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Rubbery brown algae taking over a rock :(

badbread

badbread

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So this thick, rubbery brown algae has slowly been invading one of the base rocks in my tank and has finally spread onto some zoanthid polyps. I can try to get a picture of it tonight. It's super slick and rubbery to the touch and in some spots forms a little lobe of rubbery'ness. Any idea how to get rid of it?
 
http://www.reefcentral.com/wp/?p=401

Exactly what it looks like:

lobophora.jpg



That site says a Naso tang will eat it but there is no way I could put one of those in my 28 gallon tank... The rock it is on is a base rock and removing would involve moving over 20 frags and encrusted frags.... :(
 
Is it something you can siphon off at all?

If you can't siphon it, anyway you can manually scrape it in the water? (toothbrush etc), what I would do is have a good amount of water change water ready to go, and use a siphon in conjunction with scraping so you don't spread it around the tank. If that doesn't work... I say re-aquascape time :D
 
I had some of that stuff before. Get some tweezers and pick it off outside of the tank. make sure you get all of it. that stuff can really take off
 
I have that in my anemone tank right now. It is all over my skimmer pump, and the upper portion of my heater ... it's not smothering anything in my tank, so I've just learned to live with it.
 
i just went through my worst reefing experience yet.... :(

So I tried to peel off some of this algae when I got home tonight. A little patch came off but then there was no other lobes to grab on to to pull more off. I check out the rock (it's a large base rock in the front corner of the tank) and it looks like if I move just one rock above it I will be able to pull it out. Sweet, I pull that rock on top off, a couple rocks in the main structure shift a tiny bit but all is well. I get the rock out, frag off about 5-6 frags on it and I'm good to go... Or so I think. I frag off about 3/4's of the rock and now there is this big barren spot on the right side of the tank. I figure I'll make it work somehow and put that piece back in... When I did that I had my first (of many to come) massive structure failures in the tank.


long story short, massive structure collapse multiple times, frags all over the place, try to fix it, another structure collapse, rinse and repeat about 5 times. I ended basically re-rock working my whole tank. I would fix one thing nice and another piece would fall. It was hell and one of the most frustrating things I've ever been through. 3 hours later here I am, frustrated as hell, wondering why I got myself into this, looking at a tank full of pissed off slimy corals.

Sigh. Hopefully everything makes it, there were a few points where I had corals all resting on top of each other in the middle of the tank because I had no where to put them while I was adjusting the base rock. I stirred up the sand bed quite a bit, I'm hoping that doesn't kill anything.
 
Sorry to hear about the frustration Jay, I've been there before, so I can emphasize. So, is most of the brown algae in question gone now? I'm sure all your corals and frags and what not will be fine :) Do you like the new rock work better than before?
 
Jay should have told you, 99 times out of 100 if you remove ANY rocks from the tank other than those that are sitting on the ground with nothing above them, you won't be able to get it back the way they were :D

While the act of re-scaping your rocks is a pain (especially when you spend an hour or more trying to get them the way they were and fail before re-doing it), the end result is a new tank! :)
 
I'm kind of liking the way the tank came out, I have way more spots for SPS than I did before I guess. All the rock with any of that evil brown algae is gone. I guess it's a good thing, not only did that rock have that brown algae on it, it also had those yellow polyps and some GSP so this was for the better.

I took a video of the tank last night, watch it in HD here to see the new rock scape and to see Mikes's super sweet rainbow acan eating (that's at the end of the video.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sghdebx_RaI
 
Nice job, what do you do again? Movie editor? :D

I had to watch it because I was thinking "what super sweet rainbow acan". Were those arcti-pods floating around? Mine hardly ever feeds during the day, and when it does it doesn't open up that much!
 
Thanks Euphyllia, all in time, I'm never happy with the way my tank looks.

Mike, I start off with a concoction of Arcti-pods, cyclopeeze and Oyster feast to get everything in feeding mode and then target feed them whatever. I posted up a couple video's in the DBTC thread of it eating some 1mm pellets.
 
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