jgraz
12/19/2013, 02:02 PM
A little background first. In my sons 20gal reef I always had a but if bubble algae going, few bubbles here and there but always stayed light and never really saw any reason to be alarmed. The tank has been up for about a year and I normally did about a 5gal WC monthly. Yes I know it's not ideal but it's a lightly stocked tank and everything was going very well. About 2 months ago I bought him a pistol/goby pair and the pistol went right to work digging. Mind you it was a 1.5" sandbed relatively undisturbed prior to this. When I saw this I figured I would start up a more frequent WC. So for the past month and a half I've been doing a 5gal WC weekly. During this time I started to notice that the bubble algae started to flourish. It started popping up everywhere. All corals seemed to be responding well to the increased WC's though so I kept it up. During my most recent WC(Tuesday) I noticed that many of the bubbles had turned white and were popped/deflated. Though it was odd but again everything looked good. Yesterday morning I noticed that many more of the bubbles had the same white popped look, any many new bubbles had formed. Now I concerned. Last night I get home from from work And saw that a 10 head acan colony had literally died through the course of the day. And a good size colony of orange cap is now greyish in color. A couple of other montis also look off. The few acros and zoas he has are solid though.
So any thoughts here. I have heard that caulerpa can go sexual and pollute our systems. Can bubble algae do the same? Any thoughts on how to combat this. At this point I would clearly say it's an infestation.
The nano is outfitted as follows.
20gal high
10gal sump
4x24" T5 bulbs are under 6m old
2 o clowns
Royal gramma
Pistol/goby
Fire shrimp
Porcelain and Pom Pom crabs
Assorted snails
Any and all thought and solution are welcomed. Thanks in advance
John
So any thoughts here. I have heard that caulerpa can go sexual and pollute our systems. Can bubble algae do the same? Any thoughts on how to combat this. At this point I would clearly say it's an infestation.
The nano is outfitted as follows.
20gal high
10gal sump
4x24" T5 bulbs are under 6m old
2 o clowns
Royal gramma
Pistol/goby
Fire shrimp
Porcelain and Pom Pom crabs
Assorted snails
Any and all thought and solution are welcomed. Thanks in advance
John