand 2) For the aquarium trade, they never needed to be replaced. They kept new oxygenated water going through the substrate and the bubbler oxygenated the water column, they pulled nutrients to the plant roots and kept the water clear. Then everyone starts slating the under gravel filter, word gets round and its finished, people just stop using them. That’s how the aquarium businesses get a foothold on the public.

Honestly, I’m so glad I went off in the direction I did when I did otherwise I would have probably quit just like you. It’s opened up my eyes a hell of a lot. And I’ve learned so much more. I wanted to spread the word and get the hobbyists looking and going back to the basics but I fear common practices are just too far from how the hobby originated and you end up getting publicly attacked for suggesting people try no water changes for a while. Like ‘oh my god would you sit in your own waste for weeks in end’?
‘What about hormones building up and stunting fish?’
‘What about the organic wastes?’
‘ThE SoLuTiOn To PoLlUtIoN Is DiLuTiOn’

And all the while these people are talking about the ‘one two punch’ and triple dosing glutaradehyde to deal with algae. Hypocrisy at it’s finest.

People only care about what the aquarium looks like, how good it makes them feel when others are struggling and they feel like they have all the knowledge, they obsess over algae and long for what someone else has so much so that they go to the lengths of adding products that the material safety data sheets explicitly state are deemed harmful or toxic to aquatic life. Madness.

Sorry to put a downer on things at the end but here bud this hobby is a far cry from what it used to be and I can see why so many people give up.

Wish you luck mate whatever you decide to do...
 
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Caliban, very interesting to read, I understand the whole concept as we never really know what we're putting back Into The tank when we do water changes,, but I believe you have a jungle, and pothos roots etc etc in your tank right, I don't want a jungle I want a nicely planted tank with room for my bows to swim, if I misunderstood your post correct me please, I don't understand how someone can do no water changes unless they have a huge amount of plants that are filtering the water which I don't have, I just checked tank parameters again and my gh is 10 which is worry some as I only wanted to go to 8 (was previously 6), tbh I would love to dint have to add ferts and do water changes but with the plants I have and with my minimal fish load I dint think I can get away with that, again if I'm wrong correct me, I could swap out plants but even my Wisteria is growing like [emoji90] where it should be growing the best out of all the plants as its a weed and can grow in mud I was told, so even if I sent another hundred on super low demanding plants im afraid they will sti have issues due to the Wisteria not growing.

New tests show
https://i.imgur.com/01CKzd4.jpg
Might if had vials switched in the picture but the readings are right kh 4 gh 10
Added a few Pic of nitrate because it's hard for me to read even with the nutrafin kit looks between 20 /50 to me phone makes it a little more dark
https://i.imgur.com/AS6r7MY.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/doPgh5V.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/pnR250R.jpg
Phosphate is 2.5-2.7
 
I've also had to euthanize 2 tetras in the last day a lemon that was bloated and no color yesterday and today an ornate tetra that was bloated and couldn't really swim well, all my tank parameters are perfect, no ammonia, no nitrite, ph 7.4, nitrate i think around 30, the only difference I've done is raise gh with equilibrium which is now 10
 
I've also had to euthanize 2 tetras in the last day a lemon that was bloated and no color yesterday and today an ornate tetra that was bloated and couldn't really swim well, all my tank parameters are perfect, no ammonia, no nitrite, ph 7.4, nitrate i think around 30, the only difference I've done is raise gh with equilibrium which is now 10


Probably all the drastic changes in TDS that the fish are probably not used to. Happened to my fish a few times.
 
Caliban, very interesting to read, I understand the whole concept as we never really know what we're putting back Into The tank when we do water changes,, but I believe you have a jungle, and pothos roots etc etc in your tank right, I don't want a jungle I want a nicely planted tank with room for my bows to swim, if I misunderstood your post correct me please, I don't understand how someone can do no water changes unless they have a huge amount of plants that are filtering the water which I don't have, I just checked tank parameters again and my gh is 10 which is worry some as I only wanted to go to 8 (was previously 6), tbh I would love to dint have to add ferts and do water changes but with the plants I have and with my minimal fish load I dint think I can get away with that, again if I'm wrong correct me, I could swap out plants but even my Wisteria is growing like [emoji90] where it should be growing the best out of all the plants as its a weed and can grow in mud I was told, so even if I sent another hundred on super low demanding plants im afraid they will sti have issues due to the Wisteria not growing.

New tests show
https://i.imgur.com/01CKzd4.jpg
Might if had vials switched in the picture but the readings are right kh 4 gh 10
Added a few Pic of nitrate because it's hard for me to read even with the nutrafin kit looks between 20 /50 to me phone makes it a little more dark
https://i.imgur.com/AS6r7MY.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/doPgh5V.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/pnR250R.jpg
Phosphate is 2.5-2.7


Not really a jungle or spectacle.

