{"id":19328,"date":"2015-05-28T08:50:53","date_gmt":"2015-05-28T07:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/?p=19328"},"modified":"2015-05-26T09:00:16","modified_gmt":"2015-05-26T08:00:16","slug":"beating-the-algae","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alananna.co.uk\/blog\/2015\/05\/beating-the-algae\/","title":{"rendered":"Beating the Algae"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t want to talk to soon, but I think I might just be getting on top of the algae problems in my new Aquascape<\/a>. Last time I talked about the aquascape about a month ago algae was taking hold and becoming quite a problem.<\/p>\n

The algae seems to be coating the rock and pebbles, but there is also now some longer filamentous strands coming off some of the rocks, and worse still some coating the Eleocharis<\/em> which can’t be doing it much good. There is also a strange brownish fuzzy substance coating the tops of some of the rocks.\u00a0I’m not sure if this is coming off the substrate or if it’s something else.<\/p>\n

Since then I have been fairly pro-active and have been manually cleaning algae on a fairly regular basis. The brown algae on the glass gets wiped\u00a0off with some wadding. The filamentous algae was manually scraped off and removed. The algae coating the rocks and pebbles was scrubbed off and the algae coating the Eleocharis and other plants gets gently teased off with a pair of long-handled pincers. It sounds like a lot of work, but once you get the hang of it it\u00a0isn’t too bad. Occasionally some of the Eleocharis gets dislodged in the process, but it seems to do OK if replanted, although that can be quite fiddly.<\/p>\n

I’ve also reduced the brightness of the main lighting with the dimmer switch, and the shrimps have been helping with the clean-up too. We have 9 Amano shrimps in there now, along with 4 Endler’s Livebearers (Poecilia wingei<\/em>) that I added at the weekend. They seem to be fairly happy in there so far. The plants seem to be growing well on the whole and things are taking shape. It’s a long, slow process though so it is still in very early stages.<\/p>\n\n\t\t