Controlling Algae in Your Aquarium. Rich Ross MACNA 2022

Summary

In the MACNA 2022 presentation, Richard Ross discusses various approaches to controlling algae in aquariums, focusing on methods that prioritize ecological balance and the health of the tank rather than aggressive chemical solutions. He emphasizes the importance of understanding the life cycle of algae and the benefits of using natural herbivores to manage its growth. Ross also shares personal insights from his decades of aquarium experience, highlighting the value of patience and a hands-off approach to ecosystem management. The talk is peppered with humor, practical tips, and innovative strategies to maintain a healthy reef tank.

Highlights

• Richard Ross's entertaining approach keeps the complex topic engaging. 😂
• Algae management requires a balance of patience and strategic action. 🎣
• Herbivores are often the best, natural solution for algae control. 🐟
• Ross shares amusing anecdotes from his aquarium experiences. 🤣
• Algae thrives in the craziest conditions, reinforcing its resilience. 💪

Key Takeaways

• Embrace algae as a natural part of the ecosystem but manage it carefully. 🌿
• Stay patient; reef tanks naturally stabilize over time. ⏳
• Avoid aggressive chemical treatments as they can disrupt tank balance. 🧪
• Use natural herbivores like snails and urchins for algae control. 🐌
• Stability and understanding benthic succession are crucial. 🌊

Overview

At MACNA 2022, Richard Ross delivered a compelling talk on managing algae in reef tanks, blending humor with expert advice. His vibrant storytelling and wealth of experience offered attendees a fresh perspective on what many consider a challenging aspect of aquarium maintenance.

Ross discussed the life cycle of algae, emphasizing its resilience and how it can thrive under various conditions. He suggested natural herbivores as an effective means to control algae growth, moving away from chemical treatments that might destabilize the tank environment.

The session urged reef tank enthusiasts to be patient and understand the natural progression of their ecosystem. By focusing on a balanced approach and leveraging the power of natural algae predators, Ross provided a roadmap to healthier and more sustainable aquarium practices.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Welcome and Introduction The chapter titled 'Welcome and Introduction' serves as a prelude to a session at MACDA 2022, featuring Richard Ross. Richard's diverse background includes experiences as a glass blower, a performing artist on cruise ships, and a juggler with connections to comedians. He also worked at a major aquarium in California's Bay area before transitioning to a career as a YouTuber. He is introduced as a board member who will be speaking at MACDA 2022, focusing his discussion on the topic of problem allergy control and reef tanks.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Richard Ross - Personal Interests and Background Richard Ross introduces himself with thanks to the audience for attending. He confirms that the session is about discussing problematic algae and potential solutions. He shares a bit about himself, mentioning his fondness for cephalopods and showcasing his family, emphasizing their enthusiasm for Halloween. Additionally, Ross discusses his summer activity of kiteboarding by the Golden Gate Bridge, portraying it as an excellent hobby one should try if they have the opportunity.
• 02:00 - 04:00: Tank Setup and Phosphate Management The chapter titled 'Tank Setup and Phosphate Management' features a humorous and unconventional narrative, starting with the speaker sharing a fun and eccentric activity of dressing up as death and e-foiling around an island to entertain and scare people. The narrative then shifts to a personal note, where the speaker reveals that they have a secret home laboratory for consulting, research, and spawning activities. Additionally, the speaker mentions their involvement in a podcast titled 'Reef Beef' with Ben Johnson, which is humorously recognized for its use of foul language.
• 04:00 - 06:00: Algae in Tanks - General Discussion The speaker discusses their display tank and shares a past prediction from 2014 about dosing nitrates and phosphates in tanks, which has come true. The speaker finds humor in how the prediction, initially met with laughter, has now become a reality.
• 06:00 - 08:00: Nutrient Control and Algae The chapter titled 'Nutrient Control and Algae' discusses a situation from 2016 where high levels of phosphates (1.6) and nitrates (70) were present in a tank. The speaker has been working on reducing these levels in the simplest and most effortless manner possible. One method mentioned involves using a light dose of lanthanum chloride.
• 08:00 - 10:00: Algae on Wild Reefs and Herbivores In this chapter, we are introduced to Mazna, an organization where individuals, including someone named Kevin, can meet. There is a humorous exchange involving the dislike of an unspecified 'thing,' and a technical difficulty involving a 'dongle,' which is eventually resolved with applause as things return to normal.
• 10:00 - 12:00: New Tank Setup and Algae Mitigation The speaker discusses the process of setting up a new tank and addressing the challenge of algae growth. They mention that phosphates are decreasing due to the slow dosing of a substance named Lantern into the skimmer. Additionally, they perform daily automatic water changes, exchanging about eight liters in a 450-gallon system. This method humorously references Craig Bingman, likely an expert or well-known figure in the field. The current level of phosphates in the tank is noted to be 0.18.
• 12:00 - 14:00: Herbivores and Biological Controls The chapter discusses the issue of algae in tanks, emphasizing the importance of understanding and controlling bad algae, regardless of the specific type. It starts by mentioning the nitrate levels, which were found to be around 20, possibly contributing to algae absence in certain conditions. The speaker also highlights a project involving coral spawning, showing interest in coral propagation. The main focus, however, is on identifying and managing problematic algae, avoiding a detailed analysis of each type, and instead opting for a general overview.
