[untamed]

This isn't the first reef I've ever run, but it is proving to be different than my previous effort.

When I planned this, I attempted to just do everything as I had always done...just bigger. This has now proven not to work. The reason - bigger fish. In particular...Tangs.

My previous tank was much too small to house any Tangs. I grew lovely macro algae and harvested it as necessary to maintain balance. I like the look of macro algae in the display and figured I would do the same thing in the larger tank.

Moe (the Naso Tang) ate all the macro algae.

One of the golden rules of aquarium keeping is "Algae will grow". It's either nice algae that you like or nasty algae that you don't like. Since all the nice algae was being eaten, the hair algae took over.

Attempting to keep control of hair algae by weeding it from a 400 gallon tank is well...impossible.