Anyone familiar with this? I thought it was a nice macro growing on my live rock, but I’m starting to see it pop up all over the tank, growing on other macros & seagrass and even growing on a sponge. Any ideas?
Red algae (possibly a nuisance algae)
- Thread starter willwoo
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Anyone familiar with this? I thought it was a nice macro growing on my live rock, but I’m starting to see it pop up all over the tank, growing on other macros & seagrass and even growing on a sponge. Any ideas?
appears to be some type of gracillaria. if you have a herbivore, it will be happy to chow the algae down.
Definitely looks similar to gracilaria but it’s much, much finer than species of gracilaria I’ve seen. I’d say the little frills are about 1mm across. Also must have a way of reproducing via some kind of spawning because it’s showing up all over the tank. Definitely getting a little nervous, especially since this is a planted tank with higher than normal nutrients. I may have to add some additional macros and see if I can get them to outcompete this stuff.
Couple pics of it sprouting up on other plants/macros.
I have it too! Sprouted from my Florida rock after dosing tons of phyto lol. It’s a graciliara but I haven’t been able to find the exact species, I’ve seen it while diving too
Is yours doing the same thing where it’s growing everywhere? Mine also sprouted from FL live rock. I’m gonna do a water change today and see if I can slow it down a little.
Yesss, then a lot of it disappeared when I chilled on feeding for a bit
And when I stopped dosing phyto which I think was adding Po4
Yep that makes sense. I’m not sure exactly how to approach NO3 and PO4 in this tank since it’s a planted tank with seagrass and mangroves, and I want to make sure they have the nutrients they need. I may just pick up some extra macroalgae and see if I can outcompete this stuff. It’s honestly not too bad yet, but I feel like if left unmanaged it could go nuts.
It can, and I would just manually remove, and let everything compete and balance each other out. That’s the thing about lagoon style it’s hard to pick what grows and what doesn’t it really just counts on manual removal. But lots of grazers typically helps, they’ll recycle that physical algae back into the system. Try some purple urchins I’d say, they’re Floridian and not a bad price
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