Algae ID wanted

T

Titus

So most of my cyano is going away , but an underlying algae of similar color remains. This was there before, but was covered in cyano... with the cyano mostly gone, it remains. It can be sucked off of the rocks fairly easily, so it doesn't seem to have a root system.It grows pretty fast... a single hair can get as long as 4" in the week since I last siphoned it all out.

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@mmiller40 wrote:
Looks like hair algae. A tang or Lawnmower should mow it down said:
That is what I originally figured, but I couldn't find any pics of hair algae in this color. I will be adding my GFO and carbon reactor this weekend and the bristletooth will go in next week, so between the 2 I am hoping it won't last much longer.
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It should be green or brownish. I cant tell color in the pic with your lighting. Could also be cyano on top of it making it look more purple.
 
@mmiller40 wrote:
It should be green or brownish. I cant tell color in the pic with your lighting. Could also be cyano on top of it making it look more purple. said:
Some of it is brown, other areas of the tank have more of a dark lavender tint.



On a side note, I am finding the testing of phosphates to be incredibly annoying. It seems to me that if you have enough for it to cause problems like cyano and hair algae, the nuisances created by it are using it all up so you read zero on the test. I am thinking that I don't really care what the actual number the test returns is... I just need to decide which of the following categories my tank falls in:

A) Tests Zero or near it and no sign of nuisance algae- Everything is good. Have a beer or three to celebrate.
B) Test is greater than .03 but no sign of nuisance algae- Levels are creeping up. Put down the beer and deal with it now before it causes a problem.
C) Tests Zero and nuisance algae is present- It isn't really zero, but you should know that just by looking at the tank, so I don't know why you even bothered to test. Throw in the towel and grab a bottle, or hunker down for the long term and start dealing with the problem. Don't even bother pulling out that test again until all the cyano and GHA is completely gone, because you already know the test isn't going to tell you anything.
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@Matt wrote:
I would lean towards a possible macro algae like Gracilaria. Google for pics and see if that resembles what you have growing there. said:
Gracilaria pictures look somewhat stiff and branching. What I have is not stiff at all, waving very fluidly in the current. It is single strands, each thinner than a human hair, but grows in tiny clumps of 10 or more strands... The waving causes the strands near each other to twist together to look like a single hair with split ends. The clump base is no more than 1mm in size.
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Well the BRS Dual reactor I ordered arrived and it only took about 20 minutes to get it installed and online. Hopefully I won't be annoyed by this stuff for long.
 
A follow up... The GFO seems to have wiped out the last sign of cyano. I also sucked out the hair algae several days ago. The Algae grew back, but now there is no red/purple color to it.. it is all a light brown color. I think this confirms that it was GHA with cyano piggybacking on it. The Bristletooth will be moving in to the tank on Friday, so hopefully she will take care of the GHA. Before the Cyano showed up, there was a spot of turf algae. The Cyano seemed to starve it out. Now that the cyano is gone, another spot of turf algae popped up, although not at the same place in the tank.
 
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