Algal genus Spotlight: Bryopsis "hair algae"

[got2reef]

I battles hair algae for almost a year. I tried everything, hand removal, adding more herms, snails, lettuce nudi, water changes one a week with ro/di water. reduced the lighting as far back as my corals could take. Nothing worked. Then i got a Sea Hair, this dude went to town on the algae! i could pick him up, and place him on a patch of algae, and in a few hours it was reduced to a level that the herms and snails could handle. It really was amazing. Only problem is that after two weeks (almost all the hair algae was gone) i came home to find him half sucked through a grate on one of my powerheads. I read that if they die in your tank your screwed so i pulled him off, he had shrunk to about half his normal size and i did what anyone else would of done. I chunked him. I had a little service for him and drank in his honer. it only seemed right, after all he won my battle with the dreaded hair algae. cheers.

it was also called a sea hare

[Plantbrain]

Originally Posted by jack.pe

Theoretically you are absolutely right, however I have also heard that water changes can sometimes feed algae even if the water is "clean", i.e 0 on Nitrate and Phosphate, the theory being that there are other substances or minerals that come with the salt mix that are also feeding the algae. Not sure which substances or minerals these are supposed to be or if true but I have heard that before.

What frustrates me about this hobby is that there are so few definite answers and that so much ofit seems to be pot luck, such as someone having a perfect tank for years, nothing changing and then suddenly getting explosions of algae... we need more proper scientific reasearch and analisys so we can properly understand what really drives these suddend changes. Still love it though!

Humm.........I think it has less to do with the salt mixes and more to do with the disturbance and flow during the water change itself, it kicks up detritus from places that have not been cleaned out for sometime.

We tend to have a lower O2 level and the subsequent rise in CO2 as result of bacterial action on the detritus, then the nutrients follow.

I suspect noxious algae are able to respond to this group of changes.

So rather than limiting ranges of ppm's or ppb's, it has little to do with limitations like Liebig suggested for plant growth growth 160 years ago.

It's not nutrient competition in otherwords.

Let say this, I have lower Mg and also much richer N and P levels, and yet no issues with noxious algae.

That is a "reference", eg an aquarium lacking the noxious algae, yet having the supposed hypthetical algae inducing Evil nutrients.
Such aquariums falsify these hokey myths about nutrients and algae blooms.

It does not answer why the algae bloom, but it does illustrate what it is "not" in and of itself. So that is a much better bit of info that speculation, dogma and myth.

So that is another way to approach the questions and problems.

Once you rule out most of the main players that seem most likely, then you are left with only a few choices(generally/hopefully).

Ruling things out can be done fairly well by good seasoned aquarist.

I think some higher Mg seems to help, but I'd need to know what induced the Byropsis to germinate and recruit to a rock etc to begin with. I'd need to be able to do so that the methods are the same for the treatment.

If you cannot grow the pest in question and there's a lot of variation, between test, treatments, then it's going to be very hard to say much.

You need a good culture to test any algae from.

Regards,
Tom Barr

[Bladez]

For about 18 months I have had my HA infested live rock placed in a dark room inside a large sump and I have had a small aquarium attached to house the 2 yellow tangs and the couple of corals that I have left.... In December 09 I decided to get my display going again since the HA had disappeared (for at least 12 months) and was not growing in the small attached tank. So, I moved all the (clean) live rock back into my 200 gallon display. Now (Feb 13) just this evening I was inspecting my tank and noticed small shoots of this nasty weed (algae) growing in multiple places on my glass surfaces. I have been in this hobby for some time and I can deal with the financial and irritated wife part of this hobby but this stuff is about enough to drive a person over the side of a bridge!

Thankfully we have this place to come and vent about and research our problems....

[Elliott]

Originally Posted by Bladez

For about 18 months I have had my HA infested live rock placed in a dark room inside a large sump and I have had a small aquarium attached to house the 2 yellow tangs and the couple of corals that I have left.... In December 09 I decided to get my display going again since the HA had disappeared (for at least 12 months) and was not growing in the small attached tank. So, I moved all the (clean) live rock back into my 200 gallon display. Now (Feb 13) just this evening I was inspecting my tank and noticed small shoots of this nasty weed (algae) growing in multiple places on my glass surfaces. I have been in this hobby for some time and I can deal with the financial and irritated wife part of this hobby but this stuff is about enough to drive a person over the side of a bridge!

Thankfully we have this place to come and vent about and research our problems....

wow, so cooking the rock for that length of time still did not completely eradicate it, I agree with your frustration, this is enough to drive one nuts or at least quit! It sounds like you may have Bryopsis and not hair algae

[Bladez]

Originally Posted by Elliott

wow, so cooking the rock for that length of time still did not completely eradicate it, I agree with your frustration, this is enough to drive one nuts or at least quit! It sounds like you may have Bryopsis and not hair algae

Correct - I was using HA as a generic term for Bryopsis.... Obviously the spores of this stuff can hang around for some time - even in the dark.

