Quote:
Originally Posted by
luvmyreef http:///t/390054/i-need-help-with-algae#post_3451860 I also like to siphon off the rocks with a water change. It is better imo than basting it out into the water column.
You are losing a lot of good food in doing so. There is some great coral food sitting in those rocks. In larger tanks, basting may not be the answer, you may even need to use a power head in your hand to "blow" the rocks off. This I think is your biggest concern Lois and maybe you too Luvy if you are still getting some algae on the rock work. Remember this is not rocket science here, light and nutrient are what algae need to grow with. The light is a given, needed in the tank. You must find the source of the nutrient and do something to do away with the overabundance you have.
Just for your reading pleasure here is an excerpt from The Building of a Reef by EB.
"About a year into it, the sand bed is productive and has stratified, water quality is stable, and the aquarist has bought a few more power heads, understands water quality a bit, corallines and algae, if not corals and other things are photosynthesizing well, and the tank is "mature." That's when fish stop dying when you buy them (at least the cyanide free ones) and corals start to live and grow and I stop getting posts about "I just bought a coral and its dying and my tank is two months old" and they start actually answering some questions here and there instead of just asking questions (though we should all always be asking questions, if not only to ourselves!).
So, ecologically, this is successional population dynamics. Its normal, and it happens when there is a hurricane or a fire, or whatever. In nature though, you have pioneer species that are eventually replaced by climax communities. We usually try and stock immediately with climax species. And find it doesn't always work.
Now, the "too mature" system is the old tank syndrome. Happens in nature, too. That whole forest fire reinvigorating the system is true. Equally true on coral reefs where the intermediate disturbance hypothesis is the running thought on why coral reefs maintain very high diversity...they are stable, but not too stable, and require storms, but not catastrophic ones....predation, but not a giant blanket of crown of thorns, mass bleaching, or loss of key herbivores.
This goes to show what good approximations these tanks are of mini-ecosystems. Things happen much faster in tanks, but what do you expect given the bioload per unit area. So, our climax community happens in a couple years rather than a couple of centuries. Thing is, I am fully convinced that intermediate tank disturbance would prevent old tank syndrome."
I think what Eric is saying here is that it is good to "mix" it up once in a while. In the small systems we have it is easy for things to get stuck in places where they can't be reached. The biodiversity in our tanks do not and cannot equal what is on the reefs. That mixing it up could be as simple as using a power head in your rocks to really get down and deep. Or it could mean a rearrangement of the rock work some, and the flow patterns to accommodate a "storm" on the reef.
I also like to siphon off the rocks with a water change. It is better imo than basting it out into the water column.
Can you use a flow bar with it?????