• 14:00 - 16:00: Algae Management and Strategies The chapter "Algae Management and Strategies" discusses the complexities and aesthetics of algae in aquatic environments. It references a conversation with Mike Paletta about a tank from 1983, highlighting the beauty of algae-covered environments despite common perceptions. The speaker believes that identifying each species of algae, although seemingly tedious, will become valuable in the future.
• 16:00 - 18:00: Conclusion and Recommendations The chapter discusses the challenges of dealing with algae in a tank, which can harm the desired animals in it. Common advice for handling algae issues includes adding chemicals to kill it or simply waiting it out.

Controlling Algae in Your Aquarium. Rich Ross MACNA 2022 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 welcome everybody back to macda 2022 our next speaker it has been a glass blower uh he's been a Performing Artist on cruise boats uh he's a juggler that knows Comedians and somehow he landed a job at some big aquarium in the in the Bay area of California and was important for a while and now he just talks on YouTube for a living to my knowledge it's Richard Ross he's one of my board members and I'd like to welcome him to a Mac note 2022 to talk about problem allergy control and reef tanks please
• 00:30 - 01:00 welcome Richard Ross thank you Kevin thank you everyone thanks for coming out on is it Sunday it's Sunday um we're going to talk about problem algae and what to do about it um make sure this works that's me I like cephalopods a lot this is my family we take Halloween very seriously during uh during the Summers now I do a lot of this is kiteboarding by the Golden Gate Bridge which is excellent if you can do it and I also like to
• 01:00 - 01:30 um scare people around the island I live on by dressing up as death and e-foiling around the island and scaring people um because it's just a stupid thing to do to spend your time uh I have a secret home lab right here uh where I'm doing some Consulting and some research and some spawning stuff I also do a podcast with Ben Johnson called Reef beef uh it is uh it was voted the um number one foul language grief podcast by foul language Reef podcast voters
• 01:30 - 02:00 X thank you this is uh this is my display tank um and actually this is my this is my tank as it is now and in 2014 I did to talk about phosphates and um how I don't care about what level they are at and uh I actually predicted in that talk and it got a laugh that uh people would be dosing nitrate and phosphates to their tanks and that's happened and that makes me giggle all the time so this is the
• 02:00 - 02:30 tank um in 2016 and the phosphate was 1.6 1.6 and the nitrates were 70 and this is germane to the talk uh I have been bringing it down uh because I wanted to see if I could bring it down in the completely most lazy easiest way where I had to do nothing which is there's two of them one of them is uh dosing a really light amount of lanthanum chloride what's going on Phil so
• 02:30 - 03:00 mazna is an organization where you can meet Kevin they don't like my thing nope I don't like your thing okay oh is everything showing all goofy it was oh bad dongle no no dongle back dongle good dog oh [Applause] gone thanks Kevin I wouldn't have noticed
• 03:00 - 03:30 [Laughter] the what was I saying phosphates are coming down because of dosing Lantern very slowly into the skimmer and I'm also now doing a water change uh Auto water change I do about eight liters a day in a 450 gallon uh system and that's for Craig bingman to make his head explode um but so the levels now are 0.18 and
• 03:30 - 04:00 the nitrate is about 20. so um no algae there when the when the numbers were crazy no algae there and we'll get to that in a second this is some corals I I spawned that's a whole bunch of baby corals that's very cool and here's the same thing again so we'll just move on problem algae in tanks so what's the deal with that right we care about bad algae whatever you want to call it um or whatever type it is we'll touch on a few but we're doing a general talk rather than a specific of each algae
• 04:00 - 04:30 because I actually think picking out each species of algae is insane at this point but will eventually be useful but the algae people don't like how it looks although I was talking to Mike paletta last night and telling him about the tank I had in 1983 that was a 60 gallon tank filled with live rock with a beautiful juvenile nabaricus Angel and it was covered in in in algae and it was friggin beautiful it was like that's what it looks like because if you didn't know you didn't know then and there was
• 04:30 - 05:00 no way to find out I was very happy with that tank and then laughed very hard when I found out that that wasn't what it was supposed to look like but looks aside problem algae can grow over smother and kill the animals you actually want in the tank so we don't want that to happen common responses on forms and at fish stores and at places where people talk about the things we're talking about to uh algae problems are at a chemical to kill it wait it out
• 05:00 - 05:30 lower your nutrients manual removal add herbivores or thoughts and prayers so that's pretty much what people say so we're going to talk about those as we go through additives to control algae not a fan in any way um it was maybe a four percent fan for special cases but I'm not a fan of additives to eradicate anything in your tank at all we spend so much time trying to make the system
• 05:30 - 06:00 stable and you know that was kind of what the push has been for a long time and and in thinking about it over the last couple of years uh stability on back to stability is the key but it's tricky to say that because it's stability it means something different when you're starting your tank and something later so a mature tank I don't do anything to my tank it gets an auto water change it gets some Trace elements added because it's easy and inexpensive and there's a skimmer and and that's it
• 06:00 - 06:30 and I feed a lot of food to my tank and then once in a while I wipe the front glass that's that there's literally when I leave for this the only thing I'm worried about is a power outage happening and something not coming back online it's I am interested in the tank and what's inside of it so I want it to be easy so I can spend my time enjoying the animals right so I don't like these additives because we
