Brown algae all over my rocks!

N

Nathans_Dad

I have a 29 gallon tank that I have had up for about 5-6 months now. I only have a CUC and two percs as livestock. I have some mushrooms and a few zoas, also one hammer coral which is small.

I have noticed brown algae really growing on my rocks a lot. It doesn't seem to grow much on the substrate though. The CUC will eat it, but they are just not keeping up. I checked my water parameters and everything looks ok to me: ammonia, nitrite and nitrate are all 0, phosphorus is not detectable, pH is 8.2 and salinity is 1.026.

I just did a water change and flipped all the rocks over so the algae side is down, hopefully this will kill off some of it. What should I do? I have thought about buying more snails for the CUC to try and keep up with it, but there must be something I am doing wrong to get this much growth. I am not getting much in the way of coralline growth at all.

My lights are a combo fixture with a MH (which is currently off as an experiment to see if it will stop the algae growth), four actinics and moonlights. I run my lights about 8 hours a day.

Here are a few pics of the algae:

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I can't figure out what I am doing wrong. I use only RO/DI water. I have two Hydro 750s for flow. Any ideas for combating this stuff?
 
I would say diatoms, but they would be on the sand as well. Could the rocks be a source of nutrients? I think they say that silicates can contribute to diatom growth.

Could you run some ChemiPure?

Old light bulbs and/or improper spectrum of light?

Algaes of different kinds appeared and disappeared in my system during the first year and a half, approximately. Stuff sometimes happens.

David
 
@Nathans_Dad wrote:
I buy my water from the LFS said:
The biggest advantage to having your own ro/di unit with a TDS meter, is always knowing that your water is good. When you have issues, that is one less thing to worry about and makes narrowing down the issue much easier. I would suggest getting the phosphate level's checked and making sure the bulb's are not old. A good clean-up crew will help manage this once parameters/lights are inline.

Cheers,
Click to expand...
 
I had about 4 different kinds of algae going all over my rocks (nuisance algae). My wife picked out a Golden Headed Sleeper Goby and 2 weeks later I don't see any nasty algae (had dinoflagellates, etc), it was all filtered by this goby. Not a long term fix of course, but if you have someone who has one, you might want to use for a week or so.
 
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