Algae on back glass

[johnsonw2]

I have a heavy build up of what i believe to be hair algae on the back glass. It's been there for probably a month. I do 20%-30% PWC every sunday. Today when i did my water change i scarped half of the algae off the back glass and siphoned out what i could. I was not able to siphon all the algae because there was just too much.

A couple questions:

Is it hair algae and why is it only on the back glass?
Will the scraped algae that did not get siphoned cause an outbreak on my rocks?

 

[bill302]

looks like you have some bubble algae there to me... watch this...

 

[johnsonw2]

I looked up bubble algae on google images and it looks different. I then came across a post about air bubbles sticking to algae. I took a turkey baster and blasted the algae on the glass, the bubbles seen in the picture blew off and went to the surface with ease. Maybe the bubbles were a result of my skimmer since the waters on the low side.

Thanks for the reply!

 

[Ingy]

I agree it just O2 being produced by the algae. Many algaes actually love high low areas as that is how they gather nutrients. It grows there probably because you scrape the back less often. You could probably do with more snails (turbo) to eat the algae.
I would be less concerned about the stuff that was scraped off, and more about the excess nutrient issue. How so you export nutrients? Skimmer? Chaeto? Resins?
Decreasing feeding and/or lighting schedule should reduce algae growth.

 

[johnsonw2]

The main way I remove the nutrients are through water changes, once a week. Also my reef octopus (HOB) protein skimmer. I dont have a sump.

The tanks 42 gallons and has been running a little over a year now. I have about 8 astrea snails, 5 nassarius snails, and maybe 5 little blue legged hermit crabs. As for fish two clowns and 1 firefish goby. I feed pellets or flake every other day and frozen mysis once or twice a week.

The rocks have little to no algae on them. I think im starting to see some come up after i scraped the glass though.

Also I noticed when I take a turkey baster to the lower rocks, I get clouds of debris. Also the sand bed gets pretty dirty, I try to vacuum the top layer when I do my PWC. I have two 800 GPH powerheads on opposite sides pointing towards one another. They were cheap ebay ones though. Maybe I need to upgrade them to 1200's

Heres a couple pics of the tank. You can see where I scarped the back glass.