• 06:30 - 07:00 don't know what they do to your microbiome and then you end up in this kind of sine wave of problem after problem after problem as your tank recovers from whatever this stuff did turns out that this stuff is super bad it's just an algaecide and and people were seems like they were just getting lucky if they weren't killing everything so there's a whole drama behind that and I we don't need to get into it this one is interesting fluconazole it it really does seem to work um so if you are nuking your algae from
• 07:00 - 07:30 space which we'll get to if it's become a real problem this might be a good way to go if you've got little Tufts I'm not thinking that that's the way to go um and and we'll get to all of that so I'm not a fan of I think you're just taking a huge risk and I've got to have a really really good reason why I need to add this stuff any of these things to a tank to take care of algae algae in new tanks is an issue and it's different than an old tanks because we
• 07:30 - 08:00 get the Uglies which is really a benthic succession so these are things that that we we talk about in the scientific community and what that means is if you put a clean piece of anything a clean substrate in a tank a clean Rock clean sand a clean frag plug it's going to take time for different microbial and microphonal communities to develop on it so that's just you can't make that not
• 08:00 - 08:30 happen um I think also some people have an idea that The Rock should be this color forever and they kind of freak out when stuff starts happening to it um I think that's the biggest issue with dry live rock is people expect it to look like this as the tank Rose and then they'll tear down their tank because they get some algae on this rock and then there's no way you're getting the stability that I I think is important uh this is what live rock looks like in
• 08:30 - 09:00 the ocean this unfortunately this is this is Buck Island this is a coral graveyard where the acropora palmata has died off over the last 25 years you can see in the bottom that no it doesn't oh I can do that I can look I have a thing you guys don't get to see what I'm talking about um there's a little bit of live palmata there but the rest of it is dead it is died off but look at the color of it it is not white um things need to grow on surfaces and
• 09:00 - 09:30 we like those things because they help filter and they help feed our tanks so they're good so don't expect white stuff uh here's a little bit and when we're doing Coral spawning oh this this may change when we want baby corals to settle the tradition has been to season those tiles those substrates for a couple of months to get past the Uglies so that when the corals settle down they're
• 09:30 - 10:00 easier to take care of you really don't want to be taking dealing with a hair algae on a coral plug with a single polyp coral that's a millimeter across it's it's a nightmare to clean so you start seeing the rock change color here's a picture of some mature rock with some white new rock that's put in there so they look different and you've got to let it season what tends to happen though is something like this happens and then people freak out and don't know what to do so um and then also eventually in benthic
• 10:00 - 10:30 succession you'll get well I'm ahead of myself look if you're setting up a new tank understand this concept and be ready for it so what does that mean what we used to say in the 2000s when I was working in fish stores or helping out in fish stores is you set up your tank and you leave the lights off and by the way we're using imported fresh live rock then it's the same thing benthic secession happens everywhere especially when you move something into a new tank It's gotta adapt to the new conditions a
• 10:30 - 11:00 piece of rock um set it up leave the lights off for the first month just no lights just have a dark tank not putting any animals in it you're not doing anything you're letting everything settle down you know the idea that nothing good happens fast in a reef tank starts at the beginning and I know there's a push to want to set up a brand new system and have it going really quickly and there's a way to do that which we'll talk about but if if you don't have the space to do that kind of thing
• 11:00 - 11:30 um just take the time pay the time up front and your life will be much easier um if you put a bunch of lights on your tank and you grow that now you have to fight this and once you're in a fight with it you're it's a pain in the butt frankly and you have to deal with it and you have to do more work than you should have to do and I want everyone to have an easier time at Reef keeping so what do you do age your rock you leave it in the tank for a month or two if you can
• 11:30 - 12:00 deal with that but you can put a fish in there if you want to see a fish but if you're patient and then you bring your lights up slowly over the second month as you're adding herbivores to deal with things you shouldn't get problems because you've got other if you get Coraline algae to grow on your rock or a bunch of different things from the microphone or microbiome they will compete for Real Estate with the algae if not and we'll talk about this too I've said that like 50 times I love it
• 12:00 - 12:30 um algae is really good at life algae is going to win algae can live I'm gonna handle myself all right um what we used to do at steinard aquarium and I do this at home as well is I keep a bunch of live rock in a sump so we had these huge stumps behind the scenes that I would fill them up with Rock and when it was time for me to set up a new system I would pull out this rock set it up instant system right took took a week to acclimate to the light and we're all good um people who didn't do that people who
• 12:30 - 13:00 started with fresh rock like this because it's displayed to the public it's got to come up soon so people can see it but then they were fighting algae problems for months and fighting algae problems on public display is even harder than it is at home um and if you don't want to do it in your display if you're like I don't want an ugly tank for a dark thing in my living room or wherever you're keeping it for a couple of months get a big brute trash can or an ad container or an old tank and put the Rock in there and
• 13:00 - 13:30 treat that like a temporary aquarium fill it with salt water put a skimmer on it or not it's up to you have some water motion keep it warm and let the rock season in there so now you've jumped months ahead of what's going to happen if you don't do that we used to have a lot of stores that would keep cured Rock back in the day they used to do it because there would be a die off on the Rock so if anybody remembers the idea of cooking Rock which was the stupidest
