Uncalled for in a persons thank thread. Sorry jaa just have to state it- Im a big believer in pm's for that type of stuff. A tank thread is for compliments, advice and questions on someones tank, not criticism. No one knows it all but all should know enough to be tactful if they want peoples respect.
Thanks. And I am sorry about the past incident, if only for the way I handled it and phrased things -- though I still consider your BTA entirely too pale for my liking.
I wonder if it's some sort of morph with a natural tendency towards thinner tissue or lower zooxanthellae content, 'cause in spite of my view of it, it still looks like it's thriving in your care. (and still bubbling. Lucky SOB.) When given evidence contrary to what I believe to be true, holy crap, I actually consider the fact that I may be wrong. Unlike jaa.
And from everything Ive heard bryopsis is probably the hardest thing to deal with, limit or erradicate in a tank, so I believe that it not spreading on him shows hes pretty darn good at what hes doing. Just my .07 am done.
Thanks.
In my experience, bryopsis isn't the unholy terror that people make it out to be, it's just somewhat difficult to entirely eliminate. So I don't bother. I had it break out in my 29 when I first started it, all over the place -- the entire inner tank glass was covered in a two-inch turf, most of the rock wasn't much better. Sure kept my ammonia and nitrates down, though. Nothing like most of a square meter of turf scrubber to eliminate wastes.
In any case, I've found that, at least in my system, keeping the mag and alk nice and high and the phosphates as low as possible, bryopsis can be managed. I've found that by allowing it to establish it someplace where it won't cause problems, or at least can be easily removed if it does, you can essentially cause one colony to outcompete other, smaller colonies. I've got zero bryopsis on the rocks or glass in my 29, now, but the sump is filthy with it, and I have to remove clumps from the overflow every week or three. And there's cyano in the sump, and god knows what else, 'cause I haven't really bothered to look in there in a couple months, but I like having these colonies established there. This way, if nutrients spike, the colonies there explode and (mostly) keep out of my DT.
Additionally, I'm planning on keeping both a naso tang (yes, I know, I'll probably have to switch it out for another small one in a few years, if I don't wind up upgrading my tank again,) and a flame angel. I know they both require green algae for their health, so I haven't been too bothered about the bryopsis colonies in the DT -- I'm hoping that they'll get eaten when I get my fish in there. Of course, I also have no experience keeping these fish yet, so we'll see.
I'd like to see what jaa would've said if he
saw my tank before the swap. I finally got around to doing some delayed water changes and making sure that my mg, alk, and ca were where they should be -- Mg around 1300-1350, Ca in the range of 400-420, and alk ... well, wherever the alk is when the pH is at about 8.5-8.6 with the prior parameters. I believe that places it around 9-11 dKh. (Because carbonate content and pH are directly linked at a specific level of magnesium, I seldom actually test for alk, I just watch the pH.)
...Anyway, before I did that, I had lovely thick, red-purple mats cyano everywhere, which was both normal and expected for a tank with the bioload I had in it which was started with mostly marco rocks and a mostly-dead-but-LS-seeded sandbed. Within two days of correcting the Mg and the Alk, the cyano basically evaporated, as I expected it to. Now there's just a few little patches that the cucumber and ceriths haven't gotten to yet.
...Just because I know how to take care of a tank properly doesn't mean that I'm not lazy as hell, and it certainly doesn't mean that I can do much to accellerate the algal successions in the tank. Once it's been up and running for a few more months, and once I have it fully attached to my controller/ato/kalk supply, it should both look much better and flourish in spite of my neglect.
