Have a read at this: How to get rid of Black Beard Algae (BBA)
Pretty much sums things up about BBA.
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Alternative causes of bba
- Thread starter Qwedfg
- Start date
Pretty much sums things up about BBA.
Qwedfg
Member
I have read this and implemented the solutions with little effect. As I said I only have shrimp and 4 oto and feed very limited amounts. I clean my filter often and vacuum detritus. My CO2 has been set to a 1.3 ph drop and now I am trying to push it closer to 1.5. I lowered the flow of my filter (eheim 2217) and put a flow restrictor on my eheim surface skimmer. My CO2 is distributed through an line diffuser so it does have a lot of micro bubbles but I do not notice more BBA in areas directly in the flow of the filter.
I am starting to wonder whether I am dosing too much micro nutrient (particularly Fe) which is causing slow growth and some stunting in my stems or I am missing a micronutrient since I use RO water with a TDS of 2 and only remineralize using calcium and mangesium sulfate and use CSM+B for micros which might be missing something essential that you could get from tap water?
No amount of shrimps or ottos will ever eat BBA.
Do you have woods and how healthy are your plants? These two alone are source of organics in the water to a large degree.
Qwedfg
Member
Sorry I didn’t mean they would eat the algae but that I don’t have high organic matter from over feeding or something of that nature. I will take a picture of my tank tomorrow but my plants seem healthy enough but do not grow very fast. I do have some spider wood in the tank.
Edit
Here is a pic of my tank that was taken about three weeks ago. I had just trimmed the stems so they are pretty short. Not very good detail I will take a better one tomorrow.
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That would be my first suspect. When I have wood in a tank I can be sure I will eventually get BBA. When I remove the wood and make sure my maintenance is up to PAR I have 0 BBA, nada, nothing, rien. I have yet to correlate BBA to micros or Fe myself. I have been dosing Fe at 0.5ppm for as long as I can remember but I also do 60%-70% water changes weekly and do partial substrate vacuums every week. I don't tolerate dying leaves, I clean my skimmer every other day, clean my pre-filter every 2 weeks or so and I certainly don't let anything funky last long. A lot of this BBA and algae problems in general comes down to maintenance.
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Now this picture tells me more than just pointing fingers at Fe and Micros.
I see mostly slow growing plants. That's not helping depending what your dosing is.
I see a lot of dust in the substrate.
You seem to be injecting a lot of CO2 for plants that would still grow fine without that much CO2.
I wouldn't be surprised if those stones are releasing some carbonates in the water, increasing your dKH, and perhaps making it more difficult for certain plants to grow optimally. What's your dKH after WC and at week end before WC?
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Qwedfg
Member
The stones definitely are increasing my kh and gh. At the end of the week my kh is about 5 and my gh is 8ish. Normally I add about 5 gh to my water and no kh. When I clean my substrate I use a turkey baster and my water change hose to suck up debris. This probably only removes detritus from the top and maybe a half inch below the surface of the substrate. What would you suggest I do? I was thinking of going to a Dutch style scape but wasn’t sure what to do with my livestock while changing everything over.
That's why I refuse to work with any stone with carbonates. They are just a pain and makes everything more difficult. I am not saying that KH alone is the reason for your BBA, but that's probably not helping.
Keep doing that perhaps a bit deeper. On the picture I can see that the dust is nearly all the way up to the substrate surface. Personally I don't bother with turkey basters. That's a gimmick IMO. I use my fingers and wave them gently on the substrace surface. It will have the same effect that a turkey baster except you have one less piece of hardware to think about 😉. Make sure you are sucking all that dust on the spot with a hose at the same time. Don't let it spread around.
I was not implying you scrap your scape. Sometimes having some challenge is a good thing. It makes you dig deeper to try to understand things. Dutch style tanks might be easier on the algae front if you have a lot of fast growing stem plants but you also have a lot maintenance involved if you want to have a nice looking scape. Any Dutch aquascaper will tell you this. It's probably the most demanding and difficult type of scape you can do. If you are ready, why not.
Oldguy
Member
I agree. Was a big fan of bog wood and dried heather twigs but not any more. I tie plants to plastic 3/4" pipes and fill with gravel and water. If you have enough plants you can't see the pipes.
Without wood far less mulm accumulates and gravel vacing is easier.
I have found high nitrates produce good plant growth and with good plant growth BBA is on the back foot.
As to what really triggers BBA I do not know.
xZaiox
Member
I can't really comment on the wood part because I always tend to use wood, but Happi has also said the same, that wood may be a risk factor. I am confused though why many aquascapers are able to use huuuge amounts of wood and yet maintain an algae-free tank... maybe it's to do with the type of wood? I noticed with spiderwood (azalea root) that it tends to shed a looot of stuff when it's first put in the tank. The harder, denser bogwood stuff seems like it doesn't really shed anything.