• 13:30 - 14:00 term actually it's the best term in the world turned out doesn't work because people boiled their Rock which don't and then and then there's palestoa on the Rock they're boiling and then um then they all go to the hospital and that's fine um but the icky's you would really have to do water changes and deal with that because goo would come off of that rock so good stores or nice stores would cure that for you I think we need more stores curing this dry Rock for you um you can also buy live rock from like Tampa Bay saltwater and they'll fly it
• 14:00 - 14:30 to you and they fly a completely submerged now so you don't get the same die off we used to get um but if you do that stuff in your garage or out in your backyard for a couple months and then you put it in your tank you'll have a much faster good looking display right and Coraline algae is kind of one of the best examples it hair algae cannot grow on that it can grow around it but this stuff can grow so fast it will grow over hair algae and smother it so you've taken away from the
• 14:30 - 15:00 algae any real estate that it can use then you're winning and you want to be winning controlling nutrients to end algae problems so people seem obsessed with controlling nutrients I'm I'm on a different side of that we don't have to have any argument about it there's room for all of us to sit at the table and do it different ways I don't like taking the time and money it takes to try to lower those nutrients
• 15:00 - 15:30 I don't find a difference in my corals I find that I have just as much problem with certain kinds of corals as people who run lower nutrient systems I think it's a wash either way and you're just moving the work around to what you feel comfortable doing and that's fine there's a million ways to skin a reef people who are pushing the nutrient stuff and dealing with ratios and and seeing uh results that they they see that's great that's pushing the Hobby in
• 15:30 - 16:00 a different direction than I'm going and I think that's great because eventually along with uh microbiome testing and Edna we will have enough information to get ahead of all of this stuff and we'll know what's going on we'll be able to Target what we want what we don't want in our tank but right now the idea seems to be more General algae needs fertilizer to grow more fertilizer would mean more algae that just seems obvious and less algae less fertilizer would mean less
• 16:00 - 16:30 algae right QED I think not so much I think if this was the case it would work all the time or would work more than we see and what I mean by that is there are lots of posts and lots of reports of people who lower their nutrients and the algae doesn't go away so something so so clearly it's not if lowering nutrients makes a difference it's clearly not the only thing that makes a difference right and we see
• 16:30 - 17:00 people with low nutrients that have no algae problems and low nutrients that have algae problems and we see people with high nutrients with algae problems and people with high nutrients that don't have algae problems so I'm not while this idea seems to make sense I don't think it pans out on second look and I don't think it pans out in reality and why is that because algae is really really really good at life it it survives in puddles
• 17:00 - 17:30 of vomit that's I just that's not true it I don't think I think I and I don't know who's keeping puddles of vomiting so I don't maybe I'll run that test um when I have time but it really trying environments really horrible environments it's it's a it's a it's kind of a primitive been around for a long time kind of life and it's really good at using tiny amounts of whatever it needs to survive right and Thrive and
• 17:30 - 18:00 grow and kill everything else around it which is its goal right algae's goal and it's teeny little algae brain is I want to kill everything else so I can live in its house uh it scavenges what it needs very quickly so the average so think of it this way too if you want to if you're lowering your nitrates and your phosphate to fight algae and we think that wild reefs are a model for us right the average nitrate levels on a
• 18:00 - 18:30 reef are less than 0.2 PPM right we recommend that you keep it from five to ten right that's a general recommendation I say below 50 you're fine below 70 you're fine I get worried when it gets to be 90 because 100 is a scary number that's literally the reason why I lower it when I get when it was getting that high phosphate levels on the reef are less than 0.03 PPM and we generally think 0.05 to under 0.1 is kind and some people are
• 18:30 - 19:00 not happy when it's at point one so there's algae everywhere on uh look it's like oh oh I was with Andy Ryan trying to come up with a metaphor or analogy to explain this and he sent me this uh last night so I'm not sure if this is the best um the best metaphor at all but in this video uh the cat are your corals
• 19:00 - 19:30 food are your nutrient levels and the duck is algae that's a funny way to present the duck there's no duck yet um okay and so here we go foreign
• 19:30 - 20:00 so I I hope that metaphor makes sense no matter if if you decide to lower nutrients in this case the food the duck's gonna get it before the cab and then your cat is going to starve which is okay because who cares about cats but it you you can't uh in it makes if you
• 20:00 - 20:30 bring your nutrients down to nothing so there's nothing there for the algae to survive on it will still survive longer than you think it's going to and that it has any right to but you won't you you're not getting ahead of it it can use nothing to grow um and these are all my opinions and I hope if anyone agrees with me they rip me apart in a way that is compelling um on the wild Reef we think I think people think there's no algae on the wild Reef I don't see any algae in this picture I don't see any algae in this
• 20:30 - 21:00 picture right but there's algae everywhere on the reef right so why don't you see it as I was in French Polynesia um uh in January and snorkeling around and it all just kind of hit me in a way that it never coalesced in my brain before so this is snorkeling so it's a little bouncy sorry for that um this is what's going on on a healthy Reef in French Polynesia those are herbivores and there's a butt
