Algae

Yes, they have been hungry and stuffing their bellies with Valonias, GHA and apparently some Coraline algae (I had some green Coraline, if that exists, which is disappearing).

Look at this rock, can you see that it has some sections clearly free of Valonias with white rock showing, right beside sections infested with it? They were not like that a few weeks ago... too bad I don't have an exact same picture to compare, but I'm sure this rock had more Valonias on it, and less with purple ...

In my war against Valonias I lost an important warrior some months ago, my lone Mithrax crab (known as emerald crab to most of you of the northern hemisphere). My supplier of that crab had moved out of business and I couldn't find an LFS that had them.

Well, two weeks ago I found a new guy from Rio de Janeiro who supplied them, at brasilreef.com forum!! Brazilian ones, red/pink and not green but of the same shape as the green ones (my original one was pink too), which he fishes/catches ...

Decided to use my last day of vacation to continue the Valonia cleanup of my tank, with a small video showing how I'm brute-force scraping it off the rock with a water change.

The idea is that the bubbles I eventually pop get their spores sucked into the water change.

As the video shows that is probably not 100% true as sometimes the hose's suction isn't fast enough because it's clogged with previously sucked up bubbles.

Here we go:
...

Today I started my war against Valonia, officially. :-) Nothing too special, just decided it was time to start thinning them out by manual removal as a start.

I took a hose, 1/4inch, cut the tip at an angle to make it easy to scrape rock with it, and did a water change scraping the rocks. One rock that was literally covered with Valonias for months is now almost clear. Another water changes like this one should be enough to reduce the bulk of the Valonias.

Unfortunately ...

Got myself a copy of Julian Sprung's 'Algae, A Problem Solver Guide' looking for insights in the battle against algae.



The book is compact and easy to read if you don't fret about the many scientific species names and terms.

I learned that a lot of different things have the same common name 'Green Hair Algae' and they're not eaten by exactly the same ...