IMG_1205.jpg

This tank is more experimental and I’ve never really had the eye for placement but what do you want for a tank you do nothing but feed and top up every now and then. Needs some rain water to go in from outside.

The plants in this system are limited but they grow. Sword is struggling a but but thats the point. I just now that this is not the tank for that plant so I’ll just try something else.

If I were you I would try a floating plant to help soak up some of the excess. My plant growth is controlled by the fish and large population of shrimp I have. When I added lots of Rasbora the sword plant started to take off.

They’re probably Nitrogen limited.

Are there any plants that grow in your tank? Maybe add a few more of those until things stabilise.
 
Not really a jungle or spectacle.

View attachment 311167

This tank is more experimental and I’ve never really had the eye for placement but what do you want for a tank you do nothing but feed and top up every now and then. Needs some rain water to go in from outside.

The plants in this system are limited but they grow. Sword is struggling a but but thats the point. I just now that this is not the tank for that plant so I’ll just try something else.

If I were you I would try a floating plant to help soak up some of the excess. My plant growth is controlled by the fish and large population of shrimp I have. When I added lots of Rasbora the sword plant started to take off.

They’re probably Nitrogen limited.

Are there any plants that grow in your tank? Maybe add a few more of those until things stabilise.
Crypts were growing are like crazy, but currently melting back a bit from the changes in water parameters as crypts hate changes or disturbances, pearlweed is growing surprisingly well, rotala I have to half every 2 weeks as they are at the surface, the tops of the Wisteria seems to be doing okay except the one in the far corner
 
Some pics of the green spots on the plants, some pics of staghorn /thread, and photbombed by some beauties
https://i.imgur.com/NJSeIeC.png
https://i.imgur.com/b8UB5Xs.png
https://i.imgur.com/lOI7jsE.png

About 20 stems of pearlweed that got loose when I trimmed, stuck to the pre-filter
https://i.imgur.com/530PHIi.png
https://i.imgur.com/gOpF2OW.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/auM2mNy.jpg


Green spot algae is caused by excessive light. It shouldn’t grow on leaves. If algae is growing on a leaf the plant has already given up on it.
 
Green spot algae is caused by excessive light. It shouldn’t grow on leaves. If algae is growing on a leaf the plant has already given up on it.
Tapatalk is being silly never saw the reply, this stuff never was in my tank until I doubled my ferts and started adding equilibrium, my anubias was spotless, it's even on My spiralis that has never had an issue, I'm trying to slowly lower my gh back down 2 degrees so it's at 8 not 10, I'm doing 50% water changes and only adding 3/8th of a tblspoon which cuts 3/4 in half, I also got a pothos but I'm not sure if I should put the roots in the tank or in my filter and also researching how to prep it, this planted tank stuff is frustrating. From what I've read green spot is phosphate related but I add so much I can't see this being it unless too much will cause it too
 
Tapatalk is being silly never saw the reply, this stuff never was in my tank until I doubled my ferts and started adding equilibrium, my anubias was spotless, it's even on My spiralis that has never had an issue, I'm trying to slowly lower my gh back down 2 degrees so it's at 8 not 10, I'm doing 50% water changes and only adding 3/8th of a tblspoon which cuts 3/4 in half, I also got a pothos but I'm not sure if I should put the roots in the tank or in my filter and also researching how to prep it, this planted tank stuff is frustrating. From what I've read green spot is phosphate related but I add so much I can't see this being it unless too much will cause it too


When I was doing high light high ferts it would grow on the glass and some plants. When I switched to ultra lean dosing and low light it turned opaque but stayed there. When I eventually scraped it off it never returned. Recently I switched back to high light keeping everything else the same. Took a week or two but eventually it grew back on the glass and on my oldest Anubias leaf.

Right now I’m running ultra low light to see if there are any obvious changes.
 
When I was doing high light high ferts it would grow on the glass and some plants. When I switched to ultra lean dosing and low light it turned opaque but stayed there. When I eventually scraped it off it never returned. Recently I switched back to high light keeping everything else the same. Took a week or two but eventually it grew back on the glass and on my oldest Anubias leaf.

Right now I’m running ultra low light to see if there are any obvious changes.
I don't know how you have the patience lol, I need a par meter, it would make this so much easier than just guessing, I did turn the light down by 5% on every color which I'm assuming is how I lower the intensity of the fluval planted 3.0, I have a friend but haven't been able to get ahold of her as she has the 36" model and a par meter where I could give her my settings which would give me a closer estimate but world be higher than hers as I have the 48"
 
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