One other note - I also have some live sand that I have kept in the sump from the original set up which may have harbored the spores.

[cw150]

I had an explosion in hair algae that lasted for several months. I was close to tearing down what had been a beautiful tank. I used the following measures which has all but completely eradicated the HA:

1) replaced my RO membrane. I'm fairly convinced this was the biggest part of my outbreak. My old membrane had stopped working, and I had been too lazy to replace it, and my DI was getting exhausted too quickly (duh). Obviously many water changes were required as I have around 250 g. including sump and fuge.

2) siphoned the HA from my fuge. This problem had gotten so bad it had overwhelmed my chaeto and caleurpa. Just used a hose and siphoned it all out. It returned several times over the course of 3-4 weeks, so I just siphoned it each week.

3) Removed coral that had HA trapped inside it and hacked it down. The coral was partially dead anyway.

4) Set up a GFO reactor. I purchased the large grain GFO from Bulk Reef Supply. This stuff will not eradicate HA on its own. I do believe it helps break down the decaying matter though, which seems to cause the growth cascade in HA. Don't be surprised if your chaeto will dwindle at first with GFO running. Your water needs to figure itself out before the chaeto can grow.

5) I used a product called 'Vanish'. Comes in a tiny bottle from my fish store. I removed all carbon and did not change the water until the HA was almost completely gone. Perhaps this is the same approach as dosing carbon sources like vodka- I don't know. It worked.


In my experience, there are no amount of critters you can buy that will eliminate a serious HA outbreak in a large system.

[Paul B]

In my experience, there are no amount of critters you can buy that will eliminate a serious HA outbreak in a large system

That is correct.

[Charlies_Reef]

One does not become an experienced reefer until He/She has battled and won Bryopsis eradication.

[bermuda reefer]

Having read this article and also tackling a huge outbreak of HA, my entire 180 plus fuge are covered with HA, i believe it went unchecked in the fuge and i wasnt running the fuge lite 24/7 and it just went asexual. So i went to the shore and collected 10 or 12 sea hares and they made a good attack on the HA but they eat until they roll up in a ball and then they dissapear, no idea where they go, they just vanish. So the Tangs nibble as do the blennies but you would need a hundred of them. So i collected a dozen or so small common urchins, not to big as they knock alot of stuff over. These guys plow! they eat HA and clean right down to the rock coraline and all, they are making fast work and seem to be best consumer to date, i was at the point of tear down and rebuild but i just might be making progress.

[reev]

I'm also fighting with an hair algae outbreak in my 125G+sump/fuge. I have a fair size cleanup crew of various snails, hermit crabs, emerald crabs, a few shrimps. I am growing chaeto in my fuge and running an Euro-Reef skimmer. Beside the cleanup crew I only have some Zoas, LPS and few SPS corals and a orange spotted goby. The goby feeds on the pods from the tank (I have plenty) and I only give little food to the shrimps once a day. I am not feeding the corals at all right now.

I had more fish earlier, including a yellow tang, a sailfin tang and a lawn mower blenny, but now they're out of the tank. Since they're out, the hair algae growth has slow down, but still growing.

I have been pulling algae out almost daily in the past week. The clean up crew appears to come and eat the short leftovers, but I don't see much progress.

The nitrate and phosphate levels are undetectable. Maybe because the algae feeds on them? The chaeto grows relatively fast too.

I added recently 2 lettuce slugs. They ate very little and then they "parked" on the glass. Reading more on them I have found that they can feed days to months on the algae cells they sucked up. So it would take a huge army of slugs to eat my algae.

Should I turn on the UV? Should I stop feeding my tank completely for few weeks? Would the shrimps survive?

I'm planning to try out an urchin soon.

Thanks!

[reev]

A short update on my fight with the algae.

I took the statement that "there are no amount of critters you can buy that will eliminate a serious HA outbreak in a large system" and I decided to look at ways to reduce the nutrients instead of adding more snails/urchins and others that "eat" algae.

Searching around, I ran again into the threads and articles discussing the dosing of vodka in reefs. They made sense to me: using vodka as an additive to increase the bacterial population and make it consume more nutrients faster than the algae can.

So I started planning an working on 2 items:
1. I purchased a few more dry live rocks, bleached them and put them to dry out in the sun. After few more weeks I will put them to cure for a month and then I will add them to my tank. I need these because I feel my tank to be understocked on live rock. More rock is more medium for bacteria to grow on.