Just going to add here, that although I now think 0.5ppm is still unnecessary (I haven't noticed any deficiencies crop up since halving that), the OP is currently dosing 1.2ppm of Fe per week, which is definitely unnecessary. There wouldn't be much harm in just trying a reduction. The OP even has an aquasoil which will help with iron too, I'm using an inert substrate with no deficiencies at 0.26ppm Fe.
Yeah I definitely noticed organics seem to play a role too. If the tank and/or pipes need cleaning I would notice an increase in BBA. This is why I now think that BBA may be caused by something such as high organic content, but that iron may fuel it somehow. Otherwise I'm not really understanding why reducing iron in my tank has impacted the BBA so much, but it has 🤷♂️
Definitely agree here. I used to have loads of Sieryu stone in my tank... it looks great, but damn it really messes with the water parameters 😬 I've swapped to slate now, I prefer the look of Sieryu stone, but at least slate is inert and can look pretty nice too.
Who are these miraculous aquascapers exactly? Problem is that what you see on one picture posted one day, is usually the apex of the tank (or the tank is cleared of BBA through some anti-algae compound). The same aquascaper usually never posts how the tank is several month later, or when it's not looking great, or they simply reset it and do something else. I dare anyone with a mature tank which has/had wood come here and tell us they never had any BBA. I am pretty sure Tom Barr, Dennis Wong, Gorge Farmer etc etc etc all have had BBA at some point in their tanks with wood. Wood eventually decomposes. Some faster than others, but they all release organics progressively.
Comes back to the EI concept. It's not whether it's necessary, it's whether there is plenty enough. Now, I agree that 1.2ppm is probably over the top and could potentially be problematic and that 0.5ppm is perhaps still more than needed, but I haven't seen any harmful effect when dosing 0.5ppm Fe. Could this 1.2ppm of Fe be partially responsible for BBA, who knows, maybe. I've also had BBA under much lower Fe concentration. As for micros I haven't really bothered correlating that with BBA, so who knows, maybe. All this is just my experience, nothing more.
My opinion is that organics plays a major role. As for Fe, well maybe maybe not. What I often see though is that many people use EI dosing and then only change 30%-40% of water or go lazy on maintenance... Not saying you were doing that, just stating what I have observed many times. If you are dosing EI levels, you also need to somewhat reset the tank at each WC of these minerals and traces else you end up with large accumulations which can have an adverse effect.
Hi all,
cheers Darrel
Then you don't need to remineralise your RO water, the dissolution of the limestone (CaCO3) will add <"1 : 1 dGH : dKH"> and you are going to add magnesium (Mg) with your fertiliser.
I only used foraged wood, but things like <"proper bogwood"> and <"oak heartwood"> last pretty much eternally in the tank. I like really dense wood, that way you know it has <"plenty of lignin"> and won't degrade. Bark is another option that is lignin rich.
cheers Darrel
MichaelJ
Member
I think an overload of organics, be it from decomposing plants, wood, fish- and food waste - in other words; lack of proper maintenance - is the biggest culprit when it comes to algae in general. But it can also happen in an otherwise well maintained tank due to unstable water parameters - such as fluctuating / poor application of CO2 - which is easily compounded by high dosing of micros (Fe) as mentioned by @Happi ... excessive light intensity is too blame as well. I don't think I am totally wrong by saying that by far the most of the BBA questions we get here are from people that are injecting CO2 and typically also are quite generous with their fertilizers. I wouldn't go as far as blaming it on one or two factors though. If it would be that simple we would have figured it out eons ago.
In both of my very mature, very stable low-tech tanks I have Malaysian driftwood and no BBA (or other algae to speak of). Early on with these tanks I did get some BBA on my anubias (slow growers). I got rid of that with a combination of providing some shade for the plants, getting rid of badly infected leaves and treating the rest in a bath of diluted Excel.
A good example of unstable water parameters.
Cheers,
Michael
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MichaelJ
Member
Just came across this.... if you actually WANT to grow BBA.
Some "tips":
Cheers,
Michael
Some "tips":
- Tons of light
- Plenty of Iron
- Fluctuate CO2
- Elevated organic waste levels
Cheers,
Michael
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I had to shamefully retract my "Like" 😳
For some reason I thought the link was to the same site @Happi has previously linked, which was a somewhat scientific looking instruction on how to culture the algae (or something like that).
The article in your link is a little bit more suspect to me 🤔 Its talking about growing with carbon monoxide, has a bunch of spelling errors and generally seems a little iffy 🤔
The author also switches between calling it brown beard algae and black beard algae at random intervals. Iron is also not a macronutrient 😁
Im not necessarily disagreeing with the general themes, but im not sure I would use this particular article to represent it 😅
Perhaps that is the joke 😁
MichaelJ
Member
Yes @Hufsa … the link to the article was not meant to be very super serious… sorry to everyone who took it that way. I do like to joke around (it's who I am... sorry!) and sometimes my jokes falls flat! You can’t win them all - well, at least you can’t throw beer bottles at me blues brothers style… So you can go ahead and “like” this post instead
… I take this as a warning to spare @Guest and @LondonDragon the trouble (sorry guys) 🙂 Cheers,
Michael
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