Citric acid against BBA?

[MrAqua]

Hi
On some of my buce rhizomes I haved discovered patches of BBA. Do u recommemd a bath of citric acid or liquid carbon?
Thx

 

[Finn]

Try citric acid first, I've found from my admittedly very unscientific experience of using gluteraldehyde on bucephalandras that although the leaves and main growing points of remain okay, longer rhizomes without any active growth on them which were previously healthy become yellow and die back.

This is doing my usual method for BBA treatment which is to put a ml of 2% gluteraldehyde into a small glass of water with the affected plant and leave for 5-10 minutes or so before returning to the tank.

 

[MrAqua]

Thx for the reply. Do I dillute the citric acid? If so, how much?

 

[Crusader58]

Some people (myself included) have found that reducing micro fert dosage causes bba to clear up.
Reduce micros by 10 times....ie if you normally dose 40ml, then only dose 4ml.
I had bba going mental on my anubias, I read about micro toxins being a possible cause, so followed the above dosing advice and within 4 days my anubias was completely clear of bba.
I was previously following the usual ei dosing of macros, micros; but have now changed my dosing to reduced micros as the results speak for themselves.

 

[Finn]

That's a good question, what's the source and concentration of the citric acid? I've actually used lemon juice to good effect to treat mosses for tenacious diatoms and filamentous algae as I thought it would be the most gentle, but never tried it for BBA.(I don't know why and probably should test it out at some stage).

 

[MrAqua]

Not sure what I will be using, citric acid. But lemon juice sounds like a good thing to try.
I fairly confident I have read about it somewhere online, specifically using citric against BBA on buce..cant remember where though.