2. I built a vodka dosing calendar and slowly I started adding vodka to the system. I followed the process described in this article, except that my nitrate and phosphate readings are not accurate since the algae feeds on those. http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2008-08/nftt/index.php

After about of week of low daily doses of vodka and a few rounds of pulling algae from the rocks, I noticed a change in the HA: there were spots that turned light green-yellowish color and I saw much more algae floating through the water - I need to clean my return's pump prefilter daily. It's too early for me to tell if this means the algae is fading/dying out or i just the color of new algae blooms. I hope it's because the algae is dying since I haven't seen this color on it before the dosing. It also feels softer and easier to pull it from the rocks. I take that as another good sign.

I will continue dosing vodka at the same levels, around 1ml/100G. So far I don't see any side effects from this dosing.

[nattarbox]

I am also about to ramp up vodka dosing to deal with Bryopsis. I used vodka to successfully rid my tank of cyanobacteria last year. I had about four months of clean tank enjoyment before a strand of Byropsis came in on a coral colony I had bought.

Thought it might have been a seafan or something at first because my LEDs made it appear bright blue.

I added four lettuce sea slugs who have done an admirable job over the past month, stripping an entire glass wall of the algae, but they seem less effective on the rock. Also I read that they retain the algae within their body and use it to derive energy through photosynthesis, and I've noticed they spend a lot of time basking at the top of the tank under the lights instead of eating the algae.

Obviously going from cyano to bryopsis, there is a larger issue I need to address around available nutrients. I hesitate to make huge changes to my tank routine because the corals and everything else are growing better than ever.

[reev]

I forgot to post a more recent update to my fight with HA until I saw the post from nattarbox.

Here it is:
I used vodka dosing and a few weeks into the dosing I started replacing the rocks that have been covered with the rocks that I had purchased & bleached. At the same time I dosed MB7 to replenish the bacteria. I did some heavy siphoning of the sand in the DT and fuge.

Once I was able to replace all rocks that have been covered with hair algae (took me a couple weeks), I had left very little in the DT. At that time I added a sea hare. The sea hare eats much more HA than the lettuce slugs since it simply digests the algae instead of using its cells for photosynthesis. The guy cleanup every single piece of the algae that I could see in my DT in a matter of weeks and then I moved it to the fuge where it did the same with the algae growing on the sand and rocks, but some was left mangled in my chaeto and I had to remove that myself. After cleaning my fuge, I had to give it away because I was afraid that it will starve in my tank.

Since then, I'm trying to keep my tank nutrients low, I have added carbon filtering and I'm considering adding a GFO reactor as well.

So far it's all good, I saw a couple very small patches of algae in the low flow areas of the tank or on the baffle & overflow teeth. The fish and clean-up crew are able to keep them in check so I didn't do anything about them.

Oh, my algae might have been just the plain hair algae. AFAK, the sea hare don't consume bryopsis. (I'm mentioning this just in case you are considering one).

[biecacka]

will the urchins eat brown algea too? its a reddish brown color
corey

[DeathWish302]

Originally Posted by cw150

In my experience, there are no amount of critters you can buy that will eliminate a serious HA outbreak in a large system.

Wow! All these years and this thread is still kicking....

Moral of my bryopsis story:

bryopsis + snails/mithrx crabs/hermits + other nuisance alge in sump = DT bryopsis outbreak

Many months later.....

1 Cup of Bleach + Infested LR = DEAD Bryopsis...

Problem solved

[nattarbox]

Yeaaaahhh..

I've beat cyanobacteria in my reef, and a number of various freshwater algae types. But this stuff is something else. I'm starting to think it might be a good excuse to spec out a new tank setup.

I guess I'd have to quarantine everything for months before moving it over though. Even the snails have bryopsis growing off their shells now.

[nattarbox]

Has anyone tried using a UV sterilizer to potentially minimize the spread of viable fragments from manual removal and clean up crew poop?

I had very good results using a cheap/small UV unit on freshwater tanks suffering from green water, a condition that perpetuates itself in a similar fashion.

[DeathWish302]

Originally Posted by nattarbox

Has anyone tried using a UV sterilizer to potentially minimize the spread of viable fragments from manual removal and clean up crew poop?

I had very good results using a cheap/small UV unit on freshwater tanks suffering from green water, a condition that perpetuates itself in a similar fashion.

I don't think UV would completely eliminate the possibility if kill off the strain at all. I once found another small patch start forming on a rock that did not have a high concentration of bleach when I first tried this. I used about 3 cups to a gallon and left the rock air dry in the sun for about 3 days. The bryopsis survived!

