Is this Staghorn algae?

[XimeD]

I have had this algae growing in my 20gal for about a month now. I scrub it during my weekly 25-35% PWC but it keeps coming back. Is it Staghorn algae?


See My Tanks for the plants (and fish) I have in there.

Lighting: single T8 15W Tube I keep it on 13hrs/day. I have now just reduced it to 10hrs/day to see if this helps.

Water parameters:
Ammonia - slightly above 0ppm (I took out one of my 2 filter cartdriges and put a brand new cartridge in there, so that I could put the old one in my 75gal for seeding - this is probably why the ammonia is above 0)
Nitrite: 0ppm
Nitrate: 0ppm
kH - 100ppm (6 drops on the API test kit)
gH - 200 - 400ppm (18 drops on the API test kit)

I don't know about the phosphates, is it worth getting a phosphate kit?

I am ordering some live plants online for my 75gal and I could order some Nerite snails at no extra shipping costs. Is this worth doing? I like the Nerite snails and have read that they will eat most algae but I feel this does not really take care of the problem, it just "masks" the symptoms.

Thanks for any help

 

[XimeD]

Oops forgot to mention, my nitrates are always at 0ppm, looks like the plants are using all of it up. Once I overfed (trying to get a particular fish to eat) and the nitrates went up to 20ppm, following day they were at 5ppm and next day at 0ppm.

So it looks like I have some plant that is taking up a lot of nitrate. Is it possible this has something to do with the algae (ie not enough nitrate for the plants so they dont use as much of the other nutrients allowing the algae to grow? If so, I guess I could always dose dry ferts)

Also, I dose with leafzone once a week, a couple of days after the weekly PWC

 

[XimeD]

Anyone?

 

[JohnPaul]

It certainly looks like it could be the beginnings of staghorn. If it is, then you will probably have to address it via nutrient levels since I don't think anything actually eats it. Nerites are great snails in planted tanks and they eat a lot of different kinds of algae (including Green Spot Algae, which nothing else eats that I know of) but I don't think even nerites will eat staghorn. Probably the first thing you want to do is to start dosing nitrates so that you can keep at least 10 ppm nitrates in the water at all time. Cutting down the light period is a good idea also. Your next step after that would probably be exploring some sort of CO2 system or perhaps Flourish Excel.

As for a phosphate kit, I went for years without one, then I finally bought one just about a month or two ago, used it once, and found that the results didn't really make much sense so I haven't used it again. Usually the sign of low phosphates is Green Spot Algae; so if you don't have that, then it is pretty likely that your phosphate levels are ok. At least that's my sense of things.

EDIT: this link might help you, both on this question and future questions about algae.

 

[neilanh]

Greater Washington Aquatic Plant Association » Algae in the Planted Aquarium

 

[neilanh]

haha - JP beat me to it.

 

[XimeD]

Thanks for the advice, I am going to try DYI CO2 been reading up on it.

I did order some Fluorish excel but I will be very careful with dosing since I have vals in there. Probably will go the dry fert route for Nitrates, etc