• 21:00 - 21:30 ton of them and they're going around the reef eating all the time eating eating eating eating eating eating eating right schools of herbivores don't exist if there's nothing for them to eat they need to eat so these guys in this convict tanks and you can see there's also huge schools of little parrot fish doing that as well which is interesting on herbivores if I forget to mention that later please somebody remember for me so they're swimming around there
• 21:30 - 22:00 eating constantly grazing all around this was a little a tiny little island that was a coral garden and you could swim around it in 10 minutes and there was about six schools of these tangs and and the same with the parrotfish sometimes they would intermingle some of them they wouldn't but we went there seven times and all the time they're just there swimming around swimming around swimming around they're eating the algae as it grows right before it becomes a problem that's the only way they exist um
• 22:00 - 22:30 and there's not just the fish right there's there's bazillions of herbivores that we don't see they're snails there's urchin there's amphipods and all other kind of tiny herbivores and they're all eating the algae the reason the coral can be there is because they're eating the algae and then the coral ends up giving them shelter so it's this kind of self-fulfilling way to go um where is their algae on the reef so this was another Reef that I was able to snorkel at a totally different location but inside these Coral heads
• 22:30 - 23:00 are these jackass fish um and in this particular location there were no sharks in the area so there were a lot of these fish and these are a damsel fish I think it's called Jack AB jackassy damsel fishy jerky is the Latin and plan that but that's great um
• 23:00 - 23:30 and they they Farm the algae they chase everything away from it and the algae grows the only reason it grows in these low nutrient levels that we're talking about on wild reefs that we often don't even recommend is the levels we're trying to keep in our tanks the algae grows it doesn't not grow um there were no sharks in this area and uh in other areas where there were more sharks um these guys were getting eaten and so there were very there were few of fewer
• 23:30 - 24:00 of them in this area there was like almost no herbivores uh and I'm if somebody knows more about that than me my guess is that these jackass fish don't like herbivores and when they see them they chase them away they would literally and we Dove this we snorkeled this for three days no you know one or two tanks here and there and there's algae all over the place in this place right uh Buck Island um that I talked about before why is there no algae there
• 24:00 - 24:30 saddest thing in the world huge schools of tangs swimming around in the squirrel skeleton graveyards still doing their job but they're not being enough coral for them to grow give you one more slide on this as we're hammering that part home it's a little hard to see in the picture but on the top part I'm going to face this way for a minute so everyone feels like you're you're all my favorite children um you can see on the diadema so in in the 80s there was a huge diadema die off
• 24:30 - 25:00 in the Caribbean right it was bad and then we have a lot of algae reefs at the same time also a lot of the parrotfish and herbivores were fished out for food fish more algae right more more algae is going to grow then and human impacts so we got a Kind of Wonderful soup of horror to let algae take over the reefs um as we're studying diadema to see what they do it turns out they kind of have a range they kind of have a home base and go out they don't just wander randomly around the whole Reef so the top half of
• 25:00 - 25:30 the reef you can see that's the diadema range and the bottom of half of that picture the diadema don't get that far on one side no algae on the other side algae that's that's pretty much my case right my tank we can see it in my tank as well what people often consider ridiculous nutrients now I'm just just High I'm not ridiculous anymore um no algae going on in there herbivores right
• 25:30 - 26:00 on my Euro brace algae because the herbivores can't get to it and um three or four weeks ago the Euro brace all across the front was completely filled with algae and I scraped I did my maintenance I scraped it off I cleaned my overflows so the water level went down a little bit and I went I needed a picture of that and I didn't take it but luckily over on that corner water still gets up there but you know like I can get a cup of algae every week off of that Euro brace and the only
• 26:00 - 26:30 thing that's going on between that and that is uh herbivoral access that sounded scientific or viviral action or drunk um here's a frag system or a subsystem I have on my system I was away for a while I think something happened there was like a temperature Spike something happened and there was there had been snails in there and Urchins in there and they they died for some reason I can't I'm upset that I can't remember what it
• 26:30 - 27:00 was I got back and it's covered in algae it's a terrible picture but you can see all right put in a bunch of snails and a couple urchins and um about nine days later that that was what it looked like and then today it looks like this and all that's in there there's a rabbit fish in there too now when I put the herbivores in I have not added any herbivores since I feed it it gets the same water as the rest of the system it's got some snails it's got
• 27:00 - 27:30 some urchins and it's got a rabbit fish no algae this was taken on Tuesday before the power outage that's wonderful to have happen before you get on a plane to a reef conference um the only algae I could find in this system was on this uh temp probe and the temp probe was floating uh you know was hanging by the wire so herbivores couldn't get to it so I fully expect so I pushed it down by a rock and I fully expect that algae to be gone by the time I get home so
• 27:30 - 28:00 what do you what's your strategies for algae I keep I I think whatever your philosophy is in Reef keeping and there's a million philosophies and it has to make sense to you and that's the only thing that matters is that you understand it you can change later on as new information or experience comes up but what you think is going to be happening in your system you have to have a plan for algae right one of the plans is get it while it's