Before that, I tried a kalk paste applied to the patch and it came back in about 3-4 months. This strain of algae is nasty. I had no luck besides soaking in a uber-high concentration of bleach water or straight bleach soaks.

Give the UV a try, but I'm reluctant that it will result in controlling stray fragments. I've heard other's try UV for controlling aiptasia and mojano, but the major problem I see is that unless you zap every ounce of water circulating you cannot guarantee that the nasties won't get by the path of least resistance.

[nattarbox]

Yeah, I assume UV would not be effective against anything larger than one cell. I also have a HOT Magnum filter lying around that has a very fine filter, it might be effective at removing a lot of the fragments after my weekly manual removal ritual.

I might give that magnesium theory a try too, not much to lose at this point!

[DeathWish302]

Originally Posted by nattarbox

Yeah, I assume UV would not be effective against anything larger than one cell. I also have a HOT Magnum filter lying around that has a very fine filter, it might be effective at removing a lot of the fragments after my weekly manual removal ritual.

I might give that magnesium theory a try too, not much to lose at this point!

Can you remove the rock from the DT when removing? I eliminated a majority of my stray bits by removing the mats while the rock was outside the DT.

As for the Mg theory, I have shot my levels beyond 1600ppm before (when RC was actually measuring 1350ppm and not 1150ppm as prior batches). The mangroves and prolific algae in my lagoon didn't slow their growth rates at all. Maybe it would work for bryopsis, but it didn't work any miracles on my HA when it shot to 1600+ppm.

JMO

[mccorry]

I've been fighting a Bryopsis outbreak in my tank for a few months now. I've tried the following with not much sucess:

Sailfin (Lawnmower) Blenny - Starved to death... wouldn't touch the stuff
Emerald crabs - Won't touch the stuff
Various snails (Astera, Margareta, Turbo's, etc.) - not found one that will touch the stuff
Lettuce Nudi's - no dice... plus... my damn peppermint shrimp ended up eating them right in front of me.
AlgaeFix dosing - killed off all the other nuisance green algae in the tank, but didn't hurt the Bryopsis one bit.
Scrubbing / Manual removal - Keeps it under control / at bay ... but isn't fixing the issue.
Chetomorpha in the sump - I've tried this twice and I can't keep Chaeto alive. I think my tank doesn't have enough Nitrates to support it... it just disentigrates over 2-3 weeks.
Shortened light cycles - no significant change.

I am running out of patience. I hate this stuff! Argh!

[nattarbox]

Same.

Just lost a few more colonies to it. I'm losing soft coral polyps during manual removal, as the Bryopsis has entangled them almost completely. Tank looks like crap most of the time.

I can't decide if I should order another dozen of the lettuce nudis and a uv sterilizer, or a new tank.

[1fishkeeper]

Well I think that I have come to ends wit with fighting the bryopsis in my tank. I would really just like to nuke it all and start over fresh. But my only prolbem is I dont really have a place to put my mag that is doing really good. I have tried the Tech-M with no luck I just done a peroxide bath on the rocks that have it really bad. So I guess i will wait until I see how that comes out. But if that dont work Im nuking it with a small atom bomb. But if I have missed something about killing that works please let me know.

[tedcb]

A long time ago, I had problems with hair algae as well. I was told to get a lawn mower blennie by a friend of mine, and he worked wonders. I have another lawnmower in my 125g that I recently set up, and he is amazing!!! I broke down my 75g and moved everything into my 125 and needed more live rock. One of my LFS had a beautiful large chunk of cured live rock that had been around for a while because it was covered with hair algae. The owner just about gave it to me. I put it in the tank and the LMB just went to town. It's a month later, and not a single bit of algae left on it. None cropping up on any other rock either. Only problem is my LMB doesn't want to eat anything else now. Won't eat algae sheets, ulva, chaeto, culerpa, or gracilaria.

[DeathWish302]

Originally Posted by 1fishkeeper

Well I think that I have come to ends wit with fighting the bryopsis in my tank. I would really just like to nuke it all and start over fresh. But my only prolbem is I dont really have a place to put my mag that is doing really good. I have tried the Tech-M with no luck I just done a peroxide bath on the rocks that have it really bad. So I guess i will wait until I see how that comes out. But if that dont work Im nuking it with a small atom bomb. But if I have missed something about killing that works please let me know.

I promise that the Clorox bomb will work. 1cup of bleach per gallon of water will do the deed overnight. Let it air dry and rinse with about 20gal of water and voila!.... No HA. By doing this you can go rock to rock and not completely tear down a tank.

I still have a patch on my overflow bulkhead, so I just pull some off every couple months. This stuff hasn't spread ever, so a couple rocks at a time should not cause you grief in the long run.

Believe me, it could be far worse like redbugs or AEFW.