edenholly Posted May 20, 2011 Report Share Posted May 20, 2011 I'm having a massive algae and snail explosion and I really can't figure out why. I can't even figure out what the algae is! It started as dark brown spots on the edges of leaves which couldn't be removed even by scraping with a fingernail. It doesn't really look like the images of black spot algae I see online. Anyway, then it moved from my baby tears to my amazon sword, java fern and eventually even my anubia. Then hair-like algae grew in the same spots up to maybe 2cm long. I also got some beard algae in places and some green hair algae which are both easily removed. At the same time, I have had a snail explosion. I went from seeing a couple of pond snails around which always got crushed, to seeing maybe 3 types of small snail everywhere. Now, I've never had much/any of an algae problem. I know I probably overfeed my fish by accident, however it's never caused an issue. I have a 1200lph canister filter on my 80L tank. It was *clean*. Regular water changes etc. I recently added a new 20W light so there are now about 2W/gal on my tank because I had a nicely planted tank. I was using flourish and flourish excel for that reason though since getting the algae issue I stopped with the flourish and only use excel, now every day since I read somewhere that helps. For the past week I haven't had any fish in there besides 2 adult bristlenose and some fry in the cave so there hasn't even been any fish food floating around as I figure the BNs have enough bloody algae. I also did a 50% water change last week and regular 10% changes since then. I'm at my wits end, I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong or how to fix this. I am ready to rip everything out and start again because it all looks like crap. I'm sorry this is long but I'm going crazy, does anyone have any suggestions? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brockssracer Posted May 20, 2011 Report Share Posted May 20, 2011 Try some clown loaches for the snails, you can get a product called pond cure i think it was. Its the same stuff as for aquariums but alot stronger. Instead of using 5 ml to 50l its 5ml to 300. That should clear some of the algae. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DeadFishFloating Posted May 20, 2011 Report Share Posted May 20, 2011 Yea I'd add a group of loaches and a group of siamese flying foxes. Also get your phosphates tested. Also, just in case you are, never clean filter media (sponges/noodles etc) in tap water! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