• 28:00 - 28:30 small right I think some people have problems because they see a little bit of algae and then they start mucking with nutrients and expecting the algae to disappear and it's not going to because algae is really good at life and it hates everything else and it's going to try to steal all the real estate it can right it's a it's gentrifying your neighborhood with algae algae gentrification that's really dumb and I want to chase it down and make it a thing
• 28:30 - 29:00 gentrification of algae so you you've got if you see a little bit of it it takes a second it's like aptasia people have three aptasia and they buy bergia and so what are you doing kill the three optation be done if you add the Bergen you wait zeptasia are going to keep growing but you might be able to get ahead of them eventually but take the gun right and there's a million ways to do it if you got a rock with aptasia on it and you can remove it take the rock out just take it put a new rock
• 29:00 - 29:30 in uh this person uh has there's a little bit of bubble algae right here and you know so I would say take care of it right away um what this person was asking shockingly to me was should they break down their whole tank because there's bubble algae in it now right that's that's kind of how I see people thinking and it not kind of that's I see people thinking that way and it makes me a little nervous all that stability we're trying to make
• 29:30 - 30:00 if you break down the tank you're starting again from zero and then it's going to be harder uh while we're on Bubble algae I just want to throw out the idea there's no reproductive anything inside the bubbles there is not um uh I've talked to some phycologists about it I've talked with Andy Ryan who talked with psychologists about it and I said we need send me the paper that shows it he sent it to me and I said this part and he said yeah that part and
• 30:00 - 30:30 I said huh and he said oh that's in phycologists speak no one's going to understand it but what it means is there's no Brew product of anything inside of there so pop them all you want right if you want to scrape them and pop them great when I see them I just pop them I don't they just scrape them off let them float away into your filter socks that everyone loves that I don't use um but there's no problem with popping the algae that's a great myth if we could kill that
• 30:30 - 31:00 um so really what I like is herbivores I think herbivores are really sexy and I I want to make a two cautions about herbivores um biological controls can always be hit and miss right when somebody says um my rabbit fish ate my biopsis you should get this rabbitfish often sometimes other people get that rapid fish it will not touch bryopsis right so don't get a biological control
• 31:00 - 31:30 unless you really like that animal they're not sure fire um uh charity I can't think for that word again I couldn't think of a word earlier when I was introducing Adam Sandler and now I've just Frozen again philanthropic was the word before so uh biological controls are not philanthropic
• 31:30 - 32:00 uh if you get something like you know snails and things like that that's okay you can get snails they're not really gonna hurt anything in your tank but if you get a rabbit fish um it might decide it likes to eat your zoanthids which happens right so you're always taking a risk so make sure you're not just buying it without understanding what it can do uh and then the other caution is there's a couple of uh animals that make me make me squidgy when people recommend them one of them is a sea hair a c hair can
• 32:00 - 32:30 eat algae um it is one of the things that kind of can be thought of to actually mow down long algae um but then they have nothing to eat and that makes me very sad because then it's going to die and most people don't care because it's a snail without a shell on the outside and people talk about moving them around and if that's done responsibly I'm all for it um but they often don't because you all
• 32:30 - 33:00 the problem's gone away I don't know where the sea here is it's somewhere in the tank so you know ethically that's that's a that's an area I think we want to uh watch out for and also uh these the lettuce nudibranch same kind of thing um they can eat some algae but then what are they going to do and then they're going to starve in your tank and we should feel bad when that happens I mean we could still decide to do it don't get me wrong right we we kill animals all the time for all kinds of reasons but uh
• 33:00 - 33:30 doing it without being thoughtful about it is what makes me unhappy okay so herbivores you can't just throw herbivores in and expect they're going to do it you want to set them up for success and so what does that mean crop down long algae you can't just throw them in and they're gonna you know in a big mess of algae they're just gonna chew it away it's it's the same kind of thing maybe that uh you know deer will eat uh the leaves off the tree but they don't eat the branches right so you you scrape it down get it down as
• 33:30 - 34:00 low as a hand don't worry about eradicating it then your Predators your herbivores can get to it and eat it up um problem rocks this is the one that kills me the most if you can pull a rock you know if you've got extra rocks in your sump and you got algae grown just pull that rock out take the corals off of it let that out let that rock bake take another rock from yourself put your cow put it back together on your Reef your Reef is a dynamic system and it's
• 34:00 - 34:30 changing all the time your reef is never done no matter what you do it's you're gonna have to change the Aquascape at some point if the corals are growing you're going to have to eventually radically change your Aquascape because corals grow up and they often die from below that's how Reeves are built right so if you're succeeding you get corals growing up the underneath gets shaded doesn't get as much water movement or uh or philanthropy and eventually you're gonna have to pull that out and chop it
• 34:30 - 35:00 off and replant it so don't be scared of I gotta replace a rock and move the corals around you're going to have to do it anyway if you're successful Joe Joe talked about Joe waielo at Long Island talked about a 35 pound parcelapora that he just took the tips off because he he's not going to bother to lift up a 35 pound thing before he bleached that system um kill it while it's small we already went over that but if you see a little bit of
