Biofilm, or Black Beard Algae on aquarium wood?

The friendliest place on the web for anyone with an interest in aquariums or fish keeping!
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.

jordzcov

Aquarium Advice Activist
Joined
Sep 27, 2022
Messages
104
Im unsure what this is, and nothing i do seems to get rid of it. I try to clean it each week in the extracted water during a water change, and have even left it out the tank for a week to "dry off" and then clean it, but this stuff comes back within a few days. Is very slimey to the touch, and makes all the substrate gravel beneath it cling to it, so when i remove it, it pulls up a load of gravel to.

Have tried the standard, tank black outs, lowering food, lowering light amount, but nothing seems to kill it off.
It didnt always exist, the wood may have been in there for about a year, but this stuff started apearing just a few months ago
 

Attachments

  • PXL_20250312_084824162.MP.jpg
    PXL_20250312_084824162.MP.jpg
    148.8 KB · Views: 1
  • PXL_20250312_084839523.MP.jpg
    PXL_20250312_084839523.MP.jpg
    99 KB · Views: 1
  • PXL_20250314_085037842.MP.jpg
    PXL_20250314_085037842.MP.jpg
    123.4 KB · Views: 1
  • PXL_20250314_085040844.MP.jpg
    PXL_20250314_085040844.MP.jpg
    132 KB · Views: 1
  • PXL_20250314_085051097.MP.jpg
    PXL_20250314_085051097.MP.jpg
    121.3 KB · Views: 1
It looks more like mold to me. Is it just on the wood or is it in other places as well? Try boiling water to kill off the spores.
 
It looks more like mold to me. Is it just on the wood or is it in other places as well? Try boiling water to kill off the spores.
Only on the wood. That's why I tried leaving it out the tank to dry, hoping cleaning it then would fully remove what it is, but clearly not.
Do I need to leave it soak/repeatedly boil it, or can I just soak it in boiled water for an hour or so and that's it?
 
I had this happen on a new piece of wood. Whenever the mold got significant I took the wood outside onto the yard, boiled a kettle, poured boiling water all over the wood, repeated with a few more kettle fulls of boiling water, hosed it down to rinse off all the dead mold and cool down the wood, then put it back in the tank. Repeated this every week or so until after a few months the mold stopped coming back. It might have stopped coming back in the same timeframe without the boiling I suppose, but killing mold spores seemed like a good idea.

If you have a large enough pot, actually boiling the water with the wood in it would be more effective than pouring boiling water over the wood. But it makes a mess of the pot, and my wife would have gone nuts if I tried this with one of her pots.
 
Ive been cleaning it each week for a few months now, so thats why i wondered if its algae or biofilm and is just regrowing on the surface each time. Ill give the boiling method ago. Thanks for the help :)
 

Latest posts

Back
Top Bottom