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What eats foot long hair algae?

Patio

Patio

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These two all stars! Down to the glass. I am excited to track their feeding, should be easy :D

Regretfully, It took me 20 years before giving urchins a try at hair algae removal. To be honest, mostly because I kept smaller tanks previously.

I put these two in on Saturday around 2pm. This picture is from today at 8am. The first day they did not move and I assumed they might not make it or just needed more time to get adjusted. Pretty sure I was wrong... They did not need to move to find food and the long strands of algae took some time to eat.

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I pull as much as I can when I do weekly water changes but I can’t pull it completely down to the glass and rock like the urchins are doing.

The algae doesn’t worry me yet. It’s a young tank and will hit its stride eventually. Algae scrubber is recently online and sliming up nicely. If it’s anything like last time I set it up, algae comes soon after the slime.
 
I like urchins too. Long spine black urchins are cool but in my experience eventually start eating SPS. Mexican turbo snails (the big ones) also tear through hair algae. Much better at this than other common snail types in my experience.
 
phc567 said:
I know you said animal but how about a small diy algae scrubber. Super easy to build. Cheap. Just tap it off of your drain pipe to the sump.
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The scrubber (Santa Monica Rain) has been running about 5ish weeks now getting primed. The scrubber screen is in slime stage which usually is followed by algae, in my past experience. The plan is- clean up crew takes care of the display while the scrubber grows in its clean up crew-free section of the sump.

My guess as to what got me into this mess- After I moved the established scrubber over to the new tank, we had a brief power outage. The scrubber pump was not able to get itself running again when the power came back on and it didn't cross my mind to check and make sure it was running. That step is now on my checklist. I discovered the pump issue after all the algae melted. I assume the melted algae feed the display algae really really well.

The few stony corals that moved over from the previous tank (spongodes, porties, forgotten name acro from battlecorals) don't mind it at all. So far only a favia has been bothered by the strands of algae hitting it. Fish are fat and happy. Holding off on adding any more coral until it gets a little more under control and matures. I am happiest reefing at a snails pace so this works out okay.

Coral2Coral said:
I got 3 big black urchins(3-3.5”) you are welcome to pickup and try, they cleared my algae(hair & tuff) pretty good.
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Very nice of you to offer! I am think I am going to stick with the two smaller variety I have now and keep an eye out for a juvenile Foxface in the mean time.
 
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