• 35:00 - 35:30 algae there's several ways you can kill it while it was small you could pull it off with your hand you could use your bone shears or your Cutters or needle nose pliers to scrape it off the rock you could chip off a piece of that rock you could pull that piece of rock off saw that piece of that's got the little bit of algae on it put it back in your tank you could use epoxy this is my favorite because you can get like Julian sells the Coraline colored um two-part epoxy uh and he has several colors of it I think two little fishies for sale and you just smother the algae
• 35:30 - 36:00 with it you can do it with super glue if you want you can actually flip the rock upside down smother it that way too um but that smothering with epoxy is great because the the two-part stuff if you want to take it off it it just crumbles when you go to take it off and then you've got your Rock back the way you had it before at the Academy at steinhardt we had bryopsis and we were fighting briopsis in one and it was growing and growing and growing and they wanted anyway I eventually went in with a big ball of z-spar which is a marine
• 36:00 - 36:30 epoxy and just smothered it all just covered it done algae problem was over we've been fighting it for months and now it's over because we killed it from space because algae is gentrifying your Reef algebra no we'll figure it out um I already talked about that clip it off smother and papa great pay attention to your herbivore population so my Revelation over the last couple years is that I learned in
• 36:30 - 37:00 my life was that the dish I thought you could finish doing the dishes and then there would be no more dishes to do and it turns out that's there's always dishes um it turns out you finish the dishes some jerk in your family you'll come put dishes right in the sink that you just finished cleaning right ureifa's like that there's always going to be stuff you have to do so just keep up on it a little bit it's much easier than waiting till your your dishes are all over the place just do them while they're small right so but pay attention to your herbivore population we tend to
• 37:00 - 37:30 because because they were kind of unseen and you see a few snails and and it's kind of boiling frog one goes one another goes eventually and then you only have one snail and it's not doing the job or you only have one urchin um and I saw this when I lost uh I had a rabbit fish that had to be removed because it was eating my zoanthids and within a week I had algae popping up and all over in places and and I got a new herbivore and boom it went away
• 37:30 - 38:00 what does that say okay good herbivores I like because the summer boards I think are great and and I'm often saying I don't want to give recipes or tell people what to do but these are the ones that I use and that I like I love these tuxedo Origins you can get them uh Vos and Aquatics often has them small uh the smaller they are the better you make them don't you Bill makes them so talk to him afterwards because we need more people like him making these for us we uh Jamie craggs another thing he's
• 38:00 - 38:30 done so much for us but one other thing he decided to do was instead of scraping the um the frag plugs where you've got your one tiny settled Baby Coral that you've worked for a year to make happen and you've got to go in with dental tools and scrape algae away from it he said why don't we just get baby urchins this actually the idea may have come from Martin Moe because I remember being at a workshop with uh with Jamie and Martin and the idea of using diadema for Reef restoration was how do we breed them and
• 38:30 - 39:00 I guess oh yeah there John you've got the Martin's new book Diamond diadema culture for Reef restoration right so why don't we do that in the tanks these guys are easy to breed as things go yeah right 80 days and then they settle and then they're tiny something like that um but you can get them you can also get them big wild caught so if you want to do that do that but um for my money if you've cropped stuff down so they can get to it they keep stuff really clean and they do a minimal job of pushing stuff over there's another urchin I
• 39:00 - 39:30 don't have a picture of it sadly it's the lidocinus one it's a Caribbean urchin this one is a indo-pacific one that does a good job too I think it's a little bit more of a bulldozer uh you all you always see that one with the plastic hats on them by the way I love the idea that that we care about getting plastic out of the ocean but we'll print little plastic hats to put in our reefs I think that's I just love that um I like a bunch of tangs I like a yellow tang I like a coal Tang a Kohli
• 39:30 - 40:00 Tang depending on if you like Pokey or poke I don't like the Powder Blue Tang I'll say that another way I love the Powder Blue Tang it's one of my favorite fish I will never keep one again in a mixed Reef because they're jerks and I don't want to deal with that but if you do go ahead but no they can become Terrors so I keep a yellow tang and I get them from biota because I that seems easier versus getting not being able to get
• 40:00 - 40:30 them at all from the wild so there you go um rabbitfish I like rabbitfish too I usually keep a tank and a rabbit fish in my tanks in the smaller tanks I only keep one because these fish can get a little larger the the um I think it's a guitarist the lined one the one on the left my left that's a captive bred one from biota as well it's apparently a biota commercial well why not but they're bringing all these captive bread things to Market that no one else had a way to get so good for biota
• 40:30 - 41:00 um snails I like I like Asteria snails um there's also what's the big one that's a zebra one it's all zebra stripe but they get huge so I don't like it a big giant trocus I like these guys they seem to do a nice job keeping stuff mowed down as well there's the Mexican turbo and there's uh there's always debate about the Mexican turbo and and this is what made me think one of the things that's made me think that you can't trust biological controls to do their job
• 41:00 - 41:30 um there's a so you've got to get Mexican turbos and then somebody goes okay I got them and they didn't mow down my algae someone will say it mows down their algae I got them they didn't mow down that you need them from a different part of Mexico you got to get the right ones um so uh but some people have very good success I use these as well um some people have very good success um so you know they're and they're not big and they're not horrible they're
