damselfish | (no subject)

I'm too weary to talk politics like I kind of want to-- the entire post would be WHARGARBLE-- so I'm gonna talk fish instead. Because everything else I have to talk about is jobs and nobody wants to hear that.

I'm fighting black brush algae.* This is hateful stuff. It's black (as the name suggests) and it coats all the plants, smothering them. But worst of all is the smell. I don't know if I can properly describe it. It's a sharp, high note, like a little rider going up your nose with a lance and a message: there's nothing you can do about it. Not just that, but the smell reminds me of an episode of Dirty Jobs, where someone once described a smell as "the stink is so fine it penetrates the gloves." I understood, intellectually, what this meant, but I didn't understand it until I started fighting BBA.

The first time I spent a couple hours hand-scrubbing it off my plants, my hands smelled for 24 hours afterwards. A constant stink that followed me wherever I went.

But I cleaned my tank! All was well for, oh, two weeks. Now it's coating my rotala and growing back on my vals.

The causes of BBA: too much light, not enough fertilizers, too much organic material, not enough CO2.

Basically? It can be anything.

The solutions to BBA: overdosing the tank with liquid CO2 (which will melt your vals), spot treatments of hydrogen peroxide (which only works if you have... spots), and reducing whatever it is that's out-of-whack with your tank (good luck figuring out what it is!) My favorite solution: removing all the fake plants and hardscape and leaving them outside so the algae is murdered by sun and dryness. I almost wish algae was an animal instead of a plant just so it could suffer (no, I don't, but I do imagine the algae cells wailing in despair as righteous fury rains down on them).

I have two bristlenose plecos which won't eat it. In fact, they don't seem to each much of anything, but they're cute, so I keep them around.

There is only one fish that will eat this stuff: the siamese algae eater.

There is a problem with siamese algae eaters. Or rather, there are two problems. Most stores that sell siamese algae eaters are actually selling totally different fish. The employees at the store will probably not know the difference, or will insist they're real. Only a very close inspection will tell you which is which, and even then, people get it wrong because it can sometimes be hard to tell. In my high school twenty gallon, my "siamese algae eater" was in fact a flying fox. The problem with chinese algae eaters and flying foxes?

They grow up, stop eating algae, and have a nasty habit of taking the slime coat off bigger fish-- I've seen a few tanks where the cichlids/discus have patches where a chinese algae eater has attacked them. It is horrifying to see, especially in youtube videos where the poster is all "haha, it's cleaning the fish!" and a commenter (aquarium commenters on youtube are nicer than your average youtube posters) are like "uhm...."

Another problem with the confusion is that it's hard to get info on them: some sources say the SAE is aggressive with conspecifics unlike the shoaling flying fox, others say it's a shoaler and that it's the flying fox/CAE that's aggressive. I'd like to know if I only need one or several, because I'm not sure I have room for that many algae eaters in a 75 gallon but I'm desperate oh my God.

I am half-tempted to take out all my plants and replace them with fakes. Instead I bought a bunch more plants and put them in the tank in hopes of out-competing the algae. I probably still don't have enough plants to start out with. No matter how much you prepare and research, there's always something you don't know until it's too late-- like, when you're starting a planted tank, you want a fortune in plants or else algae will take over.

*I thought this was an algae outbreak, but it's really not. Yes, there's black gunk smothering everything, but in the course of my research on getting rid of algae I saw pictures of outbreaks-- deep green messes where you can barely see inside, everything is carpeted in a varied assortment. I just have BBA. Which I guess makes the problem easier to diagnose, slightly. Whatever would cause other kinds of algae isn't present. This only works in academic settings.