In over 10 years of reefing I’m experiencing bubble algae. It’s not too crazy yet but I am noticing it popping up in various books and crannies of my rock work. I’m planning on grabbing a small army of emerald crabs. I want to catch it before it gets gout if hand. How many would you recommend to keep in under control. I was thinking 5-7 but again I have no experience with BA
Bubble Algae
- Thread starter hiimsean
- Start date
I put 7 in my 80 gallon tank, 2 per rock structure and one for good measure. The males slowly fought each other over about 6 months for territories, now I think I'm down to 1 big male and 3 small females. In my experience they will forage for any other algae before they try to eat whole green bubble algae, I still have a bunch in my tank and even when I had 7 emeralds they didn't put much of a dent in the bubble algae that was growing. I did find that the crabs and tangs will both readily eat the bubble algae, if it is popped/dying. I go in every couple of weeks now and scrape a bunch off the rocks and scoop it out of the tank, the emeralds and my tang then eat the little broken bits off the rocks that got left behind and it looks clean for another month or two; doing this I now have way less algae, just a few tufts here or there that I can't get to without doing a bunch of accidental fragging. In short, my advise is less emeralds and rely on them less, go in and remove/pop what you can yourself whenever you can and it will be much easier to manage.
My experience has been pretty positive. I ended up with males in most every case they can ofter be seen eating the bubbles. They also got my Pipefish too though..
Emeralds are hit or miss and they'll stop eating it sometimes.
The 1 thing that destroyed every last bit of it in every tank we had was our Magnificent Foxface - that dude LOVED it. Didn't care if it was red or green.
I battled it - pretty bad in 1 of our tanks - for well over a year before we got the Foxface.
The 1 thing that destroyed every last bit of it in every tank we had was our Magnificent Foxface - that dude LOVED it. Didn't care if it was red or green.
I battled it - pretty bad in 1 of our tanks - for well over a year before we got the Foxface.
+1 on Foxface, regular in one tank, Magnificent in another, problem solved.
I had a round of emeralds that did good with it, then they disappeared. I recently added 6 more to my 75 and they don't seem to really be doing much with the bubble algae. ... /sigh my fox face doesn't seem to either.. I did pick at some and my sailfin would eat it when it was floating around, but he doesn't seem to be eating it on rocks etc.. so i'm pretty much not sure what the best plan is forward.. i'm sort of taking it slow and steady for now.