• 41:30 - 42:00 just a nice snail so they're fine too I don't have a lot of these I have four or five in my display um then there's amphipods so you know I like to inoculate with amphipods I sometimes go to the beach and collect Alpha plus I used to do that a lot when I was breeding cephalopods a lot I'd be using them for food so I was every week I was putting hundreds and hundreds of amp logs into my system um now often I'm lazy and we've been having a huge algae bloom in the Bay Area so I'm not collecting anything because it's dead and um but you can buy these relatively inexpensively you know
• 42:00 - 42:30 that's like 30 bucks or 39 bucks for a thousand of them and often they run double you know because they have too many um so I like adding those as well those are the herbivores I like the ones I don't like are the ones like the uh the sea hair and the um the uh crispa the lettuce and it'll bring so this is a horror show um we whatever this has gotten out of control the person hasn't been on top of it hasn't been doing it while it's small
• 42:30 - 43:00 I don't want to judge them because maybe they don't know what they're getting advice so we shouldn't we shouldn't shun people who have tanks like this what do you do when this happens you want to Nuke it from space you could do that there's also variations of nuking from space it doesn't mean a complete tank reset um you don't have to and I think with all that rock if you can avoid it you don't want to throw away all that benthic succession that you've been working so
• 43:00 - 43:30 hard to have uh the tank is fine you just have a bunch of algae um so how do you deal with horror right change out the Rock that's great flip the rock over said that before pull the rock out and scrub it or and you can do it at peace at a time that's why this doesn't have to be onerous or or make you cry you can you know every two days you pull out a piece of rock and deal with it and put it back in and then do another one and do another one something that works for me is spraying muriatic acid on the Rock 10
• 43:30 - 44:00 be careful when you do it but it definitely kills the algae if you let it sit for 20 minutes and put it back in rinse it with tank water put it back some people are reporting very good success using hydrogen peroxide for the same reason so I haven't done that yet but hey go for it it sounds great um you remove the algae by hand right so in that picture you can remove eighty percent of that algae dose by going in with your hand and pulling it out right so do that
• 44:00 - 44:30 um or you could do it with tools the the thing that's funny to me is when somebody has a tank like this one and somebody says well when you if you're using a toothbrush to scrub the rock make sure you siphon out the algae because otherwise it will infect your tank uh you're done man whatever so when I get in that size problem I pull it out by hand but I run one of these so this is um
• 44:30 - 45:00 whether they call it the in-tank polishing filter and it comes with a pleated cartridge so it's a micron filter I glue a magnet to the side of it so I can move it around the front glass because there's no space in my tanks for it and I scrub the algae and pull the algae off and let it fly around let it get everywhere and let this suck out as much as it can I think this is a better way to go than letting it go to the filter sock because the filter sock is
• 45:00 - 45:30 kind of a passive you're hoping it goes over the Overflow there's some of that too and I've done this when I set up the the secret home lab tanks uh those four tanks I showed at the beginning I came home and two of them were just filled with algae like in that horror show picture and I just scraped it and one of them was kind of empty so that was easy the other one had my baby corals in it I did the same thing and algae was flying around it was wrapping around the corals I left that pump on
• 45:30 - 46:00 for a day the next day most of it was gone I went in and pulled some of it off by my by hand and then added the herbivores and it never came back so filter it out and by the way this um is there anything else on that slide let me see yeah no good the good thing about that is you can use it for all kinds of stuff um storming your tank you know you've got detritus or mullum as as as because detritus is something that's going to break down mullum is already broken down so my Sump has got this much mullum in
• 46:00 - 46:30 it don't care um but if you want to remove it like I do in a frag tank I stir everything up and I blast it out with the power head and then leave this in there for a couple of days pull the pleated cartridge out rinse it off with a hose and it's good and ready to go this is like a Workhorse of my home lab I have three of them now so the too long didn't read version it's actually longer than this but algae problems are not fixed they're managed just know you're going to have to manage
• 46:30 - 47:00 them and uh um try not to eradicate it because it's part of the ecosystem that you've got going on there the early life of the system you need to think differently than an immature system there's a different management strategy you need for both of those if it's too late you have a plan and you don't have to do it immediately but you know you can do it slowly or you can hit it hard in a weekend or a day and just get it over with um and you can get super lazy as it goes on
• 47:00 - 47:30 because as your tank matures and your herbivores are balanced and everything's working out you're in good shape you can relax and enjoy the tank um and I would say that all of these things are rules of thumb there are I don't think there are any rules in Reef keeping there is nothing I can tell you to do that will work for everybody all the time so take it if you disagree with me I'd love to hear about it if uh if you if if you want to do something else go ahead but these are all rules of thumb and develop your own Blue Thumb your own saltwater
• 47:30 - 48:00 thumb that's the key to success in Reef keeping is you understanding what you think you're doing even if you're wrong if you're wrong you'll figure it out if you're not you'll keep building on that and I need to thank everyone I know and mostly fair use laws because I ran out of time to credit everything and so uh check out our podcast because apparently we have to pimp everything we do and if that's not a cephalopod but I love that picture and if you have
• 48:00 - 48:30 any questions I'd be happy to take them and thank you for your attention and coming out on a Sunday thank you