Invasion of Green Hair Algae..

[Pennies2Cents]

Okay, some how our 55 gal has been invaded with Green Hair Algae. Some long some short and ugly. I belive from a frag we bought from the store.

What is the best way to get rid of it. I thought about taking the LR out and scrubing it down but Im afraid to kill everythng in it/on it..

Does any one have any advice before I start scrub. We dont have any tangs but we do have snails, mexican turbos w/ baby turbos, and lots of other snails. But seems like they just cant get to it all.

Its lookng uglier everyday. I want to have my nice clean tank back.

Can somone please give me some feed back.

[dustint21]

Scrub it! Then get lawn mower blenny or foxface! Good luck!

[Pennies2Cents]

Will it hurt it any?

[profntbtr]

no, it will not damage other life assuming that you don't mess with it too much. just get a 5 gallon bucket of water remove your rock piece by piece and scrub it, dipping it in your bucket after every couple of passes with the brush. as long as you don't scrub the actual corals it will be fine

[Pennies2Cents]

Im thinking tank water right? Most of our corals are softies and are still frags, so I kind of got it a little easy. Hopefully. Thanks..for the info.

[Bill S]

If it's bryopsis, you need to get rid of it NOW. It's insanely invasive. And nothing eats it.

[caferacermike]

I can attest that it will kill many corals in your tank.

I ended up with a bad frag once and within a week my tank was full of hair algae. I cannot, a year later, get rid of it at all. I've tried most everything. Removing rock and drying it, it lives everywhere unseen and quickly repopulates the rock. I've lost several corals, in fact almost all of my SPS due to it encroaching upon and right over living corals. I've tried rabbit fishes, foxfaces, tangs, snails, hermits, sea hares, overskimming, no lights, phos removers (exchanged media every other day for weeks), daily 5g water changes, pretty much anything I can think of.

The algae grows right up next to most of the corals. It then begins irritating the corals preventing them from extending polyps. In turn this limits their intake of food and light causing rapid degradation. Several LPS and SPS have died as the algae attaches and grows from the external skeleton. Over time it seems to almost "pop off" the LPS heads as they shrink and explore other areas to attempt a better living. I've heard of the algae leeching into the skeleton and using up the photosynthetic properties of the light that soaks through the flesh. This causes RTN and leaves behind a green skeleton instead of white.

Do I consider it bad? Beyond words. Nothing of my current tank will be put into use/display in my new tank.

The only control I have is to do weekly mass extractions. I shut off all flow and very carefully denude every inch of rock work of any and all algae blooms I can get. This can clean the rock for about 2-3 weeks if not kept up, but alas it does not seem to ever go away.