HELP!!! What The Hell Is This Stuff???

[untamed]

Originally Posted by MMAX

Today I dismantled the whole set-up. Every rock was taken out and scrubbed, the back glass which was also grown over with the stuff was scraped, a bunch of the sand which had collected a pile of it was chucked and finally a 90% water change was done.

What are you using to provide biological filtration on this system? If it was the rocks, you have potential problem there because you would have destroyed your bio filter when you scubbed all your rocks....

[RSM]

I had this problem for 3 months. I did the same thing by taking all the rocks out scrubbing them only for it to grow all back in a week. I just started up my tank and had been battling this red turf algae until.....................................I went to Red Coral and got a Sea Hare, (thanks Kevin). Saviour! It devoured all of my red turf in about a week. 30lbs of rock covered in this. This is what worked for me. I have not seen any grow back, its been over a month. Good Luck!

[Whatigot]

RSM< you should hook him up with your sea hare now as if its eaten all your turf algae it's probably starving in your tank....

[RSM]

The Sea Hare was a rental from my LFS. Agreed it would starve without algae as this is all they eat. Try Red Coral MMAX I know you can rent one out, it worked for me!

[MMAX]

I'm pretty sure I know what went wrong after doing a bunch of reading. I did mention overfeeding as part of the problem, my tank also sits in the basement under an east facing window. I would always open the curtains and let the morning sun shine into the tank. The corals seemed to enjoy it so i didn't think anything about it. The green algae also enjoyed it and then the red joined in the fun. I also got lazy during the summer and instead of using RO water for changes started experimenting with tap water. The overfeeding and tap water probably overloaded the tank with phosphates and the sun caused the red stuff to multiply out of control. I have been keeping the curtains closed, used RO water when I did my clean up job and increased the flow inside the tank. There's a few reminants of the red algae here and there that I'll have to clean out but so far so good. A few more days and I should be able to tell if it's going to come back or not.

[MMAX]

Picked up 3 fairly good sized turbos today. They started working the minute I put them in. For the most part the algae hasn't come back....yet. There's still a few tufts of it around so the snails should be able to take it out quickly. Hope to hell I get lucky and have this thing beat. Tested my water yesterday and phosphates and nitrates are next to nothing.

[MMAX]

The rocks were scrubbed in salt water from the tank. I also have a Fluval cannister filter filled with live rock and live rock rubble.